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China releases a five-year regulation blueprint for broader crackdown
- cucumb3rrelish 5y agothey really are keen on annoying investors aren't they. i wonder for how long tencent and the other conglomerates will obey these orders
- mc32 5y agoYou can’t just ignore regulation in the jurisdiction you’re doing business. Like it or not, they will have to follow regulation or cease operations.
- bilbo0s 5y agoi wonder for how long tencent and the other conglomerates will obey these orders Strange question with what I would consider to be an obvious answer. They will obey for as long as they want the profits they get from China's market of video game players for instance. Which strikes me as pretty much "forever". What company is gonna leave and give that kind of gift wrapped profit center to someone else voluntarily?
- AnimalMuppet 5y agoAny company, when the realize that it's no longer a profit center, and isn't likely to return to being a profit center any time soon. The trick for China is to get the regulations in place that are necessary, without putting so many in place that it strangles profitability (and therefore destroys business). But come to think of it, that's the trick for any country when regulating.
- itmayno 5y agoThey will either leave voluntarily or be out of business at the whim of a dictatorship literally the next day. It’s just risk vs reward here.
- jollybean 5y ago"What company is gonna leave and give that kind of gift wrapped profit center to someone else voluntarily? " When it's no longer a gift. These companies are sometimes high flying startups along the lines of US firms and they require access to capital. If their valuations are clipped by an order of magnitude because of regulatory apparatus (i.e. can't list in the US and American investors have no appetite for Chinese exchanges), then this will be a problem for a lot of businesses. TikTok is getting big in the US and the West where margins are a lot fatter, it could feasibly make more sense for Bytedance to jump ship and become an American-based company with a Chinese workforce. Obviously that's hugely speculative but just an example. It's like any bit of regulation it has a bunch of externalities. Some may be pretty bad for the company. Maybe, maybe not.
- AzzieElbab 5y agothey are not trying to be annoying, they are incompatible with free markets, and free flows of info.
- itmayno 5y agoIf you are still manufacturing in China, you are a fool. Get ready for your factory to be seized/shut down in the next couple of years, or be taxed/fines so much that you have no choice but to leave. Or get ransomed by the local factory that you are working with (like extreme delay of products or shoddy products delivery).
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- tablespoon 5y ago> they really are keen on annoying investors aren't they. i wonder for how long tencent and the other conglomerates will obey these orders They will obey as long as the state has power, which will be for the far foreseeable future. The Chinese government has been smart enhance its power by keeping its domestic businesses in a strictly subordinate position and creating an environment were foreign businesses cooperate because dependence is the best business decision (e.g. Apple has no "plan B," it's China all the way for them). And it might work out for them, especially if foreign nations continue to complacently indulge in free market Kool-Aid.
- baybal2 5y ago> Apple has no "plan B," it's China all the way for them I know many people who work, or worked for Apple on the hardware side. I assure you, Apple has "plan B," and it been trying executing on it relentlessly for the last 2 years — just without any success. Vietnam's total electronics industry output is like a single district in Dongguan. The supply chain is very, very immature there, despite it already towering above any other place in developing Asia, but China. If what my buddies tell me of Apple's internal assesment of countries is correct, no other countries are even close to a 2nd place alternative on that, except for Taiwan, which is their "plan C" — a sure to work, but expensive option if everything else fails.
- itmayno 5y agoSamsung stopped mobile phone production in China since 2019. They are heavily in Vietnam. Apple is just doing something wrong is all.
- tablespoon 5y ago> I assure you, Apple has "plan B," and it been trying executing on it relentlessly for the last 2 years — just without any success. Can you share any details about that? > If what my buddies tell me of Apple's internal assesment of countries is correct, no other countries are even close to a 2nd place alternative on that, except for Taiwan, which is their "plan C" — a sure to work, but expensive option if everything else fails. That's actually kind of what I meant by "there's no plan B." They may be able to formulate other plans (B, C, D, etc.) and even spend a little money on them, but Western business-thinking won't let them actually deviate from plan A. One of China's advantages is that the West puts business in the driver's seat in a lot of situations, but business is short-sighted, selfish, and geopolitically naive, so it is exploitable and controllable with the right methods.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoIt will be interesting to see what a mass exodus of investment money leaving China does to their economy and geopolitics. Edit: If
- vkou 5y ago1. Why would there be a mass exodus, any shareholder board will fire a C-suite that gives up selling to the world's fastest growing market / building in the world's most capable manufacturing market. Expecting one is just wishful thinking. Boards and executives tend to care about the bottom line, and very rarely about political grandstanding. 2. Even if there were a mass exodus (Which won't happen, because #1), the factories, the expertise, the knowledge base and the human capital those investments paid for aren't going to disappear. All that will happen is that they will become China-owned, as opposed to partially China-owned.
- SubiculumCode 5y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-27/china-s-crackdown-stocks-extend-declines-into-a-third-day https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-07-27/china-s-c...
- vkou 5y ago1. Investors selling stock has zero bearing on the operation of a factory, barring certain edge cases. Companies extract money from the stock market by issuing IPOs, after that happens, it doesn't matter to them very much at what price their shares are traded. See my previous post - just because the stock value drops, doesn't mean that actual assets, know-how, expertise, or training disappears into thin air. [1] 2. Foreigners selling will lead to locals buying. Those firms will simply go from majority-Chinese-owned, to Chinese-owned. 3. Stock markets don't just go up all the time, sometimes they correct. [1] It does in the United States, but that's because during slumps, the government is very skittish when it comes to creating demand, outside of the MIC. The CCP takes a longer view, and actively prioritizes building up China's industrial base, as opposed to dismantling and offshoring it.
- Alupis 5y agoIf they can make Jack Ma disappear for months over some casual comments - I think executives at these conglomerates understand the message pretty clearly.
- eunos 5y agoMy tinfoil hats say that they realize that we are in the age of ultra loose monetary policy, so abundance of capital. Therefore it's time to clean the house. Gonna spook investors of course, but hey all other places offer zero or minus yield rate, China still has positive yield anyway.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago> i wonder for how long tencent and the other conglomerates will obey these orders Probably as long as the regulation exists. It is amazing, but once there is the real threat of personal, physical imprisonment, most CEOs are pretty good about making sure regulations get followed despite any impact on the stock price.
- yogthos 5y agoI don't think they give a shit about investors actually.
- csense 5y agoThey'll obey as long as they are run by people who have families that can be threatened.
- jet_32951 5y agoNice golden goose you have there. It sure would be a shame if anything happened to it.
- kps 5y ago> “Strengthen the construction of the national ‘Internet + supervision’ system, and realize the integration and aggregation of data from supervision platforms by the end of 2022.” I'll bet they're pleased with you-know-who's you-know-what.
- SkyMarshal 5y agoHuh?
- yorwba 5y ago"Internet+ supervision" doesn't refer to supervision of the internet, but using the internet to make supervisory agencies in general more efficient. E.g. this post by the Zhejiang Archives from 2019 http://www.zjda.gov.cn/art/2019/6/10/art_1378485_34553497.html http://www.zjda.gov.cn/art/2019/6/10/art_1378485_34553497.ht... mentions that employees no longer have to carry around documents and manually fill them in to do their work, but can use an app for that. The part you quoted probably means they want to get to the point where if someone in Jiangsu needs documents archived in Zhejiang, they can just access them through a unified platform instead of having to ask their colleagues there to send them over.
- SubiculumCode 5y agoI have a fairly dim view of China's ethics and respect for human rights, and so tend to suspect the worst; however, the hyper-competition in China's production industries has led to product ecosystems rife with unsafe materials (e.g. lead), and other cut corners. Now that many Chinese are able to purchase the things they produce, I can imagine that safety regulations are starting to be demanded by the public, and that is a good thing. Nevertheless, I am sure this push will also be used to further crackdown on political dissent and to consolidate power, I can well imagine.
- itmayno 5y agoUSSR followed the same path when their citizens grumbled about liberalization. State owned enterprises are now seizing power from private companies and foreign entities. Pretty soon you are going to see replays of USSR SoE dominance such as lack of innovation, bread lines, inefficient operation, and corruption. It seems xi jing ping did not fully study the downfall of USSR after all.
- vkou 5y agoI've been hearing from pundits that the collapse of China is around the corner for the past 25 years, and I have yet to see why I won't be hearing about it for the next 25.
- coolspot 5y agoYou will not hear that because all non-sino people will be wiped out by a race-targeted virus. The Alpha version leaked, unfortunately, giving us glimpse on where they are going with the research, won’t happen again. For those who thinks my comment is outlandish: we are talking about the country that literally has concentration camps, forceful sterilization and thought police among other things.
- reccanti 5y agoNot used to hacker news commenters being quite so mask-off, but I suppose it was only a matter of time
- warning26 5y agoTranslation: get ready for arbitrary enforcement of nebulous, ill-defined standards!
- ep103 5y agoSelective enforcement is a feature, not a bug, of authoritarian systems
- raincom 5y agoIn what way is it different from prosecutorial discretion practiced in the West?
- PicassoCTs 5y agoThe west usually does not: > Arrest people who report freely on a unjust case > Arrest & incarcerate the lawyer of the accused > Forces the accused, by threatening his family, to confess to crimes on video > And then lifestream those confession videos to the world as "evidence" > The western government do not have much control over their "justice" systems as in, they can not turn on & off cases as they feel (Although they wish they have, and they have watered it down, by creating crimes that everyone automatically commits in recent years + selective enforcement laws) But yeah, the west needs to get better. It always does. And so does china. But lets take something objective- the "were does money flee towards and were from" as a measurement of law and lawlessness and watch the crypto bleed out of china were it can. I rest my case on the scale of law and lawlessness.
- kragen 5y ago> Arrest people who report freely on a unjust case Julian Assange. Allegedly, Lauri Love. Jake Appelbaum hasn't been arrested, but he's not doing that well either. He was harassed by law enforcement for years after his reporting on the Iraq war. After Gary Webb's reporting revealed that the CIA had been trafficking cocaine to Los Angeles, using the money to support a terrorist campaign in Nicaragua, he wasn't arrested, but he was forced to resign, and no newspaper would hire him thereafter; he was found dead in his home with two gunshot wounds to the head. The death was ruled a suicide. Edward Snowden fled to Russia to escape arrest. Reality Winner has been incarcerated for five years because she revealed the Russian interference in the US election in 02016; she's still imprisoned. Chelsea Manning was imprisoned from 02010 until 02017, and has been barred from entering Canada or Australia (which, if not in the West, is at least a close ally of the West). John Kiriakou, who revealed the US torture of prisoners, was imprisoned for two years in 02013 to 02015. NPR reporter Mumia Abu-Jamal covered the abuses of the notoriously corrupt Philadelphia police force and was kept under illegal surveillance by the FBI; in 01981 the police accused him of murdering a cop who had shot him after beating up his brother. At the trial, he was not allowed to represent himself, instead being represented by a court-appointed attorney he described as a "baboon". He was convicted and has been in prison for 39 years. Four years later, the Philadelphia police dropped two firebombs from a helicopter onto a townhouse owned by a group of his friends, killing eleven of them (five of them children) and burning down 65 houses. "The west" absolutely does arrest people for reporting freely on cases of injustice. Sometimes they do more than arrest them. Reporters Without Borders has the US at #44 in their press freedom ranking index: https://rsf.org/en/ranking https://rsf.org/en/ranking That's worse than Botswana, Taiwan, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Lithuania, Namibia, Latvia, Samoa, and New Zealand. Other countries in the west, like Belize, Chile, Poland, Argentina, Brazil, and Greece, are even further down the list. (PRC is of course near the bottom at #177.) > Arrest & incarcerate the lawyer of the accused True, no cases of this in EU, UK, and USA come to mind at the moment. I've known a lot of lawyers here in Argentina who have been threatened with this, but none that it has happened to since the end of the US-supported dictatorship 37 years ago. > Forces the accused, by threatening his family, to confess to crimes on video I think you would be surprised at what goes on in grand jury cases. It's not quite the same: by threatening the family of the accused, the government "forces" them to testify against the accused in secret, and not tell the accused what they testified, or even that there was an investigation. Prosecutors and the police can do much the same, whenever they please, except that they can't prohibit the family members in question from telling the accused about it. > And then lifestream those confession videos to the world as "evidence" It's true that confessions are rarely broadcast live in "the west", but I'm not clear on how that is relevant to questions of justice. > The western government do not have much control over their "justice" systems as in, they can not turn on & off cases as they feel Prosecutorial discretion is very wide in the US. 98% of defendants in federal cases plead guilty without a trial. In US criminal cases that make it to trial, in felony cases, 68% are convicted. (That statistic includes non-federal cases.) Basically if a prosecutor decides to go after you, you are fucked. My friend Aaron committed suicide after being hounded by federal prosecutors for several years and facing decades in prison. His alleged crime was downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.
- RegnisGnaw 5y agoI take a much dimmer view of this. Xi knows that climate change is coming and its going to be really bad. One of the issues coming from climate change is food shortage. Food shortage is going to cause riots in US, Canada, and EU for sure. Just based on the vaccine protests/riots, imagine what will happen when rationing is introduced. He's going to crack down hard and control the population, so when the inevitable comes there is acceptence.
- nickff 5y agoXi is just trying to centralize party control over the country, and solidify his grip on it. This is very common in dictatorships, take North Korea for example.
- FredPret 5y agoGlobal warming will be good for crops if anything. Not saying it’s a good thing overall of course.
- katmannthree 5y agoIf you take it as a simple additive 2°C increase in temperature sure, if you instead trust the models predicting significantly more unstable weather on both ends of the temperature spectrum then not so much.
- flavius29663 5y agomore warm weather AND more rain, crops on average will do better.
- RegnisGnaw 5y agoMore fires, more droughts, more pests, etc.
- flavius29663 5y ago
- fw4h5 5y agoEveryone talks shit on the CCP but how different are they from the rabid insane fascist liberals from San Francisco?
- PicassoCTs 5y agoIm by now convinced that xi jinping, in the back of his mind, hates the communist party and its apparatus, and wants to destroy it by going back to a north-korea style totalitarianism, against which the citizens will rebel en mass.
- kragen 5y agoWhat, like the North Koreans are rebelling en masse?
- PicassoCTs 5y agoThey never had the hope that their descendants could escape poverty permanently snatched away.
- thombee 5y agoare you actually serious LOL
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]