So you want OpenRAN, that's cool, but who is exactly going to build the hardware for that in Europe if it isn't Nokia and Ericsson? Infineon? IDK man, I lack information here but I'd say that be careful with what you wish.
Nokia Networks used to be called Nokia Siemens Networks - it was a joint venture between Nokia and Siemens before Nokia bought out Siemens in 2013. They still have lots of employees in Germany.
Nokia Networks recently announced Open RAN allegiance/support.
I guess this is about forcing Ericsson to do the same for some added competition. If they don't, who cares, lots of money will still flow back into the german economy.
> The German draft proposal includes over €300 million of investment in Open RAN technology,
This is sort of a (possibly) legal way for the german government to subsidize the company formerly known as Nokia Siemens Networks.
I'll believe OpenRAN when I see the interop party. Telco suppliers loath open standards - in practice they are usually only implemented as far as necessary to tick a RFP checkbox. Better than nothing though.
Yeah, I'll tend to agree. I think this is Germany being Germany.
As a Swede: I've long thought that EU will split up in northern/southern parts. Germany is in the middle - this is a stab in the back of Sweden. Before this I thought Germany might end up in the northern part. Now they have forged an alliance with Finland/Nokia.
Stab in the back of Sweden ? How so? Because of lower barrier for entry that might hurt Ericsson's bottom line ?
Ericsson will still be at the forefront of EU infrastructure, they have the money to do it and will earn from that, their reputation too is already favoured in the EU over Huwawei.. Which is the whole point.
But sure.. Swexit, lets 'extrapolate' that out then, Ericsson will then be under increased tarrifs and excluded from initial EU contract proposals.
They have not forged an alliance with anyone, they are leveling the market to allow for other competitors and not have a bottleneck on suppliers.
The idea is that you don't need one fully vertically integrated specialist manufacturer, like you do now.
You can have multiple different components.... Think of like building your desktop PC today - you can have CPU from AMD, the motherboard from ASUS, GPU from MSI, SSD from Intel, etc...
This is really puzzling. For once we actually have not one, but two ’hi-tech’ companies in Europe, that can be considered significant competitors in a global market, yet instead of embracing this opportunity, Germany thinks its better to further segment the market to smaller players? A market that to be honest, is not as lucrative as many might think and has huge upfront R&D costs everytime the next G is coming up, especially on the RAN side.
I guess if its not airplanes or cars, we can leave it to Silicon Valley to handle. Or is it only airplanes now?
The reasons the network equipment suppliers consolidated was that the network service providers had consolidated and were starting to buy in bulk. That forced the prices down and gave advantages to the larger players who stayed larger players by gobbling up the other players before a competitor could.
The key problem is differentiation for network access providers. The business is highly infrastructure intensive and at the end of the day you take an IP packet, ship it to an interconnect and collect monthly payments. It is hard to see how such an industry where innovation is centered around bundling of tariffs for different access technologies is able to run more fragmented network technologies in cost effective ways.
So this is imho. all support PR to justify funding general EU tech investments. The US has venture funds the EU has research grants.
> two ’hi-tech’ companies in Europe, that can be considered significant competitors in a global market
And they still will be, this just lowers the barrier for entry on smaller companies who might have some beneficial R&D but dont have to sell/lease their intelectual property to the big two.
I have worked at Ericsson and they're extremely patent hungry. Thats not a bad thing in and of itself, but it reduces significant competition when you can buy smaller companies IP or block them out of the market.
I don't understand why Huawei is suddenly the networking devil when it comes to 5G when it didn't (and still doesn't) bother anyone when most of the GPON/EPON/XGPON/NGPON hardware is full Huawei...
I bet the fibre connection to the not-Huawei 5G towers is going to be Huawei anyway.
I used to work for Australia's national broadband network.
The issue with 5G is that there is a lot more software involved e.g. software defined networking, network function virtualization, edge computing, containerisation etc.
This makes securing the platform much more complex as you have to constantly validate that each piece of software is not able to access your core network or siphon user traffic.
Optical networks like you listed are pretty dumb so aren't nearly as much of a threat.
In addition, I think that a lot of ISO Layer 1/2 and even L3 gear can be swapped out too without much effort because of open standards (IETF, ISO, etc) that allows for easier mixing and matching.
Whereas a lot of wireless components are more tightly coupled to each other.
Which is why many service providers are talking about Open RAN.
If the COM/SYS layer to the infrastructure is all Huwawei due to no other providers being immediately available for contract, then all of the infrastructure has security issues along the entire chain.
It's implementing the security and 'ownership' of the data along the infrastructure thats at risk. And Huwawei don't have a good track record.
You do have a point, but I think from a risk perspective there is a difference.
When Huawei was chosen for those fixed line projects it was providing relatively ‘dumb’ pieces of kit (switches etc.), with controller software that could be looked at and ringfenced.
The 5G stack has been implemented using much more virtualisation, and the vendors are providing much more general capability which makes it a lot harder to risk assess and probe for weaknesses etc.
The UK has tens of thousands of Huawei VDSL2 DSLAMs installed, I imagine most countries have similar (Portugal seems to use Huawei for nearly all of their FTTH equipment). They are not dumb pieces of kit at all in terms of computing power.
Regardless, even if it was, it is still a huge potential problem. Imagine Huawei had some backdoor code that looked for a certain pattern of data across any of the network interfaces and corrupted the firmware so it wouldn't load without being physically replaced. China then buys a load of ads and as users browse the web, they load the image with the secret string in, triggering it (one example).
Within a couple of hours enough users have seen it that the vast majority of western infrastructure is down, and needs replaced (and I would assume in this case, China wouldn't be willing to sell more!).
I think this sort of attack would likely take down most 5G anyway - as it's incredibly likely that the backhaul has some sort of Huawei fibre product in it somewhere along the line.
China et al don't care all that much about individual users.
By compromising a large network provider they have the ability to access data from enterprise and government customers. Which as we saw when the US did it is very beneficial for trade negotiations etc.
Do they though? Nearly everything these days has TLS/SSL. What would they gain from intercepting a load of encrypted data?
Even NSA said their snooping on network infrastrucure was becoming useless with the leaked info on their monitoring, which was years ago.
I really don't see the value these days of being able to intercept traffic like this. You will obviously find bits and bobs that isn't encrypted but it's not like 20 years ago where you could get everything in a few days.
That is one form of attack, but that's "the nuclear option" of infrastructure. It's a concern, but many of the concerns around 5G are persistent nation state spying activities. China is far more concerned with data aggregating and mining than it is with nuking the West. China, in general, tends to avoid cataclysmic actions that upend the current order. Especially given that most of the Western world is China's largest trading partners and a fundamental part of their economy.
China's strategic plan is spy and collect, not destroy. Traditional espionage stuff that every country does.
Here’s another side of it. When Huawei deployed their equipment previously with at least one big telecom it’s equipment worked so badly that they sent a boatload of engineers onsite to fix it all and as far as I know they did.
Now imagine all the systems, schematics, blueprints and locations these engineers touched or at least gained knowledge about. Even without a backdoor in this knowledge would probably be a hacker group’s wet dream if they wanted to plant themselves inside a telco.
Eh, this is getting silly. There are Chinese nationals working in the West, obviously they see how systems are made. Then they can go back and build something similar based on their knowledge - you can't copyright someone's brain.
I keep thinking that if, hypothetically, i would be in charge of a developing economy, I would not recognise foreign copyright and patents untill the country can catch up, at least on medicine and software. Especially the idea that breaking copyright is a crime and not a civil offence is an absurdity
This is exactly what has always been done. US did to UK, Japan did to Germany, now China is did/is doing to US. Copyrights and patents only come to the table when they get useful.
Easier to replace because 5G is being fresh installed, imagine replacing all that fibre. It's also easier to hide possibly nefarious equipment in 5G and proxy to somewhere else, whereas the usual fibre splitters and taps nation states use are high traffic, bulky and basically impossible to exfil back to China. Fibre is "dumb" equipment whereas much of the 5G stack includes vendor software, virtualization etc which increases risks enormously.
Actually the title of the article is kind of misleading. "Berlin" stands in this context for the German federal government (the announcement is from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy) not for the state of Berlin.
Living in Berlin myself I can attest that very few people would believe that the state of Berlin could pull off such a feat, however, the federal government is (somewhat) better positioned for that.
I am going to put it in the most blunt, politically incorrect and frankly offensive way: I don't want my communications to touch any Chinese services, hardware, applications or processes. This is what my gut feelings are. I have surveyed over 200 suppliers in China, I've got zero trust in their professional ethics.
EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications. No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure because it's reasonable to expect strong ethics and professionalism. It's completely opposite with Chinese companies. Really. This is a broad generalization to help navigate. Of course there are exceptions, many, in fact. I find it totally ironic that the CCP is recently cracking down on low level corruption in mid-sized firms in China (a good thing), while ignoring their own deeds.
> EU should develop its own infrastructure for communications.
Before telling that EU or US should develop its own infrastructure for communications, think why it's not there already, and why it needs a boot from the government.
US, and EU largely nuked their own industries without any foreign spies blowing up bridges.
I cannot single out what's in particular what's solely responsible for demise of industrial economy in the West, but having tried it myself I can say that the sense of swimming against the current is omnipresent.
Don't just spray money, first think why doing so 10 times before did not work.
This hard to explain for me, as somebody faring from Russia, a country super hostile to entrepreneurs.
From one side just any place in US, or EU, are 100000% better deal for people doing business on paper, yet you keep running in the overall "systemic apathy" towards boring businesses like manufacturing.
You all get all the welcome if you are doing something relatable to people making social elites like some hot shot VC business, and have a personal image of Musk Elon. You feel the entirety of society is ready to flex, and mold itself around you.
Now, try to come to some "high society" event, and complain that some absurd accounting law effectively shutting down your manufacturing business... People will not even look at you, if not trying to snub you.
You feel some kind of unease, or friction.
If I were to be in Russia, I will just know that bureaucrats are bastards, I will bare with them, and go doing my business later like if nothing happened. The negativity ends there.
In the West... But in the West, the most of the obstacle course only begins when you already pass the red tape. You will keep having to deal with the same impassionate attitude with your own employees, your professional community, every lawyer/banker/mba dominated circle be it a client, or a supplier.
While bad guys in Russia will hit you on the head, and take your money one way or another, the "bad" guys in the West will just say "we don't need you, your business, and your money, go away."
Sometimes when I read History, I wonder why the hell people at the time didn't see the obvious threats that were looming over them. Actually there's always some guys that see what's coming and tell, but nobody cares and a lot of time passes whith plenty of opportunities to correct the course.
There was a narrative that was pushed by Davos and others that advanced economies should be structured around services. I talked to economics students in Manchester at some point and they sneered at me, when I argued that Germany was in a much better place compared to most places in Europe because it hadn’t lost all of its industrial base. They called that thinking backward. One other reason I can think of is that a large majority of decision makers in Europe and US are non-technical and/or even openly hostile to practical aspects of industry. So everything operates with multiple levels of indirection between stakeholders and technical people.
US/EU sold out to cheaper prices in China partly due to currency manipulation and partly due to the fault of their own (meaning capitalistic incentives, no regulations, international trade agreements, etc.).
Further they did so with the presumption that China will shed off its authoritarian tones as it grows. That didn't pan out as well.
I would say your assessment of this situation is pretty spot on - we need to ask Why and what led to centralization of manufacturing specifically.
Hit tech industries are limited by the number of educated people in the population available to support them, so they operate at the whims of citizens and the education system.
If countries want to expand their silicon design and manufacturing capabilities, then they need to somehow get their citizens to study the relevant fields necessary to grow such industries.
American university graduates tend towards degrees related to business or healthcare. I'm not sure how countries like China, Korea, and Japan manage to graduate so many technical people.
Part of the issue is chicken-and-egg. It's hard to get a job in the field of chip design / manufacturing because there just aren't that many of those jobs available in the USA, outside of a few key regions.
A lot of it is labor costs. There's also the fact that there are other, more lucrative industries for American industry to chase. Everything has tradeoffs. I don't know if I would say industry left the US due to a failure of any kind. This is kind of the definition of an economic comparative advantage.
I think the decline of the industrial economy in the US is substantially down to the US government effectively subsidizing foreign manufacturing with seignorage (dollar printing) profits.
It sincerely pains me to write this, but I tend to agree with the general conclusion of this comment. Of course, Germans, French, Canadians....etc are NOT immune to incompetence or unethical conduct either (see Enron, VW, Total...etc). But once you've dealt long enough with Chinese CM/ODM/OEMs, you've seen things that make you nod along this comment.
JUST YESTERDAY, we received an SDK doc from a well-known networking gear OEM that was encrypted using 3DES. [1]
For sure. But the specific statement of expecting "strong" ethics from some group of companies is bizarre.
I would go all the way and say that it is completely unreasonable to expect "strong" ethics from any company. There are just too many individuals involved with their own incentives.
It's like looking at MLB dopers and expecting european cyclists to be a better type of person and never dope. It will never happen that way. However, you could reasonably expect a sport whose governing body does regular testing of athletes and their gear to have less cheating. You could say that has nothing to do with ethics. It's about consequences.
This should be a very easy conclusion for anyone that has ever read about cheating in any kind of system. sports, finance, academia's replication crisis, scrabble tournaments... it is sad, but the most reasonable conclusion is to expect cheating and unethical behavior. It's just what people, including some very good people, end up doing due to pressure and being able to get away with something. And if it is profitable to just pay the fine and not do a recall, don't do a recall. Even if that means kids will die.
When you mentioned Germany, I chuckled a little. Worked there for many years and corruption and lack of professionalism I witness in IT section was astonishing. At least here in US corporate corruption is not blunt; nobody here - like it happened to me in Germany - will meet you for the first time, listen to your case and then ask for $15,000 Euro bribe.
Here is a good start how terrible German ethics are:
Thanks for the contrast. We also know the VW scandal. As I said, this is a broad generalization from my own experience with mid-sized firms in China. I can only expect larger unethical behavior with CCP members in the board meetings.
At least in EU/Germany, you don't have the Government asking you to do shady things without due process. Worse, unspoken threat and chilling effect executives and leadership team would have to appease the CCP members. There was a recent example of this - Jack Ma.
How’s Jack Ma related to your trust in Hua wei? It was a different company and it wasn’t just random interference from the government it was the other way round. Jack Ma started using his position to interfere with government.
In my eyes, Jeff Bezos is constantly disappearing. I mean, he's only in the media spotlight once every few months right? I'd dread to think what happens to him while he's missing during those media lapses...
I've worked for a few German mega-corps and I was always struck by how in point their "anti-bribery" training was. It kind of felt like a "how-to" course on bribery where they just tell you not to do the thing at the end.
Kind of like those anti-drug campaigns in schools where the police would tell you about all the different drugs and how not to use them. "This here is crack cocaine, it's like regular cocaine but cheaper and more effective. Most people put the crack rock into a glass tube and light it with a torch. Now smoking crack makes your body feel better than anything in the world. So don't do it." Then they tell you how to spot a drug dealer and let you know that most offer free samples.
Regarding Siemens it reminds me of John Perkins' book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man about the engineering firm Chas T Main. Bribes are merely one technique to obtain power by companies like these. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confessions_of_an_Economic_Hit...
> No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure
Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad. I've been living in Germany for 5 years, and for the most part I love it, but the telecom situation is shocking. Speeds are slow, most people are still on DSL, and hardly a day goes by where I don't have at least a few minutes of random network blackouts, which is really great for working during a pandemic. A few weeks ago my home internet was down for 72 hours. Sometimes it feels like like when I have traveled in the developing world and the power just goes out sometimes and nobody makes a big deal about it because they're used to it.
If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment. This is not due to technology, this is due to carriers and ISPs. Those two are completely separate from tech companies making networking hardware. Ironically [for this comment] Germany uses A LOT of Huawei stuff for the access network on xDSL.
>If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment.
Except it isn't though, not by a long shot. With the exception of maybe Italy and Portugal, pretty much every other European country has better internet than Germany, especially Eastern Europe, like Hungary or Romania where you can get Gigabit fiber to your door in any neighborhood of any big city and they all use Huawei and ZTE almost exclusively.
Germany's infamous terrible internet is not due to them using Huawei equipment, it's due to the monopoly of a few players who bought the outdated copper infrastructure from the government decades ago and resorted to a rent-seeking business model to maximize their return as it's more profitable than updating the infrastructure.
It's the same in Austria. The government privatized the national telecom operator to their crony buddies, claiming that would lead to better deals for customers, when in fact, the minute the investors took over the national infrastructure and the customer base, instead of investing and creating competitive deals, they just resorted to rent-seeking to recoup the acquisition cost they paid to the government; who could have possibly foreseen that lol.
When the goverment asks them why they're not investing in updating the infrastructure, the telcos' response is always something along the lines of "Building infrastructure is the government's job, ours is to make a profit for our shareholders LMAO." So the taxpayers end up being shafted form both sides, once by paying for expensive services to a monopoly and once again for shelling out cash for updating the infrastructure that will be rented out to them later by the telcos for $$$.
The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use.
And of course, you should not compare next gen access infrastructure with xDSL, as they are not mutually exclusive, and all countries have areas with degraded infrastructure on old technology, but also new infrastructure on new technology.
This is, again, completely unrelated to who makes the telco equipment.
>You might have missed my point. The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use.
Excuse me, but isn't this what you claimed in your original post? Quote: "If it's any consolation, it is just as bad in other countries, when using Huawei equipment."
Yes, I said that, and that would mean "The fact that Germany has bad internet is completely unrelated to the manufacturers of equipment that German telcos use."
OP said:
> > No one would hesitate to use German communication infrastructure
> Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad.
My intention was to note that the fact that German communication infrastructure is bad is not related at all to the manufacturer of ICT equipment, in the context of the quality of German (and European - in general) telco equipment manufacturers.
If Germany has bad infrastructure, and uses XYZ European ICT equipment manufacturer, this cannot be extrapolated to mean that XYZ is bad at making ICT equipment. The same applies to Huawei. The fact that some countries have good or bad infrastructure is not related to what equipment they use (at this point in time).
The end result being that quality of telco infrastructure is not an argument for or against any particular maker of equipment, because those two things are unrelated.
Any to underline why they are unrelated - simply because ISPs are profit-driven businesses and not tech playgrounds, so they will not invest in the latest and greatest equipment that XYZ/Huawei has to offer, instead they will milk the existing equipment and infrastructure dry and then switch to the cheapest new next-gen-access "thing" that exists for the next 20+ years. This does not mean that XYZ/Huawei doesn't have anything better to offer, it just means that the telcos do not want it.
> Maybe they would hesitate to use it because it's embarrassingly bad.
German here. That's not because our tech companies are incompetent (AVM's FritzBox DSL/Cable modems are top notch, Fraunhofer and the public broadcasters' research arm IRT are leading in communication standards development)... it is a side effect of our dysfunctional politics and decades of "conservatives" in government:
1) Our mobile networks are ... lackluster because the governments (both center-left and "conservative") extracted something like 50 billion € from the operators during the infamous UMTS license auctions to prop up the government's balance sheet. That, together with the cost of building out a network in rural areas that don't have many customers, is the reason why mobile plans are so expensive and the quality so bad.
2) Our fibre adoption rate is so utterly disgusting because the fibre plans were shelved by the newly elected Conservative government in 1982 - it got replaced by cable-TV so that the percieved "too far left" (=too critical of the government) public TV stations could be "countered" with private TV stations. I wish I were joking, unfortunately I'm serious: https://netzpolitik.org/2018/danke-helmut-kohl-kabelfernsehe...
While I absolutely do have the perception that Chinese businesses are more corrupt than Western businesses, admittedly any sort of data or analysis would be welcome.
I happened to work a few years in German company that made fiber and carrier ethernet products for telecoms.
We had a lot of ethics and professionalism and really good feature set, even occasionally we out innovated other companies, but we didn't have the price point that Huawei can achieve, hence contracts went to China.
I wouldn't trust Americans either if I had no access to courts that had jurisdiction over them. This is one of the issues of trade without reciprocal jurisdiction. The problem extends beyond just communications hardware and the special concerns of that category.
1. metadata leaks
2. denial of service backdoors - a real consideration for nations going to trade war with China and Huawei is pretty connected to the Chinese government
Also there is the problem that lot of tech is legacy and can not be easily upgraded for encryption (think SMS and mobile calls)
Ironically. You could be right about the 200 suppliers in China, except that Huawei in this case IS actually one of the few trustable Chinese companies.
I feel like this is akin to one of those Stanford psychology experiments, but in political science/cultural development, i.e. what happens when you bomb a country back to the stone age (interregnum post-Qiang dynasty, then WWII), but then juice up the economy in 2-3 decades but without the "normal" cultural/political/ethical development, and in a complete effectively laissez-faire libertarian-but-also-authoritarian-with-a-lot-of-bribes environment
It goes beyond ethics. The CCP has clear long term global power goals and espionage plays a large part of this.
China threads turn into whataboutism. Yeah obviously the West spies as well. But we don't tend to use that to steal IP and coordinate with our state-owned or virtually quasi state owned companies. Even if we did do that I'd rather the spying be on our side. Plus we do have some individual liberty protections (no matter how deteriorating) and can push for more/transparency (Democracy versus a dictatorship).
We're in confrontation already why give up such an important strategic asset?
Well, maybe the idea is to fix your own house first?
I mean this is the whole reason we've got into the Brexit situation, by constantly casting blame on the EU for our own government's failings. But I guess that's the whole point in Democracy isn't it? Constantly blaming someone else, making up false accusations of someone else, and when they try to defend themselves, intensify the accusations.
I am also curious about where you think Huawei stolen the 5G IPs from? Or are you regurgitating false accusations without any evidence?
- I never claimed huawei stole 5g ips i don't know much on this subject but you can not argue that China has not stolen IP broadly and aggressively
- sure fix the house. but why let a foreign actor in the 'house' who would do even more damage.
Germans will still get confused as it's not really common practice for a large part of Germany to refer to Berlin when referring to the government.
The reasons for this are many fold, including that the Berlin government is pretty bad and as such the city has monetary and other problem all the time.
Also in difference to e.g. the US the capital city has not the same kind of special position, besides some small area in it the rest of it is fully self governed by the city state in the same way e.g. Bavaria is self governed by it's local government.
AFAIK, it's common to use the capital of a country when referencing government decisions in news articles. e.g. Washington, Beijing, Ottawa, Delhi, Brussels, etc.
This is an english linguistic practice called metonymy. This practice involves referring to a whole entity by something that it is part of it. For example, Berlin is part (the capital) of Germany. This is a very common practice in discussing international politics, with other examples being Washington, Moscow, and Beijing to refer to the US, Russia and China respectively.
Yes she fired the diplomat of the US Embassy for a few months IIRC.
But it’s irrelevant to this post , the goal is for Germany to get sovereign 5G Telecom Infrastructure, today it’s either China with Huawei or American antenna ( NSA + CIA ) with Ericsson.
I'm sure you'd agree that vendor lock in on client endpoints is a much lesser issue than the critical infrastructure those endpoints are connected to, specially because not all endpoints are Microsoft
Indeed. As a Canadian too I'm agnostic to Chinese or American-backed equipment - they both pose a similar threat. If there is an option for domestic equipment then that is of course wildly preferable to either.
Yea not sure what the overreaction to China is. Any foreign power is a threat- but I'd rather the enemy you know, than a friend who would (and have a record of) stabbing you in the back.
You shouldn't. The US is our ally through NORAD, NATO and free trade agreements. It has had a rough pass because of the Trump administration, but they would still defend our interests in case of trade disputes or armed conflicts.
Canadian geostrategic policy has always been to limit reliance on the US as much as possible. This is the reason why the Canadian military went as far as training with the USSR in the 80s.
The US will not help Canada in trade conflicts. In fact, most trade conflicts that Canada has are with the US. Equally, the US only helps Canada militarily as far as it furthers US interests.
Here is a good example. The only significant military challenge to Canadian interests right now are Russian claims in the Arctic. The US, instead of supporting Canadian claims, first made its own claims, and then argued that the territory should be under international jurisdiction.
The absolutely do not compare!!!! As Canadian I am appalled at the constant CCP apologists in our country and on HN.
One is a totalitarian regime devoid of basic human morality such as ripping out organs out of people for profit while they are alive , responsible for genocide of Uighurs and suppression of information and many many other stuff that is devoid of any dignity for humanity.
The other is a democratic hyperpower that Canada is also part of under the Five Eyes agreement.
If I had to choose between the CCP, Russia or America, it's America every fucking time.
edit: I took a look at your comment history and when you talk stuff like this I see where you are coming from:
A significant reason why Stalin was able to successfully rise to power and why the Bolsheviks were able to secure total power is because of foreign violence and interference.
Whether by racism or political calculus, US authorities do not seem to respect lives of citizens of third world nations.
US has kidnapped random people around the world to keep them in jail idefinately with no court or trial. It has killed thousands of people in drone strikes, in violation of international law, airspace and territorial sovereignty.
Add to that some invasions, and maybe you will start to realise why people in Russia/India/Vietnam/etc. do not trust US any more than they do anyone else when it comes to upholding international law. As a Britton/German/Canadian you don't have to worry about these things.
Additionally, if you consider territorial ambitions, various land disputes of old world nations are usually historical. As in "we will reverse some kind of injustice and get back some lands that belonged to our ancestors". That doesn't justify them, but one benefit of this is that they are predictable - China is not going to wake up one day to invade Somalia, but with USA you never know.
That is just plain false. If you transplanted like that your chance Of rejection is way higher because of stress hormone... why would you bother? You’ve been reading a bit too much epoch times my friend.
There is evidence of organ harvesting of prisoners on death row, that seems clear. Morally that’s different ballgame to vivisection.
I'm not making any value statements here. The US, democratic as it may be, is a threat to Canadian strategic independence, and has been forever. For this reason, Canada has always strategically hedged.
This is the reason why Canada maintained ties with Cuba, a Communist State, and did some limited military training with the USSR in the 1980s.
The US is the greatest peace-time threat to Canadian independence.
Nations have no friends. Only interests. It's sad, but it is how it is.
I think your view of China is ignorant, not the GP.
There othering of a whole nation is only going to make the situation worse. They have different political and cultural values and yes some morally questionable actions... but so do all countries.
In terms of Canada/US relations... Canadians were imprisoned (and put to death?) in China because of the very questionable US indictment of Huaweis CFO... how was that good for Canada?
Canadians were indeed imprisoned on bogus charges for which the maximum penalty is death, but they were not sentenced yet (and won't be unless something happens to the CFO).
Indeed, it's a situation where Canada won nothing and lost a lot.
It was. But Germany cooperated with the NSA on mass surveillance so that’s okay. The anti Huawei narrative is entirely political and not based on facts.
I believe one of the major reasons why Huawei is so vilified is that it's the first Chinese corporation that not only outprices its Western competitors, but also outtechs and outmanages them. This goes so counter to the Gated Institutional Narrative that cognitive dissonance kicks in - media insist there must surely be something dishonest and fraudulent about Huawei.
Both Ericsson and Nokia barely make any profit, even amidst of what should be a 5G bonanza. They're famous for their perennial layoffs, constant cost-cutting, bland working conditions, outsourcing, infighting, insane level of bureaucracy and proliferation of management positions.
Huawei on the other hand, is well known for paying above-market wages (though long working hours), "poaching" skilled people from competitors, generous employee share scheme, valuing engineering above middle management, contributing to open source projects, and relative freedom their R&D personnel enjoys in tackling technical challenges. And their B2B offerings are the best value. And their consumer electronics is among the best value. And on top of that, they're highly profitable.
Even if you assert there's some secret money pump from CCP to Huawei, you cannot deny the fact that Huawei is a well-oiled machine that delivers. Pump billions into not only Nokia/Ericsson, but also IBM, SAP, HP, Oracle - the money would just get sucked into a black hole with very little to show for it. Huawei is portrayed as evil, because the alternative is to confront our weakness.
> Huawei is portrayed as evil, because the alternative is to confront our weakness.
While this may be the case with some people with loose morals, don't put your words in my finger tips. I portray all major Chinese corps as the worst possible alternative in most cases because they are backed by a government with modern day concentration camps
I hang in the EU a lot lately. My friend takes corporate groups on tours of various places. She told me of one group from China last year who happened to see European reporting on protests in HK, while they were at a bar. The group's reaction was "what is this a joke? Are they being sarcastic? Is this a movie?" They had no idea what was happening in HK. A couple of them sent messages home to friends/family about the matter and within minutes all of their phones were disabled.
This actually happened. I want that government as far from me as possible.
The HK protests were well covered in mainstream Chinese news. Was this tour from a part of China without TVs?
There was wide National Support for the crackdown on HK protests, it wasn't controversial at all. The government didn't need to censor any of the media.
> I portray all major Chinese corps as the worst possible alternative in most cases because they are backed by a government with modern day concentration camps
So half of Europe and South America have modern day concentration camps, they just call them "Refugee Camps". In other Asia Pacific Countries (including Australia) they have "Immigration Detention Centres" (prisons for the persecuted). In the US they have Gitmo AND immigration detention.
In China they have Work Camps and Re-eduction camps.
I fail to see the moral high ground. Are you from a part of the world I missed?
> In China they have Work Camps and Re-eduction camps.
OK, I give up being reasonable. Collect your 50 cents.
> I fail to see the moral high ground. Are you from a part of the world I missed?
I am not claiming any moral high ground. In fact, my experience tells me that anyone claiming the moral high ground for one country/race/group over another takes the risk of being a dangerous fool. This side of humanity will be our end if we do not grow out of it very soon.
Huawei is a legitimate threat from a country that doesn't have the same checks and balances as other countries e.g. free media, robust judiciary, democracy.
And it's not like network providers are specifically trying to secure their platform against Huawei. It's against anyone.
The internal structure of a country is not a good predictor of its foreign policy. How countries act foreign policy wise is very simple - they will attempt to achieve the most advantageous positions for themselves, without regard for you (unless you can help them, of course).
It doesn't matter if you're dealing with a dictatorship or a democracy when it comes to foreign policy. Both will kill you.
> Using "CCP" in place of "China" is a trend that started with the recent demonization of China.
I take exception to this as I have been trying to explain to everyone how evil the CCP is for many years. It is not recent. Using the term CCP is simply an attempt to accurately identify the problem, and not be lazy/racist by blaming things on "China."
The lowest common denominator for systems which I find "evil" are systems with low accountability.
Non-democratic authoritarian regimes, populations with large income divides, US policing systems, economies with monopolistic actors... all of these things are systems with low-to-zero accountability.
Or if you are truly asking the innocent question "how are they evil?" Examples of how the CCP is evil can be found in HK jails, Tianamen square, and Xinjiang province for a start.
"Evil" is just lazy shorthand. Unfair, unjust, not cool... many words could work here.
Also, just because I am currently talking about the evils of the CCP does not spare other actors and systems from my derision.
People seem to be easily led down the path of A vs B when the truth is always more complex. For example, the antique dichotomy of Capitalism vs Socialism is somehow still the main discussion. From my POV, history has clearly proven both doctrines as faulty in their pure forms. For years we have seen and lived the "third way" but somehow, it's still Capitalism vs Socialism in the conversation.
The reaction to COVID clearly shows how plain dumb US capitalism really is. That doesn't excuse the CCP from anything.
> So all countries are unfair/unjust and no ones excused but let’s keep talking about Chinas bad...
In comment threads about China, yes. But also, you keep twisting my words. I never said China bad, I said CCP truly evil.
> I hope somewhere on the Chinese version of HN...
This is either disingenuous or very naïve. Please send me a link to a Chinese platform for open discourse where their own government can be criticized, like I criticize the US government in this thread, and I will donate $500 to the charity of your choice.
You don’t think Chinese have technical forums online? Save your $500. They do. You’re right they won’t criticise government so openly, but they will criticise the US (which is what I was saying) and they do criticise their own government but it’s usually through innuendo and pun rather than direct criticism. Where do you think Winnie the Pooh memes came from?
This thread is about Huawei a Chinese company. Not the CCP... am I the one twisting words? Or does everything Chinese immediately get grouped up to CCP and hated on?
I know an informed opinion of China when I see people make a distinction between Xi, CCP, and Chinese companies... they are not the same thing at all.
> Also, Hua wei isn’t the ccp. I’m sure there is influence for sure
Actually, the CCP controls all companies in China, and has agents on site in each company over about 40 employees. The founder is PLA, which reports to the CCP.
Wow... Where do people make this stuff up? This is like CCP fan fiction.
Larger companies often have to have a ccp representative, these aren’t agents... Founders are not PLA... you mean Huawei in particular... the founder was once in the army?
Similar to how Amazon, Boeing, and AT&T are dual use?
Or how Johnson and Johnson’s CEO is Ex military? Guess you should think twice about that shampoo.
And that CCP cell controls the direction of the company? Or less dramatically does it ensure (a) workers rights (admittedly these are far worse conditions than western countries), and (b) that the company isn’t working against the CCP.
No, they blame "Israel", which is a political and national entity. You can be more specific and blame one leader or party when that is a variable, but that's not the case with China- the CCP is in fact its fundamental political organisation.
So the only reason to talk of "the CCP" instead of "China" is that it reframes an issue which is mostly a struggle for economic and military power between countries, to an issue within China itself, between the Chinese people and their government. Which is dishonest, because truth is, from one side the Chinese don't have much issues with their government, it's working great for them; and from the other side, the US would have issue with any government of China, as long as it keeps steadily advancing to become the first economic power in the world. But of course admitting that is not easy, so it's better to pretend the issue is "the CCP".
