Let me dispel some falsehoods about China that I hear people say all the time
https://x.com/shaunrein/status/1970790893197377653
Let me dispel some falsehoods about China that I hear people say all the time
1)China didn't ban LinkedIn. I actually did LinkedIn's entry strategy for China. After it was acquired by Microsoft, MSFT didn't want to deal with housing data in China requirements. They also didn't know how to deal with groups and censorship
So LinkedIn left on it's own because of this and because MSFT didn't want to get attacked from the US side for enabling censorship. LinkedIn also didn't do well financially under MSFT in China
China never banned it. It's too bad as LinkedIn was an incredible way for Chinese and non-Chinese to communicate
2)Google as a company also wasn't banned in China. They have a huge office in Lujiazui. One of my neighbors is a senior exec at Google China - Android is widely used. Similarly Facebook sells $5 billion USD of ad space to Chinese companies
Google itself shut its search engine in China because it didn't want to adhere to China's censorship laws any longer. Eric Schmidt was the CEO then (yes the guy who just a few months before the release of DeepSeek said China was years behind the US in AI)
Schmidt has also called for containment of China. In other words, Schmidt and Google are not good, moral players who understand what's going on in China
Americans and Chinese both should be scared of having someone like Schmidt dictate tech policy in either country
But again, Google precipitated the crisis by reneging on the deal with Chinese officials. And because they did this, and made China look bad, many officials lost face and even more have never trusted US tech firms ever again
The Chinese felt they made a deal in good faith, only to be cheated by Schmidt
3)Although I generally like the street cameras because it makes things safer and traffic better, at times things are a little big brotherish. I don't like that many massage parlors have cameras in the treatment rooms that local police can watch in real time.
If there is prostitution there, they should just shut the parlors down. It's an invasion of privacy to have cameras there
4)Because officials of a certain rank can't go into the private sector (this helps ensure loyalty to the Party), they sometimes are scared to make decisions on their own. They all too often wait for what their superiors say, or else worry about getting fired and unable to get a good job.
Too often this slows decision making down. Or officials err on the side of caution out of fear of getting fired. So if Xi says to jump 5 feet, provincial heads will jump 7 feet, city heads 10, district 15, neighborhood committees 20
This is what happened during covid when neighborhood committees sometimes went crazy in implementing covid containment policies. They weren't doing what Beijing wanted but what they thought Beijing might want to what they thought would keep them safe and secure
posted by Satish Sharma at
09:15
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