Yeah, sure clean all yards but start with your own.

Do you say that to Europe, to China, or both?

It’s obvious you’re addressing only Europe. Why?

This is what I meant with ‘The West bad, China bad okay’. It’s hypocritical. It’s double-standards. It’s ignorant and disgusting.

What about cleaning all yards? This ‘the West bad, China bad okay’ stance is dehumanising and ignorant. [Edit typo.]

I posted this elsewhere already, but it also fits here goven many of the posts in this thread: It is not just about data/privacy concerns (which are underestimated imo, as China pursues an own agenda with collecting your data through Chinese tech) and ‘unfair’ subsidies, but about gross human rights violations.

In short, some parts of the cheap Chinese cars are made in concentration camps where people are forced to work under catastrophic conditions.

I posted this elsewhere already, but it also fits here goven many of the posts in this thread: It is not just about data/privacy concerns (which are underestimated imo, as China pursues an own agenda with collecting your data through Chinese tech) and ‘unfair’ subsidies, but about gross human rights violations.

In short, some parts of the cheap Chinese cars are made in concentration camps where people are forced to work under catastrophic conditions.

Chinese orgs love signing MOUs

The CCP - or, better, the China Scholarship Council (CSC) under the rule of the CCP - forces Chinese students and researchers to sign ‘loyalty pleadges’ before giong abroad saying they “shall consciously safeguard the honor of the motherland, (and) obey the guidance and management of embassies (consulates) abroad.” The restrictive scholarship contract requires them to report back to the Chinese embassy on a regular basis, and anyone who violates these conditions is subject to disciplinary action.

In one investigation,

Mareike Ohlberg, a senior fellow working on China at the German Marshall Fund, sees the CSC contract as a demonstration of the Chinese Communist Party’s “mania for control.”

“People are actively encouraged to intervene if anything happens that might not be in the country’s interest,” Ohlberg said.

Harming China’s interests is in fact considered the worst possible breach of the contract.

“It’s even listed ahead of possible involvement in crimes, so effectively even ahead of murder,” she noted. “China is making its priorities very clear here.”

[…] Kai Gehring, the chair of German parliament’s Committee for Education and Research, says the CSC contracts are “not compatible” with Germany’s Basic Law, which guarantees academic freedom.

In Sweden, for example, universities have already cancelled the collaboration with the CSC over this practice.

There is ample evidence that China uses scientific collaboration with private companies as well as universities and research organizations for spying. You’ll find many independent reports on that as well as of the CCP’s intimidation practices of Chinese students who don’t comply with the party line, e.g., in Australia and elsewhere. It’s easy to find reliable sources on the (Western) web.

What is a good source for information on China?

These are not marketing but training materials offering authoritarian principles in areas such as law enforcement, journalism, legal issues, space technologies, and many other topics, to build and maintain a totalitarian regime as China’s authoritarian capitalism model. It’s for the benefit of a few, while the people’s freedoms are suppressed.

Read the whole report.

Corrected, thanks. It’s no bear initiative :-) 🐼

@trevron, It’s good practice to name source. Read my other post in this thread on the same topic citing another source, and feel free to post sources you deem more reliable.

[Edit typo.]

Ukraine accuses Russia of intensifying chemical attacks on the battlefield (February 2024)

Ukraine accused Russia […] of using toxic chemicals in more than 200 attacks on the battlefield in January alone, a sharp increase in what it said were recorded instances of their use by Russian forces since they invaded two years ago.

CS gas […] is banned on the battlefield by the international Chemical Weapons Convention which states in Article 1: “Each State Party undertakes not to use riot control agents as a method of warfare.”

[…] The Ukrainian general staff said: “815 cases of the use of ammunition loaded with toxic chemicals by the Russian Federation were recorded. Of these, only in January 2024 – 229 cases.”

The Nato expansion issue is far to simplistic. Nato doesn’t expand itself. All Nato members join this alliance voluntarily. Finland, for example, has been committed to neutrality for 80 or so years and joined Nato only after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

Neutrality is fine in a world where everyone -especially your neighbours- respect democratic values and human rights. If this isn’t the case, countries seek alliances. (We have a similar situation in the Asia-Pacific region, where countries seek to establish alliances following China’s increasingly aggressive behaviour.)

The ‘problem’ isn’t Nato -that’s indeed Russian propaganda- but the fact that Russia failed so far to develop democratic structures. The aggressor here is Putin’s dictatorship.

Yes. We need human responsibility for everything what AI does. It’s not the technology that harms but human beings and those who profit from it.

No Gaza ceasefire until Israel war aims achieved, Netanyahu says

His [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s] statement comes after US President Joe Biden announced Israel had proposed a three-stage plan to Hamas aimed at reaching a permanent ceasefire.

You wouldn’t trust the Chinese supplier (or any supplier). You’d go to the bauxite shipment company and let them register with the network, you’d send independent auditors to their premises, very much as we do it with ibdependent audits nowadays.

We do need to physically access the premises across the supply chain to verify that ‘on-chain personas’ reflect their ‘real’ identities. But no single authority can control the data, we can be quite sure that all transfers of ownership across the supply chain have been authorized by their controllers. Compared to centralized systems, the blockchain provides us a much higher level of transparency and certainty over the fidelity of the information.

there’s no way tovtrack where resources, material, items come from, who made them

Independent audits are done -they are very common in many industry for a variety of reasons- and they work if done properly.

We could even track the provenance of each material through a trustless system like a blockchain to guarantuee a high level of credibility and transparency, just to name a relatively new technology. This is done already.

They have been already managing that for a long time. Independent audits are common - except in a few countries.

That’s strange. I can see the video at the top of the page, just before the text begins.

In addition to the other comments, the EU is considering to alter its decision-making process and implementing a majority vote (at the moment every single counrty must agree to a decision). That could significantly reduce the risks brought by countries like Hungary and Slovakia.

What do we understand by genocide?

The Encoclopedia Britannica says:

Genocide, the deliberate and systematic destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity, nationality, religion, or race. The term, derived from the Greek genos (“race,” “tribe,” or “nation”) and the Latin cide (“killing”) …

Tibetan children are separated from their families at a very young age and sent to state-run boarding ‘schools’ where they have to complete a “compulsory education” curriculum in the Mandarin Chinese language, with no access to traditional or culturally-relevant learning.

Forced sterilization of Tibetan women.

Individuals advocating for Tibetan language and education are persecuted.

Rounding up hundreds of thousands of innocent Tibetans, Uyghurs, and other minorities in military-style reeducation camps where they are forced to work.

More can be found, for examples, in the report on 100 atrocities of CCP in Tibet (pdf)

There’s is many more across the web.

Forced labour in Chinese prisons isn’t limited to Xinjiang, nor to the car industry. A lot products we use in Europe and North America and elsewhere around the globe are made by Chinese prisoners forced to work under catastrophic conditions.

There is strong evidence for this provided by many independent sources, among them a documentary by Arte (a French-German media outlet). If interested:

Forced Labour - SOS from a Chinese Prisoner – (documentary, 95 min.)

A desperate cry for help written in Chinese was discovered in a pregnancy test sold in France and made in a Chinese factory. It revealed a hidden world of Chinese prison-companies where prisoners are forced to work for 15 hour days manufacturing products for export. This documentary tries to find out who wrote the letter.

(And, yes, prison labour exists also in the U.S., and it is as evil, but this doesn’t make the autocratic Chinese government any better.)