Lord... That's such a simplistic black and white view of the world. You're either for us or you're against us. This is the toxic juvenile attitude that's so scary honestly.
One can express support for a particular action of their government, or try to share some common misconceptions about life in China without being a supporter of the whole system.
Youve really proved my point. You post anything positive and everyone assumes you're in a click farm jerking off to a picture of Mao Zedong. There is so much misinformation about China in the West - it's truely mind boggling. I used to not care - but lately there is so much warmongering in the West that it's gotten to be honestly scary and I dunno - it's harder to sit back and ignore it all.
Of course if I'm honest with myself - at the end of the day I know that my voice is just a drop in the ocean and doesn't matter
I don't post anything positive about China on any account associated with my name. In the current zeitgeist it'd be career suicide and with all the frothing at the mouth in the public discourse with the US itching for a cold war - I honestly think in a few years it won't be safe to have that on your internet record
How is beating pets to death political posturing..? Someone thought it'd make them look good?
Most likely it was some misinformed overzealous local official. Pets from pretty early on in the pandemic have been known to catch corona. I think the question of if you can catch the virus from a pet is inconclusive (last I heard) - but obviously very unlikely
If you are trying to get to zero COVID so your city isn't shutdown and thousands of people don't loose their way of life then you're prolly quarantining sick people. No one to take care of their potentially disease spreading pets, so local official decides better safe than sorry
It's messed up, but it's totally not unreasonable for someone on the local level to make this kind of call in a high pressure situation with minimal guidelines and the safety of a city on the line
Ironically both articles come from a very typically western patronizing perspective
A lot of expats come to asia and get frustrated with many small cultural details. It's especially prominent when the person doesn't speak the local language (as this BBC corespondent... shocking). The general reaction is "why can't you just be more like the us/europe/etc." It's really miopic. There is always a larger broader cultural context for why things are the way they are. Things that have developed organically over generations and aren't exactly planned
Just a couple of examples:
"Hiring 6 people to do the job of 2 is sadly common in Japan, and it’s a big reason why Japanese people earn such low and stagnant wages.“
Yes, this is very common in Asia. They also will work extremely long hours. However the productivity (as also pointed out in the article) is much lower. People are a lot less stressed at work. This ties into other aspect of work culture.. where East Asian cultures have a lot less of a fixation on professionalism and it's more of "friends hanging out" at work. You go out to drink with the boss, and you sit playing on your phone at work sometimes. Okay, you might not like that yourself and you'd like to just do an intense 8 hours and clock out - but that's how things operate and a lot of people enjoy it. If your KFC has twice as many workers as it technically needs - do you work less and get paid less? Yes. That's the tradeoff
"I think an equally or even more important problem is corporate gerontocracy .."
This ties into some very fundamental cultural priorities about caring and respecting elders. Yeah you get a bunch of morons promoted b/c they're older and "more experienced" - but the flip side of the coin is that people generally really take care of the elderly. I took my grandmother to visit China once and she was blown away at how respectful and kind everyone was to her. Could you somehow have people care and respect elders and yet have CEOs that was 22yrs old? Maybe - but the two things are a bit at odds.
Living in Taiwan now, I can see the effect of westernization and it's a mixed bag (You have waves of US-educated Taiwanese reshaping the cultural landscape). It's very interesting to contrast with how things develop in China - which has gone for a more Japanese-style modernization and has been more selective about importing western ideas. I don't necessarily think the changes the writers want are bad (and I haven't really lived in Japan, so I wouldn't dare to have an opinion), but the way they're presented shows a very shallow understanding of what's really going on. At the end of the day you can't tweak one cultural irritant without affecting the whole cultural edifice.
I mean I lived a sheltered life in the city and my friends were city folks, but I often hear people had issues firing bad employees. And on the flip side people new their rights and knew they couldn't just be left off on a random day.
Companies seemed always cautious with firing. Yeah there was tons of sneaky stuff and people not getting their contracts and lots of grey area stuff - maybe the enforcement wasn't great. But my point is that they actually have some mechanisms in place that do function when it's you vs a company (not you vs the government). So it's not fair to characterize the whole place as lawless
In this case from the news it seemed to have worked out exactly as it should legally. Foxconn messed up (or tried to get sneaky with paying people), they got slapped on the wrist by the government, everyone got paid
I hope their legal systems keep improving (it was way worse a decade or two ago) and less companies get away with screwing their employees. I'm skeptical other developing nations like India are on some other higher level with their legal systems.
I think your original post is extremely sensationalist - comparing factory work to pseudoslave labor in cotton fields - especially given you're from a background that benefitted from this (I assume your parents worked when the system was much worse)
If the government is out to get you, then yeah you're screwed.
If it's you against a company - then you typically have more protections than I think the typical western reader would expect.
I personally know people that had issues firing others at their company as well as people that got compensation when fired. Sure there are loopholes and people still get screwed a lot, but on the whole companies are generally apprehensive to fire employees and it's not totally the wild west
In the current situation, it very much sounds like it's people vs. Foxconn and that in the end people got their compensation.
You can argue that the situation was instigated by government policies, but that's sorta besides the point
Yeah, I think it's a scenario where you can probably sue and you can probably win - but then (just like in the US) you're known as the person that sues their employer and it's a black mark.
I haven't heard of people getting lawsuits about 996 thrown out in China - but to be fair I also haven't heard of people suing over that either.
I don't know where people get the idea people are semi-enslaved in factories.. Having lived in China, in my second hand experience Chinese worker protection laws are quite strict. Somewhere between US and Europe. It's not really easy to fire people and people regularly sue their employers and win. The legal system is generally very heavily biased towards the little guy
I just feel really bad for these people. They probably left some country side life making peanuts to go make some real money for a while at a factory and like send their kids to college or whatever - and now westerners are like "no, you shouldn't do that. go back to your bucolic life of poverty. And btw we hate your government". Cool
From the initial reports it sounds like Foxxcon really royally screwed up and was not prepared logistically for a lockdown.
Another big part of this whole fiasco seems to have been conspiracy-theory style rumors and just a general freakout of the workers (which is kinda understandable given how policies are opaque and feel arbitrary)
"This young factory worker heard that the army was going to come in and take control so as to enforce a type of giant "living with Covid" experiment which involved allowing everyone in that part of Zhengzhou city to get sick."
In my experience.. even talking to educated middle class people.. these kinds of things are super common - even with all the social media controls. People believe all sorts of insane things b/c their sister's husband's cousin is in the army and told them blah blah. If in the US a double digit percentage of people believe that 9/11 was inside job - in the developing world the numbers are way scarier. It sounds like there was mass panic (again, kinda understandable given the mushroom management that's so common in Asia)
B/c there is no sense of justice about it. It's just the arbitrary fickleness of some decision maker and it can't be appealed.
The US government alleges they (Huawei ZTE etc.) colluding to put backdoors in infrastructure equipment. The companies say "no we don't" and the US government just says "well.. we think you're lieing!" - and that's the end of the story. It's all just amateurish and undermines the rule of law and sense of fairness when dealing with America and the American market.
If there was some formal process where countries are semi-sanctioned and all thing made in some super long list of authoritarian countries was not allowed to be used in some other long list of "critical infrastructure" .. well at least there would be a sense of impartiality.
The way things stand.. it looks like Huawei's 5G and infrastructure technology got too good, it threatened the pseudo-monopolies of some big American companies with deep government connections, so the US bureaucrats curb-stomped them as best they could .. and now they can't even sell their laptops/cellphones in the US? It's just completely nonsensical, arbitrary and vindictive.
There is also just very little logic to it, b/c even if all the allegations about their tentacles in networking equipment are true and were proven to be true, why should I be prohibited from buying some completely unrelated consumer good - like a Huawei laptop, but an Apple or Lenovo laptop (also made in China) is totally fine? It's like the US government is in some state of war with these firms and is out to destroy them (based on no public evidence or accountability) - and the threat on US infrastructure seems to have devolved to be a convenient pretext.
Maybe the intentions of the US authorizes are good and pure and they have a good reason for all of this. But they way they're going about it is vindictive, authoritarian and undermines the impartial fairness of the American system
Yeah I saw Minority Report. I know about future crime :) Now I'm imagining clones in vats at CIA headquarters telling them which companies will turn evil.
I dunno man, in the US you don't just ban people and companies for stuff they haven't yet done. Sure potential attack surfaces are important and you should think about stuff like that. But that's kinda my point.. you should make laws about that and regulate critical infrastructure. (maybe networking equipment shouldn't get OTA updates at all? Maybe that's too simplistic..）
I think singling out China or the PLA is kinda the problem... Just any government/military controlled company from any country arguably is an issue. If you make it more country agnostic then it's going to be taken more seriously
"it's the Orwellian thought-suppression psy-ops stuff."
I mean that's like a "bigger" issue. I think it's a completely fair to decide you should just not conduct business with companies under authoritarian regimes (see N.Korea Iran Myanmar etc.). If you wanna blacklist the whole country then okay.. but here it's some indefensible middle ground where you continue to do business with them, until it's inconvenient and some bureaucrat decided it's making you look bad so lets just ban some of their strongest companies to cripple them. We will do business with you as long as you only make low end widgets thankyouverymuch.
That might not be what's actually happening, but that's how it looks
This whole things looks more and more embarrassing. From the outside it just looks like the US is struggling to compete and so they create extrajudicial barriers based on "secret evidence" to block competitors.
The hypocrisy is that this is the exact anti-competitive behavior the US has been criticizing China for years.
It's possible these companies are doing nefarious things. In which case create a country-agnostic legal framework and take them to court and prove your case. If it's all super-secret-spy-stuff then just do the damn parallel construction and show all these secret backdoors you claim to have found.
If you don't like foreign equipment near military bases or whatever else, then make laws against it
After the Bloomberg microchips-embedded-into-motherboards fantasy stories you can't help but think all this is the product of some CIA director's overactive imagination and isn't based on reality. It does feed into the US frothing-at-the-mouth anti-China rhetoric of the past few years so people eat it up - but cutting out the judicial process and singling out companies/countries just looks horrible imho
One can express support for a particular action of their government, or try to share some common misconceptions about life in China without being a supporter of the whole system.
Youve really proved my point. You post anything positive and everyone assumes you're in a click farm jerking off to a picture of Mao Zedong. There is so much misinformation about China in the West - it's truely mind boggling. I used to not care - but lately there is so much warmongering in the West that it's gotten to be honestly scary and I dunno - it's harder to sit back and ignore it all.
Of course if I'm honest with myself - at the end of the day I know that my voice is just a drop in the ocean and doesn't matter