China also just scheduled fentanyl as a controlled substance. This is after China promised the Obama administration they’d curb the supply of the drug.
The NYTimes said that tens of thousands of Americans have died from Chinese-sourced fentanyl.
I don’t understand how American startups can take money from China, or how Google and others can work with them. They’re in a soft war with us, have a 100 year plan yet we’re all so naive.
Re: the soft war, I think perhaps the biggest threat is the disinformation campaigns being run by various worldwide entities, including the Chinese.
This is one of the best summaries I've seen about democratic governments as they contrast to 'soft' totatalitarian countries like Russia and China. This is why we all want to live in democracies.
The operational differences, for all their practical implications, may be less important than the simple recognition that Beijing and Moscow both approach influence operations and active measures as a normal way of doing business. The United States approaches covert action as something distinct from the routine business of foreign policy, requiring special authorities and oversight or legal arguments over whether Title 10 or Title 50 applies. This is simply not the case for the contemporary Chinese or Russian states. They still bear the hallmarks of their totalitarian and Leninist pasts.*
I was going to comment on The Epoch Times and China Daily (two English language papers that are tools to run influence operations), but let's leave that one for another day and just recognize that we need real, honest, truth-seeking media to have a democracy, and democracies need to figure out how to deal with our new media environment that is penetrated by disinformation.
Hey, didn't the CIA fund a hell of a lot of the 20th century's abstract art movement and help push it into the artistic mainstream by deliberately purchasing loads of it to inflate prices and make it seem a lot more popular, partly because it was much more difficult to use abstract art for understandable political statements?
I generally take all non-literal war claims with head sized grains of salt along with all N-year plans. The "thousand year Reich" didn't even last twenty years. Generally when you see people swinging around nationalism and 'the new war' rhetoric they are emotionally manipulating you into doing what they want - if they had facts they would have brought them up first.
Yes the Chinese government is engaged in all sorts of shady shit and human rights violations that they deserve being criticized for but drawing Fentanyl in is a very strange link. There are many reasons to not want to do business with China from dodgy enforcement, concerns about 'extra shifts' at factories producing authentic bootlegs, technology transfers, digital security being undermined by surveillance, and not wanting to enrich unethical forms of government.
Fentanyl being treated as malice brings to mind the farcical "Mexico as a hivemind" rhetoric about Mexico" sending" drugs and criminals into the United States. Mexico didn't send jack shit - individuals did so on their own accord because it made money. That is literally treating all of them as one individual and is so ridiculously racist that it looks satirical. It would be like claiming that Americans are all crazy and suicidal because JFK was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald who was then shot by Jack Ruby.
The more likely reason is that the Party infamously only pays attention to their own problems when they start to threaten power or cause them to start lose face by being embarrassed in some way. Everywhere you'll find people willing to do shady things for a quick buck - the limit is only in what they can get away with.
I liken it to conspiracy theories: market forces can make it seem like there are single entities conspiring to do things when they are emergent forces. Happens all the time in economic markets, political stories, business stories, etc.
There is a lot of inaccurate reporting on this. Fentanyl and many analogs have been controlled substances in China for some times. However chemists keep on coming out with new variations of the chemical that are not on the list. Now China promised to put the whole category of chemicals on the list. However they will need to revise their laws to give their FDA the power to do so, and that will take some time to carry out. See also https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/geopolitics/article/2176358/f...
> I don’t understand how American startups can take money from China, or how Google and others can work with them. They’re in a soft war with us, have a 100 year plan yet we’re all so naive.
This is what happens when people stop caring about their country and only about themselves.
I might even expand beyond "country"-- we have worldwide a loose set of alliances between lots of liberal-democratic, often Western (but also including Japan, South Korea, South Africa Ukraine Poland to some extent) countries, that have a long and/or stable history of democratic governance.
"This is what happens when people stop caring about democratic governance and society, and care only about themselves."
I was born in South Korea under dictatorship. (South Korea democratized in 1987.) It makes me so happy that South Korea now "has a long and/or stable history of democratic governance".
This is largely ancillary to your point but I don't think that Washington, London, Paris, etc consider South Africa and Ukraine to be members of that club.
The NYTimes said that tens of thousands of Americans have died from Chinese-sourced fentanyl.
I don’t understand how American startups can take money from China, or how Google and others can work with them. They’re in a soft war with us, have a 100 year plan yet we’re all so naive.