After a visit to UN in Vienna for some CCPCJ side events, and a short discussion on Google revoking Huawei’s Android license, yesterday had turned to a sad day for me. Perhaps the low emotion was down to lack of sleep, as usual. But I had some reflections on it anyway.
Talking about the trade war or Huawei and exposing my bad feelings towards these issues is a tricky thing for me. Aside from lacking professional knowledge on international trade, intl. law, national security and Sino-US politics, the biggest problem for me is talking and having a feeling that is not biased as a Chinese, and particularly, not biased as someone that grew in China and went through all sorts of patriotic education. I’ve been wary about nationalism in China for years, and recently questioning myself more and more if my emotion is that of Chinese nationalism leading me to become a ‘little pinky’ (小粉红). Whether I should respond or letting out my emotion is also another problem. Who’d honestly read about your personal emotion in this hardcore information era?
But if I may say so, I think there are a few things that are deep inside my low emotion yesterday, and they are not only emotions by themselves:
- The experiences, opinions and emotions about the ‘international student’ status in the UK;1
- The recurring issue of the Chinese Government incapable of doing the right things at the right moments, particularly in this context, the reform and opening of China;2
- The US under Trump’s presidency being a global bully, and its current protectionism and anti-liberalism actions (noted that the US is having trade conflicts alsos with other countries or regions, such as the EU).
But above all, I guess what makes me deeply frustrated, is that Trump’s national emergency order is a rejection of the common approach and principle of ‘admission by merit’; the order against Huawei is an example of admission (or more precisely, rejection) by origin, which ultimately, is racism and discrimination. Surely there are connections between Huawei and the all-agreed authoritarian Chinese government. But why think that the US governmental agencies would be or are only spied on by Chinese tech companies, or Chinese government agents? Germany and US have a recent history on spying each other.3 If the US government is truly worrying about its national security regarding the 5G implementation or else, then all companies from all countries should be subjected to equal scrutiny, as it should in a free market economy. The current action seems more to be a protection of the commercial interests of US companies regarding 5G (notice US doesn’t ban, for example, One Plus).
By not allowing such scrutiny on Chinese tech companies, the Trump government is also treating US and perhaps global engineers and security experts with contempt. If Chinese tech products are truly unsafe, then the vulnerabilities should and can be discovered, in the same way as the exposure of the Specter and Meltdown.4 Ultimately, Trump’s administrative order is a contempt of knowledge and skills, or simply, virtues.
And these two embedded spirits — admission/rejection by origin and contempt of virtues — are the ongoing and probably worsening threats against immigrants that are now common in many parts of the world, not just US or Europe, but also in China (given many Han Chineses' overt or covert racist attitudes towards black people). Time and time again, we (I say it as an immigrant in Austria and in the UK before) are guarded from participating in the local society and suffer from harsh, tedious visa applications and many other things simply because we are not originally from a few bunch of wealthy, developed countries (and let me just skip the colonial histories here). And quite often, many immigrants would still suffer from unfair treatments or discriminations even when they have went through governmental scrutiny. And are all white people free from discrimination? No, because Polish and Hungarians are (to some extent) discriminated against in the UK, and Balkans like Serbians are (to some extent) discriminated against in Austria.5
There is no conclusion to be drawn in this post, as I am neither able to produce a critical analysis and comment due to my limited time and knowledge, nor do I think that it is appropriate to draw any conclusion now regarding this global rise and seemingly dominance of right-wing politics. One thing is likely, though: given Huawei’s founder Ren Zhengfei’s responses yesterday, Trump may have sowed the Dragon’s teeth. With this lesson, China will seek even more technical independence from the US, and US companies may see only more and greater competitions from Chinese companies.
That is, of course, if Huawei and other Chinese tech companies don’t die, and China can properly move forward with its unfinished reform and opening to become a modern country that is appropriately compatible with the contemporary world.
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The ‘international students’ in the UK are those that are not from the UK and EU/EEA countries. They (and I from 2015 to 2018) pay double to triple amount of tuition fees to university compared to domestic students and annual IHS fee to fund the NHS. In return, they have no access to public fund, only 20 hrs per week legal time for work in term time, they are subject to difficult transition to Tier 2 working visa with few employment opportunities in the UK after graduation (due to, for example, the required minimum annual salary for Tier 2 visa sponsorship which exclude many entry level positions), and the long queue (just like probably many Brits) for NHS services if not requesting an emergency appointment. International students are guarded from being part of the UK society, but are subject to the 20% VAT, the rise of living cost due to the Tory government’s lame policies, including Brexit. ↩︎
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This is only my personal opinion. I wouldn’t be able to have an wholly and objective view on what the Chinese Government and CCP has done right or wrong. But recently I read an article (Chinese only) on Sino-US trade conflicts by Dr Ma Xiaoye (馬曉野, who had participated in quite some trade negotiations on behalf of China), in which he notes that the incorrect understanding of the word ‘reciprocal’ in Chinese has led the Chinese Government misjudged many trade issues. ↩︎
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See, for example, ‘German Intelligence Also Snooped on White House’ on Spiegel Online and ‘New report: NSA did more than just tap Merkel’s phone’ by on the Local. ↩︎
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Though, of course, there is a time issue here given how easy and fast security exploits can be discovered and properly patched, and how much loss there will be before that. Ironically in this context, such security issues are a result of design flaws by US companies such as Intel). ↩︎
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The statement here is based on my limited knowledge with Eastern Europeans in the UK, particularly in the discussions on Brexit, and some stories I heard from my Serbian friends here in Vienna. ↩︎
Last modified on 2019-05-22