I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that you don't actually know how the hukou system work do you? The fact is, the weakening of the hukou system is precisely made China's huge migrant army possible. So long as there is a huge and growing disparity between the eastern urban and the rural areas, it will remain the case. Of course, the Chinese government is planning a different set of alternatives, namely the go west policy. Can't blame them. You move a factory 30 miles outside Guangzhou and you instantly halve your labour and power costs. And as meh mentioned, in the foreseeable future, there is no alternative to replace China.
They have non emergency health care? I do think there are some public education though here, even though the right wingers keep trying to take it away.
No. The only thing insightful from your moronic post is that you have utterly no reading comprehension. Do I really need to re-quote my post? I've made it quite clearly that lack of IP protection hurts China and the Chinese government is smart enough to know that it hurts the Chinese themselves in the long run. Nowhere did I make a rationalization that piracy is OK. The only thing I did is call out your moronic assertion that the Chinese government condones piracy when it merely has the inability to enforce it, due to the sheer scale of the problem. But look who I'm talking to, some moronic little twerp wearing Dalai coloured glasses. I really ain't surprised that the original message "got lost." And before this thread gets detracted any further, I take it you don't have anything worthwhile to say about the google situation? How typical.
China can't maintain this structure forever....and I think their leaders know it. It's easy to control a poor population...but it's not the changing world that will be the undoing of China's communist party....it's the changers occuring within China. As the standard of living increases and the population becomes more educated and with more leisure time...it's natural to think that they are going to want greater rights. They are going to want better health care, better drinking water, better this and that. And yes, they will want the things the middle class in many other societies have. That desire is what will be the PRC's downfall. Nothing else.
Your posts are very biased. It's simply Occam's Razor. The Chinese govt is totalitarian and openly endorses strong censorship, and has spied on and imprisoned human rights activists. The party most likely to have an interest in hacking the email accounts of Chinese human rights activist is the Chinese govt. You are right when you assert above that it's easy for any of us to assert any conspiracy theory of our liking when it comes to internet attacks. Even if there was solid evidence of an attack, the evidence would be couched in language only a select percentage of the population can understand. And perhaps even that evidence could be easily faked. So we believe what we choose. Your reasoning is not self-consistent: But only a few sentences later... Which is it? Did Google just make it up as an excuse, or did some 20 year old comp sci kids do it? It's clear what the answer is in your mind- anybody but the Chinese govt. You'd have to be "stupid" to believe that. You assert that Google is lying or using a real attack as an excuse to leave, when the real reason they are divesting is because they aren't the top search provider, and are in the middle of fights over copying books and tax evasion. Why are people talking **** about a %20 to %30 market share, as if it's meaningless? That's HUGE. In the country with the most people online in the world, it's even bigger. Do you have any idea what Microsoft would pay to have that? Google is going to walk away from 200-300 million annually... does anyone believe that they are operating at a loss in China? Really? How can anyone believe that Google is walking away from a quarter billion in annual revenue and a 20 percent market share in the wolds' largest market, and they are losing nothing? It's a silly assertion. Of course they are losing something. Something had to come up that would balance such a loss out. It is not likely that such a thing is nationalist college age hackers. I do not believe that Google has suddenly become a paragon of human rights- they've had the chance to do the moral thing for four years now and haven't. A threat to their business model prompted this. We each believe what we choose. One could even assert that the US govt prompted this attack and made it look like China did it, for who knows what convoluted reason. Occam's Razor supports my assertion, however, and it does not support yours.
The worthy question is whether the collapse of PRC or CCP will automatically lead to the better social-economical terms of the ordinary Chinese people. Undoing something for the sake of it is not going to cut it. Or just **** CCP and the people over there is none of my business. Funny your statements indicate that some good things are happening with CCP in power. Are we running circles or something here?
My post is very logical, hardly biased. The Chinese government is not a totalitarian one, it's an authoritarian one, and in actuality, there are very few totalitarian governments. The Occam's Razor is that the Chinese government would never carry out such a bumbling exercise to drive google out of the country. And if it needs information on human rights activists, it can easily do so without getting google involved at all. If there is no easy proof of the occurrence of a certain event then there is no evidence. I don't think you quite grasp the word you are using so here is Merriam-Webster for you: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/evidence Main Entry: 1ev·i·dence Pronunciation: \ˈe-və-dən(t)s, -və-ˌden(t)s\ Function: noun Date: 14th century 1 a : an outward sign : indication b : something that furnishes proof : testimony; specifically : something legally submitted to a tribunal to ascertain the truth of a matter 2 : one who bears witness; especially : one who voluntarily confesses a crime and testifies for the prosecution against his accomplices — in evidence 1 : to be seen : conspicuous <trim lawns…are everywhere in evidence — American Guide Series: North Carolina> 2 : as evidence See any outward signs? I thought so. In any case the burden of proof rested with you. It is not self-consistent how? It is a convenient excuse to for google quit the market while still have semblance of dignity. Nothing self inconsistent with that at all. There are plenty of reasons divestiture, not all of them smart. What I find more incredulous is that somehow a company won't pull out of a market, even a lucrative one, if it can't compete. Tech/internet related companies alone, you should ask how EBay did in China (or Japan for that matter). And of course, guess who now runs Yahoo China? Ali Baba, a local company. I think google is making a terrible mistake, hence the "google management showing their lack of business expertise lines." But my reasoning google shouldn't pull out of China does not hinge on whether it is successful there. There are other important strategic implications. All you've shown me is your belief, and hardly the most reasonable one at that.
Oh btw, before I forget, Google China's traffic direct revenue is FAR FAR lower than Baidu, even excluding the now gone paid searches. The company is hardly making good money. Food for thought.
Google still has a superior product, and it's bull **** for some chinese-state corporation to try and steal this product. If Baidu engineers are not smart enough to make a great search engine, then Baidu should hire smarter engineers.
One counterpoint is that when they look at the governments of Japan or Taiwan, they see massive amounts of corruption with a bureaucracy that provides many similar functions. I tend to think that corruption is more prevalent in an authoritarian state and that perception is lower due to a lack of a free press. Nonetheless, the culture still buys into the social contract concept deeply, so when they see the problems and uncertainties plaguing Asian "democracies", a lot are willing to grin and bear the limitations of the CCP or a Lee Kuan Yew provided they deliver peace, stability, and progress. Maybe when most Chinese are rich and spoiled will they have time to stop and assess their emotions in order to tell the government how they really feel.
See my post above. Baidu is no Chinese-state corporation and already made a superior product, for the Chinese market at least. Think about that moron, before you run your mouth, and try to figure out who's trying to copy whom: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_China http://www.pcworld.com/article/130497/rival_asks_google_to_yank_copycat_application.html
Being a bit of a history buff and a strong proponent that history tends to repeat itself almost endlessly, what is the current level of China's intelligence agency? For example, in the states, we have organizations such as the NSA and CIA that work on intelligence... is there such an agency(ies) in China? The only reason I ask is because the arguments going back and forth between people here (which mainly seem to be MFW/Yallmean vs. the rest) is that China would not need to orchestrate such a poorly planned and executed attack on Google's accounts. Going back to history, everyone can see that countries on the rise to become superpowers often focused first on industrialization and economics, and intelligence second. If China lacks such an intelligence agency as centralized as FDR made the FBI, then it's reasonable to believe that they orchestrated these attacks (for whatever reason you want to come up with). Lets not forget, in US history, FDR consistently had illegal wire taps even when it was outlawed. It's not so hard to believe that an underdeveloped country (in terms of intelligence and counterespionage) would do something like attack Google. Now I'm not at all saying China is such a country but if it is, then it's certainly possible to see them developing such an attack.
Not to knock Baidu, because I use it for stuff (mp3 mostly) time to time, but ever looked for pr0n using Baidu and did that work out? How about sites like 文学城 (wenxuecity). But then again, I don't live in China so my search pattern is different.
Hopefully I won't get flamed by the forces of Jingoism for trying to answer your query. I would think that if they didn't have "intelligence agencies" they would be negligent in their defense of their country. I don't know the author, but I googled him and he seems to not be a conspiracy theory nut (he wrote a book whose thesis was that Oswalt acted alone). I don't like the title as I think it is a bit sensationalist. [rquoter] China's Secret Cyberterrorism by Gerald Posner While Google weighs exiting China, a classified FBI report says that country has already developed a massive cyber army attacking the U.S. with “WMD-like” destruction capabilities. A classified FBI report indicates that China has secretly developed an army of 180,000 cyberspies that “poses the largest single threat to the United States for cyberterrorism and has the potential to destroy vital infrastructure, interrupt banking and commerce, and compromise sensitive military and defense databases." These spies are already launching 90,000 attacks a year just against U.S. Defense Department computers, according to a senior FBI analyst familiar with the contents of the report, making news Tuesday that the Chinese government may have hacked the email accountings of human-rights activists, prompting Google to consider withdrawing from that country, seem like child’s play. Cyber warfare is part of every developed country's 21st century arsenal. Although no U.S. official will admit it, the Pentagon, CIA, and NSA regularly probe and try to hack into China's military and industrial computer networks to obtain the information that years ago were brought back by the James Bonds of spy services. The U.S., and many of our European allies, try to find ways to wreck some havoc in the Chinese computer grid if a conflict ever takes place. The difference is that the Chinese are better than anyone else and lead the way in technological breakthroughs for the cyber battlefield. The FBI report concludes that a massive Chinese cyberattack could “be in the magnitude of a weapon of mass destruction," says the analyst, who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about it, adding that it would do substantial damage to the American economy, telecommunications, electric power grid, and military preparedness. The FBI report estimates that since 2003, the Chinese Army has specifically developed a network of over 30,000 Chinese military cyberspies, plus more than 150,000 private-sector computer experts, whose mission is to steal American military and technological secrets and cause mischief in government and financial services. China’s goal, says the FBI report, is to have the world’s premier “informationized armed forces” by 2020. According to the bureau’s classified information, the Chinese hackers are adept at implanting malicious computer code, and in 2009 companies in diverse industries such as oil and gas, banking, aerospace, and telecommunications encountered costly and at times debilitating problems with Chinese-implanted “malware.” The FBI analyst would not name the affected companies. One of China’s most effective weapons, according to the FBI report, is a continuation of what Pentagon security investigators originally dubbed Titan Rain; it is a Chinese scanner program that probes national defense and high-tech industrial computer networks thousands of times a minute looking for vulnerabilities. The Chinese military hackers, the FBI analyst told me, enter without any keystroke errors, leave no digital fingerprints, and create a clean backdoor exit in under 20 minutes, feats considered capable only for a military or civilian spy agency of only a few governments. These attacks are proliferating. The FBI report lays out the identifiable attacks originating from China just on the Defense Department computers; they increased from 44,000 in 2007 to 55,000 in 2008, and topped 90,000 last year. “They probe, they test our responses, as quick as we make changes and fix vulnerabilities, they are moving a step ahead,” the analyst told me. The Chinese hackers aren’t after credit-card numbers or bank accounts or looking to steal private identities. Instead, they are hunting for information. Although the barrage of attacks may at times appear random, the FBI report concludes that it is part of a strategy to fully flush out U.S. military telecommunications and to better understand—and to attempt to intercept—intelligence being gathered by American spy agencies, particularly the National Security Agency. “It’s the great irony of the Information Age that the very technologies that empower us to create and to build also empower those who would disrupt and destroy,” President Obama said last May when he announced a new White House office dedicated to protecting the nation’s computer systems. The Pentagon followed shortly after with a new military cyberspace command. In his remarks, the president said that, “In today’s world, acts of terror could come not only from a few extremists in suicide vests but from a few keystrokes of a computer.” And he admitted, “We’re not as prepared as we should be, as a government or as a country.” China’s Ministry of Public Security has thousands of so-called Information Warfare Militia Units that effectively monitor all domestic Internet traffic of the country’s 140 million 'Net users. It’s this internal program that may have affected Google. On Tuesday, Google said it had detected a “highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China.” While Google did not specifically accuse the Chinese government, it said it was “no longer willing to continue censoring our results” on its Chinese search engine, as the government requires. Thus, it may need to withdraw from its largest potential market. The private-sector issues affect government security. As a precondition to doing business in China, several years ago Microsoft was required to provide the government the source codes for the company’s Office software. The Chinese State Planning Commission contended that Microsoft's Windows operating system was a secret tool of the U.S. government and demanded Microsoft instruct Chinese software engineers on inserting their own software into Window's applications. That gave the Chinese Army’s cyberwarfare department what computer hackers dub a “skeleton key,” allowing them access to almost every networked private business, military, and government computer in the U.S. Among the Chinese Army-backed Microsoft attacks, the FBI report includes successful forays against computer systems at the State Department, Commerce Department, the FBI, and the Naval War College, among others. Some Chinese attacks plant embedded covert programs into government networks, searching for classified files and then automatically forwarding them by email to China. Using sophisticated “rootkit” programs to hide their presence, China’s hackers are “simply the most sophisticated,” says the senior FBI analyst. Homeland Security’s $1.8 billion computer network was penetrated by Chinese cyberwarriors in 2007, and an unknown amount of information was copied to a secure Chinese Web site. Even the Pentagon was breached in 2007 and again in early 2009, despite what it considered foolproof Titan Rain security patches. The 2009 intrusion was particularly worrisome since the Chinese managed to get inside the Pentagon's $300 billion Joint Strike Fighter project—the Defense Department's costliest weapons program ever—according to a government official familiar with the attack who spoke to The Daily Beast on the condition of anonymity. The cyber intruders copied several terabytes of data about the design and electronics systems, information that might make it easier to defend against the craft. The FBI report concludes that many of the attacks identified as being from China might be part of Beijing’s plan to occasionally let its cyberspies be unmasked in order to give American and other Western counties a false sense of security. “There is no telling how many breaches there are that we haven’t yet picked up,” the FBI analyst told me. Most American government agencies have stopped buying Chinese hardware from Lenovo (the Chinese firm that acquired IBM's personal-computer division in 2005) and any software from the mainland. But China is manufacturing microchips for dozens of major international companies, and those chips could hold viruses set to activate when used in a computer network. Chips employed in military applications could be designed to reverse engineer the weapon’s design and provide the information to Chinese spies. China’s microchip output is almost doubling every two years, and chip giant Intel has opened a multibillion-dollar plant in Dalian, China. The FBI report’s grim conclusion: China sees its cyberwarriors as a critical component of its asymmetric warfare capability and the U.S. government should publicly identify China as an “ongoing intelligence risk.” The Chinese Embassy says that the country "opposes and forbids all forms of cyber crimes" and that charges of its cyber warrior program are remnants of “a Cold War mentality" and intended only “to fan up China threat sensations." “Without confronting it as a major threat,” the FBI analyst told me, “companies like Google go to do business there incorrectly assuming they face no greater risk from Chinese penetrations than they face from any other country. It’s just not true. There’s no more imminent cyberthreat than the one posed by China.” [/rquoter]
