China

by 1 comment on "10 years of the Jamie Doctrine: not a symposium of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House"

There have been a hell of a lot of opinions put forward about modern China – from the Blairite vision of a superpower of economic liberalism with lots of CCTV, integrated fully in the system, to cold-warrior visions of a monolithic neo-USSR, anarchist hopes of a convergence of mass-group incidents into revolution, tankie fantasies of…

Read More 10 years of the Jamie Doctrine: not a symposium of the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House
by 2 comments on "If we could only get the same oversight of Facebook we have of Huawei UK"

So, the Huawei oversight report is out and it’s apparently terribly scary. If you’re interested in the content rather than the mood-music there’s a good key points summary here, and if you’re the kind of person who reads this blog, the report itself is here. The point I would like to make, though, is that…

Read More If we could only get the same oversight of Facebook we have of Huawei UK
by 3 comments on "Enough with the bad faith about Huawei."

Any discussion of Huawei relating to the Chinese “National Intelligence Law” has to start out from the recognition that all states, always, have tried to weaponize telecommunications systems and have taken considerable legal powers over people and property involved, even where they didn’t create the assets and organizations themselves. Take a look at Section 94,…

Read More Enough with the bad faith about Huawei.
by 3 comments on "Ten Years of 4G: Trump, Snowden, Huawei, and Brexit"

Back at the end of 2007, as we dived into the trough of the Great Recession or Great Financial Crisis or Second Great Depression or what you will, a crucial decision was taken. Verizon Wireless, then still a Vodafone division, chose LTE for its new mobile network, and put one of the most important women…

Read More Ten Years of 4G: Trump, Snowden, Huawei, and Brexit
by 3 comments on "This is what the mandate of heaven looks like"

Here is a really superb paper on the 50 cent party, the Chinese Communist Party’s army of loyalist Internet trolls. The researchers scraped literally millions of below-the-line comments and Weibo posts, hired Chinese students to identify the 50-centers in random samples and classify the posts by subject, checked that the students, who worked independently, agreed…

Read More This is what the mandate of heaven looks like
by 0 comments on "Canalising the marshes: tidying up the people"

Well, this is interesting, both on the Bo Xilai story and also on the general theme of the state of the art in contemporary authoritarianism. It looks like a major part of the case is about BXL’s electronic surveillance of Chongqing and specifically of top national-level Chinese officials: One political analyst with senior-level ties, citing…

Read More Canalising the marshes: tidying up the people