You go in there, you sit across from your [Chinese] counterpart and say, ‘You spy, we spy, but you just steal the wrong stuff.’ That’s a hard conversation,” says Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA, and later the CIA, under Bush. “States spying on states, I got that,” says Hayden, now a principal at the Chertoff Group, a Washington security consulting firm. “But this isn’t that competition. This is a nation-state attempting espionage on private corporations. That is not an even playing field.
Now that power in China has been marketised and valorised along with everything else, this type of skill - being able to avoid both accumulating too much political debt, and spreading risk in the universe of networks around you - is even more critical. The new name of the game is “patronage diversification”, where a lot of success lies in ensuring you extend your risk as far as possible (not unlike playing the stock exchange).
Some believe that the way for women’s lives to be improved in Afghanistan is through marches and protests in the streets. I respectfully disagree.
This code is tantamount to issuing you a “driver’s license” for speech: You will be subjected to point deductions for speech violations (which Weibo censorship frequently tells its users); once you have no points left, you will be barred from “going on the road” again, and that is, you will be barred permanently from speaking on information/opinion platforms.
The real-name system has two purposes. One is the chilling effect, and it works very well on average netizens but not so much on activists. The other and the main purpose is to be able to locate activists and eliminate them from certain information/opinion platforms, in the same way that opinions of dissident intellectuals are completely eradicated from the traditional media.
If immigrants burden American taxpayers, we can make immigrants ineligible for benefits. If immigrants hurt American culture, we can impose tests of English fluency and cultural literacy. If immigrants hurt American liberty, we can refuse to give them the right to vote. Whatever your complaint happens to be, immigration restrictions are a needlessly draconian remedy.
Disposable incomes tend to be higher in places such as Zhengzhou and Chongqing, even if wages are slightly lower than they are in Beijing and Shanghai. A big part of the reason: for all the talk about a real estate bubble in China, apartments are much more affordable in smaller cities throughout China’s interior.
It is ironic yet befitting. “In the past 20 years, every China director faced a great torment,” said director Feng Xiaogang, who was called China’s Spielberg by Newsweek, “and that torment is [beep].”
The censored word, as anyone reading Feng’s lips can surmise, is “censorship.”
