I wish apple would stop making stuff in China. Not only have I replaced 3 Iphones because of defects, I'm also legitimizing Chinas government by doing business with them. On the otherhand it does help the people.
Can you explain why only Apple, when overwhelmingly majority of american consumer goods are manufactured/assembled in China?
Just to take Apple's example (they also rely on other asian countries for certain parts, ie. Korea & Taiwan comes to my mind right now), if they were to not rely on China to assemble/manufacture their products Apple products would have been even more expensive.
Also your iphone being defective has nothing to do with the fact that they were manufactured in China. While China made goods tends to be of low quality. High end computer gadgets like apple/dell goes through a certain high standard of manufacturing than your typical Chinese stuff. Companies tends to have a more hands-on approach to maintaining a certain standard and quality, which is generally missing in other chinese made products.
The problem is not that apple / google / MSFT invests and does business in China. The problem is that our government have legitimized Chinese style of government (a unique variant of communism), regardless how much they criticize on the side. Our government does not confront Chinese government directly. Its already too late to do anything now - we are too connected with their economy. If they go down - we go down, if we go down - they go down too.
The government can't do anything or the companies can't do anything without shooting their own leg. The only way we could pressure Chinese government is to start some kind of mass movement where we refuse to buy products manufactured in China (or similar government with questionable human-right records).
Its easier said than done, but the change has to come from us.
Why? Do you have any other historical examples of consumers from one country pressuring another country to reform its government through boycott?
And why China? China has a significantly more organized and helpful government than most countries in the region (say, the ones in which most of your clothes are made, or where some of the raw materials for those gadgets are mined).
But most importantly, why do you feel the need, as an American consumer, to act on the relationship between China and its citizens?
>Why? Do you have any other historical examples of consumers from one country pressuring another country to reform its government through boycott?
I don't know of any example but do you really need a precedence to follow for everything or can you not take extraordinary steps to counter extraordinary circumstances?
>And why China? China has a significantly more organized and helpful government than most countries in the region (say, the ones in which most of your clothes are made, or where some of the raw materials for those gadgets are mined).
The subject of this thread is China's human-rights record. More on next question.
>But most importantly, why do you feel the need, as an American consumer, to act on the relationship between China and its citizens?
You can't have double standard in reference to human rights. You (government, not you as in _you_) can't cry foul about communism and human rights record and use it as a reason to sanction some countries and even use it as (one of the) reasons to go to war at the same time blissfully do business with China. As far as human rights go, China is one of the worst offenders out there, and by human-rights I don't only mean not being able to search the internet unrestricted. If you say something against the government or try to start a movement, they will hunt you down and kill you. You can't even talk about those killings they will hunt you down and kill you. You don't hear about it much because they do a very good job of keeping things tight - do some digging around and you will see what I am talking about. You can start from here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_China
If any other country did what China does, there would have been massive sanctions if not war. But of course, no one wants to fight with a nuclear-powered military strong nation.
If any other country did what China does, there would have been massive sanctions if not war
Wow, calling for war with China, really? Did you support the war in Iraq for the same reasons? Do you also support war with Saudi Arabia, Russia, and Pakistan?
Well for me, I used to be a Chinese citizen. So there's some emotional obligation for me to try to not let the country go to shit. For other Americans, there should be a moral obligation to make sure developing countries are doing so correctly.
> Can you explain why only Apple, when overwhelmingly majority of american consumer goods are manufactured/assembled in China?
because the overwhelming majority of consumer goods i buy are from apple.
I think China has a bad enough reputation that advertising that it's not made in china won't be like shooting yourself in the leg. Although I also agree that it is vastly the governments (and thus our) faults for Initially legitimizing the government (or maybe nixon's fault). Unfortunately government action would be too strong an attack, and so would a massive boycott. so that's why a slow public opinion change, like my opinion, that actually makes it advantageous for companies to not make their crap in China.
If apple stopped making stuff in China, I might just upgrade more often. Now multiply that times every apple fanboy/girl and it's apple no longer has to shoot it's own foot.
Let's be realistic here for a second. If Apple manufactured in the US, not only would its products be twice as expensive, I'm pretty sure they would be equally, if not more shoddy. GM and Chrysler, after all, aren't exactly known for the reliability of their products or the quality of their manufacturing...
Companies that have had shoddy products coming out of China are companies that don't pay attention to their supply chain -- and Apple is fanatical about supply chain management.
Furthermore, the ethical problem of manufacturing in China isn't the same as that of practicing censorship in China. If tomorrow Western companies got out of China, besides unleashing an economic apocalypse that would make the last two years look like a rainy picnic, China wouldn't suddenly turn into Sweden. It would turn into Cuba, or North Korea. An angrier, more nuclear-armed North Korea. Nobody would win in this scenario, least of all the Chinese citizens we all want to eventually live in a prosperous, democratic country.
They can always move those factories to India or Eastern Europe.
And the biggest reason for outsourcing labor is for reducing the costs involved ... that's why I don't get why aren't they working on more advanced industrial robots and why is Japan the only one having breakthroughs in this regard ... probably because of unions, but what's worse ... outsourcing work or fully automated factories in your own country (that creates more jobs for engineers)? IMHO, it's the former.
And please note that with this statement I'm probably shooting myself in the foot ... since working on outsourced projects is at times my only source of income :)
>They can always move those factories to India or Eastern Europe.
I think there is a popular misconception that most companies prefer China simple because they are cheap and you can easily replace them with x country which also has cheap labor.
There are several advantage of doing business in China besides cheap (skilled) labor. They have better infrastructure than most third world country with cheap labor I can think of. I don't know much about eastern Europe and what it bring to the table besides cheap labor. But from my experience I can tell you India (or any south-east asian country) is not an alternative to the manufacturing goods produced in China.
There is some kind of international trade pact (no reference handy at the moment) that forces most western nations to divide imports of manufactured goods from third world countries. If this was not the case - I have little doubt that most western countries would have relied on China, even more than it already does. Perhaps exclusively.
> They have better infrastructure than most third world country with cheap labor I can think of.
That's probably true, but this is a chicken&egg problem, isn't it ... if the westerners would outsource to India / Eastern Europe ... with economic growth their infrastructure will be better and better.
And cheap labor is the primary reason ... you take that away and I don't think anything else will matter. Because of its economic growth, costs in China will rise, it's only a matter of time.
Assuming it isn't already to some extent. This point should be made louder and more often. It's easy to see China as some big evil empire but there aren't many governments that haven't committed major atrocities.
Not that Most Chinese would Even care. I think most of them are worried about getting their children into university so they can lead a better life. Stuff like politics is of little concern. Governments censorship efforts are pretty futile, and the only reason there isn't revolt is because it's good enough for people to not care.
I mean we care because most of us have cushy jobs, or have already made it in a developed country, so we have time to think about philosphy and politics. But honestly it's no big deal, because their censorship is a meaningless effort. When I went to china no one had false understanding of the living conditions in china comapred to the USA, and most people were enjoying what they had to care.
With the Internet, telephone, mail, it really becomes impossible to censor. It's just a facade to make the government feel like it's in control.
I think you should be taking in to account the IP address you're searching from as well as the language that you are searching in.
My guess is that searching from within China and in Chinese would yield different results. Maybe someone on the other side of the great firewall could run a test ? On second thoughts, maybe better not...
I doubt that the IP address I'm searching from has much to do with it, as it they won't show any more results to me (who isn't in China), presumably they won't show any more results to someone who is in China.
Although I agree the language of the search term might have an effect. If anyone can try this in Chinese I'd be interested in the result.
Contrasted with the > 1,000,000 results on google.com
And curiously, google.cn gives ~42,000 results - and they still say they are censoring (据当地法律法规和政策，部分搜索结果未予显示。 = According to local laws, regulations and policies, some search results are not shown.)
Since they do content based filtering (sending a RST if they don't like the contents of your packet) the actual IP address of the server returning search results is irrelevant.
Any page with 10 or more links on them is supect then.
I'm fairly sure that if they blocked all forms and all results pages with more than 10 links on them that the internet would cease to be an asset to China.
Censorship is a delicate thing, censor too little and it is useless, censor too much and you might wake the dragon.
Don't you think they'd block on keywords, not link counts? These people aren't stupid, and are supplied by purveyors of the very best western technology.
But maybe more practical to provide an easy-to-install package that allows an apache installation to provide a proxy service in a standard way. Probably with a configurable bandwidth limit. Not sure how people would discover them though...
This may allow full search results, but the links still won't work, as the firewall blocks 'undesirable' URLs.
So the proxy would also need to convert URLs in the returned pages to link to proxied URLs, and to provide a proxy service for these 'undesirable' URLs.
If content filtering is used, then it would also need to strip out 'undesirable' words to prevent the whole page from being blocked based on its content rather than its URL.
I suppose a central service could be provided to provide all the proxy servers with the uptodate list of URLs that need proxying, and words that must be removed.
All this seems to me to be very possible, although it's probably a little more than you were thinking.
> All this seems to me to be very possible, although it's probably a little more than you were thinking.
That's probably true.
But I can't see how a single government entity would be able to withstand the collective smarts of the population on both sides of that link cooperating to defeat it.
They would either have to shut down the link or stop censoring at some point.
And who would dare even enter such a search result from an ISP in China?
One of the "search results" would probably not appear on your screen... but in some sort of government database of "suspected dissidents." A government-run search engine is a must for any totalitarian regime.
When I went to china I did it all the time to see what was banned and what wasn't. As far as I can tell, nothing has happened to my relatives. Also if you were a dissident you'd probably be smart enoguh to use an encrypted connection anyways.
Its not returning a search result - just sending you back to home page. You just added Falun+gong at the end of the address - you are not doing any search request.
