Quotulatiousness

October 4, 2020

A huge new German Offensive begins – Operation Typhoon! – WW2 – 110 – October 3, 1941

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 3 Oct 2020

Adolf Hitler’s renewed drive on Moscow, the Soviet capital, begins this week, even as the Japanese drive on Changsha ends. But major news this week is the colossal amount of equipment, arms, and ammunition that Britain and the neutral USA plan to ship to the beleaguered Soviet Union.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
Dememorabilia – https://www.instagram.com/dememorabilia/
Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
Klimbim – https://www.flickr.com/photos/2215569…

Sources:
Bundesarchiv
Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
RIA Novosti archive, image #585208
Yad Vashem 3725/4
Picture of Lord Beaverbrook, courtesy Yousuf Karsh, Dutch National Archives
Graphics of Hawker Hurricane, courtesy Martin Čížek https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hu…
Graphic of P-39Q Airacobra, courtesy Martin Čížek https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
From the Noun Project: Skull by Muhamad Ulum, Radar by Econceptive, Mining by Pham Duy Phuong Hung, golds by iconsphere, Diamond by IconMark, puncture by supalerk laipawat, tire by Juan León, wool ball by IconMark, Boots by Atif Arshad, Oil by TTHNga, Needle by artworkbean, Gloves by Berkah Icon, Knife by Vladimir Belochkin, saw by Stepan Voevodin, forceps by IcoLabs, Chest X-ray by Turkkub, pills by Komkrit Noenpoempisut, antibiotics by UNiCORN, Roll by rivercon

Soundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Johan Hynynen – “Dark Beginning”
Johannes Bornlof – “Death And Glory 3”
Jon Bjork – “For the Many”
Johannes Bornlof – “Last Man Standing 3”
Reynard Seidel – “Deflection”
Johannes Bornlof – “The Inspector 4”
Bonnie Grace – “The Dominion”
Johannes Bornlof – “Deviation In Time”
Gunnar Johnsen – “Not Safe Yet”
Rannar Sillard – “March Of The Brave 10”

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

September 28, 2020

It’s been a while since these stickers occupied pride of place on every Prius bumper, hasn’t it?

Filed under: China, History, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Arthur Chrenkoff wonders “Whatever happened to ‘Free Tibet’?”

With its heyday probably twenty years ago, it used to be a major cause celebre for artists and activists, with bumper stickers adorning countless cars, including – proverbially – the early Priuses. It was mostly a thing of the left (certainly in Australia it was largely associated with the Greens) and the hippies and New Agers enchanted by the wit and wisdom of the Dalai Lama, spruiking his version of Buddhism from exile. This probably scared many people off, which is a pity because the question of Tibetan independence shouldn’t be judged on the merits of its incense burning Western supporters.

So what happened? Tibet is certainly still not free – if anything the things have gotten worse on the rooftop of the world – but the campaign has largely dropped out of the public consciousness. I don’t quite know the answer myself. Maybe some political causes, like fashion trends, have limited life spans. Maybe the left has learned to stop worrying and live with China as one of the few viable alternatives to the “Western neoliberal world order”. Maybe China has become too rich and powerful to hope that candle-lit vigils for Lhasa will do any good.

So what’s been happening in Tibet lately, just out of interest?

September 27, 2020

Free from the Nazi Occupation – but for how long can it last? WW2 – 109 – September 26, 1941

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 26 Sep 2020

In former Yugoslavia, the Republic of Uzice breaks free from the German occupation, even as the Germans are mopping up the masses of shattered Soviet Armies after last week’s capture of Kiev. In the north, it really looks as if Leningrad will hold out for the time being, and German troops from both north and south converge on the center for the coming drive on Moscow.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day –https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
– Mikołaj Uchman
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…

Sources:
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild_146-2005-0176, Bild_183-J21813,
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

September 26, 2020

QotD: A visit to Pyongyang Department Store Number 1

Filed under: Asia, Business, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

He [Anthony Daniels] sees throughout these Marxist backwaters a physical infrastructure comprising perhaps the most ugly and dehumanizing architecture known to man. The cavernous emptiness of all public spaces and the gigantism of the buildings are designed to intimidate, to belittle and to discourage insurrection by making every crowd seem small. Any pre-Communist architecture not destroyed to make way for these monstrosities is charming only because it is preserved by a lack of economic development, which also, however, ensures its eventual degradation.

What few consumer products he finds are of the very worst quality, with packaging that provides as little information as possible and that destroys all confidence in its contents. Even the material shortage of these products has its uses to the state, however, as they remind the comrade that it is only by the good grace of their leaders that they eat, and when one spends all afternoon queuing for an item that turns out to be unavailable, there is little time or energy left for revolution. Besides, isn’t the desire for consumer goods artificially created by capitalists to enslave the proletariat?

Nowhere is the dishonesty of this last belief (as well as the sheer insanity of modern North Korea) better illustrated than in Daniels’ description of his visit to the creatively-named Pyongyang Department Store Number 1. He wanders into the store without a minder and is dumbstruck by his eventual realization: the entire store is a fake. Although it is a frenzy of activity and is filled with beautifully packaged and artfully arranged consumer goods, no one is actually buying anything. Daniels watches individual “shoppers” go up and down the escalators or exit and re-enter the store in a continuous loop of simulated shopping. At the line for a cash register, cashiers and customers stare aimlessly past each other, unmoving. Under Daniels’ gaze some of them realize they are found out and cast about nervously, wondering what to do next. “I did not know whether to laugh or explode with anger or weep,” he says. “But I knew I was seeing one of the most extraordinary sights of the twentieth century.”

Arnold Beichman, “The Wilder Shores of Marx: Journeys in a Vanishing World”, National Review, 1991-10-21.

September 24, 2020

QotD: Gurkha versus Japanese, mano a mano

Filed under: History, Humour, India, Japan, Military, Quotations, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Favourite of [Field Marshal Viscount] Slim’s tales of these wonderful little fighters from the Himalayas is that of the Gurkha who met a Japanese in No Man’s Land. Jap and Gurkha decided to have it out in a duel, each using his own chosen steel. The Jap swiped at his opponent with his two handed sword, which the Gurkha avoided. Then, the Gurkha slashed with his kukri, the broad, curved knife which is his traditional weapon. “So, you missed, eh?” jeered the Jap. “You just sneeze,” said the Gurkha, “and see what happens to your head.”

“The love affair the British have with India, as Rudyard Kipling, M M Kaye, John Masters, et al, have shown”, Sikhs in Burma Campaign.

September 23, 2020

The Man in Monty’s Shadow – Claude Auchinleck – WW2 Biography Special

Filed under: Britain, History, India, Middle East, Military, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:30

World War Two
Published 22 Sep 2020

Claude Auchinleck put military matters over that of politics. Although this angered some, mainly Churchill, Auchinleck still found himself in India, and later facing down Rommel in North Africa.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Francis van Berkel
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Lennart Visser
Edited by: Monika Worona
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations by:
Norman Stewart

Sources:
National Portrait Gallery
USHMM

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

September 20, 2020

Our World 100 Years Ago – September 1920 I THE GREAT WAR

Filed under: Africa, Britain, Europe, France, History, Japan, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

The Great War
Published 19 Sep 2020

Let’s take a look at our world 100 years ago, in September 1920.

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Contains licensed material by getty images
All rights reserved – Real Time History GmbH 2020

Another week, another half million for the Germans – WW2 – 108 – September 19, 1941

Filed under: China, Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 19 Sep 2020

Kiev falls to the Germans, yielding hundreds of thousands of prisoners as whole armies are surrounded, but behind the lines all over German-occupied territories, partisan movements are gaining steam. Meanwhile, in China, Japan launches another campaign against Changsha.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Monika Worona
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations – https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man) – https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– Ra Boe / Wikipedia / Lizenz: Creative Commons CC-by-sa-3.0 de
– Mil. ru
– Narodowe Archiwum Cyfrowe
– Estonica

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

September 18, 2020

Was the Wuhan Coronavirus (aka Covid-19) created in a Chinese lab?

Filed under: China, Health, Science — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Rowan Jacobsen profiles the scientist who believes, based on her own research, that the Wuhan Coronavirus was not a naturally occurring mutation and was instead deliberately created in a Chinese government lab:

It wasn’t long before she came across an article about the remarkable stability of the virus, whose genome had barely changed from the earliest human cases, despite trillions of replications. This perplexed Chan. Like many emerging infectious diseases, COVID-19 was thought to be zoonotic — it originated in animals, then somehow found its way into people. At the time, the Chinese government and most scientists insisted the jump had happened at Wuhan’s seafood market, but that didn’t make sense to Chan. If the virus had leapt from animals to humans in the market, it should have immediately started evolving to life inside its new human hosts. But it hadn’t.

On a hunch, she decided to look at the literature on the 2003 SARS virus, which had jumped from civets to people. Bingo. A few papers mentioned its rapid evolution in its first months of existence. Chan felt the familiar surge of puzzle endorphins. The new virus really wasn’t behaving like it should. Chan knew that delving further into this puzzle would require some deep genetic analysis, and she knew just the person for the task. She opened Google Chat and fired off a message to Shing Hei Zhan. He was an old friend from her days at the University of British Columbia and, more important, he was a computational god.

“Do you want to partner on a very unusual paper?” she wrote.

Sure, he replied.

One thing Chan noticed about the original SARS was that the virus in the first human cases was subtly different — a few dozen letters of genetic code — from the one in the civets. That meant it had immediately morphed. She asked Zhan to pull up the genomes for the coronaviruses that had been found on surfaces in the Wuhan seafood market. Were they at all different from the earliest documented cases in humans?

Zhan ran the analysis. Nope, they were 100 percent the same. Definitely from humans, not animals. The seafood-market theory, which Chinese health officials and the World Health Organization espoused in the early days of the pandemic, was wrong. Chan’s puzzle detectors pulsed again. “Shing,” she messaged Zhan, “this paper is going to be insane.”

In the coming weeks, as the spring sun chased shadows across her kitchen floor, Chan stood at her counter and pounded out her paper, barely pausing to eat or sleep. It was clear that the first SARS evolved rapidly during its first three months of existence, constantly fine-tuning its ability to infect humans, and settling down only during the later stages of the epidemic. In contrast, the new virus looked a lot more like late-stage SARS. “It’s almost as if we’re missing the early phase,” Chan marveled to Zhan. Or, as she put it in their paper, as if “it was already well adapted for human transmission.”

That was a profoundly provocative line. Chan was implying that the virus was already familiar with human physiology when it had its coming-out party in Wuhan in late 2019. If so, there were three possible explanations.

For the record, my strong suspicion is that she is correct about the origins of the virus, but I don’t think it was deliberately released by the Chinese government. I think if it had been deliberate, it would have been much more directly “weaponized” in both delivery mechanism and targeting.

September 13, 2020

Victory for the Red Army! – WW2 – 107 – September 12, 1941

Filed under: Germany, History, Japan, Military, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 12 Sep 2020

The German invasion of the Soviet Union has taken enormous amounts of territory, but this week the Red Army not only stops the Germans, they score a ringing victory. However, Leningrad comes under siege and Kiev is in great danger, and Adolf Hitler is issuing directives for the next phase of the operation.

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Follow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sources

Written and Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Indy Neidell
Edited by: Iryna Dulka
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)

Colorizations by:
– Jaris Almazani (Artistic Man), https://instagram.com/artistic.man?ig…
– Olga Shirnina, a.k.a. Klimbim – https://klimbim2014.wordpress.com/
– Julius Jääskeläinen – https://www.facebook.com/JJcolorization/
– Carlos Ortega Pereira, BlauColorizations, https://www.instagram.com/blaucolorizations
– Norman Stewart – https://oldtimesincolor.blogspot.com/
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
– Mil.ru
– Bundesarchiv, CC-BY-SA 3.0: Bild_102-08824
– Imperial War Museum: CR 165

Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

September 11, 2020

JS Izumo, Japan’s largest warship

Filed under: Japan, Military — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

AMANO Jun-ichi
Published 12 Jun 2016

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JS_Izumo

At open-house of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force Yokosuka Naval Base.
On June 11, 2016.

#JMSDF #MSDF

From the Wikipedia entry:

JS Izumo (DDH-183) is a helicopter carrier with a planned future conversion into an aircraft carrier. Officially classified as a multi-purpose operation destroyer, she is the lead ship in the Izumo class of the Japan Maritime Self-Defense Force (JMSDF). She is the second warship to be named for Izumo Province, with the previous ship being the armoured cruiser Izumo (1898).

The ruling Liberal Democrat Party announced in May 2018 that it favours converting Izumo to operate fixed-wing aircraft. The conversion was confirmed in December 2018 when Japan announced the change of its defense guidelines. Upon the completion of the process, Izumo will be the first Japanese aircraft carrier since World War II.

September 5, 2020

Chinese 7.62mm Sten Gun

Filed under: Cancon, China, History, Military, Weapons, WW2 — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Forgotten Weapons
Published 13 May 2020

http://www.patreon.com/ForgottenWeapons

https://www.floatplane.com/channel/Fo…

Cool Forgotten Weapons merch! http://shop.bbtv.com/collections/forg…

During World War Two, Canada supplied some 73,000 Sten guns (made by the Long Branch arsenal) to Chinese Nationalist forces in an effort to help them fight the Japanese. These Stens were standard MkII pattern guns, chambered for the 9x19mm Parabellum cartridge. However, many of these were eventually converted to 7.62mm Tokarev ammunition, especially after the victory of the Communist forces over the Nationalists. The conversion involved a new barrel and new magazine and magazine well. The 7.62mm barrels were typically longer than the original ones, and the magazine of choice was that of the PPS-43. Some were done by installed a magazine adapter into the original magazine well, and some (like this one) were done by cutting off the original magazine well and replacing it with a new one. In addition, some Sten guns were made domestically in China, both in 9mm and 7.62mm. The 7.62mm Tokarev cartridge was popular both from Russian pistols and submachine guns and also from China’s long military use of the dimensionally-identical 7.63mm Mauser cartridge in C96 pistols.

Many thanks to the Royal Armouries for allowing me to film and disassemble this interesting submachine gun! The NFC collection there — perhaps the best military small arms collection in Western Europe — is available by appointment to researchers:

https://royalarmouries.org/research/n…

You can browse the various Armouries collections online here:

https://royalarmouries.org/collection/

Contact:
Forgotten Weapons
6281 N. Oracle #36270
Tucson, AZ 85740

September 4, 2020

Shinzō Abe

Filed under: Government, History, Japan, Politics — Tags: — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kapil Komireddi on the achievements of Shinzō Abe, “the man who saved Japan”, who served four non-consecutive terms as Prime Minister between 2006 and 2020:

Shinzō Abe, Prime Minister of Japan, 2006-7 and 2012-20.
Official portrait from the Government of Japan under Government of Japan Standard Terms of Use (Ver. 2.0)

To appreciate the achievement of Shinzo Abe, who on Friday announced his decision to resign as Japan’s prime minister because of faltering health, consider the state of the country he inherited. Between 2007, the year Abe vacated the prime minister’s office after serving exactly for a year, and 2012 — when Abe staged a spectacular comeback — Japan had seen off five prime ministers in rapid succession. In fact, with the exception of Junichiro Koizumi, no Japanese prime minister had completed the full four-year term since 1987. A debilitating fatalism had seized Japan: a nation that had risen from the ashes of World War II to become the richest economy on earth after the United States was becoming reconciled to the prospect of irretrievable decline.

Such a posture may have struck some as virtuous. To Abe, it was sacrilegious. The scion of a storied political dynasty, he wanted Japan to become a “nation which can withstand the raging waves for the next 50 to 100 years to come”. Abe nursed a lifelong grievance against what he described as the “terrible” Constitution drafted by the Allied forces after Japan’s decimation in 1945. His greatest political aspiration was to revoke the clause that shackled Tokyo to pacifism as a form of punishment for the sins of imperial Japan. In a land where singing the national anthem with enthusiasm can be seen as a symptom of hawkishness, Abe approached voters with a pledge to “take back Japan”. As a campaigner, he was a populist before the word entered common usage. Once in office, however, he evolved into something altogether different.

The ideological passions that animated his politics were almost instantly subordinated to the higher cause of dispassionate service to Japan. As democracy after democracy fell to populists, Abe, the original populist, travelled in the opposite direction: a rare leader in the democratic world who did not allow partisanship to consume him. Abe did not disavow his conservatism: he aligned it to the challenges before him. The upshot? In the eight years since his return to power in 2012, he presided over the longest period of economic expansion in Japan’s post-war history and the lowest unemployment rate in at least a quarter century. He introduced free preschool and day care for children between the ages of 3 and 5 and created the conditions for the entry of a record number of women into the workforce.

Imparting stability to Japan was the preliminary act. As Tobias Harris reminds us in his important and outstanding new biography of Japan’s outgoing prime minister, The Iconoclast, Abe did not hesitate to dispute and dismantle the dogmas of his own side to pursue policies — such as the guest worker programme — he believed were imperative to securing Japan’s future. He deployed, Harris writes, “his power to defy his conservative allies and open Japan to the world”. At the same time, he strove to be conciliatory with all those who did not vote for him, regarded him with implacable suspicion, and marched against his “militarism” on the streets. This perhaps explains why, despite protests, criticism and scandal, he was able to lead his conservative Liberal Democratic Party to a series of comfortable victories at the ballot box and cement its position effectively as the default party of government in Japan.

QotD: Muhammad Ali Jinnah

Filed under: History, India, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Born into a Shia mercantile family, Jinnah left for England after high school, where he studied law and acquired a love for parliamentary procedure. Thoroughly and poshly anglicized (200 Savile Row suits were found in his closet after his death), he returned to India before the First World War, armed with a fearsome reputation as a barrister so brilliant judges tried to avoid him, and committed to Hindu-Muslim unity. His English was exquisite, but he spoke no Urdu. Completely secular, Jinnah was so indifferent to his religion — he drank and ate pork — that he planned Pakistan’s inauguration-day banquet as a luncheon, unaware it was Ramadan (they changed it to dinner).

Jinnah’s political intentions are hotly contested. According to New York Times Pakistan expert, Jane Perlez, many Pakistan researchers contend Jinnah had no interest in an Islam-dominated state, but “used the idea of Pakistan as a mere bargaining chip for Muslim majority rights within a loosely united post-colonial India.” With no autobiography or recollections from close friendships for our guidance, Jinnah remains a shadowy historical player, a political loner with an indeterminate goal beside Nehru, Gandhi and Viceroy Lord Mountbatten.

It is quite possible, for example, that Jinnah created the Muslim League and employed the rhetoric of Islam (slogan: “Islam in Danger”) and started wearing native clothes to harness religious fervour to political ambitions never fully articulated. But we can’t ever know, as a lifetime of chain smoking caught up with Jinnah, and he died before the first (bloody) year of Pakistan’s existence was out.

In Jinnah’s first speech to his newly minted country, though, we have this strong intentional clue: “You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed — that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”

Barbara Kay, “A celebrated figure today could well be the condemned sinner of tomorrow”, National Post, 2018-06-05.

September 2, 2020

Trust – the limiting factor on Chinese tech firms’ growth

Filed under: Business, China, Government, India, Media, Technology, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Henrik Tiemroth on the “glass ceiling” that Chinese technology companies are struggling with:

The rise of Chinese technology firms has been one of the major developments of the last decade. As some of those companies expand their operations overseas, some observers see China laying the groundwork for a broader imperial project, using their growing digital might to project power and influence. By 2030, will we all be sending messages on WeChat, searching on Baidu, and shopping on Alibaba?

Probably not. As China’s major tech firms attempt to expand to global markets, they are running into a glass ceiling of their government’s own making: people don’t trust them. The recent ban on ByteDance’s popular social media app TikTok in the United States demonstrates the extent – and the limits – of China’s digital ambitions.

TikTok was the first Chinese internet product to have a mass following in the United States. As of 2020, the app has 100 million active users in the US – about a third of the population. But the popular and seemingly innocuous app for making, viewing and sharing quippy homemade music videos has been declared a national security threat.

In August, President Trump signed an executive order effectively banning the app, along with WeChat, unless their US operations are taken over by a domestic company. Given the close links between Chinese companies like ByteDance and the government, they argue, the data collected on American users of the app could be used by the Chinese state for espionage or other nefarious purposes.

The Trump administration is not the first government to take this step. In July, India banned TikTok, along with 59 other Chinese apps, amid rising tensions with China. The government cited similar concerns about the potential for mining and misuse of private data. Indonesia temporarily banned the platform in 2018, and Japan is reportedly considering following the US’s lead.

Across the world, people are becoming warier of who uses their data and how. Lawmakers are perking up, as the implications of data for national security are becoming more clear. In 2018, the European Union implemented landmark data privacy laws. In the US, tech CEOs are regularly dragged before congressional committees and a bipartisan movement for regulation is building.

Chinese internet companies face those same concerns and then some. It’s one thing to have your personal data used to promote conspicuous consumption. It’s another entirely to have it weaponized by a sophisticated digital surveillance state at the cutting edge of data-driven totalitarianism.

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