The Rise of Huawei is This Generation’s Sputnik Launch

There was an article today where they've confirmed that Huawei has some sort of third party back door with a lot of their electronics. There was a lot of speculation to why the United States was banning Huawei from the major providers because they were very close to releasing some. And they have some amazing phones and they were really close to. I refuse to use them. Just some principle. In fact, like one of my girlfriends, she's kind of sponsored by Huawei. She's European. I wanted to take a selfie with me and I was like, there's no way that my face could ever be in your phone. Really? No. Absolutely. Tell me why. What are your thoughts on it? Huawei is really another just apparatus of the main party, the government. And I really think that Huawei is with respect to the next era of the digital world is the next Sputnik. Like it is the Sputnik issue of our time. We should be doing everything we can to not allow Huawei to have this big market share. And the person who started it was somebody that had a lot of party connections to the I think it was a general or something. And it's really they really operate in a way that's very opaque. And anyone doing business in China will have to have connections to the government, especially when you're that big. And because it's a government that has such totalitarian control over everything, you can expect that whatever information or that they would have to answer to the government, whatever the government wants. If you're willing to put your privacy in the hands of an entity like that, you know, go ahead. But know also that the Chinese government has enacted all these mass surveillance policies. It's I just wouldn't trust. I just wouldn't trust them. So what is different between Huawei and there's many Chinese manufacturers of cell phones and like Xiaomi. Yeah. It's it's the it's the government connection. And also that the only one that has that deep government connection. Well, the founder, at least, was the general that much I know. And just a lot of party connections and, you know, just it's also heavily subsidized by the government, which is one of the ways that China has been competing kind of unfairly in global markets. When you have you can drive out innovation in the United States by by making sure that your local version is so competitive on prices that they can't match you. So in a way, it's like a form of economic warfare, which is one of the issues that Trump has really pushed back on. It's the China trade issue. And he's been criticized by about that. Do you think he's correct on China? Yes. I do think he's correct. He's been pushed back on. It's interesting because I think the Democrats were a lot more protectionist when it came to trade. Right. The Republicans and the libertarians always like free trade, free trade, everything like, you know, let's globalize the world. It was the whole Thomas Friedman position when he wrote about it in Lexus and the olive tree that if we globalize the world, that economic that you're you lift a lot of people out of poverty or your economic pie grows. But your politics shrink. That was the idea. Right. No two countries that have McDonald's would fight a war or something like that. That was his theory. And in the case of China, obviously, that didn't happen. Right. Like the part about the politics changing. There was this quote by a Tiananmen protester. He said, if the free world doesn't change China, China will change the free world. And if you think about what happened with the NBA, you know, the whole Daryl Morey. Yeah. Explain that because that was shocking to me because the way they were capitulating to China, I was, you know, I was a little stunned because it was so open. Yeah. And can you explain what happened? So Daryl Morey, who is the GM of the Houston Rockets, he tweeted out basically a little picture that that showed that he supported the Hong Kong protesters and the Hong Kong protesters have been added since July of last year, 2019. They have been protesting the incursion of Chinese control into their supposedly autonomous region. China promised them that there would be two systems, one country, two systems after the handover in 1997 from the British to China. They slowly kind of eroded that in many ways. And their freedoms have been kind of, you know, diminishing over time. And the straw, the straw that broke the camel's back was actually this policy that they passed, this law they passed that said that anyone can be extradited to China for trials. Basically, it was after a case that happened, the criminal case. And the Hong Kong people knew that this law, if it goes in effect, basically gives the Chinese government legal right to disappear, kidnap anyone and bring them for trial in some sort of kangaroo or show trial in China. And that has happened. So booksellers, it's always the booksellers in Hong Kong have been kidnapped because they were publishing these like insider accounts like Dirty Secrets of the you know, the CCP, whenever there was a leak, because the Chinese Communist Party is huge, the Politi Bureau is huge. And so there was a bookseller called Causeway Books. And they were publishing all these like accounts from within the Chinese Communist Party. And the owner of that bookshop one day just disappeared. And he ended up in China was basically a forced kidnapping. And he was released, I think he was, you know, he did his jail time. And now he's setting up another bookshop in Taiwan. But but that law, basically, would just have allowed China to do that legally this time. So the Hong Kong youth were up in arms, they you know, they were tired of all their the ways that their way of life had changed since the British handed handed it over. And in a way, they were kind of pining for the good old times, good old times, and they were under a colonial, you know, an English colonial master, which was one of those like moment for anyone on the left. And so there were more I tweeted this out. And of course, you know how big the the China market is for the NBA, right? Like all these players have contracts with them. In fact, the Houston Rockets have a lot of contracts with the Chinese CCTV for broadcasts. They also had like merchandising opportunity sneakers that were made there. And that caused a huge, huge outcry in China, they were just like, oh, he's disrespecting us. And they were able to force him to basically make a groveling tweet. That said, I'm sorry for hurting the feelings of the Chinese people. And then like all the other some NBA players actually came out and, and, you know, kind of took the side of the of the Chinese government like, oh, wait, who are we to, you know, they kind of like to this backpedal thing when when they're so strong on other forms of activism here, like the NBA, when it came to the North Carolina the bathroom bill, you remember, like the transgender bathroom bill, they were, they were always on the side of the woke. But then when it came to the China Hong Kong issue, they stood with the biggest oppressor. Thanks for watching.