Chinese Law Requires Spying

First in 2015 and then again in June 2017, the party declared that all Chinese companies must collaborate in gathering intelligence.

“All organizations and citizens,” reads Article 7 of China’s National Intelligence Law, “must support, assist with, and collaborate in national intelligence work, and guard the national intelligence work secrets they are privy to.”

All Chinese companies, whether they are private or owned by the state, are now part and parcel of the party’s massive overseas espionage campaign.

https://nypost.com/2018/12/22/how-arrest-of-chinese-princess-exposes-regimes-world-domination-plot

China Not “Seizing” Assets

The news of China taking over Sri Lanka’s strategic port and 15 000 hectares of land on a 99-year lease have caused the Chinese embassy in Zimbabwe to deny that assets are used as collateral for loans:

“In the case of Zimbabwe, there is no mortgage of resources for now between China and Zimbabwe, and we never force any conditions on any country. We are equal, we are brothers and sisters,” he said.

Although the details of such loans are secret, he is probably technically correct. Here’s how China’s takeover of Africa seems to be playing out:

  • Find a country notorious for failed debt due to corruption
  • Provide infrastructure loans
  • Wait for the debt to become unpayable
  • Help the current leader stay in power
  • In return for giving up the asset as partial debt repayment

You don’t have to have a mortgage over an asset to negotiate the sale of it to pay off said debt.

China Tracking School Children with GPS

Eleven Chinese schools have begun enforcing “smart uniforms” with computer chips embedded to monitor student movements and prevent them from skipping classes.

Whenever a student enters their school, the time and date is recorded, and also with a short video is recorded. Facial recognition is used to prevent students from cheating the system, by wearing somebody else’s uniform.

Skipping classes, even while still at school, will trigger an alarm to inform teachers and parents, while a voice alarm is activated if a student walks out of school without permission.

A GPS system tracks student movements even beyond the school grounds.

Full story https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-28/microchipped-school-uniforms-monitor-students-in-china/10671604

Few Full Democracies

Less than 5% of the world’s population lives in a “full democracy”, according to The Economist.

This is map pretty much in line with the East / West split I envisage -blue versus brown & red. The only difference is that I figure the southern African “Wall” might be a little further North.

Two Walled Worlds

There is a future that I don’t think anyone has thought of, or at least few people are discussing — our planet split into two worlds that have nothing to do with each other. Essentially East and West.

And it will occur when considerations regarding ethics and technology combine. Blame China. Well, actually, blame us for buying Chinese goods and enabling this potential outcome.

  • China is using technology to enable a surveillance state straight out of dystopian fiction.
  • Last week there was news of possibly designer babies being made in China using CRISPR.
  • And China is going all out to win the AI war.

If they do succeed in having a superior AI system/being to the West, then it could wreak havoc on everything, especially jobs and finance.

Elon Musk has rightfully warned of the dangers of AI, and the need for safeguards. China won’t have ethical restraints. China will make an autonomous robot army, while the USA will be tethered to requiring human oversight of all robot actions involving weaponry.

Meanwhile, from fears of spying, the West is forbidding Chinese technology to be used in things like 5G phone networks. While China blocks their citizens from seeing foreign websites.

China is making a big push to become economic friends throughout the world, targeting less affluent countries. In Africa they are getting long leases on land, via corrupt local leaders, to secure food supplies for decades into the future. They are building a city in Pakistan just for Chinese people.

And we had (will have again?) Donald Trump, who has just the personality to actually go through with some of his grandiose threats. He could easily start a trade war with China that ends up with zero trade between the two nations.

So here is the prediction: two worlds, East and West, that have absolutely nothing to do with each other. The physical boundaries could be complicated — think the thin corridor that linked West Berlin to West Germany — although I think primarily based on continents. Shipping routes might dictate whether a country sides with the West or East.

I expect that the East will be contiguous, and that will make things much easier. Donald Trump-like walls will go up.

EAST:

  • China
  • Russia
  • South East Asia
  • Middle East
  • Turkey
  • East Europe
  • Pakistan
  • Northern Africa, down to Angola and Uganda

WEST:

  • All the Americas
  • Western Europe
  • Japan
  • South Korea
  • PNG
  • Pacific Islands
  • Australia
  • NZ
  • India / Sri Lanka
  • Southern Africa

Certain borders will suffer unknown consequences, although those areas could be used for diplomatic relations. There will have to be some level of communication between the worlds, and so these borders are logical places. We will need to discuss things like climate change, inform each other about volcanic eruptions and so on.

Borders:

  • North / South Korea
  • Japan / China
  • India / Pakistan & China
  • Northern Africa / Southern Africa
  • Australia / Indonesia
  • Eastern Europe / Western Europe

Technology in each world will grow in isolation. Spying will become a major activity, keeping tabs on what the other world is up to. Possibly satellites will all get shot down, to stop spying.

The good news is that each should be happy with their own world. The East gets to oppress, while the West has freedom.

The East will suffer economically initially, but China and Russia will grow from exploiting the resources and cheap labour of Africa and SE Asia.

The West will suffer economically initially, because we won’t have cheap stuff from China any more. But that will work itself out, and free people will perform better than oppressed people.

Wars should disappear. The West already doesn’t have wars any more, and China/Russia will dominate the other countries very quickly with military bases, before the East/West split occurs.

The reasons for wars between East/West will disappear, because with zero contact there will be zero reasons to act or react. Possibly there might be some water issues between the two. Possibly the East uses weather modification that affects the West negatively.

There is a small chance that one day the East tries to takeover the West by first hobbling it via disease or electromagnetic pulses. They won’t try traditional warfare or nukes.

When will this happen? If Trump is re-elected, before his second term is out the split will be seen as inevitable. Otherwise, it will come down to when the ethics of AI are conflicting, or it will be when neither sells any technology to the other — I think by 2030.

Or, it may depend on the expansion of territories. Russia is keen to get the Soviet Union happening again, while China seems keen on controlling Afghanistan.

So if you want to travel to the countries that will end up in the East, the time is now.

Talk of a Split Internet

The Internet has been global, with the same experience for every browsing person, for decades now. It has led to a more homogenised world, as it is dominated by the English language. Popular services like eBay have been cloned in every culture.

The exception has been the firewall countries like China , Saudi Arabia and North Korea.

With the GDPR in Europe, that is changing. While in the past local laws have detailed specific products or services a website might not be able to provide locally (like gambling, supply of pharmaceuticals), we now have regional data laws that apply across the board, depending on where a web visitor has come from.

Recently, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt warned about the risk of “a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America.”

The natural progression for Western countries (or states, California is getting its own version of GDPR), is that via a few different versions of this, we end up with one GDPR policy for the entire West. At some point a decision might be made to start firewalling websites and even countries that aren’t a part of the Western GDPR.

Meanwhile as China rapidly increases their influence and control of the East, expect to see more firewalls to go up that block the West. If they can bribe African leaders to lease agricultural land, convincing them to block access to the evil West – in exchange for trade deals – might be a possibility.

Data localisation is also an issue – where data is stored. Russia and China require all data to be stored locally, on servers that are physically local. Some Western countries have similar, and the trend is towards all countries having this, where there are only other certain countries where your local data can be safely stored – New Zealand might trust Australia, for example.

Something China doesn’t control is the actual Internet infrastructure. Expect to see them start building their own, parallel Internet. It could be disguised as a secure channel for government or military business (which is how our Internet began).

East To Dominate AI Chips

China builds many things cheaply, but even expensively it has not been producing computer chips. Massive investment from the Chinese government means that this could soon change.

If/when China makes the most advanced AI chips, you can be sure of two things:

  1. The West won’t trust the chips, so they won’t be imported in any way
  2. The East won’t allow them to be exported, as they could give China a massive AI advantage

This will be one of the key aspects of the East/West Split, advances in technology combined with a lack of trust in what is built into that technology

Opinion from Will Knight at Technology Review:

China is the world’s largest and fastest-growing market for semiconductors, but no Chinese chipmaker has broken into the top 15 globally in terms of sales. Advanced chips are primarily made by companies from the US, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and Western Europe. China’s big economic rival, the US, accounts for about half of global sales and half of China’s chip imports.

…it released Made in China 2025, a sweeping blueprint for upgrading China’s entire manufacturing industry. This set the hugely ambitious goal of producing $305 billion worth of chips per year and meeting 80% of domestic demand for chips by 2030, up from $65 billion and 33%, respectively, in 2016.

…China won’t be playing catch-up with these new chips, as it has done with more conventional chips for decades. Instead, its existing strength in AI and its unparalleled access to the quantities of data required to train AI algorithms could give it an edge in designing chips optimized to run them.

China’s chip ambitions have geopolitical implications, too. Advanced chips are key to new weapons systems, better cryptography, and more powerful supercomputers. They are also central to the increasing trade tensions between the US and China. A successful chip industry would make China more economically competitive and independent. To many, in both Washington and Beijing, national strength and security are at stake.