So prison labor for profit is bad now?

It should be a matter of course, but the EU already banned forced labour explicitly this years. The question is rather that we must ensure that the law is enforced.

It would be interesting to hear what the presumptive PM has to say about China’s support for Russia’s war in Ukraine.

Last year, the Chinese ambassador to France said that former Soviet nations had ‘no effective status’ of independence in international law, and he said that Crimea belongs to Russia. Lithuania’s foreign minister, Gabrielius Landsbergis, said back then that "[Chinese] diplomats [should] reminded we [Lithuania] are not post-Soviet countries but countries that were illegally occupied by the Soviet Union”.

On social media, Landsbergis then wrote: “If anyone is still wondering why the Baltic states don’t trust China to ‘broker peace in Ukraine’, here’s a Chinese ambassador arguing that Crimea is Russian and our countries’ borders have no legal basis.”

What does Lithuania’s presumptive PM say about that?

Addition: Don’t give a free pass to Beijing for its aggressive behaviour

[…] The type of influence China exercises is not something we can accept as simply ‘what great powers do’. It launched a cyber attack on the Pacific Islands Forum, spreads online disinformation in the Pacific to undermine democracies and weaken Pacific partnerships, sought security agreements that lack public transparency, and undertaken various other malicious activities—such as hybrid and grey zone operations.

And that’s just in the Pacific—China is carrying out this malicious activity globally, not to mention being the main supporter enabling Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Of course, other significant powers seek influence, but responsible nations don’t behave like this […]

Or maybe a proxy war of democracies against dictatorships.

I didn’t miss the point, but this is a different topic. We need to provide housing, end homelessness and possibly the right to a bank account for everyone. These are different things.

Also nobody agreed to protect Ukraine for giving up nukes.

This is irrelevant. We have to do it anyway, no matter whatever they agreed upon 30 years ago.

This is not about ‘neoliberals’ but about foreign malicious actors attacking digital systems for no reason.

Affordable housing and the threat by malicious actors to attack digital payment systems are two different things. Homelessness has to be addressed, of course, but we are dealing here with something else.

In a piece published in November 2022, Nobel Economist Daron Acemoglu argues that China’s economy is rotting from the head.

For a while, [China’s leader] Xi, his entourage, and even many outside experts believed that the economy could still flourish under conditions of tightening central control, censorship, indoctrination, and repression [after Xi secured an unprecedented third term (with no future term limits in sight), and stacked the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee with loyal supporters]. Again, many looked to AI as an unprecedentedly powerful tool for monitoring and controlling society.

Yet there is mounting evidence to suggest that Xi and advisers misread the situation, and that China is poised to pay a hefty economic price for the regime’s intensifying control. Following sweeping regulatory crackdowns on Alibaba, Tencent, and others in 2021, Chinese companies are increasingly focused on remaining in the political authorities’ good graces, rather than on innovating.

The inefficiencies and other problems created by the politically motivated allocation of credit are also piling up, and state-led innovation is starting to reach its limits. Despite a large increase in government support since 2013, the quality of Chinese academic research is improving only slowly.

[…] The top-down control in Chinese academia is distorting the direction of research, too. Many faculty members are choosing their research areas to curry favor with heads of departments or deans, who have considerable power over their careers. As they shift their priorities, the evidence suggests that the overall quality of research is suffering.

Xi’s tightening grip over science and the economy means that these problems will intensify. And as is true in all autocracies, no independent experts or domestic media will speak up about the train wreck he has set in motion […]

I am not a fan of Ms. Merkel -and, even less so, of Ms. Thatcher who “topped a poll of Britain’s best post-war leaders”-, but this article is just an empty rant without any substance. Except from the defense spending, there is not a single number, no source cited that would foster the authors’ argument.

Just a few points: There is a lot of reason why you could criticize the former German chancellor, but Ms. Merke’s “call to turn off Germany’s remaining nuclear power plants” isn’t likely one of them (the mistake here wasn’t the end of nuclear power but the failure of establishing a German renewable energy industry that was thriving in the 2000s).

And Ms. Merkel was not “inviting” over a million Syrians and others to Germany in 2015. The support Germany and some other states gave to refugees then fleeing a war was the right thing at the time. I can’t say whether this sign of humanity has “helped fuel the rise of the hard right in Germany and elsewhere,” but I am firmly convinced that if Ms. Merkel’s successors in politics -in Germany and elsewhere- would show a more human stance towards our current democracies and human rights and against autocracies, voters would likely have a real alternative to “the hard right in Germany and elsewhere”. (But, in the same article, the Economist criticizes Germany for “China [having] soaked up its exports, glad to face few questions over human rights, while Germany failed to worry about getting hooked on another autocratic regime”. What, I wonder, do they say about the current transparency discussions, forced labour and other issues in Chinese supply chains?)

So I conclude that you could write a whole book on Ms. Merkel’s economic policies, and not much of it may be positive. There is a lot to criticize. But this Economist article is another topic misconduct. To me reading this was a reminder why I unsubscribed to this magazine long time ago after having been a reader for many years.

I apologize for the long post.

Addition:

TikTok Has Pushed Chinese Propaganda Ads To Millions Across Europe – ( July 2024, updated September 2024)

According to TikTok’s newly public advertising library, ads from China’s largest state media outlets touting everything from China Covid lockdowns to tourism in the troubled Xinjiang region have been broadcast to millions of the platform’s European users.

TikTok Ads Paid for by Chinese Media Target European Users – (August 2023)

Chinese media sponsored over a thousand ads on TikTok targeting European audiences. Additionally, accounts that carefully obscure their connections to China may pose further risks in coordinated information manipulation campaigns.

This are just two examples, there is much more across the web.