or random "islands" being built in the South China Sea,or the uncontrolled trafficking of endangered species and ivory. The Wholesale exploitation of copyright infringements. The list goes on.
Or the way they're 'investing' in developing countries to influence votes within the UN as well as driving the countries towards coal fired power stations running Chinese coal rather than sustainable alternatives while robbing those countries of natural resources at corruption discount rates.
If you can keep your head, while those around you are losing theirs, you may not have grasped the seriousness of the situation.
[...] Countries like Australia have strict rules about what is and isn't allowed to enter the country in case it wipes out native species. Can't even take in an apple you bought to eat on the plane journey to get there and they have trained dogs checking arrivals for foodstuffs. Quite right too.
Unfortunately the UK in particular and the EU in general have been historically lax in controlling imports and it's had consequences from new insects with no natural predators to diseases arriving on plant material.
Unfortunately, Australian customs can be over-zealous as reported here:
There's a fine line between not buying substandard products and right out prejudice against China. The Huawei fiasco is ridiculous, they have some of the best 5G network technologies going and this idiotic government just plays up to the bunch of xenophobes and racists to remove them from the UK's privately owned infrastructure. If they buy Ericsson or Nokia equipment, where do you think it's manufactured? In China of course...where is your mobile or computer that you're using to write your comments? Fingers crossed a more enlightened time is coming because the deplorable state of discourse in the UK when it comes to relations with Chine is as toxic as the US.
I don't want to get into complex detail, but there's a big difference between using western company tech manufactured in China, and Chinese tech manufactured in China. Chinese companies must support state intelligence by law. It is much easier for them to build "backdoor" functionality into chipsets and code they own, because they understand it completely. It's exceptionally difficult to build the same flaws into code from other Western based companies because a) many technical reasons make it very difficult, and b) any changes by a Chinese manufacturer can be detected by the Western company relatively easily.
Removing Huawei from the communications infrastructure is a very sensible decision.
That said, everything coming from huawei has been reverse engineered and scrutinized for backdoors for many years. There's a GCHQ sponsored company in Oxford that does it. Similarly, anyone who thinks Western security services don't engineer their own backdoors is mistaken!
So far as I know, ash dieback was imported from the Netherlands by “reputable” suppliers of saplings who sent young plants from there to England.
Quite why anybody needed to import ash trees from anywhere is beyond me. I could have supplied any local authority, or other large organisation, straight from my own garden, on demand.
Can you supply 500 trees with a stem girth of 25-30cm at 1.5m and a 2m clear stem, with fairly regular balanced crowns, with a lead in time of 6 weeks? That's the sort of capacity the Dutch nursery trade is capable of delivering. Hopefully the UK sector can be made to catch up post-Brexit.
"What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbour".
There's a fine line between not buying substandard products and right out prejudice against China. The Huawei fiasco is ridiculous, they have some of the best 5G network technologies going and this idiotic government just plays up to the bunch of xenophobes and racists to remove them from the UK's privately owned infrastructure. If they buy Ericsson or Nokia equipment, where do you think it's manufactured? In China of course...where is your mobile or computer that you're using to write your comments? Fingers crossed a more enlightened time is coming because the deplorable state of discourse in the UK when it comes to relations with Chine is as toxic as the US.
Agreed, I’m no fan of the Chinese government or authorities but there is a difference between politics and a let’s blame them for everything rhetoric because it sends out the message that nothing good comes from there. Substandard goods and dodgy ploys are not constrained to one nation.
No, but the Chinese system is noxious for its own citizens and other countries and should be resisted.
I realise that a lot of the USA problem with Huawei is just commercial - they have nothing to rival it because of lack of investment and ingenuity - but I still wouldn't trust the Chinese with anything that becomes essential to modern life and could bring it crashing down if withdrawn or corrupted.
Vendée - 20kms from Atlantic coast.
"The price good men (and women) pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men (and women)."
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Removing Huawei from the communications infrastructure is a very sensible decision.
That said, everything coming from huawei has been reverse engineered and scrutinized for backdoors for many years. There's a GCHQ sponsored company in Oxford that does it. Similarly, anyone who thinks Western security services don't engineer their own backdoors is mistaken!
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/huawei-gchq-security-evaluation-uk
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-04-30/vodafone-found-hidden-backdoors-in-huawei-equipment
When you don't even know who's in the team
S.Yorkshire/Derbyshire border
I realise that a lot of the USA problem with Huawei is just commercial - they have nothing to rival it because of lack of investment and ingenuity - but I still wouldn't trust the Chinese with anything that becomes essential to modern life and could bring it crashing down if withdrawn or corrupted.