[boredhedgehog]

Why do people worry about China so much? There is barely any cooperation between Chinese intelligence and the rest of the world.

If I was forced to pick one government to share my secrets with, it would be the Chinese, because there's nothing they can do about it. My own government and its allies is infinitely more dangerous to me than such a foreign one.

[mylidlpony]

> because there's nothing they can do about it

Are you talking about the China that bought huge areas in ports around the world? The same one that has secret police stations as well?

[Cthulhu_]

TECHNICALLY they only supply loans and construction assistance to countries that don't have the infrastructure themselves yet, but, yeah.

Not like the US is much better though; US based investors and shell companies own property all across the world, and US intelligence agencies infiltrated / owned European based secure communications companies / products (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypto_AG).

Also, the US has public / non-secret army bases in 100+ countries, and secret police stations in loads of places elsewhere (50 prisons in 28 countries: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_black_sites)

[nicce]

So, basically... nothing? You should go into China to get a real threat. On the other hand, there is global cooperation with intelligence agencies of USA and many European countries.

[pell]

China spies on Uyghurs in other countries, puts pressure on them and has been known to run secret police stations as well.

China spying on Uyghurs in Sweden: https://www.rferl.org/a/Sweden_Jails_Uyghur_Chinese_Man_For_...

China controls dissidents abroad through relatives back home: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-uighurs-idUSKBN0UD1...

China's secret police stations in Europe: https://www.spiegel.de/international/world/beijing-s-long-ar...

>On the other hand, there is global cooperation with intelligence agencies of USA and many European countries.

Two wrongs don't make a right.

[nicce]

They key point was not in acquiring information.. instead in authority to do something real with that information without real concequences.

[Alifatisk]

> If I was forced to pick one government to share my secrets with, it would be the Chinese, because there's nothing they can do about it.

Unless you live or visit there. Wasn’t there reports of China having concentration camps?

[ilyt]

Obviously if someone would pick China it was because they were not planning to visit there

[richardw]

Because if you want to influence the voting patterns of a population, knowing as much as you can is useful. Search history + TikTok + FB would give you unbeatable datasets that you could use for the lifetime of the person. Take a dataset now, add a decade of AI progress and I’m pretty sure a nefarious actor would be leading many people around by the nose. Not all, but 5% would move many elections.

They wouldn’t even need to learn all that much about you as an individual. Just enough to match you with a cluster from their own population that they have infinite data on.

[3np]

In other words, your data in their hands is dangerous to you when combined with that of others.

[didericis]

> If I was forced to pick one government to share my secrets with, it would be the Chinese, because there’s nothing they can do about it.

What makes you so sure about that?

I worry about China because there’s no internal checks to prevent them from doing anything.

Western governments and allies have a long culture of court systems and thinking about balancing constituent needs. That is eroding and becoming more dangerous to the extent western leaders are envious of dictatorial powers and trying to emulate Chinese totalitarianism, but there is a lot of institutional and cultural bulwark against it.

Any powerful totalitarian country should worry people. People underestimate the level of covert aggression in all facets of foreign involvement in regimes with no internal accountability.

[Cthulhu_]

> What makes you so sure about that?

I think the commenter means that China can't do much about them while living where they do (e.g. the US), whereas the US based intelligence agencies can black bag them in most of the western world.

Given the Snowden revelations, I don't believe there's much accountability to what the NSA and co collect and analyze. Secret courts, CIA dark sites, Gitmo, all kinds of things that might be legal according to the letter of the law, but feel immoral and unjust (war crimes level of unjust).

[didericis]

The fact that we’re able to talk openly about the unaccountability of the NSA, CIA, FISA courts and Gitmo is a form of accountability that does not exist in China.

I do not condone the actions of all of the US institutions and believe many are largely unaccountable, but there is still far more accountability in our least accountable institutions than any in China. Culture within institutions, the populace at large from which institutions hire from, and the history of institutions is a very important but subtle factor that westerners take for granted and is not identical between countries.

The fact that we even call US actions war crimes is another form of accountability China lacks. China forcibly annexed Tibet. China has concentration camps in inner Mongolia. China massacred it’s own people during the Mao era and is run by the same party today. China releases dams upstream of cities and drowns its own people. China committed war crimes in its support of North Korea during the Korean War, and Vietnam in the Vietnam War. China turned hundreds of its college students into mincemeat in Tiananmen square.

These are not on the radar of most people in China the same way Gitmo and Iraq and Vietnam are in the US because the CCP has a level of unaccountability westerners do not understand. Their stranglehold on media and public perception is extreme, and they have been exerting influence on western social media like reddit, youtube, and facebook, as well as google search. They do so through virtually all corporations that want access to Chinese labor and the Chinese market.

The ramifications of this are severe. The lockdown policies that have destroyed a lot of the global economy were pushed on the world by pressure from China (and our own fear and incompetence), despite existing pandemic plans in western nations that were far more sane, more humane, and less destructive.

They were able to get us to discard our own pandemic plans from our own institutions because of the influence they have been gaining. China exerted influence over the WHO recommendations, and was very aggressive/in PR panic mode when the virus first escaped. Our own internal division is largely our own doing, but they were extremely aggressive in the early phases of the pandemic online and greatly exacerbated western problems precisely because they knew what talking points to copy and paste for maximum division and lack of consensus.

Giving them your data and more ability to influence you and people that fit your demographics online is incredibly naive and foolish, no matter how much you may dislike your own government or how valid that dislike may be.

[ilyt]

Eh, never stopped USA

[dwighttk]

> because there's nothing they can do about it

What makes you think this?

[cscurmudgeon]

https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2022/12/04/world/china-overseas-poli...

Yep totally harmless.

> China operating over 100 police stations across the world with the help of some host nations, report claims

[londons_explore]

I agree. For most people here, it is their own government (or allied governments) which are the ones to be most cautious about. They're the ones most likely to ruin your life if they don't agree with what you're up to - elected or not.

[dncornholio]

Because American propoganda.

[eynsham]

Some people are Chinese.

[talkingtab]

You may not have noticed this, but China is seeking to extend it's influence. By whatever means required including deadly force. There is a picture you might want to look at. Search "Tank Man". That is why people worry about China so much.

[zanellato19]

oh, you mean like the US and its global reaching government?