1,100 Scientists and Students Barred From UK Amid China Crackdown - Slashdot
source link: https://politics.slashdot.org/story/23/03/15/239221/1100-scientists-and-students-barred-from-uk-amid-china-crackdown
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1,100 Scientists and Students Barred From UK Amid China Crackdown
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Aren't we using "National Security" as a weird stand in that substitutes economic interests for military ones. Cos its feeling like none of this has much to do with Chinas shitty human rights or concerns for Taiwan, but rather "China is doing really well economically and only America is allowed to do really well".
Which if you think about it its using government intervention to defeat competition.
Meanwhile a bunch of pointy headed science types are getting denied a chance to work on science because some dude in a black suit and sunnglasses from the government said "Trust me bro..." (What? Do you think they actually tell the applicant *why* they are a security threat?).
Governments get weird about all sorts of research. One researcher friend had ASIO (I'm in australia, its our version of the CIA or MI6/5) once visit and tried to shut down some research on sattelite sensing of plankton, becuse apparently military submarines churn up a lot of plankton. Thankfully the Universities lawyers managed to shut that nonsense down.
Oh and the technique to detect subs from aerial imagery of plankton has already been publically known since WW2. No secrets protected here.
Another friend DID have his research shut down, an Aboriginal physicist who had the idea of creating throw-down EMP devices for cops to use to replace those roll-out tire popping things cops use to stop car chases. The idea being that those roll out things regularly cause car crashes (which at the time was disproportionately killing a lot of aboriginal teenagers) , so with his device the car just shuts off, both protecting the passenger, the public, AND as a nice bonus, actually leaves the stolen car in a recoverable state. Its an everyone wins invention, but the govt had it shut down because you could in theory use them on the battlefield against tanks (I'm fairly sure the bad guys just bury 20kg of fertilizer in the road and convert the good guy into red mist).
And the kicker is, ask ANY physicist how to make the EMP device described above, and chances are he'll pull out a piece of paper and draw you up a diagram of parts you can probably buy from your local radio shack. Nothing here is protected secrets.
Either way, none of these guys where foreign agents or acting on behalf of malevolent or terrorist interests, but instead where just regular scientists trying to make the world a bit better by researching and inventing stuff.
How many of these chinese "Foreign National Security Threat" guys are actually real threats, and how many are just some regular scientist effectively exiled from the kingdom because some paranoid idiot in a security agency barely even understood what he was looking at.
Just because we dont currently *like* China, doesnt mean we should treat people *from* China like threats. Its 2023, that kind of arcane thinking is what got us into the worst of the hot water that the 1900s threw at us.
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Real threats from Chinese industrial and military espionage have been shown to have already occurred. The problem is not all Chinese students and workers are spies. It's very likely that most are not spies. However, the damage from spies is not only real but widespread, even if only a small portion of the Chinese students and workers are spies.
How should the US, the UK, and other Western countries proceed? The extremes are to either ban all Chinese students and workers or to treat all Chinese students a
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No. The West was happy to engage with China economically, in the expectation that economic reform in China would be accompanied, or at least followed, by political liberalization.
It is now clear that is NOT going to happen. China isn't liberalizing. They are sliding backward into a "Big Man" Maoist dictatorship. Xi has abolished term limits. The CCP crushed democracy in HK. They fired missiles into Taiwan's territorial waters. They are bullying the Philippines and Vietnam in the South China Sea. They killed
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So, we had an "expectation" to change their political orientation, but they are the initiators.
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Better reading comprehension than average, but typically unwarranted sarcasm. 3/10.
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"The idea being that those roll out things regularly cause car crashes (which at the time was disproportionately killing a lot of aboriginal teenagers)"
It would nice if Aboriginal teenagers DIDN'T steal cars in first place perhaps ?
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It would nice if Aboriginal teenagers DIDN'T steal cars in first place perhaps ?
Don't confuse an Is with an Ought.
Its all very well that its not a good situation (It IS a situation however that has historical causes by chronic economic underdevelopment leading to generations of people without hope pissed off at society and thus unwilling to follow its rules. After all why follow the rules of the game if the dice are loaded.).
Whatever the case , being a delinquent teenager shouldnt carry a death penalty. And
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