Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2019/02/18/alibaba-behind-chinese-communi.html
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By declaration, every Chinese company is an arm of the Chinese Communist Party and is allowed to exist at its whim, though some are more closely connected than others. Which is why it’s eye-rolling when Huawei claims they’re not an arm of it.
And if they’re big enough they usually have an embedded office of the CCP to monitor behavior and make suggestions about how the company can be effective for China (aka the CCP, which presents itself as being the same as China). Uncle Xi’s been cracking down for the last year or so. So it’s not surprising to see a lot of asskissing and propaganda.
(Not that this craven asskissing is unique to China, see AT&T, etc, but in theory AT&T can disobey Trump’s raving demands and not get shut down.)
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Cool cool cool.
Meanwhile in America kids get arrested for not standing up and pledging allegiance to a flag. Land of the free!
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I sort of wish America were transparent enough to have a Department of Propoganda
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And the British parliament similarly rules at the pleasure of Her Majesty the Queen. The power in both cases is more than a bit theoretical, though. Just as Lizzie would be deposed if she actually tried to dissolve parliament, if the Communist Party of China decided to nationalize all businesses or the like their days would be numbered.
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That is a point worth making whenever American persons accuse other cultures of being built on, gasp, propaganda. The US is extremely unusual, among Western countries, in the overt way its government and citizens fling propaganda about, so that accusation is particularly comical.
But it’s not like Sweden or Spain aren’t just as saturated with propaganda. Europeans are suspicious of anything with the government’s fingerprints on it, but everything we read, watch and say is still controlled by the Establishment in a broader sense.
In Far From the Madding Crowd that one chick sez “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs”, and that’s the way it is for everyone everywhere. Except, for ‘woman’ and ‘men’, substitute ‘individuals’ and ‘established social structures’. The question isn’t if you’re swimming in propaganda, it’s whose.
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> translates to ‘Study to make China strong’
You can just see the wheels turning in the White House. MAGA app (with a beautiful wall icon) coming in 3, 2, …
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All good citizens should download. Those found without app may suffer consequences
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Y’all remember this?
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So what’s the news here? The fact that a software company actually delivered a working product under a government contract? 
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Re: Alibaba, whose Chairman Jack Ma is a member of the Communist Party
That’s how it is in a system like this. You don’t get anywhere if you are not a member of “The Party”.
And, to quote another “The Party”: The Party is always right.
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The conjugation:
I recount the world as I see it;
You subtly alter the rules of debate;
They disseminate propaganda.
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How long before having this on your phone is use in the calculation of your “social credit score?” It is the new “Little red book,” but it could log how long you spend with it open, possibly use the camera to make sure that you actually read it.
Didn’t her
representative, the Governor General, dissolve the Australian Parliament in 1975?
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This Government? The one that we currently have? The one that is going for a Hard Brexit just because it can, to make a few disaster capitalists a bit richer? I think she just about could.
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Yes, but that was …complicated.
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