China is "cooling" certain sectors, to spur growth in physical tech and manufacturing. This is where the future power is - not in social networks and ad sales, it's in stuff. Just look at what happens when we can't manufacture our own chips. Car factories halt. Personal computing prices spike. Military tech sputters.
China is doing what the U.S. would normally do in an effective anti-monopoly action, if our system was not broken and the government not bought with its guts by billionaires floating in tax-cut windfall.
Now we have entities that have more legal resources than the government, which is a recipe for disaster (and runaway legalized corruption).
China sees what happens when you let money run loose through power structures, and it does not want the same fate.
They are not doing this for anti-monopoly reasons. It's purely because they thought the tech companies had more data, and therefore more power than them.
One of the examples I've seen over here, which I can't seem to find in English, was an infographic created by Didi. Either stupidly or some tech dick-waving contest, they made a chart of the most hard working government agencies in Beijing. They had all this work habit data and they released it as a fun little thing.
Suffice it to say, it's hard to find now and a smaller part of a overarching data issue that has gone out of the government's hands.
Totalitarians are gonna totalitarian, but now they've learned to do it effectively and use the terminology the free world does to make it sound righteous.
> This is where the future power is - not in social networks and ad sales, it's in stuff.]
I strongly disagree. The US was not able to win the Vietnam war with 100x the amount of military stuff. Stuxnet halted Iranian nuclear research. US elections were interfered with by foreign hackers. Microsoft’s revenue is >$100B a year, and it’s mostly software driven.
Information, data, data-analysis, networking and intelligence is where power comes from.
And how is your example even relevant to a war from a deep pre-Internet era? What about WWII? What about Desert Storm? There is absolutely no guarantee that your adversary does not outplay you in internet cat and mouse games right from the start, like this recent disastrous scenario shows: https://www.defenseone.com/policy/2021/07/it-failed-miserabl...
And then what? If we think future wars will be won by hackers in hoodies, it's our funeral. An out-of-control hacking war will have to escalate to bare metal war. People will want to see explosions on TV, as they lose power and are unable to gas up their cars.
China is doing what the U.S. would normally do in an effective anti-monopoly action, if our system was not broken and the government not bought with its guts by billionaires floating in tax-cut windfall.
Now we have entities that have more legal resources than the government, which is a recipe for disaster (and runaway legalized corruption).
China sees what happens when you let money run loose through power structures, and it does not want the same fate.