The Chinese government has upped the stakes in its quiet conflict with the United States and US companies yesterday by banning the spending of public money on 10 different Apple products, including all iPads and MacBooks. In and of itself, this kind of move would be of relatively little importance — but it’s part of an overall Chinese crackdown on US products and companies, which in turn is based on the US government’s distrust of hardware made by Chinese companies ZTE and Huawei.
Over the past nine months, China has launched investigations into Qualcomm (and then declared it a monopoly), raided Microsoft’s offices as part of an investigation into similar allegations of market domination and abuse, banned Microsoft software, and has told its government departments to stop buying antivirus software from Symantec or Kaspersky Labs. This restriction on Apple hardware is the latest in a long line of problems, kicked off by deepening mistrust and a desire to hold the US accountable (or at least, appear to do so).
To be fair, no one should be allowed to install Symantec software
Smaller, more targeted restrictions have hit both IBM and Google, though the latter company was ostensibly restricted to prevent the dissemination of undesirable information prior to the Tiananmen Square anniversary earlier this year.
This campaign against US interests has been driven by both the Snowden allegations and by the United States’ decision to charge Chinese military officials with the crime of cyber spying as part of its own crackdown on cyber warfare. Filing charges against five Chinese officers was little more than a bit of theater, but it incensed the Chinese, who see it as blatant hypocrisy from a country that’s been caught spying on the rest of the planet and its own citizens.
It’s also undoubtedly a bit of payback for America’s own insistence that products from ZTE and Huawei Technologies couldn’t be trusted, on account of their close ties to the Chinese government. In this kind of scenario, what you can prove matters more than what the truth is — the US has been caught with its collective hand in the cookie jar, and China is going to use the issue to press ahead with its own efforts to create homegrown solutions to technological problems.
A real-time hacking map, showing a coordinated attack from China towards the US.
For years, US companies have rather blithely assumed that Chinese markets would open to them as the country’s standard of living rose. These repeated investigations and restrictions put the lie to that idea — China is more interested in building its own infrastructure and capabilities than in serving as an indefinite outsourcing facility for US manufacturing. In the meantime, the cybersecurity battles between the US and China continue to play out mostly in secret — we only hear about successful attacks or repulsions after the fact, and details are often scarce.
Link: extremetech.com
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