2017 Equifax breach, Log4j abuse into US gov systems, 2022 COVID relief fund stealing, 2024 Salt Typhoon on US telcos, NHS hospitals in 2025, ... You could list those forever. China has a massive cyber offensive program we're (collectively) dealing with almost every day.
Nice, some intangible hacking. You're right for a fact that it is theoretically harmful. Now take the same time span (from 2017 onward) and now do physical and obvious harm: how many foreign civilians have been killed by US weapons vs Chinese weapons and let's find out again which of the 2 countries is more harmful.
This is wrong re. intangible - the cost of that is spread to everyone + specific effects. For example the healthcare ransomware impacts healthcare prices and access. Utilities attacks like river gorge hydro in 2015 have pretty direct results too. But again, I wasn't making a comparison. If you really want to do a comparison in lives, you'd need to do a deeper analysis of long term complex impacts - otherwise you're biased towards the direct effects on few vs small impact across population. (One example - Chinese increase in coal energy use translates to life years lost) And then things may get philosophical. Anyways - direct military impact is not everything.
> On 3 December 2021, Lithuania reported that in an escalation of the diplomatic spat over relations with Taiwan, China had stopped all imports from the Baltic state. It said Beijing has delisted Lithuania as a country of origin, preventing items from clearing customs, and was rejecting all import applications.[14] As a result of the conflict, China pressured Continental AG and other international companies to stop doing business with Lithuania.[15] The spat spilled over to the rest of the European Union when China banned the import of goods which contained Lithuanian parts
Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, Finland have to worry more about what the United States does in relation to being very friendly to Putin, China is a distant and I mean distant worry…
None, but they’re very competitive when it comes to mercantile/trade/commerce, they are not incompetent like the Russians.
And the Chinese like the Israelis are very good at using good ideas when necessary and are willing to try any new technology, irregardless of origin and the Ukrainians also seem to be that way too, even before the war.
Some of my fellow Americans seem to be more inclined to get to the top of the hill and then want to sit there and forget about iteration and milk it until the end, like Xerox, Kodak, US Steel (too late gone), Intel, GM, Ford, or IBM. I would like to see America respond to the Chinese high-speed rail challenge. and the Thorium Reactor challenge.
From the outside it seems like China is a positive adversary for the west to have - they don't gain from military conflict and they seem to be well incentivized to just expand soft power and compete with the west economically.
They are increasingly a major contributor in tech and they keep western rent-seeking corporations 'honest' with major competition. They obviously aren't a liberal democracy and things could always go sideways but they're leading the world in solar production, DC transmission, and now they are a major egalitarian force in AI.
I'll take them over the Russian mafia state any day, for example.
