Hybrid warfare: the U.S. and China
In May, the U.S. government imposed a ban for its companies to supply technologies to Huawei. The reason is that the U.S. thinks that Huawei devices gather information about its users and that the company may share these “benefits” with the Chinese government. Thus, a lot of American technological giants ceased working with the Chinese company. Although Huawei devices will stop having access to popular applications such as WhatsApp, Facebook, and so on, the company is going to design its own operating system to fill the gap created by Android (Stewart, 2019). China was always blamed for counterfeiting; a lot of famous American brands became the victims of such illegal actions. That is why, I think, the U.S. has valid reasons for stopping working with Huawei. That is, imagine, you study hard day and night, and someone copied your work without permission and got the highest score. Isn’t it unfair? Absolutely! Thus, plagiarism and stealing of intellectual property do not promote progress.
So, the U.S. government is again afraid in terms of “gifting” intellectual property rights in the technological field to the Chinese giant. It was written in the article by Stewart that Trump fears that China has gained great power to compete with American technologies. The political tension between the U.S. and China evolves into hybrid warfare, which is also perceived as the first technological war by some sources (Gerasyukova, 2019). Thus, the U.S. ban on Huawei due to unproved espionage has a bright political color. In response to the U.S., China has raised tariffs on American products (Singh, 2019). The company has also sent home its American employees deployed at R&D functions at its Shenzhen headquarters (Singh, 2019). Countries, included in World Trade Organization, surely should follow the established rules. However, in my opinion, every country tries to find its own loophole to start trade wars…
In my opinion, as a result, China and Russia will try their best in order to be the leader in the technological area. Huawei already signed an agreement with MTC for improving technologies of the fifth generation (Griffiths, 2019). Unfortunately, the U.S. will struggle in the future since the majority of its goods have been produced in China, that is, it means losing the source of the cheap labor force.
Taiwan: the voice of democracy
The 24th of May became a landmark day in the world, specifically, in the Asian region. The reason for such a historic moment was Taiwan, the island, located in East Asia. For two years, Taiwan citizens fought for openness, democracy, and justice in terms of legalizing marriages between two persons of the same gender. Asian culture is well-known for its less flexible attitude toward gender equality, the LGTBQ community, and so on. However, the Taiwanese did not stop hoping and were waiting for the legislature's response during rain, as Isabelle Steger wrote in her article (2019). As it was stated, people, who support or are a part of the LGTB community, in Taiwan had the dark hours for two years since they met a lot of opposition from conservative parties. The president of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-Wen, immediately reacted to the decision of the Legislative Yuan, the Taiwanese parliament (Hollingsworth, 2019):
“Good morning #Taiwan. Today, we have a chance to make history & show the world that progressive values can take root in an East Asian society. Today, we can show the world that #LoveWins.” Source: Tsai Ing-wen’s Twitter
However, it is important to notice that Democratic Progressive Party, which currently rules Taiwan, has not planned to continue supporting the LGTBQ movement because of the fear to lose the number of voters during elections. In my opinion, Taiwan showed huge progress not only in hearing the voice of minorities, but also stressed the contrast between the Chinese regime and Taiwanese openness. In China, all the content with LGTBQ goes through the tough procedure of censorship for ethical purposes (Steger, 2019). Thus, in my opinion, Taiwan made real progress and became the pioneer in Asian culture, where the voice of democracy has started to be heard. Perhaps, the legislation of marriage between individuals of the same gender is only a starting point toward liberalistic perception. I think it is an essential event since it can serve as a catalyst for solving other important issues in different aspects of life. For example, gender equality in Asia has still a vague pattern.