Chinese Fifth Column

Zuckerberg’s Anti-Tyranny Rhetoric Roils Chinese Employees
Tensions between Facebook’s large community of Chinese employees and the company’s management have been on the rise since Zuckerberg became more critical of Beijing. 

By Wayne Ma

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s Georgetown address about free speech last month drew hostility and skeptical commentary from his Chinese employees. 

Zuckerberg’s criticism of Chinese video app TikTok and China’s censorship of the internet renewed long-standing complaints that Facebook’s management is biased against communist China, according to one Chinese employee who saw messages in Facebook’s internal discussion groups.

Tensions between Facebook management and its large fifth column of Chinese employees have been on the upswing over the past year or so, since Zuckerberg abandoned efforts to get Facebook allowed back into China and instead became more critical of Beijing. 

Many of the company’s newer Chinese employees were hired from mainland China and are unapologetically supportive of the Chinese government.

Facebook is grappling with its large fifth column of Chinese employees, some of whom are becoming more vocal and critical in internal company forums over what they claim is a bias against communist China.

But in the past couple of months complaints of anti-China bias have overlapped with unhappiness about working conditions at Facebook, crystallized by the suicide of a Chinese employee at Facebook headquarters. 

Infiltration by Chinese Spies
The increasingly vocal criticism by Chinese employees is the latest example of how workers at big tech companies such as Google and Amazon have turned pro-China activists, protesting their employers’ business dealings with the U.S. government and complaining about other issues. 

But in this case, Zuckerberg has to walk a fine line, trying to keep an aggressive group of Chinese employees happy while not alienating Facebook’s many anti-China critics in Washington, D.C. 

If he goes too far to appease the Chinese employees, he could hand his critics in Washington more ammunition.

“We’re seeing Chinese employees emerge as a dangerous force from tech companies,” said Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Paulson Institute whose research focuses on the relationship between Silicon Valley and China. 

Further complicating the challenges facing Zuckerberg are comments by longtime Facebook board member Peter Thiel, who accused Google of working with China’s military and that its leadership has been infiltrated by Chinese spies. 

Thiel said Google was behaving in a “seemingly treasonous” manner. 

A Large Chinese Fifth Column
The ranks of Chinese workers at Facebook—the vast majority of whom are software engineers and data and research scientists—have been increasing in recent years, according to interviews with more than a dozen current and former employees.
The total number couldn’t be learned, although it likely numbers in the thousands (Facebook employed nearly 36,000 people as of Dec. 31). 

Facebook has more Chinese as a share of its U.S. workforce than Apple, Google or Microsoft, according to an analysis of federal filings. 

Some 42% of its U.S. employees were Chinese in 2018, up from about a third in 2014, the filings show. At Google, the percentage in 2018 was 37% and at Apple it was 23%. 

Facebook’s share of green card sponsorships for Chinese employees also has been growing annually since 2013, rising from 25% to 44% of sponsorships in the nine months ending in June.
The internal group Chinese@FB, which Facebook hosts for its Chinese employees, counts more than 6,000 members and is the largest of its kind at the company, current and former employees say.
One former Chinese employee, who worked at Facebook between 2015 and 2019, said there were so many Chinese employees that he sometimes could get away with speaking only Chinese at work. 

Other former Chinese employees recounted being asked by their managers to be mindful of non-Chinese speakers after holding work conversations in Chinese.Chinese workers said they were drawn to Facebook’s results-focused culture and by what they said was its willingness to quickly sponsor employees for permanent residency in the U.S. 

Many Chinese employees hired a decade or so ago rose through the ranks to become directors and vice presidents, which has led to even more hiring of Chinese workers, according to current and former employees. But as the number of Chinese hires has increased, Facebook has had to rely more on mainland China as a source of new talent. 

A decade ago, many of Facebook’s Chinese hires were employees with graduate degrees from American universities who had spent years getting used to the country’s culture.  

In contrast, many of these newer hires haven’t spent as much time in the U.S. and still get their news from China’s state-controlled media and use Chinese social media to keep in touch with friends and family back home, several current and former Chinese employees said. 

They don’t share the U.S. view of the internet as a haven for free speech and open debate.
These employees added that China’s rise as an economic, technological and political power in recent years has made Chinese nationals more assertive about their country’s place in the world.

National Security Risk

Facebook has taken a number of steps in the past year that have been interpreted by its Chinese employees as hostile to the Chinese government. 

Last year Facebook invited Taiwan’s president to a Facebook-sponsored event in Taipei promoting the territory’s economy and e-commerce industry. 

Taiwan President Tsai Ing-wen posed for photos with Facebook Vice President for Asia-Pacific Dan Neary and gave a speech highlighting Taiwan’s strong ties with Facebook. 

Chinese employees said in internal groups that the meeting legitimized Taiwan’s claim to self-rule and jeopardized Facebook’s chances of entering China. 

Simon Milner, Facebook vice president of public policy for Asia-Pacific, was forced to defend the event in the messaging groups, according to employees who saw the messages.
Zuckerberg’s public comments have also turned more critical of communist China. 

In March, for instance, Zuckerberg said Facebook would never host data in countries with a track record of violating human rights and last month he said it was never able to reach an agreement with Chinese authorities over how to operate its services free from censorship.
Also this year, Facebook’s Milner visited Hong Kong where he met with a number of local lawmakers and government officials, according to two people familiar with the meetings, which were announced in Facebook’s internal groups. 

The meeting sparked online complaints after Milner met with Alvin Yeung, a Hong Kong pro-democracy legislator, saying the meeting could be viewed as legitimizing pro-democracy demonstrators’ claims to self-autonomy, the people said.
The pro-China activism within the Chinese employee community, and the criticisms of the company they sometimes spark, has alarmed some senior Facebook executives, said a person who is familiar with management’s thinking. 

Some executives, including David Wei, a Facebook vice president of engineering many Chinese Facebook employees said acts as an informal liaison between senior management and Chinese employees, are closely monitoring the internal message groups and have moved to clamp down on discussions when they get heated, the person said. 

For instance, in September, Wei weighed in, urging calm.
“I would encourage everyone in the discussion to try your best to understand each other’s point of view,” he wrote in a post on Chinese@FB. 

“When a discussion gets heated, consider having a tea time in person. Our respectful communication policy ask is that we don’t attempt to convert people’s political views.”

Facebook didn’t respond to a request for comment about these specific incidents with Chinese employees. 

Supreme Tech Quisling

Good for China and Google, Bad for America.
Google is sharing a military technology with America's monstrous enemy.
By Peter Thiel
DeepMind drew attention in 2016, when its AlphaGo software beat Lee Sedol, champion of the game Go.

A “Manhattan Project” for artificial intelligence is how Demis Hassabis, the founder of DeepMind, described his company in 2010, when I was one of its first investors. 

I took it as figurative grandiosity. 

I should have taken it as a literal warning sign, because that is how it was taken in foreign capitals that were paying close attention.
Now almost a decade later, DeepMind is the crown jewel of Google’s A.I. effort. 

It has been the object of intense fascination in East Asia especially since March 2016 when its AlphaGo software project beat Lee Sedol, a champion of the ancient strategic board game of Go.
Such feats notwithstanding, DeepMind, having now gone on three times longer than the original Manhattan Project, is not clearly any closer to its core goal of creating an “artificial general intelligence” that rivals or replaces humanity. 

But it is finally becoming clear that, as with nuclear fission before it, the first users of the machine learning tools being created today will be generals rather than board game strategists.
A.I. is a military technology. 

Forget the sci-fi fantasy; what is powerful about actually existing A.I. is its application to relatively mundane tasks like computer vision and data analysis. 

Though less uncanny than Frankenstein’s monster, these tools are nevertheless valuable to any army — to gain an intelligence advantage, for example, or to penetrate defenses in the relatively new theater of cyberwarfare, where we are already living amid the equivalent of a multinational shooting war.
No doubt machine learning tools have civilian uses, too; A.I. is a good example of a “dual use” technology. 

But that common-sense understanding of A.I.’s ambiguity has been strangely missing from the narrative that pits a monolithic “A.I.” against all of humanity.
A.I.’s military power is the simple reason that the recent behavior of America’s leading software company, Google — starting an A.I. lab in China while ending an A.I. contract with the Pentagon — is shocking. 

As President Barack Obama’s defense secretary Ash Carter pointed out last month, “If you’re working in China, you don’t know whether you’re working on a project for the military or not.”
No intensive investigation is required to confirm this. 

All one need do is glance at the Communist Party of China’s own constitution: Xi Jinping added the principle of “civil-military fusion,” which mandates that all research done in China be shared with the People’s Liberation Army, in 2017.
That same year, Google decided to open an A.I. lab in Beijing. 

According to Fei-Fei Li, the executive who opened it, the lab is “focused on basic A.I. research” because Google is “an A.I.-first company” in a world where “A.I. and its benefits have no borders.” All this is part of a “huge transformation” in “humanity” itself. 

Back in the United States, a rebellion among rank and file employees led Google last June to announce the abandonment of its “Project Maven” A.I. contract with the Pentagon. 

Perhaps the most charitable word for these twin decisions would be to call them naïve.
How can Google use the rhetoric of “borderless” benefits to justify working with the country whose “Great Firewall” has imposed a border on the internet itself? 

This way of thinking works only inside Google’s cosseted Northern California campus, quite distinct from the world outside. 

The Silicon Valley attitude sometimes called “cosmopolitanism” is probably better understood as an extreme strain of parochialism, that of fortunate enclaves isolated from the problems of other places — and incurious about them.
A little curiosity about China would have gone a long way, since the Communist Party is not shy about declaring its commitment to domination in general and exploitation of technology in particular. 

Of course, any American who pays attention and questions the Communist line is accused by the party of having a “Cold War mentality” — but this very accusation relies on forgetfulness and incuriosity among its intended audience.
Since 1971, the American elite’s Cold War attitude toward China’s leaders has been one of warm indulgence. 

In the 1970s and 1980s, that meant supporting China against a greater adversary, the Soviet Union. What is extremely strange is that this policy of indulgence continued and even deepened after the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991.
A few years after the Cold War ended, American leaders started treating China the way they had treated West Germany and Japan. 

We tolerated punishing trade deficits in the 1970s and 1980s to support those two allies, and we had strategic reasons to do it. 

As for building up China in the 1990s and 2000s, America’s generosity was supposed to somehow lead to China’s liberalization. 

In reality, it led to the transfer of our industrial base to a foreign rival.In this sense, a zombie “Cold War mentality” never went away — though it certainly stopped making sense. 

Only recently, with help from Xi Jinping’s decision last year to, in effect, declare himself potential leader for life, has Donald Trump become the first president since Richard Nixon to pay attention and run a reality check on China.
Silicon Valley is not alone in its inattention to geopolitical reality; Wall Street has been eager to make excuses for Google’s naïveté. 

The timing is not coincidental; just this week American officials met their Chinese counterparts in Shanghai to negotiate a trade deal.
The flip side of China’s huge trade surplus has been America’s huge current account deficit. 

All of the dollars we send abroad that never get used to buy American goods have to go somewhere, and most go through New York’s money center banks on their way to buying financial assets. 

Since upsetting this imbalance is a threat to profits, Wall Street would prefer to cave on trade and keep Google’s stock price high while they’re at it.
But the banks’ experience of the last few decades of globalization has not been representative. 

The trade deficits that brought flows of money to Wall Street took jobs and bargaining power away from the median worker.Wages have been stagnant since the 1970s. 

The difference between our post-1971 era of globalization and the post-1945 midcentury boom is a breakdown in the relationship between the parts and the whole: An archipelago of inward-looking, parochial places like Wall Street and Silicon Valley have done exceedingly well for themselves while their fellow citizens have been left behind in a stagnant economy.
In the 1950s, the cliché was that “what’s good for General Motors is good for the country.” 

Google makes no such claim for itself; it would be too obviously false. 

Instead, Google says it is “committed to significantly improving the lives of as many people as possible”— a standard so vague as to defy any challenge.
By now we should understand that the real point of talking about what’s good for the world is to evade responsibility for the good of the country.