Google and China: Flowers for a funeral

Free time has different effects on different people. Perhaps that's what your personal experience has led you to believe, but for me, and quite many others in the developed world, free time has freed us from constant thoughts about satisfying our basic needs, and allows us to contemplate higher levels of needs like "political correctness," "ethics and equality," "freedom of speech," and "technology startups."

It's probably also why the super-elite are the liberal do-gooders and political leaders. They don't have to worry about finding a job and "making it" or scavenging for food or shelter. Of course there are some with too much free time but explore it in other ways. Hippies, socialites, druggies, and startup founders I think are also examples of what happens when we satisfy basic needs and seek a higher meaning to life. It also depends on your intellectual level. But the point is that free time allows the upper-echelons of society to dwell on issues like freedom of speech, not necessarily all people though.

So in China there will be some people who are comfortable enough and start seeking more out of life. But for my relatives and pretty much all the current older generation they don't care. The younger people will probably start caring, but the older ones are just glad it's not like it was when they were children anymore. They probably just want the burden to be passed to their children... and so it will. But until my generation starts taking over completely, most of China's backwards policies will be mostly ignored by the people. Who knows, China's policies might even be superior and they might just keep it up.

I'm kind of scared of the implications to be honest. What if China, which has over a billion in population, creates a government sponsored organization that starts operating in an unregulated free market. Wouldn't it have an advantage in that economy over a multitude of separately competing entities? (sorry for slightly changing the topic. I always wanted to ask this)

Well it's generally true, one important factor is the Chinese way of thinking & culture is very different from the western. Chinese has their own definition of good and evil. It's easy to understand western beliefs, but it's damn hard to practice them.

Currently there's a trend on the Internet, that it's patriotism to damage foreign companies, no matter what kind of dirty method you use. For patriotism, any kind of line can be crossed.

Another example is Chinese people actively reject the idea of universal values no matter what content they are. I remember not long time ago a Party official speaks to media , calls 'human right' an American thing, even though it's ridiculous and laughed at after this made public, but it largely reflects part of Chinese subconscious mind. There's no extend of human rights in Chinese history & culture, or rarely advocated.

In my theory, this is a language barrier. Universal Values, human rights, democracy are all looks clumsy foreign concepts, it's not native at all, it looks like you are running a GTK app on Windows. It functions but it looks odd.

To pass these ideas and stuff to China, I think direct porting (aka, translating and interpreting) is very ineffective, it has to be rewritten from the source code level, and use native Chinese APIs :)