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Comment by balabaster | Hacker News Reader

Between what we hear out of the Western news agencies, various activist groups, hackers and whatnot, the more I hear about China, the more questions I have about what we (the Western public) know about China.

Given China's behaviour towards Western corporations (Google et. al.) which was reported in such a way as can only be interpreted as antitrust, this does seem to be paradoxical. Though, the more I read about Chinese politics the less adds up, much like Western politics. It makes me wonder if everything we're taught about China is fabrication, propaganda, lies, half truths and spin - much the same as our own political system.

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The western media makes China out to be less crazy and dysfunctional than it actually is, probably because no one would actually believe them if they reported more on the truth. E.g. China's pollution is much worse than western news story would suggest, it literally is unimaginable to most westerners.

If you want a real perspective on China, move there, or at least read Chinese propaganda directly (chinadaily, globaltimes). The latter is especially useful given how bad it is, and you quickly realize how much scarily closer China is teetering towards a DPRK-style dictatorship than would be apparent just by reading CNN.

I moved from China to US, and I had the exactly same feeling: Chinese media portrait a much consistent image of US leaders, unanimously focus on their words and deeds that are concerned to China. They left the entire other aspects blank, leave me an impression that they probably did reasonable work in other areas.

After moving, I see so many more facts from US media's portrait of US leaders. Actually, they did many many more questionable things other than those concerned China (questionable or not). I was deeply troubled by the fact that the intention to move to a free country to attain the transformation from a dictatorship regime to a free one, is more like a transformation from a worse one to a less worse one.

There are no perfect countries, just less dysfunctional. If you move from DPRK to China, you'll be impressed with the freedom and open information you have.

I think most of our beefs with China is that it was moving in a nice direction before 2008...it was becoming more open, more transparent, a nicer place to live and a nicer country to do business with. Then...after 2008...they seem to have thrown it all in the pooper. It really was heartbreaking.

I'm sure it's horrible in some cities, but I lived in a 4.5M-people city in the South (Kunming) for a year, and its air pollution level was entirely comparable to North American cities of the same size. What are you basing your opinion on? The standards of living of Chinese people are rapidly improving. I'm sure I would be horrified to see how the sausages are made, and I wouldn't bet on its long-term success, but I wouldn't call it dysfunctional.

I agree with GP; the news media makes it sound like a horrible place, but living there felt like living in a developing east-European country. I'm much more worried about India.

Kunming is west of most of the pollution. Which keeps getting worse as you approach the ocean near central / NE China. http://berkeleyearth.org/air-pollution-and-cigarette-equival...

True, but I was under the impression that even on the coast, a few cities are _really bad_, but most are ok enough (i.e. polluted, but not worryingly so). Do you have any personal experience there?

I'm there right now, visited Shanghai, Suzhou, Chengdu. In most populous cities you can't see past a few km because of what first appears to be fog in the morning, but then you realize is smog. Tap water is always undrinkable.

Shanghai is bad but still better than Beijing/Hebei on most days. Shenzhen is better than most of northern China on most days. But they still have very few days where the 2.5 ppm is below 100, even if they never have crazy bad 500+ days like northern China. Still ain't suited to much living. The pollution situation is not overstated by the western media, as anyone living in eastern China who isn't a heavily biased wumao can easily attest.

Kunming is paradise comparatively.

But I'm with you that it will improve once people get richer and start caring about their health. It'll take decades/generations, but it will happen.

Kunming was much better 15 years ago when I first visited, it is still one of the better cities in China, but it is going downhill quickly. Very sad, actually.

I'm not sure you can say the living standards of the Chinese people are improving when they can no longer go for strolls at night.

If you only read Chinese media, you'll come out with a more grim view of China than if you read western media. For that, western media is actually positively biased, not negatively.

"I'm not sure you can say the living standards of the Chinese people are improving when they can no longer go for strolls at night."

That depends on what's your base comparison. Like comparing with Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Chinese probably have a better living; but of cuz, Chinese cannot go for strolls at night while DPRK people probably can.

Or rather, DPRK people probably have a rotation of night-strolling that is monitored and rated.

But Chinese could stroll at night fine in the 80s, 90s, 00s. We are not comparing China to DPRK, but China now to China just a decade ago.

In 80s a large portion of people use food stamps... I'd be happy to sacrifice some air quality for ample supply of foods...

> Though, the more I read about Chinese politics the less adds up, much like Western politics. It makes me wonder if everything we're taught about China is fabrication, propaganda, lies, half truths and spin - much the same as our own political system.

Bearing the risk the getting a lot of down votes, I can tell you that there is definitely truth in your statement. And from the comments I read here, I sense that generally HN has a out of proportionally negative attitude towards China related news (Not this story in particular though, WSJ has been fairly neutral. NYT, on the other hand, is the extreme of negativism towards China, for example).

Disclaimer: I grew up in China the first half of my life and immigrated to the U.S. since college. And I read both Chinese/English news media equally and with healthy dose of skepticism.

You can judge the authenticity of a news source by whether or not it is blocked by the GFW. In general, the chinese government doesn't block anything it doesn't feel threatened by, which means there are elements of dangerous truths in their reporting. So WSJ and NYT are both blocked, odd because WSJ at least is heavily pro China, but I guess they are reasonable news sources in China given government action. CNN and Fox News aren't blocked, so I would stay away from them.

No, you simply cannot judge the "authenticity of a news source" by GFW blockage, because by that logic, you are entrusting GFW to be your meter of authenticity - which is absurd.

In fact, GFW has been a lot more sophisticated than a black list of sites, it applies ML / traffic pattern analysis capabilities which makes it even less relevant of "authenticity of a news source". Do a Google search of GFW analysis you will get a lot of details on that.

> odd because WSJ at least is heavily pro China

Why do you think so?

Chinese gov blocks information it deems dangerous, like financial info via Bloomberg, this is useful information if you want to make wise rather than nationalistic investment decisions. So ya, what the GFW blocks is a useful guide in what you should read.

WSJ is incredibly pro business and doesn't give much care about human rights. They take the capatalist pro business guys point of view in ignoring much of the bad about China to make money.

Again, this goes back to the "fabrication, propaganda, lies, half truths and spin - much the same as our own political system." that I commented originally.

You have almost 12k karma on HN so you are one of the experienced HN readers. I feel strongly that your tinted negatively biased China view has contributed greatly in HN community.

Being living in both China and U.S., one thing I can tell you for sure is that U.S. (being the leader in the free world) is NOT on a moral high ground to criticize other countries given the recent events of racism and bigotry.

My advise for you is that you should go out there, travel the world, living in a different country for many years and look back on your worldviews.

I vaguely recognize the name sean, and I think he's actually in (or was in) China for an extended period of time.

I left two weeks ago, before that I was in Beijing for almost 9 years.

Where did you live in China, how was your parents social status and how old you were when you went to US? I ask because from your comments it seems that you are seeing China through embellishing glasses that you usually wear when you are too young or "protected" to savour fully the harshness of the real world. I don't think that China propaganda is in any way comparable to the one from foreign western countries. At least most of these countries don't kill information freedom with a great China wall...

I lived in in Beijing for 9 years, just moved this month to LA to start a new job...

My tint of China is shared by other long term laowai, and many locals as well. The people most optimistic about China are Chinese that have already left...voted with their feet one way but vote with their mouth in an exact opposite way. This contradiction is pervasive in the Chinese government as well (Xi will send his daughter to Havard while decrying the unsuitability of western education). I guess many Chinese see no hypocracy in this kind of thing, but it drives us crazy.

Who cares about the US, they don't even bother fighting for the moral high ground. China feels like they really need the high ground badly and are also entitled to it (we are strong, but we are also always victims, Vietnam stop making us do bad things!). This just makes the rest of the world very annoyed.

I suggest that you travel the world, go back to China and see it for what it really is. You should also try living in different countries, like Europe. Your worldviews will broaden substantially.

> WSJ is incredibly pro business and doesn't give much care about human rights.

This doesn't mean that it's pro China. In fact, that proves my point of WSJ being neutral.

You're just seeing what you want to see. The BBC works just fine in China and it's def pretty anti-China. The way I see it Opinion/Editorial heavy journalism is heavily suppressed. Blogs, things like Medium don't work.

What is seen by locals as the driving force of the censorship is suppressing hysteria/superstition/conspiracy-theories. That kind of stuff would flourish in a society like here. You can see how devastating it is in places like the Middle East.

So yeah they want to suppress things that paint the party in a bad light, but mostly they just don't want anything to get out of control

Why China says it censors (to eliminate porn and dangerous rumors) and what it actually censors (political views opposed to its own) are very telling. You can find plenty of porn and hysteria behind the GFW, but you'll be shut down quickly at the slightest mention of political reform, corruption, or financial info that doesn't fit the gov's narrative.

Judge China by what it does, not by what it says.

"You can find plenty of porn and hysteria behind the GFW"

uhhh... what? Are you just making this up? I never come across any of it. Not a single porn site I've tried works. They're pretty thorough in my experience. Haven't seen any mass hysteria, though Reddit surprisingly isn't blocked yet

"but you'll be shut down quickly at the slightest mention of political reform, corruption, or financial info that doesn't fit the gov's narrative"

Again, BBC, with all their uncomfortable information isn't blocked. English Wikipedia (which is over HTTPS, so you can look up any topic you want) isn't blocked (though the Chinese one is unfortunately)

I think you've already made your judgement and are seeing the patterns you want to see

Come on! Porn is pretty pervasive on the Chinese internet, you don't even have to search for it to find it. They are not thorough at all when it comes to domestic sites...its like they don't even care. Also, all of imgur is not blocked, which is mostly porn.

I don't read BBC, but when I last checked some of the BBC sites were blocked on China Unicom Beijing (but the GFW is hardly consistent). They don't block English wiki, but make it unusable sometimes with whatever they are doing with HTTPS (if you use it too much, you get put in a penalty box for a few minutes).

> I think you've already made your judgement and are seeing patterns you want to see

I think you aren't opening your eyes to the true situation. Most foreigners in China figure out after 5 or so years, it really is messed up.

> Also, all of imgur is not blocked, which is mostly porn.

This is BS. First, do you have any source to back you up on "is mostly porn"?

Second, Chinese internet users are NOT familiar with imgur or reddit at all. Look at the stats yourself.[1]

[1]: https://www.quantcast.com/imgur.com#/geographicCard

I don't think its really up for much debate that imgur is mostly porn, given that represents the largest volume of tradeable images. You might not see it if you don't go looking for it, but its totally there.

Second, it doesn't even matter, there is plenty of porn on the Chinese internet. You run into it on Baidu for even the most innocent of image web searches.

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