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Comment by devy | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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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