The worrying implications of China's social-credit project
economist.com
economist.com
I think that line says it all.
And before you say, "this will only apply to bad people!" check out the next paragraph:
> The project is a response to the party’s biggest problems: the collapse of confidence in public institutions, and the need to keep track of the changing views and interests of China’s population (without letting them vote). It seeks to collect information on the honesty of ordinary citizens, public officials and companies alike.
In the US, ex-convicts have major problems starting over and getting on their feet but this is a whole other level. This is punishing/excluding people solely based on their opinion, not based on actions or crimes committed.
No wait, disagreeing is the crime.
"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Won't be surprised if that's the beginning of an "end" for China.
That's the problem with these systems. Their aim is and must be to get the population to willingly accept poverty and impotence.
What is going on is a system where the lower-downs (including the military and police) support the government, and in exchange the government allows them to use their official positions to enrich themselves. The higher-ups do this because they know the public is not behind them, so they need to have a paid-off security apparatus that will suppress the public if it revolts.
Keep this in mind anytime a leader in a country with a high rate of corruption says he sincerely wants to clean things up, but those lower down are stopping him from doing so. He is just plain telling a lie. And anyone who says they believe him is either naive or also telling a lie.
By the way, if you want to know how clean or corrupt a particular nation is, a good place to start is transparency.org
Doesn't this kind of contradict what you said before, though? The leader needs to allow corruption lest he is overthrown (usually by those lower down such as the military, not the public), so in essence those lower down are preventing him from cleaning up.
There really is no winning here - being a leader means pandering to the people below you, because if you don't they can just get rid of you. In a democracy this problem is partly solved by switching leaders often and dividing the power of the underlings over the entire population, but the dynamic still very much exists. And of course, in a country with no democracy it's many times worse (and very difficult to establish a democracy).
Don't automatically assume that dictators always have bad intentions - they are trapped in a system too.
Of course that doesn't mean that China isn't doing a bad thing here, I was just speaking generally.
But the dictator still lies, because he doesn't explain the system, but instead falsely tells the public he really is trying to eliminate corruption and that those below him are simply refusing to follow his orders. That is what Putin, for instance, is saying.
As for China, this has been the system for a long time. Xi Jinping says he is trying to fix it, and seems to be making some progress, but I not sure how things are going to go in the long term. My impression is that clean government usually requires a strong civil society that supports it, and in China that is resisted as threatening the central authoritarian government.
What makes you think that would be a side effect? As far as I can tell, that is the primary intended effect.
An individual not behaving according to the interests of the group would face starvation and homelessness for not adhering to certain social norms. It would be trivial to enforce beliefs (no matter how odd or antihuman) through this apparatus. Under a currency system driven by public opinion, survival becomes a matter of "Obey or Die."
In such a system, existence is analogous to slavery.
This is not an advocation for lawlessness, but rather for the continued use of currency and the independence of the financial organ from the whims of human opinion. The human mind is subject to ongoing cognitive and social distortion. Currency independent of these factors is a mitigating measure against human cruelty.
A strong social benefit system and the show of empathy in which one is anchored is a stronger mitigation against antisocial behaviour than the Social Credit concept.
You can criticise it of course, it is coercive but it is definitely not slavery, it's the stark opposite. Slavery was moving fundamentally ethical concerns into the private, people were turned into property. The Chinese system moves fundamentally ethical questions into the public legal system. Bureaucracy has one big advantage, it subjugates everybody, powerful or weak alike to the same rules. No bureaucratic system can be maintained if it exercises gross violations of this principle because that's the thing it has going for it. The CPC is acutely aware of this. There is of course practical corruption but never to the degree that it undermines the system.
>> Bureaucracy has one big advantage, it subjugates everybody, powerful or weak alike to the same rules.
I'm fairly confident some small party at the top runs the show and everyone else is a subject. Every non-democratic government boils down to being an oligarchy, and those at the very top usually have the most freedom.
- Class A : US citizen, registered voter, passed scrutiny level for Global Entry, gun license, or security clearance. Gets to use fast lane at airport security. Eligible for national security related jobs.
- Class B: US citizen, registered voter, not approved for Global Entry or gun license. Gets to vote.
- Class C: US citizen, non registered voter. Gets to live in US permanently, but can't currently vote. Can hold most jobs.
- Class D: US citizen, felony conviction. Cannot vote, ineligible for many jobs, cannot serve on jury or hold public office.
- Class F: US permanent resident. Cannot vote, ineligible for many jobs.
- Class G: Non-US citizen with temporary visa. Cannot vote, jobs limited or work prohibited, behavior monitored by ICE and CBP.
- Class H: Illegal alien. Deport on sight.
Would much prefer any of those to class D from what I know.
For instance, global entry is dependent on being a member of The Democratic or Republican Party, and you won't be removed from it if you switch voter representation.
That's the main problem with China's system: they're changing your rights based on how compliant you are with the Communist Party's agenda.
Then again, I suppose the Great Firewall has been quite a technical feat.
Successive US governments have appointed Goldman Sachs operatives to important government positions and you find that China is Characterized by corruption and opportunism?
>China, a country's whose politics and economy is currently characterized by corruption and opportunism
The US started a war for bogus reasons for the benefit of corporations like Haliburton and you find China is Characterized by corruption and opportunism?
>China, a country's whose politics and economy is currently characterized by corruption and opportunism
Obama did absolutely nothing to punish the people responsible for the worst financial market crash since the great depression and you find that China is Characterized by corruption and opportunism?
>China, a country's whose politics and economy is currently characterized by corruption and opportunism
Debbie Wasserman-Shultz empowered pay-day lenders using her public office in Florida and you find that China is characterized by corruption and opportunism?
>China, a country's whose politics and economy is currently characterized by corruption and opportunism
Hillary and Bill Clinton have been PROVEN to have engaged in par-for-play politics with operatives from Arab countries by the Podesta email leaks and you find that China is characterized by corruption and opportunism?
>China, a country's whose politics and economy is currently characterized by corruption and opportunism
The Koch Brothers have year after year used their money and influence to buy politicians at all levels so that they could pollute, fire people and evade taxes at will and you find that China is characterized by corruption and opportunism?
>China, a country's whose politics and economy is currently characterized by corruption and opportunism
The Syrian war has been nothing but another one of the USA's oil wars, with the USA FUNDING, ARMING and TRAINING TERRORISTS (Tulsi Gabbard just proposed the Stop Funding Terrorism Act, check it out), all so that Qatar could have a pipeline built from Saudi Arabia to Turkey, with the blessing of the Obama administration, and you find that China is characterized by corruption and opportunism?
Throwing stones around while you're living in a glass house aren't you? Have you even seen the CORRUPT people that Donnie-Tiny-Hands-the-Swamp-Monster has appointed to his cabinet?
The two are not mutually exclusive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corruption_Perceptions_Index
It's pretty neat that Hong Kong is perceived as right after the U.S., though!
In the future, the only crime will be to lie (which includes doing what you promise not to do). Naturally, privacy will become a thing of the past.
Once we have reliable trust scores, the world will be a lot more efficient and the workforce will become liquid (no interview, the employer will trust that you're the right fit for the job).
All other forms of currency will disappear, and only in scarcity will those with a higher score have priority over others.
Naturally, this will also be the end of copyrights and patents, as these cause artificial scarcities that are no longer relevant.
Thank you China.
Sounds pretty presumptuous for a person who's (I assume) never lived in China to claim that they know what's good for the Chinese better than the Chinese themselves do.
In particular, political elites and bureacratic, centralized government arise exactly because high populations densities and large populations lead to conflicts that require specialized decisionmakers to resolve. That's why scattered bands of hunter gatherers don't create formal governments, but cities and large countries do.
Part of my point was to bring forth the fact that stuff we automatically think of as bad, is pretty much a non-issue for the chinese, because to them it makes sense.
Human rights, democracy and free speech is better than oppression.
I'd like to remind you that the track record of simply imposing a formal Western model of governance (with a written Constitution, laws, elections, the whole shebang) on societies that are used to other ways of doing things hasn't tended worked out very well -- e.g. Iraq or Afghanistan.
Cultures are different. Some cultures are better than others. I think western culture is the best and I would like everyone to experience the same freedoms we do.
I thought that Westerners finally agreed that cultural imperialism is bad? Yet here you are proclaiming the superiority of Western culture over all other cultures.
It's wrong to judge another culture without having lived in it yourself for some time.
I don't even mean this on a just moral level, but simply on a practical one -- if you've never lived somewhere, how do you know if their society works well or not? It's very easy to get incorrect impressions from news or talking to people.
Adherence to the basic human rights as laid out by the UN. I would say any society who adheres the closest to the human rights is the best. The further away, the lower rank it has.
I don't have to live somewhere for an extended period of time to make judgements based on established "best practises" for human societies.
You may even be correct that Western norms are objectively the best way to run a society. It just seems to me that you're remarkably unwilling to analyze or challenge your own cultural biases and assumptions even a little bit, even though that careful, rational analysis is very much part of Western culture.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights#16th.E2.80.9318th...
I also think you are agreeing with me, but for some reason you find my statements hard to accept.
Sometimes challenge and analysis is good, sometimes it's a waste of time. I think this is a case of the latter.
The West moved from monarchy to democracy and developed human rights over hundreds of years of smart people criticizing their own societies and asking how to improve it. That included studying other societies and keeping an open mind about what works best. That's day and night from your openly dismissive, close-minded attitude.
To the original question, I think a naive and direct transplantation of Western political forms to China would be an unmitigated disaster precisely because of cultural differences. China should find its own path to creating a just society without slavishly and uncritically copying the West (but it should look abroad for good ideas).
Yes. What works best for the individual is different than what works best for the state, though. 'What if the state should be more important than the individual?' is not a traditional Western question.
Of course the interests of the state and the people can sometimes come into conflict, but by and large, the state and the individual are part of an organic whole, namely, all of society. China's own political culture has had a long, long history pondering the question of what government's role should be, and has mostly concluded that a government must rule justly and well in order to be a legitimate [1]. The question is not be 'What's more important, the individual or the state?', but rather, 'How should society be organized so that the individual and the state will cooperate for mutual benefit?'. Just like one usually doesn't ask the question 'what's more important, the hand or the foot?'.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandate_of_Heaven#The_right_to...
> Throughout the history of China, times of poverty and natural disasters were often taken as signs that heaven considered the incumbent ruler unjust and thus in need of replacement.
The trouble is that doesn't seem to be the intention of those in power in China. Or is it your view that the elite in every society are sincerely interested in justice?
It is simple yes.
And I agree with you that change must happen over many generations. And change must come from within.
I'll just end with my opinion. Free speech good. Censorship bad. Respect human rights good. Disrespect human rights bad. I have no problem not questioning this. Good night. Thanks for the chat.
The opposite of cultural imperialism is not moral relativism.
I'm not even against the idea that some cultures are better than others--it seems unlikely that all ways to arrange society would happen to be equally good. But I think if you're going to judge a whole culture, you should at least have lived in it first.
Uh, no, it is the left that decided this. When communism and socialism failed to take over the world, they switched to a cultural relativism argument, which they don't actually believe themselves, as they still think capitalism is wrong, no matter where practiced.
My guess is this applies to you. Do you really think, for instance, that slavery was ok when the West practiced it?
As to how you tell how good a society is, one way is simply asking its inhabitants how good or bad their lives are.
Buy even then, big data is designed from the ground up as a way to serve better ads, which is the companies way to do social control. So you have the choice between Pepsi/Coke controlled society or Gov controlled society. I'll have neither, thanks.
Replace the text "China", with "US". What's remarkable is that the story rarely changes. Every undemocratic, evil-doing charge leveled by Western media at China is happening in the West as well.
I'm well aware that it pays to villainize China in the press today. I assume they've made too much of our stuff or something, and now they're trying to be free of Western dominance or some heresy like that.
Ohh! You evil China! Trying to be free of Western dominion!
I'm well aware that it pays to villanize the USA in the Chinese press today. It definitely distracts from problems at home, and has been a standard play in the CPC handbook for a long time.
Ohh! You evil west! Trying to impose western imperialistic ideals on the world like human rights and voting in elections.
Algorithms across the US attempt to constrain the conversation to maintain confidence in public institutions. Facebook censored me from posting the Snowden documents. It stopped Mayday protestors from organizing. Amazon took down Wikileaks (for a short while).
This article is just an instance of hate-them-not-us propaganda. The problem is that I don't hate the Chinese, they are a peaceful country (read: are in and have not been in wars, are leaders of the UN peacekeeping forces, and do not militarily interfere in other countries' affairs). Plus they have done nothing to me and I love all the Chinese people I have met.
In fact, the article I think does a poor job overall doing compare-and-contrast. It has a paragraph (two?) on the United States, and dovetails into an opinion (without covering America much at all) about why China is worse.
Americans need to understand that they can't fight the Chinese for their rights. They have to fight Washington for their rights.
The goals of the organizations doing these things are not always aligned either, since many of them do have to maintain consumer trust they aren't always on the same page as the government, and that's a meaningful friction that doesn't exist AFAICT in China.
I hope Americans don't get cynical enough to discredit that we have more rights and they are worth fighting for, because it could always get far worse.
Following the state of the law with regard to providers and services in the United States, I think you've overemphasized the capability for companies to fight back, as the pressure from the state is incredible and at every front. Primarily, PR is used to emphasize that businesses are really on consumers' sides: that they'd like to not provide data and access. But in actuality, being a successful company at the scale you need to survive means working hand in hand with the US government. We saw how large ("trusted") brands worked hand-in-hand with government by the Snowden documents and we've watched it slip further since.
> I hope Americans don't get cynical enough to discredit that we have more rights and they are worth fighting for, because it could always get far worse.
We have the same rights worth fighting for that the Chinese have.
Government does not give us rights. The rights are independent of government. Americans and Chinese have the same rights. Both governments are impeding on them. Washington DOES NOT give Americans more rights than the Chinese. Rights have never been something Washington can give.
What you are seeing is Washington taking rights, and pointing fingers at the Chinese, telling you that they're taking more.
You want to fight for rights? You can't fight the Chinese for your rights.
You have to fight Washington for your rights.
No, it doesn't, because the ACLU has a degree of power and legitimacy in the US which the Chinese government would not allow to any equivalent organization. The ACLU has actually won cases in court which effected a change in law and/or behavior.
> I myself have been harassed (followed, gaslit, personally surveilled, and threatened) by state police in America, for sharing Snowden documents and their contents. My mail between my relatives and I were opened. All subtle hints and threats: stop being outspoken.
Without minimizing the wrongness, illegality, or harm those things have done to you, I have to imagine that in China, a) Snowden documents would never have seen the light of day, and, b) If you had attempted to share something like that you would have been imprisoned without trial.
As the parent poster said, the difference between some and none is significant.
I do agree with the ultimate statement of you post, about fighting for rights.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weiquan_lawyers
> I have to imagine that in China...
a) Had Washington had its way the documents never would have seen the light of day. They broke international law to ground planes in search of Snowden. They blocked as much of the documents as they could from being shared. They spread rumors about malware on Wikileaks. They worked with the media industry to not cover the contents and to work on the messaging to the American people: "This is bulk collection, not mass surveillance." Their official and public statements on the contents and scope of the programs were repeatedly shown to be false. They passed a law legalizing and expanding authorities and passed this off to the public as their stopping the programs, while the media ran 24/7 news about Caitlyn Jenning. The UK infiltrated the Guardian at gunpoint and destroyed the documents.
b) The laws are in place for exactly this. Snowden, had he been caught, would have been in military prison. His lawyers are arguing today the terms of a trial for him to come home, with senior members of our government calling for his execution. The US government under the Obama Justice Department has compromised on a secret jury-less trial in the Virginia legal subsystem (notable for prosecuting National Security cases, and siding with National Security over individual rights). Remember Chelsea Manning's court case? I don't.
It's absurd to compare this environment to the ACLU.
In 1986, Gorbachev released Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. I guess you would have been saying: "That's it, the West can stop harping about human rights in the Soviet Union, it's all equal now"...?
To my knowledge, there has not been a case of an ACLU lawyer being jailed or harassed simply for taking on a case.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Human_Rights_Lawyers_Con...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Constitution_Initiative
You read the first Wikipedia article looking for reasons to dismiss it.
There's plenty of Civil Rights activity in China. It's a myopic American view that there is none and "no true Scotsman" all the civil rights law firms, attorneys and court cases should be dismissed out of hand for consideration.
In China, most disputes are resolved without institutional involvement whatsoever. Off the bat it's difficult to point to institutions and institutional processes and claim China doesn't have equivalence.
You are right. China is different. But it's not some wasteland dystopia from a fantasy novel. It has a wide and active civil society. That civil society is uniquely Chinese, and frankly, it's exciting to see it blossom as it has been since the 80s.
The most shocking thing is that the United States thinks China and Chinese society is a country to compare itself to. The ignorance of these comparisons is nearly as shocking.
Your argument could have been made about the Soviet Union in the late '80s. I grew up in Finland, and I remember people actually saying that: defending the Soviet human rights record, saying Russia is different, and pretending that a sprinkling of perestroika has fixed everything. It was complete bullshit then, and it's the same today in China.
Because Hong Kong is part of China, probably?
Are there open debates about Chinese civil rights on Chinese websites?
Indeed, it's hard to find a place on American social media where dissenting opinions can be argued. There's either an administrative agreement to shut the ideas down, or places (such as HN) don't like the idea of having opinions on their site for whatever reason (harmful to the community) so they shut it down.
I'm certainly not getting thrown in jail. But you won't hear any dissenting opinions.
By the FBI?
Do you think some government agency actually complained to the owner of Y-Combinator threatening them with reprisals unless they evict you?
I think that both countries are on equally slippery slopes. I want to appeal to an American sense that this is something in our fiber, and civil liberties are as important to being American as baseball and apple pie.
The US has far more legal protections and better rule of law than China has ever had. And, crucially, America is a democracy with constitutionally protected free speech. American citizens have much greater ability to challenge the actions of their government than Chinese citizens do.
I think it does a disservice to those defending civil liberties in the US to not recognize that the two countries' situations are vastly different.
In contrast anyone Chinese that are active online effectively has to be capable of understanding both english and Chinese.
I find that hard to believe. I know it's not true for Portuguese native speakers, and China seems to be even more keen on providing native alternatives to foreign sites.
That's a really good point--those of us in America are lucky to be here. Do you think people are fighting enough, though? Amy Goodman was nearly thrown in jail just for covering the Dakota Pipeline Protests--what punishment will be handed out in response to that egregious attempt at violating civil rights in America. Right now it looks like: none.
Another example: At least one Journalist has been physically detained, searched and had equipment seized for travelling to cover the Dakota Pipeline Protests.^1
What about the fact that the Iraqi government was desperately trying to prove they did not have chemical weapons or weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush administration hid this from the public?^2 Even though that is a proven, factually-substantiated conspiracy, and it is not technically censored, how many Americans would you guess are aware that happened? In my experience, most aren't.
What about whistle blower protections? Human rights abuses? Guantanamo? Police brutality? Legalized propaganda? Our actions in Syria? Government harassment of Greenwald, Poitras, and others for covering the Snowden leaks? The list goes on and on.
If we lost just a few of our best 'freedom fighters:' the ACLU, the EFF, and people like Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald, my best guess is that the world would start to turn into a different place. I'm not sure if we are fighting enough.
[1] https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/does-what-happened-jo... [2]https://theintercept.com/2016/12/15/if-donald-trump-is-so-up...
Hah. Their aggression in/with South China Sea, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, India is just fake news right?
If it's the former, I don't think the US will be joining it any time soon. US military grand strategy depends on its ability to deploy marines with its navy anywhere swiftly in the world. That's why the Panama Canal was built: to allow the US Navy to swiftly move between Oceans to reallocate force posture. This is why the United States rejected the UNCLOS court juristiction over its boobytrapping the coastal regions around Nicaragua - the US refuses to be bound by this international law (the other major one, I would suggest, is the International Criminal Court/Rome Statues).
If you mean the second, the Chinese have argued that this is a territory dispute, in which case UNCLOS itself (article 299, IIRC) agrees it has no authority.
Certainly UNCLOS is a major aspect to understanding the South China Sea situation, and should be linked.
The South China sea stuff is indeed China throwing its weight around, sure, but need I remind you that China's foreign interventions has been far more restrained than, say, the US (Iraq 1 and Iraq 2, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama) or Russia's (Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria) even in the last three decades.
Going back slightly further, Japan invaded and occupied half of China and killed millions of Chinese people over the course of a decade, while it was the US that invaded, nuked, and then occupied Japan, even though the US never suffered civilian casualties from Japanese attack. Yet you don't see the Chinese government crying out for bloody revenge, do you?
One the one hand, we have China asserting claims to sea resources and sea lanes there are right in its back yard, where it has a legitimate strategic and national interest. On the other, we have the outright invasion, occupation, and overthrow of sovereign governments. Which country is objectively more peaceful?
If you read more history of China, you will also notice that the Han ethnicity prefers letting others adopt Hans customs and cultures instead of actively adopting or adapting to foreign cultures. That's another striking characteristics in my opinion.
""" Qing dynasty rule in Tibet began with their 1720 expedition to the country when they expelled the invading Dzungars. """
""" For several decades, peace reigned in Tibet, but in 1792 the Qing Qianlong Emperor sent a large Chinese army into Tibet to push the invading Nepalese out. """
""" As the Qing dynasty weakened, its authority over Tibet also gradually declined, and by the mid-19th century its influence was minuscule. Qing authority over Tibet had become more symbolic than real by the late 19th century,[35][36][37][38] although in the 1860s the Tibetans still chose for reasons of their own to emphasize the empire's symbolic authority and make it seem substantial.[39] """
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet#From_1950_to_present [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%9351)
Also, 80,000 Chinese soldiers invaded Vietnam in 1978, with the intention to take Hanoi. It was by no means a minor skirmish.
The US had repeatedly sworn to not cross the 38th parallel in the past. Once the US decided to invade North Korea proper, Truman's promises to stop at the Yalu River no longer seemed credible to China's government. Note that Beijing is very close to Manchuria, and both the Manchus and Japanese invaded China along this route in the past.
The US has certainly threatened war against any foreign powers that interfered anywhere in the entire Western hemisphere [3] -- not sure how anyone can then turn around and fault China for reacting to American troops driving right up to its Manchurian border. Remember this was in 1951, the Cold War was getting warmed up, and the US had nuked Japan only a few years earlier. No responsible Chinese government could have ignored the very real and credible threat of another invasion.
The Vietnamese invasion has an interesting history -- the PLA invaded, failed to achieve its main objectives, then marched right back less than a month later. Certainly not a full-scale invasion nor an occupation, considering the proximate cause was to 'punish' Vietnam for invading Cambodia.
[1] http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Hao%20Chinas%20Decision.pdf
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#China_intervenes_.2...
I think the US bombing various places is a bit more nuanced than it seems at first sight. For example, our military action in Libya - which is entirely contained to one coastal town - is with the support of the Libyan government, the vast majority of the Libyan people, and the United Nations. It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.
I personally don't support our airstrikes in Pakistan, but they have definitely been effective (although at a devastating price to civilian lives that I find unacceptable.)
In some cases, the US government is an unimaginable force for evil; we've dropped chemical weapons on a civilian population as recently as 2004, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah - one of the worse battles of modern times. In others, it's an unimaginable case for good.
For example, during the Indian Ocean tsunami, governments around the world donated billions of dollars. America promised unimaginable quantities of food, fresh water, and support. Within days, American aid began arriving - in the form of two aircraft carriers, basically floating cities. During the crisis period, American forces delivered the daily food requirements for 100,000 people every 24 hours.
In the end of March 2005 - remember, the tsunami was in December 2004 - the Indonesian and Sri Lankan governments reported that they had received precisely none of the money promised by foreign governments. They did report receiving some food; the Thai government in particular received many donations of rice from the governments of Israel and China. To demonstrate how pants-on-head stupid that was, Thailand is the world's largest exporter of rice, and that year they had their largest crop of rice in all history.
So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.
Libya is a failed state. There is no recognized, coherent government of Libya.
> It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.
I don't think this is the case. But if it were, it would be an argument ad populum - a logical fallacy.
> So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.
I think this is exactly right. It depends on how America chooses to use its power.
Today, it looks a lot like containment, of aggravating and funding extremist elements, of playing proxy war, of pursuing its interests behind a cloak of public relations.
The American incentive at this point of world history is to prevent, at all costs, other countries from becoming influential enough to challenge American decision making.
That's not just on the battlefield. America has been trying to block countries from lending money, from industrializing, and even from building independent news media industries. It has refused to join international institutions of law, such as the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court, it has an overt first strike nuclear policy - the only of its kind in the world.
The United States faces a choice:
A.) allow other nations to grow, in a completely peaceful and benign manner, wealthy and strong enough risking that it will no longer a hegemon capable of making unilateral global decision making.
OR
B.) disrupt the growth of regions of the world, delaying the growth of competitor states, guaranteeing America maintains its 'critical leadership role' in the world.
Judging by actions rather than words, America chooses, and will continue to choose B. America is the country with the incentive to start wars.
The world should be multi-polar, and where it there is need for violence to rectify or prevent violence, it should be under international leadership with international decision making.
Of course, given the current state of Libya, there aren't exactly pollsters walking around asking peoples' opinions on the Sirte strikes. But given the bipartisan support, it's pretty clear that they have good support in Libya itself. The fact that the UN supports the strikes - especially given that the UN can't even say "water is wet" without someone vetoing - says something about their international support.
I agree that America has been blocking countries from doing some pretty basic stuff. I recently traveled to Iran, and the American sanctions have shaken the country to the core.
But even things that seem obviously good are in fact horrible ideas. Every tiniest change in our laws affects the outside world in a massive way. In 1993, Tom Harkin, the junior Sentator from Iowa, introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which prohibited the importation of products that have been produced by child labor. Sounds simple, right? Who on earth is in favor of child labor? There were concerns about the effectiveness of the bill. Well, as it turns out, the bill was devastatingly effective. In 1993, Bangladeshi employers, in fear of losing lucrative American contracts, dismissed over 75% of child laborers in the textile industry. In 1997, UNICEF investigated what happened to these children after being laid off. They found that most children found themselves in much worse situations: crushing stones (leading to horrible particle inhalation illnesses), scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution.
Things aren't always as simple as they seem, especially when you're as big as America. Smaller countries, like the Netherlands, can take grand actions like banning child labor imports, or banning arms exports to Saudi Arabia, or establishing relations with countries the US is at war at (e.x. North Korea.) But the tiniest little movement by the US can completely shake the world. Think about that the next time America seems to face a clear choice between good and evil.
I am referring to the well known and well regarded Chinese policy of non-interference and non-intervention, and the Chinese leadership of UN Peacekeeping missions, as well as their lack of having been in a war with any external country for a very long time (and then their being the defenders in those wars).
Let me guess, you are American.
Come on man, seriously? Tibet? rings a bell?
Calling us out on Tibet is nice and all, but it does get so very boring.
If you are a CCP employee, please contact me to give me my 5角, cheers!
As a matter of fact, people who can see your comment certainly would not support a government that do not let them use Google. But this group of Chinese people are tiny.
I guess at least 90% of Chinese citizens do not know Google.
So the problem is not that Chinese citizens like totalitarianism, the problem is that they do not see it as totalitarianism, or even think it's truly democratic. Like many people here believe that Trump is for the people and will be serving them faithfully (I am not saying that Trump will not do that, I am saying that it should not be taken as a thing that will happen for sure), which has to be the case if people can put Trump in check and hold him accountable.
But I don't know how to educate 1.3 billion people...
I don't know China history, but have they never lived in a democratic fashion at least in the last 50-60 years?
You may be an american citizen, but what are you ethnically? My guess was you were Chinese.
Tibet might disagree
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_sovereignty_debate#For...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/democratic-imperialism-tibet-ch...
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/now-america-you-kn...
I strongly disagree. I think all human beings have the same basic rights, and so we should condemn actions that undermine them no matter where they happen in the world.
Furthermore, governmental violations are complicated and so for each government we need separate articles describing what it is doing wrong. And that is what we indeed get in many media articles linked to here at HN, including lots at The Economist.
That being the case, why is it that you condemn describing what the Chinese government is doing wrong, but think it is good to do so for the US? I don't know, but one possibility is that you are a troll paid by the Chinese government to promote its propaganda.
I condemn the Chinese for all of their civil rights infractions, watch: China has a serious problem with gross human and civil rights violations.
Anyway. People tend to react to accusation that the United States government commits serious human rights attrocities with a knee jerk - accusing the other person of being employed by other governments, etc.
This is not the case.
Let me put this out there, because I think it's important to understand.
China has been drastically improving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is UP.
America has been drastically devolving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is DOWN.
Is that concerning? Why do Americans feel that China is even a metric for comparison?
No government gives their people rights. Rights are inalienable.
The United States government has been taking away their people's rights.
Articles such as the above make China seem like the problem, or the most important problem.
If you are an American and you are concerned with human and civil rights, you won't win them by fighting the Chinese. You will win them by fighting your own government.
I take the allegation that I am a paid Chinese propagandist seriously. I reject this accusation fully.
The line of 'their restrictions on human rights are worse than ours' seems like at best a race to the bottom. I feel western democracy should be setting a standard so far above what this article describes that there are no comparisons to draw. In which case the OP has a good point
By the way, you guys should brush up on your English some more.
Plus they have done nothing to me and I love all the Chinese people I have met.
You are they.
Can you be more specific? You tried to post the actual Snowden documents (whatever that means...Are you Glenn Greenwald, or Snowden himself?)? Or you posted a story about the Snowden documents? AFAIK, there's no public repository of the Snowden documents, something that Wikileaks has been keen to snark about: http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-and-wikileaks-...
I tried to post actual Snowden documents (that means PDFs hosted on the internet, on CDNs, on mirrors and on news websites).
I also tried to post articles about Snowden documents (Der Speigel articles and Guardian articles).
Public repository of Snowden Documents: https://search.edwardsnowden.com/
There's actually a few of them, for example Cryptome had them hosted.
This is alarmingly disturbing nonsense; it doesn't even make any sense. What does "are in and have not been in wars" mean? The Chinese engage in lots of wars, they're just not that loud about it in recent history.
Seriously.
The comments contain all the classic deflections of wumao posts: the endless whataboutisms, claims that China is peaceful, minimizing the situation in China, outright lies, a seemingly endless and authoritative knowledge of any situation in China you care to mention that always parrots the government line...
Everyone grows up learning a version of the Boy Who Cried Wolf stories. The moral is: when someone willfully engages in deception, it destroys their creditworthiness, even when they might be telling the truth later.
Maybe you aren't wumao. Fine - but the Chinese government has invested years and billions in utterly destroying the trustworthiness of your viewpoints by employing people who sound exactly, 100% like you. Sorry buddy, it undermines all of the possibly valid points you are making.
I do not know how to address a challenge like this?
How can I - without providing something absurd like my driver's license - prove that I am an American and of American decent?
Note that I was talking the other day about the situation in Cyprus, where I used the terminology 'aggressive' to describe Turkish behavior. I was accused of being a Greek.
Anyway, I fully reject the accusation that I am 50 Cent Party member or paid by any government, including my home country the United States.
Don't appeal to us. The problem is not whether we have or have not evidence of who you are. The problem is that the Chinese government has actively destroyed its long term credibility on these issues by (a) using wumao and schills to attempt to DDOS public debate on these issues, (b) locking up and disempowering any voices of dissent that might allow a nuanced, authentic discussion of China-related issues in or outside of China, c) taking zero tolerance, blinkered and extreme views on many national/territorial issues that are very difficult for anyone else not Chinese to accept.
E.g. I would totally support the idea of One China eventually, but why does the mainland government insist on denying that Taiwan is, de facto, a separate country right now? It's insane. Few would begrudge a future, managed and gradual reunion of these historically linked countries. But why on earth won't China (and pro-China commenters like yourself) drop the charade that Taiwan doesn't have its own constitution, currency, diplomatic service, politics, borders etc.? That's why your opinions can't be trusted - because they 100% mirror the insane opinions of the CCP and the wumao they employ.
You might be a totally cool guy who just happens to believe that China is peace loving and coincidentally has done loads of detailed research into UNCLOS and the state of civil society and dissent in China.
But the issue has moved on.
Please don't appeal to me as the rest of this comment is not to you.
I'd like to address the HN community. Note the above authoritative assurance this commentor is giving, with one sided accusation of the Chinese and a complete pass on US aggression and social media propaganda. This is exactly the kind of playbook used by those operating out of the US military propaganda center Fort Bragg.
He might be just a HN commentor who is nationalistic and affected by the propaganda of his media bubble who coincidentally is charging people who dissent from those opinions as being foreign propagandists. He could.
But either way, this conversation has moved on.
;)
What a horrible place the internet has become...
Again, totally cool, but straight out of the wumao playbook. Post of last resort is call everyone and everything into question, accuse the other commenter of his own national bias and bubble (whilst refusing to accept yours), throw your hands up and play the victim.
Is there a summary of "wumao" playbook? I think all these you mentioned are standard propaganda or public communication tricks.
> call everyone and everything into question
Sorry, I did not see evidences that the poster accused "everyone and everything". I doubt HN tolerates such behavior at all.
How about references the parent comment about the specific statements that reflect your statement?
> accuse the other commented of his own national bias and bubble (whilst refusing to accept yours)
I think you should emphasize the the part "whilst refusing to accept yours". This is definitely many so-called "wumao" have to do to do their jobs.
I surely see HN members have far less exhibition of this trait.
> throw your hands up and play the victim.
I did not see the poster "play the victim". Even the accusation on China is a lie, that does not victimize any members here. The whole idea of someone "play the victim" should be seen as a way of thinking that does not fit here.
Some comments can hurts someone's feeling, but it should be clear that we discuss topic, not accusing people. We back our statements with facts, and dispute others with facts too.
Attack the message, not the messenger.
This guy is entitled to his opinions, but unfortunately the entire pro-China position is untrustworthy because of this (ref my previous comment).
Because they do.
If you're wrong, you're doing their work for them by sowing discord and mistrust in the community. If you're right, you're doing their work for them by distracting from the subject and making the thread about the threat of the enemy within. The one thing you probably won't accomplish is getting them to stop.
The only way to win the game is not to play by their rules, and to not make it personal. If you really believe someone is a shill, report it to the admins, they claim to take this sort of thing seriously.
There's a downvote brigade on my posts right now and anything I want to contribute gets detailed into accusations of my being some kind of agent.
What do you mean? Are you saying Chinese government paid people in US to do propaganda for the sake of Chinese leaders? I do not think that's any surprising. You should expect any country to do something to influence their competitors or enemies alike.
But you seem imply that the poster you accused was connected with Chinese government. You should not automatically link the government activity with personal behavior on HN. If there is an factual link between the poster's comments and government sponsorship, then go for it, expose the facts. The tactic of someone behaving pro-China, is certainly a "wu mao", is nothing better than claiming one is a traitor on the ground that he accused US govenment's any wrongdoing.
Could you elaborate?
In my head at least, I'm not accusing this guy specifically of being a paid commenter or operative or agent. I have no evidence of that. I feel like its actually irrelevant whether he's paid or genuine.
I'm saying that the content of his comments, the tone of the answers and the rhetorical techniques are basically the same as those seen in hundreds of threads about China where genuine discussion gets derailed by pro-CCP commenters. IMO, genuine discussion about China is difficult/impossible unless there's a recognition and backlash against the poor quality of pro-CCP comments. Eg:
He brings up the USA immediately and repeatedly on a post about China (whataboutism). The underlying message is consistently 'the USA is worse. The USA is the same. If the USA does it, why are you attacking China instead of looking after your own problems?'
He immediately claims the original article is blatant propaganda rather than discussing it earnestly. Similarly, he claims everyone else is living in a media bubble and their sources are not trustworthy (Economist, NYT, 'western media'). He doesn't really mention any news sources of his own that might indicate his own 'media bubble'.
He writes fairly frequent outright lies ("[China] are in and have not been in wars, are leaders of the UN peacekeeping forces, and do not militarily interfere in other countries' affairs") which can be fairly easily destroyed if you can use Google.
To my eyes, a thread about China has pretty quickly become a quagmire of multiple complex and subjective situations related to China, where mud and suspicion is being thrown on everyone, and any opinion anyone projects that might be anti-China is cast as subjective, biased, unresearched etc.
Generally speaking, anywhere you go on the internet where people discuss China-related issues publicly end up like this. Same goes for a lot of Russia related issues discussed in English. I'm sure if you are reading the Arabic internet and bump into issues that the US paid-commenting/auto-commenting systems are interested in, it's the same thing. It's a specific goal of government-sponsored commenting campaigns that you don't try to win arguments; you just muddy the waters, make everyone sound unreliable, destroy reasonable debate.
It's a sticky situation. To my mind, the comments that user posted were immediate red flags. I don't think a single one of his comments added to the substantive debate about the original article. Mine didn't either; it was a stupid response to the poor quality of his comments. Oh well...
> Seriously.
I actually just checked out this person's post history. It's all politics. Mostly about the US waning and China rising (until 600-ish days back at least, before then it was more about TTP/NSA/SONY/etc.), but the person seems extremely well versed about all of this stuff, mentioning a few things I had not heard of before (and I'm more informed than most peers while doing a cyber security study).
Either this account is a government account neck-deep, or he's totally legit and should write a blog that makes it to the front page every week. I'm not 100% sure.
A few things make me inclined to believe he's for real and not a Chinese government official.
1. He made a mistake a while ago where he responded to someone, asking why they said something to him, while they had responded to another account. I find it far fetched to assume this is reverse psychology.
2. The other account is named very similarly. No government trying to establish trusted profiles would do that. Unless it's reverse psychology there too, but that makes little sense (easy to find similarly named profiles and hold them against the light than distinct ones).
3. I managed to find a post where he actually promotes a decentralized system. I forgot what it was and closed the tab (stupid me) but it was something neither the US nor Chinese government would want for a surveillance state. This could be a calculated post to keep the profile up, hoping the post will add enough credibility to allow posting more propaganda, thus allowing for more people to read what he wants them to read... but it seems far fetched.
4. The other account posts along similar lines. Not a different persona. Why switch profiles when you are trying to establish one? He doesn't even post with the old one anymore. A person's reason would be privacy; a government official's reason... I don't know.
Added up together, I think this person is worth listening to. He knows a lot, seems to think about this a great deal, and actually seems pro-US even if it doesn't sound like it most of the time.
As for myself, what can I say? I'm not even claiming to be from the US. But the points I mentioned you can easily verify if you actually cared. It only involves clicking the profile, comments, and "more" links.
(I say he but it could also be she. Using "they" when referring to a single person is still a bit odd to me.)
Please also check xnull, xnull3guest, xnull4guest, etc.
I have another account jwtadvice.
These are all on different computers. I was lazy and created different credentials for all of them.
If you have questions, whatever, let me know.
I understand why people are afraid that other commentators may be intelligence agents. I too suffer from this thought. The truth of the matter is that governments around the world participate in social media propaganda (US, Russia, and China included, don't kid yourself).
Regarding "pro-China" accusations. I'm pro-American. I love American values. And that's why I will criticize America when it does not live up to them.
I am one person. I am an advocate for decentralized systems, including in Russia and in China.
I've given advice to people on HN in these various accounts about where I get information. If you feel that I am well educated, I recommend finding one of those comments and looking into those sources. They include all open source information channels - and many of them are US official outlets (such as State Department press briefings).
Anyway...
That's what I figured ;)
Only someone who wants to promote an "Us = Chinese vs. Them = Western" viewpoint would use this term. Don't the Russians also use terms like this?
It should be obvious that smearing another user like this is a bannable offense here, regardless of how wrong you think they are. It poisons the discourse while purporting to defend it, for obviously political reasons of its own. That's unacceptable, even in a thread as thoroughly degraded as this one. Please don't do anything like this on HN.
If you look, you'll notice that I scolded the other user as well for abusing HN for pure politics. That is a bannable offense too. Instead of both sides breaking HN's rules and going at each other, I have a suggestion: neither of you do it.
I am sorely tempted to ban you both to set an example, but on principle we try to warn people first—it's hard to ask users to give each other the benefit of the doubt if we don't do it ourselves. But I can't say steam isn't coming out of my ears right now.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13202383 and marked it off-topic.
I'd kinda suggest as mods that either (a) just outright stop/ban these kind of political and/or China focused posts, or (b) adopt hardcore moderation if and when they rear their heads.
I comment regularly on China related issues in other forums, and it's pretty boring watching any debate related to China get the same treatment by pro-China commenters. At least in my eyes, an 'ad hominem' attack or callout of 'wumao' style commenting like mine is part and parcel of pro-China commenters hijacking debates about China with endless comparisons to the US and blatant equivocism and falsehoods - i.e. I don't think you can allow one and not end up with the other. HN maintains high standards of debate and behaviour which perhaps aren't compatible with this kind of polarized debate.
All the best :)
Everybody knows the Chinese just copy Western inventions.
Instead of worrying about what China is doing, those of us in the US should be worried what our own government and private corporations are up to.
But I digress: the real danger is that other countries will use china as a blue print for their own digital authoritarianism, perhaps even the USA.
Privacy laws getting loose, private business making deals with the government, social acceptance based on a "state of emergency".
Only difference is that the infrastructure of "Western digital totalitarian states" is run by private corporations.