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Comment by btilly | Hacker News Reader

I would be inclined towards genuine antipathy towards corruption.

I have a brother that at one point regularly dealt with top levels of Chinese government. His summary was, "China is a country of crooks ruled by honest men; the USA is a country of honest men ruled by crooks." He's not sure which is worse in the end.

Based on that, I would bet on the top levels of the Chinese government being basically ethical (albeit within an ethical system that values life and liberty a lot less than we would).

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This sounds eerily like something a Chinese government propaganda person would say.

The Chinese government values stability above all else. This is why they will also not hesitate to detain lawyers asking tough questions or steamroller physically protesting activists with tanks, because their calculus is that it's the lesser evil compared to the tens of millions of dead in the various revolutions and upheavals of the past 100 years.

Of course, stability is also quite useful for preserving power and enjoying the fruits of dubious wealth, so here the moral imperative dovetails neatly with the personal interests of party cadres.

Feel free to look through my comment history and make your own opinion on whether I'm likely to be a Chinese government propaganda person.

You look realish enough. But your brother might be a propoganda person...

You will just have to decide whether to take my word that the prospect of him being a propaganda person is laughable. For one thing this comment of his was something that he came to after moving back to the US and establishing a business here. For another, a Chinese propaganda person would be unlikely to criticize the Chinese people in a way that his comment did.

For the record, the extent to which Americans can be trusted to be honest and trustworthy on a daily basis came as a shock to him after living in China for many years.

Please don't imply another member is a shill or plant or whatnot without solid evidence. It's uncivil and not conducive to constructive discussion. If you're actually concerned that this might be the case, please contact the mods via the Contact link in the footer.

It may be uncivil, but we are really truely living in an age where a significant percentage of communications are forged by paid PR people. We should focus on actually thinking about this problem and dealing with it. I know that whitch hunts are bad, but this member didn't get out a pitch-fork and noose, they only said how they felt.

Indeed, communication is fraught with all manner of difficulties today. We have a lot of things that we may feel, and some, while we may believe are justified, are not constructive to express in certain contexts. Implications like this on HN are one such case.

That doesn't mean there's no recourse. The mods actively respond to concerns like this. As I suggested above, you can contact them and they'll look into it.

One can still argue with paid PR without resorting to ad hominem and boo lights...

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