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Comment by bingomad123 | Hacker News Reader

I totally support Wikileaks. Both China and Russia are oppressive regimes. They don't pretend to be "land of free" while oppressing their people. USA does!

Secondly there is element of "outcome". Exposing US government has clear benefit of keeping people informed and hence help them make better voting decisions. Telling Chinese people that their government is systematically harvesting organs of Tibetian people has no new information or benefit.

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I'm a young person with other young people friends. One such friend grew up in Shanghai. He had never heard of the Tiananmen Square student protests (and the resulting military intervention) until he came to the US for college and someone asked him about it. Anecdotally, it seems China does a very, very, good job of controlling information through their extensive government controls. Telling Chinese people about something like that would probably surprise them greatly.

Only if you could tell them though. As you said, China is good at controlling information.

I think the point is good overall.

Your young friend was uninformed but that doesn't mean that most people in China don't know about the incident. You have to get something much further than that.

Meanwhile, if you went to China, I doubt anyone there could tell you what your government was keeping from you.

That's how good they are at regulating their information, and is precisely the reason why we need Wikileaks.

There's plenty that WL doesn't know that you might die never having known, and your great-grandchildren might ever only hear about in history books (and maybe not even then, depending on who the victors are).

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