Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SCHiM | Hacker News Reader

Leaving aside subjective judgments if doing this is right/wrong, good/in-line with the Chinese culture or whatever else.

If you view the societal/political cohesion/consensus as a process of behavioral survival of the fittest (eg. requiring a certain flexibility to adapt) then taking away the flexibility that anonymous online communication affords your citizens might not be so good when/if it becomes time for the system to adapt. There will be less space to communicate and plan gradual change, skipping that possibility and going straight for more bloody forms of change. Say like the way we did things 200 years ago.

Personally and subjectively, I think this is a dumb and evil thing to do. But not unexpected.

You make some very interesting points on flexibility and the ability to adapt. I also wonder how China is able to keep adapting to circumstances and survive if the voice of people is not heard.

But then I realize China has a different system to allow that to happen. In modern China, the only way for politicians to go up the ladder of leadership is to slowly rise from the bottom.

In this sense, they were once a normal citizen as well, and through working closely with the local community in the early political career, they should have a good understanding of the impact of policies on average citizen.

The fact that China is still strong in terms of economics despite being one-party is largely due to the economic reform pushed by the highest leadership Deng Xiaoping.

You are excluding princelings like Xi Jinping, who only started from the bottom in theory, but have a lot of family connections to help them rise quickly. In fact, as time goes on, princelings are becoming more dominant in Chinese politics and even the economy (many companies and industries are controlled by red families).

On that front, I can only hope that they have learnt the lessons from South Korea politics.

> they were once a normal citizen as well

China has a widespread nepotism.

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