We knew this going in. We decided to trade human rights and to empower an authoritarian government for cheap pants and blood-electronics. I’ve prayed just now, but I did so with a new iPad Pro 12.9” in my lap. I have no idea how to help.
Even if you are genuine, it would come across as condescending.
Majority of people in China are happy with their lives, we certainly do not see the need for help from other countries in the way you wanted to.
Instead, I would suggest you focus on the problems and issues faced in your own country. In Chinese, there is a saying that "Please take care of your own backyard, before thinking of cleaning up other people's backyard."
Every country has its own problems, US, Spain, UK and China. Do you see people from UK offering to help solve gun problems in US? Do you see people from US offering to help self-determination problem in Spain?
Don't assume you have the moral high ground and Chinese people need your help. Try to talk to Chinese people and understand their perspective first.
There's a video that went viral on Weibo a couple of months ago.
- A mainland Chinese girl is destroying HK independence posters at a HK university.
- A Honkinese girl admonishes her for destroying the posters, as they are free speech.
- The mainland Chinese girl says that free speech means that since the Honkinese girl can put up posters the mainland Chinese girl can destroy them
- The HK girl says that the mainland Chinese girl can put up her own posters if she wishes.
In mainland China, the view is: that the Chinese girl speaks better English than the HK girl and makes an excellent point about how she's allowed to tear down the posters if the other girl can put them up because that's what free speech means.
This isn't ironic, it's what people think and that's why the video was popular: because the mainland girl spoke great English, made what seems like a good point, and defended Chinese integrity.
Close friend mentions that re: democracy, the people don't have any will at all: they don't really engage with politics. It's someone else's job to lead. You'd want to engage with running the country as much as being a firefighter or running the sewers.
If more and more people are travelling abroad and absorbing this idea of free speech, the society would eventually transform and embrace the idea. However, critical thinking has to be there first, with majority of the people capable of making informed decisions, not like the reaction to the video you mentioned.
i suppose it's my western point of view that makes me view this sentiment as blisteringly immature, if that is indeed what most chinese actually think.
the stewardship of your country is always your job as a human being... even if you deny the responsibility, your country will act on your behalf, which means that you must control your leadership.
if nobody else is fit to lead, it's your job.
This summaries my points on the relationship between people and the government.
If the government is so trustworthy and so eager to please why do they need to take political prisoners at all?
Contrast with your statement on stewardship, duty, and responsibility. What is behind this besides sentiment?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2015/jun/...
People help people, while nationalists are off somewhere in their own heads.
> Try to talk to Chinese people and understand their perspective first.
And that is? They're happy to be unfree, and think everybody else in the world only cares about their own problems, divided by nationality?
You said a lot, but not one word about your own, personal perspective. If I asked other Chinese people, would they also only tell me about yet other Chinese people? Then why bother?
Also note how you're not asking any questions yourself, either. You just assume others assume moral high ground and tell them, representative for all other Chinese citizens.
Even just one political prisoner, in China or any other country, makes the opinion of anyone who is "happy" in that country of rather secondary rank.
> In Chinese, there is a saying that "Please take care of your own backyard, before thinking of cleaning up other people's backyard."
I'm not an uptight corrupt goon, so for example I can make fun of the Chinese Communist Party and plenty of other politicians in plenty countries. I did take care of my backyard. I'm not responsible for what anyone else of $arbitrary_group_you_think_matters is doing, I'm responsible for what I'm doing. Criticize "my" country and I'll probably add to it, because of course I am critical of the things going on right under my nose. But defensive pouting? What for? Why would I need that?
Just because you love healthy food doesn't mean you go around on the street shoving salad in people's mouths.
> You said a lot, but not one word about your own, personal perspective. If I asked other Chinese people
He said:
> Majority of people in China are happy with their lives, we certainly do not see the need for help from other countries in the way you wanted to.
Which I'm pretty sure you can interpret as being how he and his immediate peers feel.
> I did take care of my backyard.
Unless you country is void of any problems or internal conflict, you've missed the point. Your backyard is your own government not your own appreciation of yourself.
It's not a personal lifestyle choice or "culture". All human babies get born with a lot of curiosity and vitality. Some get broken and develop a pathological need for external validation to compensate something that never can compensate, instead of a grounding from which they can cooperate (and yes, that can mean following commands sometimes, but there's still an adult and a slave way of going about that, and if you were to say being a slave is a lifestyle choice then I'd just decide eating slaves is my lifestyle choice). That's not a matter of taste as far as I can tell, and if they defend their stunted development they by definition attack what I consider mental health, muddling it into some kind of thing nobody gets to have an opinion on until laws are broken. Not doing that. I see what I see, if you don't like what I have to say say something you think is better, but don't think I care about numbers of people. So far, I heard only "most people are happy". Not even "they are happy because", and not a PEEP how that outweighs those who are persecuted. It's literally just pointing to a blob. That's also something I see, and it's a sickness. Nothing to do with China, it's everywhere. But it's foolish in China, too.
There were people who got along fine in the GDR, too. I don't really blame them, I don't want to know how I would rate under such a regime. But really, when I want to know what the underbelly of the GDR was like, I don't ask them first, and certainly I wouldn't dream of only asking them.
Yeah, it's all subjective but that also gains us nothing because the subjective feelings of a billion Chinese don't outweigh my own subjective feelings. If they can't articulate why they feel that way, and can't interact with further responses to that, that doesn't surprise me at all.
You're basically saying -- maybe you don't want to say that, but that's what all this means, that's what matters in this -- it's good the people in the article and others are in jail or worse. Because to say otherwise would be "forcing my preferences on others"... how dare you, really. This isn't about whether someone likes the New Kids on the Block or Take That more. A million people who just go along to get along are not worth one person in jail for trying to be an individual. And you don't get to shove jail bars in their face because you can't stand words, even though you're so sloppy with those, too.
> Which I'm pretty sure you can interpret as
Yeah, I can, if I pretend "majority of people in China" means "me and my friends". But I can also read it as it's written, as opposed to sentences like "I think X because of Y".
> Unless you country is void of any problems or internal conflict, you've missed the point.
Not only did I not missed it, I addressed it. It's an invalid criticism in my books. A person isn't allowed to only speak up about anything in another country unless their country is "void of any problems" -- what would that even mean? That's like saying you can't write using any letters but square circles. That's not a point, it's just sophistry.
And as a bonus, it would also mean a person from $X doesn't get to criticize a person from $X for criticizing $X unless their country is perfect. Be HN US centric or international, it certainly is not within the great Firewall of China, right? So wouldn't a Chinese person make their country perfect and everybody in it immortal before ever criticizing a non-Chinese person? As I said, I find those demands completely arbitrary and void. But if some thinks they're valid, they should heed them themselves.
The idea of taking care of your own backyard seems pretty similar to the old Soviet Union deflection whenever they were met with criticism:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes
Many countries have issues, people should be able to criticise even if their own situations aren't perfect.
You talk about the majority position. But what about these minorities? Do they feel the same way?
Many countries don't have the obsession over multiculturalism that America seems to have. Their priority isn't to have a diverse population, but rather is to raise the quality of life for as many people as possible as quickly as possible, hence the focus on the majority of the population. A homogeneous culture has many benefits during growth, like lower interpersonal conflict. Concepts like democracy and freedom mean very little if the quality of life is low.
edit: I do find it interesting that this comment was downvoted. For those of you downvoting me, could you please explain why? Was my critique on multiculturalism not the reason my post above was downvoted?
I am specifically replying to the comment where the person wants to "help" China.
We should equally welcome opinions from Chinese citizens. I would hope blind patriotism would not prevent us from considering viable solutions.
> Do you see people from UK offering to help solve gun problems in US?
Many people do because the way UK society handles guns is very different from the US. The UK has a lot less gun violence.
> Do you see people from US offering to help self-determination problem in Spain?
Lots! Many Americans love to share their opinions. Both struggle with balancing the rights of central and local governments.
Imagine how much western companies would suffer if GitHub disappeared overnight. It would quickly become known to the Chinese that a freaking repo containing nothing besides accurate Chinese history was responsible.
If you already obtained a decent reach within Chinese social media apps, then you should consider this: China can easily "shadow-block" certain phrases like tiananmen, hong kong + protest in same message, etc. and you can be certain most of these imagines you find online will also be "shadow-blocked". However, all it takes to beat their current system is to modify a single pixel.
I agree that many Chinese don't share these values (although I do believe most of them choose to sacrifice their freedom because they don't really have a choice, and they feel it's justified by the country's growth), and that many innocent people would suffer. But I feel as long as the repo focus on spreading truthful history, then the government is to blame for whatever negative effect that occurs as a result of this.
Plus also the point about Chinese people not necessarily sharing your western liberal values is a good one. It's not true that western values are universal (they are just a product of our society and history) and perhaps they have slightly different set of values based on their society and history.
China can go ban github or something if they get upset over "foreign intervention". Then they will suffer all the economic damages that comes from that.
The reason to do something like this is PRECISELY because it makes those who do not support "western liberal values" upset.
Seriously. Thats what this is about. People posting true stuff on the internet about china. I am not going to tiptoe around stuff like that, lol.
If you're on the internet, then you can be targeted by anyone across the world, no matter where you live. Psyops/social engineering, identity theft, DDoS, doxxing, blackmail...
Oh no, my anonymous github account will be hacked!
Seriously, this shit doesn't happen. There are too many people doing too many things in the world for a government across the world to do much of anything to anyone.
I am not ever going to live my life in fear of something dumb, like that. I am going to criticize and offend whatever world governments deserve to be offended.
If they don't like it, they can send their secret james bond assassins after me for posting stuff on the internet that hurt their feelings.
China would most definitely retaliate; first by threatening and attacking GitHub, and if that didn't work then block the site completely. This would result in the Chinese companies/government losing billions, their tech progress could be severely hurt, and they would risk enraging the Chinese dev community.
It's very naive to think that the people responsible for creating and spreading this repo wouldn't be attacked, and while you might succeed in maintaining anonymity of the GitHub account (risky assumption), you most certainly wouldn't be able to remain anonymous when spreading it on Chinese services like QQ/WeChat/Weibo/etc (at least if an individual were to attempt to do this).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GreatFire
China did not win. Github did not get permanently blocked. They got DDoS for a week or something, but ultimately did not lose "billions".
The reason these temporary blocking attempts and attacks fail, is because github is a critical piece of infrastructure, and if a country blocks it, then it will suffer massive economic damage, and be forced to reconsider the block.
I very much hope that China continues to waste their time on these attacks. They will fail like they failed before. The more desperate they are, the more that they thrash around and fail to achieve any results, the more that people realize how little power they actually have to stop people from spreading information.
"This would result in the Chinese companies/government losing billions, their tech progress could be severely hurt, and they would risk enraging the Chinese dev community."
Good. Maybe then the Chinese citizens will do something about it. Chinese censorship mostly only hurts their own people (and by extension, it would then hurt the people in power), which will hurt them in the long term.
"It's very naive to think that the people responsible for creating and spreading this repo wouldn't be attacked"
The GreatFire people seem to be doing just fine, despite how much they have pissed off the chinese government. So empirically, as proven by facts, you are wrong.
What I suggested and GreatFire is miles apart. Moreover, I'm not saying that throwing up some wikipedia articles about Tiananmen, Chairman Mao, etc. will result in China being forced to block GitHub or attack you. The path to success is to have the repo spread to tens of millions of Chinese locals. Regular people, not just the tech savvy that knows what a VPN is. It certainly won't be easy, especially considering they can easily shadowblock all links to the repo, the name of the repo, a picture with a link/QR, etc.
By the way, people have already been and continue to be tracked down and attacked for doing these kinds of things (a notably incident that reached the front page of HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10101469), so no, the assumption that people will be attacked for doing this is most definitely not wrong.
You don't think governments hack their enemies?
Maybe the US would never agree, but imagine you are vacationing in some country that has good relations with China.
The first three were military interventions, very different from fighting censorship. I don't know enough about Egypt/Mubarak to say the level of Western involvement if any.
Also China is interfering in other governments - specifically Taiwan and HK - all the time. *
* Re: HK, China agreed to allow HK people to vote for the leaders by 2017 in return for sovereignty, and did not fulfill this promise, therefore there is no reason to recognize their sovereignty.
Sure there is, short of nuclear war there’s no way to get the PRC’s government out of Hong Kong.
And the PRC signed a treaty with the U.K., and the U.K.’s signature on a treaty is dirt. They guaranteed the indivisibility and independence of Cyprus and did nothing when the Greeks invaded, they guaranteed Ukraine’s borders along with Russia and the USA. Two things are always true in international relations; never give up your nukes and never trust the U.K. or USA.
It's entirely possible PRC could collapse. High growth rates and widespread corruption could easily cause a financial crisis that turns into a political one.
Turks, not Greeks
> they guaranteed Ukraine’s borders along with Russia and the USA
The Ukraine situation has much more nuance than you give credit for.
> and never trust the U.K. or USA.
As history shows, every superpower has interests, not friends.
Fuck nuance. Never give up your nukes and never trust anyone for your vital interests.
The nukes in Ukraine were not Ukrainian - they were Soviet. Ukraine had no knowledge and resources to maintain them in usable state, they would simply expire anyway. So at least someone made a quick buck on that. This episode actually sums up behaviour of Ukraine's politicians in their 25 years of existence - whatever can be sold, will be sold, consequences for your co-citizens be damned. Ukraine as a state has no interests, vital or not - only politicians have.
On the other hand, do you wonder why North Korea wants nukes?
I don’t wonder why North Korea wants nukes. I know why. Iraq, Libya, Iran. Compare and contrast.
They were ultimately military interventions but military solution is used always as last resort if you can't achieve your goal without it. West has been meddling in their domestic affairs and trying to influence these countries internally long before military invasions. And it continues to meddle and influence after war is over.
With Mubarak of course there was a lot of US involvement. Obama and Clinton supporter Muslim Brotherhood & Morsi heavily for some reason which ended in overthrowing of Mubarak and establishment of a theocratic state... which had to be then reversed in another revolution.
> Also China is interfering in other governments - specifically Taiwan and HK - all the time. *
From their point of view HK and Taiwan are part of China. On Western maps it shows Taiwan as an independent country but mainland Chinese consider it integral part of China.
> * Re: HK, China agreed to allow HK people to vote for the leaders by 2017 in return for sovereignty, and did not fulfill this promise, therefore there is no reason to recognize their sovereignty.
That's true. But countries break promises when convenient including western democracies.
It's no surprise that Russia tried to influence US politics. We need to do a better job of educating our citizens on critical thinking, including recognizing propaganda and fake news.
This may be true if correctly done, but chances are good that if a state actor tried to Correct the Record, they would add their own political spin or only give information that helps the nation giving the information, and it would be widely seen as propaganda and looked at with disdain by most of the population.
Not all of what Russia released was just emotional manipulation. Russia released the DNC emails, which greatly increased political instability despite the fact that it was true. Russia is now seen as a meddler in our democratic process.
You don't think similar disdain would be seen towards Americans if we inject political instability into their country?
Would you say this is propaganda?
Which were massively abused to spread FUD.
For example, suppose a ship with 1000 people was sinking.
- 800 lives saved by swift action and heroic first responders.
- Botched government response results in 200 dead.
Question 1: Since they have the same access as you to "truthful history" why are their values different?
Question 2: Do you believe you could change their perspectives by introducing them to additional historical information?
Everyone is unique, have different ideas, beliefs and thinking capabilities. It's only natural that, as such, people will process and respond to the same content in different ways.
I do believe that many Chinese people would form drastically different opinions if they had access to factual information. That being said, I must admit that my personal motivation would be less about helping the Chinese people, and more about attempting to limit China's power.
However, as I also mentioned in the other post, I'm not brave enough to even attempt to execute this idea. It's also important to anyone who might consider it that they would, if successful, endanger the life of themselves and their loved ones.
An additional question: suppose you could limit the power of the alt-right, neo-nazies, and other racist agitators by limiting the flow of information.
Would also be against that?
1. http://www.theweek.co.uk/politics/22535/both-china-and-west-...
In an ideal world, then I'd say that the goal should be to educate the current and future generations to develop critical thinking capabilities, so that they'll hopefully laugh/cry/shake their head (or if they have more patience/heart than me, try to educate) when they read the kind of information you'd more often than not find on the_donald.
I honestly don't support the idea of censorship, and I believe everyone should have the right to privacy (I'm very saddened today to discover that Apple/NSA/Chinese government/etc is likely secretly recording my iPhone screen as I type this message). A part of me would even want to go as far as to say that if people wanted to spread hateful messages/illegal activity, then the solution shouldn't be to censor them, but rather to rely on the people to downvote and educate. Imagine a Reddit where mods were incapable of deleting/censoring any content. What do you think would happen? I personally have no idea, but I believe that there's a real chance these alt-right and racist aggregators wouldn't be able to succeed in creating a "safe haven" where they'd continue to have their hateful views reinforced. I recently read an interesting article about a neo-nazi that was forced to interact with a black police officer, resulting in a friendship that ended his hateful views. I strongly believe that if they couldn't censor rational voices (which I'd like to believe outnumber them by at least 10 to 1) then there's a high chance that their views could be corrected.
It would definitely be very difficult to achieve this when governments like Russia's appear willing to commit hundreds of millions of dollars (I'm assuming) in supporting hateful views. But I do (probably naively) believe that if people were highly educated then it should be possible to build a platform that could withstand these state attacks (e.g. value an upvote by a high karma user higher than a low karma user). Do you think the HN crowd would be negatively influenced (persuaded) by hateful flow of information? If the answer is no, doesn't that mean that high intelligence can withstand hateful/fake information and that there'd therefore be no need to censor it?
Censorship is dangerous because it can easily be abused. You may want to argue that with the right censorship tools then we could've prevented Trump from becoming the president. But what happens when a manic like him ends up in a position of control over said censorship tools? I'm guessing he'd do everything possible to become a dictator, to rewrite history, to spread his hateful views, to worsen the education and attempt to brainwash the students, etc. The way I see it, the only sustainable solution would be achieving a highly intelligent population.
Compare all the recent outrage caused by media stories that put the words "Facebook" and "Russia" in the single sentence. Messing with social media of another country is fun until you find yourself on the receiving end, then suddenly it's scandalous.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1...
post-cold war happenings are things worth focusing on, imo.
But you didn't ask for consistency. You asked for one specific thing. Why that one thing rather than something else? Why not something more general?
It sounds like you don't just want him to be consistent. It sounds like you want him to grind the axe that you want him to grind, or else like you want to discredit him while he's grinding the axe that he wants to grind. And it sounds like you want to hide that behind asking for consistency, which is a really dishonest and cheap rhetorical trick.
Now, it's possible that I'm misreading what you're trying to do. But you sure come across that way, at least to me.
Do rush to spread information that you think is true just because you read it from the Internet and China is bad.
That was actually the plan.
Up until mid 2000's it seemed as though Russia was coming along.
Putin did a major pivot, or rather, 'major expansion of his authority' during the Obama years.
Future historians will maybe give us the answers ...
Everybody expected that economic growth = growth of democracy = growth of free speech.
If you look at the top 50 countries by GDP per capita, most of them still do have a relatively high degree of freedom (in speech, press, etc.) compared to the world average. (The exceptions tend to be authoritarian regimes with oil, but with "peak oil demand" being a possibility in the long term, the long term future of this position is uncertain, in my opinion).
Nothing has changed in this regard. China has risen far economically and is still rising today. But by the GDP per capita statistic they still rank roughly on par with the world average (in the 70s rank). Russia's probably the strongest authoritarian economy that is not hugely dependent on oil (although it's still a decent chunk of it), but as far as GDP per capita goes they've been treading water lately.
Correlation is not causation, of course, so it's hard to tell whether this is a feature or a coincidence. I suppose we'll find out in the near future. I think it's still an open question whether China's policies increasingly interfere with the increasingly important knowledge economy, and end up hindering their growth. (Based on how China tiptoes around censorship of tech areas like Github, I suspect they are well aware of this possibility.)
It's likely that China is not going high-income. It's obvious that India is not going high-income. It's apparent that Russia isn't going to be high-income either. Same for Iran, Indonesia, Philippines. So are we headed towards a planet which is mostly authoritarian, and in which most of GDP is produced in authoritarian countries?
Won't islands of democracy become fewer and further between? It seems that Democracy became much more expensive not unlike real estate and college are, and now a lot of communities can't afford it still.
So of course, anybody who stops the robbery is authoritarian then.
It would be different if HK was given to British as part of some deal reached by diplomacy which was not enforced as a consequence of lost war.
Then you could perhaps argue that UK could keep it for perpetuity.
A post-WWI agreement, called the Kellog-Briand Pact, sets the state for multilaterism, and outlaws war for conquest. This later develops into non-recognition of illegal conquests, war crimes, etc.
So, in contrast to HK, Tibet will never be part of China. But at the moment China is too rich, and Tibet to inconsequential, for anyone to make a big deal over it.
There was a great discussion of this on a recent Lawfare podcast: https://www.lawfareblog.com/lawfare-podcast-oona-hathaway-an...
This is it.
When I was in Cali 1997-2003 - 'Tibet' was all the rage.
Hollywood, popular opinion, documentaries etc. etc..
Then about the mid-2000s', 'Tibet' was snuffed out as a 'popular concern'.
There were quite a number of big business people/CEO's whispering about Tibet as a 'cause' - but they shut up pretty quick.
China has very effectively divided and conquered Western leaders who speak with 1000' voices (i.e. politicians, CEO's, academics) and even played nations against one another.
They have very effectively dangled the 'we have 1 Billion consumers carrot' in front of everyone and have them all kow-towing (pun intended) to get a juicy slice, but it never quite happens.
It's amazing how much indirect influence a coordinated attempt to attack an issue can have.
I remember the Dalai Lama used to even be a big name in the press, we hardly hear about him any more. Many, long tentacles ...
By that standard PRC could send their military and take over Hong Kong and then keep it indefinitely. In a direct conflict UK would lose and they probably knew that which is why they left voluntarily.
> A post-WWI agreement, called the Kellog-Briand Pact, sets the state for multilaterism, and outlaws war for conquest. This later develops into non-recognition of illegal conquests, war crimes, etc.
This pact seems to be historically insignificant. US has been using war as an instrument of national policy quite frequently. Same for Russia and before that Soviet Union. And other countries. So why not China?
> So, in contrast to HK, Tibet will never be part of China. But at the moment China is too rich, and Tibet to inconsequential, for anyone to make a big deal over it.
Tibet is definitely a part of China though. For example, on Google Maps I don't see Tibet marked as a separate nation. It's part of China according to biggest online maps provider.
Fund training of activists
Work on finding safe routes to deliver arms and munitions. In 10 years, all of that will be handy.