Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

Comment by qball | Hacker News Reader

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>being a westerner surely gives you such right to assume that we Chinese are all being repressed.

You're free to oppress yourselves. You're even free to believe that your slavery is freedom. But I have no doubt in my mind that China and its vision of the ideal society would be repressive to me and negatively affect my way of life.

See, I like being divisive and value the ability of a society to be disrupted in favor of bigger and better things. For example, we value the ability to petition and protest our government or society when it does something bad because that way we get progress.

The Chinese way to respond to a social grievance, whether you like/know/acknowledge it or not, is to just murder everyone and deny anything ever happened. Granted, that's also known to happen in America-backed dictatorships, but at least they don't do it at home.

And that's the culture you export- encouraging harmony, monotony, and social conservatism ("don't rock the boat") in countries they support rather than free thought, diversity, and innovation. I'd hate for the remaining 5/6ths of the planet to be under the boot of an immutable society in love with its own stagnation and mediocrity.

Something you have to keep in mind is that China is a much, much, more populated place than the USA in a smaller land mass.

I think recent times are showing an issue with protest. In a democracy, if the 'side' that 'loses' (democracy is ideally a collective decision of individuals trying to come to the objectively best decision, not a team sport trying to beat the other team - the founding fathers feared parties for good reason) decides to try to disrupt society in response, that simply doesn't work.

I think the true value in protest were sides managing to illustrate to others that support for views, that did not seem popular, did indeed have substantial support. The civil rights protests are a good example. The status quo of America was 'separate but equal'. Clearly many did not really believe this, but it can be difficult to express views that run contrary to the perceived majority of a society. Protest enabled these people to unify and others to feel more comfortable "coming out", as it were. In today's society, the internet serves this purpose. You can find and organize support nationally, and even internationally, for any view. This is a reason that I think having a completely free and open internet is crucial.

The Vietnam War is a good example of protests that were not useful, even though they did have a good overlap with the civil rights protests. Many people vehemently opposed the war, but many also supported it. So it turned into the sort of protest that is not about enabling people to come out (as it was already completely acceptable within society to support or oppose the war) but simply because one side was upset that they were not getting their way. There was lots of chaos caused, lots of social disruption, and it changed absolutely nothing.

Imagine the issues the US is having today, and then multiply our population by well over 400% with a proportional (if not exponential) increase in mutual antagonism. I think we're already starting to reach the breaking point of our political systems. So I think simply assuming our system and its status quo suddenly strapped onto a population 400% larger, without massive changes, is not really reasonable.

"China is a much, much, more populated place than the USA in a smaller land mass"

Smaller land mass? At least based on pure numbers 9.6 (China) vs 9.8 (Us) million square kilometers is not relatively massively different.

But with 4x the population...

Obviously the US has a very low overall population density, being for the most part a wasteland devoid of human life.

China, on the other hand, does not seem remarkable: higher than the European average, lower than Germany, way lower than India.

http://m.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Population+density+of+Chi...

Of course, it's a pointless metric and it fails to capture that China, too, is for the most part a wasteland devoid of human life and it still has about five times the USA's average density.

Where did you get the area numbers? China is larger than the US in land area (9,326,410 km2 vs. 9,147,593).

> under the boot of an immutable society in love with its own stagnation

China is rapidly leading in solar panel production, implementing CRISPR tech, super computers, and now building a modern Silk Road. Perhaps they are stagnating on the human rights front, but they are not stagnating in tech and economic growth.

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