A Reporter Rolled Her Eyes, and China’s Internet Broke | Hacker News Reader

A Reporter Rolled Her Eyes, and China’s Internet Broke

nytimes.com

60 pointsjustin6624 comments

The question was :

“The transformation of the responsibility of supervision for state assets is a topic of universal concern. Therefore, as the director of the State-Owned Assets Supervision and Administration Commission of the State Council, what new moves will you make in 2018? This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Reform and Opening-up Policy, and our country is going to further extend its openness to foreign countries. With General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi proposing the One Belt One Road Initiative, state-owned enterprises have increased investment to countries along the route of One Belt One Road, so how can the overseas assets of state-owned enterprises be effectively supervised to prevent loss of assets? What mechanisms have we introduced so far, and what’s the result of our supervision? Please summarize for us, thank you.”

This doesn't seem like a wholy inapopriate question. Am I missing something?

It is a 112% planted question, and a long winded one at that. I would roll my eyes too.

I suppose it very much depends on how it was spoken and the emphasis. There's a fair bit of hyping of OBOR and a gratuitous name check for the boss in there. Bear in mind the eye roll was at a particular point in the question, not at the end, so it's probably related to a particular part of it.

I worry if this reporter will now end up in jail. Does that happen?

You speak for those who can't.

Hopefully not. They usually jail people for disrupting the harmony of their society but I think intent matters.

E.g. organizing protests or selling banned books, but I don't think an unintentional meme starring oneself is up there as a jailable offense.

However I do see her job getting harder as a result. E.g. getting assigned to more boring stories, being denied a press pass.

In general yes: people get tortured and killed for stuff like that but maybe she's too prominent

Don’t be silly. China is not a paragon of free and fair government but it is not North Korea. She will not be “tortured and killed.”

German news media of highest reputation (including Zeit and Spiegel) regularity report about political torture and murders in Zimbabwe, Turkey, Syria and yes: China.

Of course that happens to persistent political activists, but it's far more likely that she will just be frozen out of state press conferences, boycotted for interviews and briefings and her employer pressurised to 'let her go'. A bit of general administrative and police harassment and obstruction is also probably in order.

fair enough

Can you provide some links?

I tried to find the relevant articles (admittedly I read the most striking ones two years ago, but I assume the regime hasn't improved that much since then?). If you are really interested I can google again.

If you really don't know where to begin, poke around on amnesty.org, which has reports on various countries. You'll be able to get more information on any given story or situation by using google.

China is not what many people make it our to be. Comparing to just a couple of decase ago, it now has a huge educated middle class.

I don't think China is a free country, but if you dig a little, you'll see that many people openly speak up and protest. Big labor protests that don't make it into western media are quite regular.

You wouldn't want the unemployed masses of Europe and America to feel a connection with chinese workers, would you? Better to cover a story on how they're stealing our jobs and making billions.

And this is why moral equivalence sucks. Yes Europe is not perfect, and America isn't either.

Do reporters get ruined for body language implying they might disapprove of what a single congressman says (but it might be a held-in sneeze too) ?

No.

Imperfect democracy IS NOT THE SAME as a dictatorship.

BTW: let's hope being ruined for life is all that happened to this woman. She wouldn't be the first one to be brutally murdered.

According to Southern China Morning Post article, her media accreditation to cover the National People's Congress has been revoked, her Weibo (twitter equiv in china) taken down, and search results of her name online also taken down.

SCMP is a paper in Hong Kong, so should be credible.

http://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/213...

Tried this little experiment, here's the reporter in red on baidu:

https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%BC%A0%E6%85%A7%E5%90%9B/979...

Tried the reporter in blue on baidu and no relevant results to her:

http://www.baidu.com/s?ie=utf-8&f=8&rsv_bp=0&rsv_idx=1&tn=ba...

Jail-wise, hard to say, but her livelihood is going to suck for awhile.

One rolling eye leading to hundreds of thousands followers (and more) and a political crisis.

chineese people aren't stupid, and they have been doing business with the rest of the world for decades now. Everywhere on shanghai you see ads to learn english... What do people from the communist party think ? trading goes both ways, and i don't see how chineese people won't want to openly express their views on the political conduct of the country, just like almost evrywhere else.

I was thinking the eye roll would be Liz Lemon's category, but nope. Nothing like the most epic eye roll in history.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ1m39K4Tgw

I don't see any reference to any network infrastructure failures. Maybe they mean 'China's internet was flooded with reactions'?

"Breaking the internet" I suppose is just saying that a meme or event went viral.

Flagged for the ridiculous click-bait headline. No, NYT, China's internet did not "break."

This was far and away the best English-language summary available when I posted it, and I used the story's own headline, as per HN policy. I can understand that you might dislike the "broke the internet" figure of speech, but perhaps you should save your flagging for content that is truly problematic.

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