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> This is patently not true. There are plenty of Chinese in the previous generation that gave up their hukou/ID card as required when they gained permanent residency in another country

Do you have a cite for this? I know you lose PRC citizenship when gaining another citizenship (and thus a foreign passport), but I was not under the impression that was true for "permanent residents" of other countries. You can be an Chinese expat while still being a Chinese citizen.

Also, Chinese National IDs cannot be renewed overseas, while passports can. I think the law was pretty explicit that Chinese citizens can't fly under their passport (though they can jump through hoops to get a temporary national ID to fly). I know people who were in a bit of a pickle when this law came into effect because they were overseas when their National ID expired. It's certainly another hassle and bother for expats.

> the law was pretty explicit that Chinese citizens can't fly under their passport

This is false. There were rumors in May 2017 that some airports in China started to reject passports for Chinese citizens per some new internal regulations, so that is probably what was initially reported. As is always, the follow-up was never reported again: top aviation administration and public security department later clarified the law still allows using passports. The real reason for the few occasions of passport bans was because those few airports didn't have networked passports readers to verify it.

> There were rumors in May 2017 that some airports in China started to reject passports for Chinese citizens per some new internal regulations, so that is probably what was initially reported.

That explains it, that's about the time my friend was trying to figure out their document situation for a trip back to China. They ended up opting not to fly domestically because of the uncertainty.

Some people forget or lose their IDs. They can always get temp IDs at train stations or airports.

I don’t have a citation, just personal experience of knowing people who were exactly in this situation. You don’t lose PRC citizenship when losing your hukou, you still qualify for a chinese passport. The policy in the 90s was that you had to turn in your ID card/hukou when going abroad to study and work, and there was no easy way to get it back. I don’t think that is true today, but it’s a reason why many older Chinese in the tech industry have citizenship but no hukou.

You can fly internally on a chinese passport. Again, because not all chinese citizens have or qualify for ID cards.

> I think the law was pretty explicit that Chinese citizens can't fly under their passport

Please stop spreading misleading info. Chinese citizens are allowed to fly domestically using passport, I did that dozens of times. It is also explicitly listed on Civil Aviation Administration of China's web site, link provided below, it is explicitly mentioned on the first line.

http://www.caac.gov.cn/INDEX/HLFW/HLZN/CJ/

Have your extensive comments about the CCP on HN caused you any hassles?

The fact that comments cannot be deleted is increasingly unethical as ML makes privacy easier and easier to pierce. People who made rational decisions about the risks of sharing various opinions on a small site in 2010 are now locked into the consequences a decade later when both technology and political landscapes have changed.

It would be truly surprising if HN history doesn't eventually play a key role in someone being imprisoned or executed due to having expressed views that a country, religion or other organization finds objectionable.

> Have your extensive comments about the CCP on HN caused you any hassles?

CCP currently cannot monitoring all foreign websites, so (currently) I don't think people will be hassled because of few archived comments on HM. But who knows, that may change in the future, and somebody may report you just like what people did during Cultural Revolution[0]. So, keep yourself anonymous under another name is always important.

In China, domestic websites are required by law to verify you and record your true personal identity (Phone number for example) when you trying to post anything on it, so you can't be anonymous. When I using that kind of website, I never do anything sensitive (Or even post anything useful).

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution

Just because it doesn't happen now, doesn't mean that will always be true. Even anonymous accounts are unsafe. ML with writing analysis and known writing samples could very likely allow attribution of even anonymous writings. May we never live in that world!

You dont need drag net fishing all the time.

You can just mine data of a person when they are of interest.

> The fact that comments cannot be deleted is increasingly unethical ...

Just assume that a few seconds after you post a comment Google, Bing, Facebook and a few other major Internet sites have scrapped your comment and are analyzing it.

And there a few aggregators that repeat the HN content and alternative UI for HN.

And some users make a local copy to run some statistics or detect dupes or just for curiosity. Some moron even made a Chrome extension to show the deleted and edited comments in HN.

And assume that the spy agencies of the major countries are making a nice backup of all your comments.

So after pressing the send button, just assume that there are 30 copies of your comment floating around.

A delete button only deletes one of them. The idea of Tweeter that you can delete a tweet and everybody really delete it is hilarious. Just assume the there is no "delete" button, it's just a "hide" button.

"Deleting" a comment is useful against a clueless neighbor that hates you because your dog barks too much. If a country with nukes hates you, they probably have the technology to save a copy of the "deleted" comment.

What you write is a reasonable precaution in 2018. Many, many HN posts and accounts were created before the Snowden revelations, before Xi came to power and before the Charlie Hebdo attack.

Many comments will be and have been mined years after their original posting. It's truly doubtful any country was logging every HN comment in the year you opened your account, for example.

"Deleting" a comment is useful against a clueless neighbor that hates you because your dog barks too much.

Probably a more common problem than spy agencies, just saying.

What if someone pretends to be you and posts incriminating posts?

I sometimes censor myself online by deciding not to comment or reply to things - both here and on other places for precisely this reason. Not fear of imprisonment or execution, just a concern that the comments might cause me hassle or grief at some point.

I might be rejected for a chinese visa someday, but that will just be a canary in the coal mine, I guess.

Totally agree with you on this point. Most westerners don't have knowledge about Chinese "hukou" system and easily mislead by false information.

Most "Chinese" online seem to be paid trolls who deliberately feed misleading and false information. Either that or they have a switch in the brain where any critisism of China leads to a nationalistic brain freeze where they regurgitate silly propoganda.

The Hukou system is broken and inconsistent. Getting mine revoked was the biggest pain the ass. I'm sure there are anecdotal evidence to support your view, but the reality is the law is very differently applied depending on where you are in China. I know from first had experience the the original poster is correct.

Most Chinese abroad (that I meet, might be biased of course) seem to be students on a sort of foreign scholarship from the Chinese state. And they are terrified of the consequences of discussing this. Probably for exactly that reason.

Or could it be because they have benefited from the system, they think it's a good thing?

For example, I rarely see expats in Asia complain about why there are so many Hollywood movies in Asia.

I'm not saying the original poster the "Chinese expat" make up a story. But he gives misleading information. Claim it's fake maybe not accurate.

1.The national ID is revoked only under some special case that the citizen is believed to be leave the country and give up the citizenship.Not for short term stay like visit/travel. For those whose Chinese national ID being revoked, they are not the equivalent of expat in Western country although technically you can insist it's expat. Again as you said the policies in China varied from place to place and even from time to time. Many emigrant such as aged family reunion emigrant can even keep their national IDs

2.China becomes a business orientated society. There's no reason to exclude passport owners to buying a train ticket online if there's a way to do it. The difficulty here is the cost of passport reader which is monopolized by only few US and European manufactures that only border control agencies can afford, while resident ID readers can be purchased from multiple domestic providers competing for quality and price. It's pure technical and economical reason, not because a regime want to do sth against its own people.

Your thoughts about somebody being paid (maybe with wu mao) is interesting and also a quite common belief

It is not difficult to make a passport reader, and the Chinese are definitely capable of that.

You can read the contents of the RFID chip using $100 off-the-shelf hardware, and the decryption key is the OCR string on the “main” page of the passport.

The piece of glass where you lay the passport, the OCR, and the case itself I’m sure any Chinese contractor could easily do as well.

This isn’t true or fair. Your comment doesn’t even follow through with the shillness claim.

Hukou is broke for sure, but airports are under control of the federal government and have no problem in letting hukou-free individuals travel on passports. My colleague was able to go mostly where I went, except Taiwan as stated above, and our work travelled to a lot of weird airports in the middle of nowheres.

That is simply not true. Maybe your friend lived in a different Hukou area. Either way, just because your friend can, does not mean every can.

This is the problem with China. Just because the system works for Jack Ma, and Xi Jinping's family, doesn't mean it works for everyone

Again, the airport doesn’t care where you got your hukou when they look at your passport.

I would say this also applies to many "non-Chinese" online. They either fall for racist stereotypes, or they have a similar switch in their brain where any mention of China means they are doing something nefarious and evil.

I'd have thought the Chinese passport and National ID would be linked into a single system: given a passport they could find the corresponding National ID (or lack or) or vice versa. Then why would they care whether you use one or the other in any particular situation?