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Comment by yakuza00000 | Hacker News Reader

Poor Chinese Millennials. They are frustrated their country turned dictatorship. They are constantly monitored by the big brother, social credit score, public cameras that have facial recognition. Their words censored by wechat, and the great firewall. If they say something wrong, they will be watched and put on no travel list. There's no moving up the ladder; they're stuck trying to buy a $500k house with a meager $1000/month income. There's no other good investment choices. They see tuhaos (country bumpkin milllionnaires) drive maseratis around. They see CEOs being disappeared by the government with each passing day, which tells them if they're ever successful, that's the fate that awaits them. Their only hope is to escape to Australia or Canada. But in the meantime they have to endure horrific pollution and rising inflation.

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I think you'll be surprised to find that many young Chinese people support their government and their hard-handed approach to social stability. I've notice that its a uniquely Western trend to apply our judgement on these issues and expect it to automatically be in line with the Chinese perspective.

Sure, and I'm sure you will find ardent supporters of North Korea regime, Hitler Germany, and Mao's regime.

It's not a uniquely Western trend to want freedom, voting rights, and justice. It's also not uniquely Western to see the regime party members get super rich and get angry.

Are there non-Western peoples who want Western things? Sure, the West has been rich and powerful and dominated the world for the last 300 years. It would be incredible for other peoples to not try to emulate the West.

But I think you're underestimating the extent to which universalism is a Western metacognitive bias that other cultures don't necessarily share [1].

The idea that there is one universal set of rules that everyone in the world can and should agree on, based on logic and rational consideration, is not really shared by all other cultures.

The Chinese response that 'it may work for the West, but it's not for us', is not a specious cop-out (the Western response being typically what do you mean there are two sets of rules!?) but probably represents the honest opinion of a large fraction of the population.

That's even before we get to the end result of democratic elections in many countries, where dictators are who the people choose.

[1] https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c742/1acd7e63519d22458b5a65...

People in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Now your house might not be entirely glass in this case, but it's not particularly sturdy either.

> They are frustrated their country turned dictatorship.

You're wrong; the majority of chinese I've talked to say that while it can be overbearing, it's given them more opportunities. I hear more things positive about the government in frank, private conversations than with most people from my country. This is a result of the recent rise in wealth. But just wait until that prosperity subsides.

I'n not arguing that there isn't bribery, censorship, or corruption. I think that western societies function better under democratic rule, but the chinese culture and political system is much different than ours. As long as the people are prosperous they won't mind the rulers, but once things go bad at a large scale the power will change.

Every country has positives and negatives, you just listed the negatives.

Have you ever been to China recently? The major cities there are 10 years ahead of the West. No one uses cash anymore in China. You use your mobile phone to pay for everything... even the street food vendor or mom and pop stores accept Alipay or WeChat Pay. Public transportation is clean and efficient; new stops (for subway) and new routes (high speed rail) are added monthly. The pace of innovation is amazing. The cities are super safe (cameras everywhere) and clean too (no homeless, no human feces, or needles on the streets like in SF).

That's what they used to say about Stalinist Russia and the fascist states.

This is a very western view of China. I'm sure many Chinese millennials would disagree with you on their prospects within China.

But if they agree, they won't be dumb enough to announce it publicly (if they're even allowed on that forum by their government censors)

gosh this sounds like a revolution in the cooking state, is this totally true? maybe not that bad I hope.

the big problems are the debt and the house bubble, one of them blows up will cause serious issues, so far so good it seems.

Last time they stood up to speak, 10,000 students were murdered in public to make an example. They might think twice now.

Except that history isn't taught in China.

If the government suppresses the history of the event in China, how are the protesters of tomorrow supposed to know to think twice?

Actually, everyone knows about it and people talk very openly about it off the record, but no one is willing to talk about it in a recorded medium with a Westerner.

don't think people born after 90's have any idea of those, or 99% of them have no idea whatsoever, so yes, history can be revised at will, at least in the short term.

btw, those students were communists protesting the privatization of collective farms among other things under Deng.

In an authoritarian state, any spontaneous popular movement is dangerous to the leadership, even if it aligns with their nominal aims (maybe especially then). The CCP has been "Communist" in name only for a long time, but Deng Xiaopings market reforms were probably the most obvious breaking point. It's not unsurprising that students who had been taught about the inevitable victory of Communism would protest against this change of course, especially given the surrounding economic instability.

Although Communism and Democracy are frequently seen as opposites in the West, Chinese propaganda doesn't hesitate to claim Democracy for themselves (there are elections after all) and volunteering in various state-adjacent organizations is encouraged. From the point of view of an upstanding party member, organizing a student rally probably seemed like the right thing to do, in good old revolutionary tradition.

Indeed. They also didn't have the omnipresent surveillance back in 1989. Hard to imagine how the student movement back then would have gained momentum using today's communication tools (with the government backdoors and all).

Surveillance and an all-powerful regime has well and truly snookered the Chinese, and it seems their autonomy will not improve for a very long time.

Not sure if I'm missing sarcasm or anything, but this sounds like the exact same problem as everywhere else in the world.

Really? Which parts of that apply to any western country? The US (where I live) certainly has its problems, but none of the things described by the original comment apply widely in the US.

The surveillance of citizens and credit scores don't apply to the US?

Or the obscene ballooning of rents without a corresponding increase in wage?

Absurd overtime expectations?

Spot on. US introduced credit scores even before China.

> The surveillance of citizens and credit scores don't apply to the US?

Strawman. Your credit score won't legally lock you out of being able to fly in the US and is not a government punishment enforced through violence. Surveillance in the US is not similar to the extreme oppression occurring in China and the almost complete lack of freedom of speech, freedom of demonstration, freedom of religion, freedom of expression, and freedom of press. This HN forum can't exist in China.

> Absurd overtime expectations?

Nope. The US works about as many hours as New Zealand, which is not infamous for very punishing work hours. It sits at the OECD average and is comparable to Italy and Canada.

> Or the obscene ballooning of rents without a corresponding increase in wage?

Non-qualified setup. That entirely depends on where you live and what your job is. If you're trying to be a janitor in San Francisco, you have a problem. Most of the US is not in fact outrageously expensive, it's quite reasonable.

In terms of using high tech for oppression, the Chinese are the world leaders by far. However, I have to admit that plenty of countries are slowly evolving towards emulating the new high tech Chinese model of tyranny.

It might be a revolution if people previously had better living conditions. But for country like China it probably looks like a big success and people want stability and not changes.

No it isn't actually true. Roughly 80% of Chinese people are happy with the direction the country is going vs 40% in the USA.

Most people don't care about censorship and the ones that do can get around it. From their point of view, it is no different to the NSA or the cameras in the UK (way more than China).

Most Chinese people I know own a house (more like a shack) BUT it is out in the countryside. They want to move to the city where apartments are more expensive and there are more opportunities.

They look at their parent's life and their life is a lot better. The ones that have enough money (not all of them) generally move to another country since they can afford it. The ones without money don't care.

The pollution is bad but at the same time China is putting more money into green energy than any other country. Every bus in the cities are being sent to the country or scrapped and replaced with electric busses (more than every other country combined).

As far as the debt goes it is something they worry about. At the same time, it is lower than the USA debt. The housing bubble is also an issue but they are building millions of apartments unlike other cities in the world.

Basically, the working class is currently better off but they have the same problem that the USA has right now. Lots of students graduating from universities without enough high paying jobs to match.

Technology scales really well so you don't need a lot of workers. You need a lot of low paid works ... same as in other countries.

> Roughly 80% of Chinese people are happy with the direction the country is going vs 40% in the USA.

An obviously fraudulent setup. There are very few things you can get 80% of people to agree on unless they feel compelled to agreement. The Chinese people no longer possess the ability to dissent. What little ability they had to do so, briefly, has been wiped out in the last five years under the new dictatorship.

Your China reference is as legitimate as Putin's approval rating.

As an American with family in Russia, I think you're underestimating the conformity of opinion developed in countries that aren't America. We're unique in the amount of diverse cultures and perspectives that we have in large numbers, and we're constantly fighting with one-another, and we hold polar opposite views.

If you look at a country like Sweden, arguments amount to "Should we give more financial assistance to refugees, or to the elderly?". Their environmental regulations, their high welfare state, their criminal law... None of that is ever debated, because they're all in near-unanimous agreement.

Russia is similar but leaning conservative, and they view Putin as the person who can accomplish their national goals and uphold their conservative values. This is how most of the rest of the world exists, and children in those countries are very likely to continue that trend, given that it's all they're exposed to. 80% approval is totally believable, with that in mind.

> No it isn't actually true. Roughly 80% of Chinese people are happy with the direction the country is going vs 40% in the USA.

This doesn't really have much do with superior governance though, does it? It has a lot do with the country's recent history.

a) It help government approval tremendously when you can censor bad news and disproportionately cover positive news.

b) It's also really difficult to assess how much credit the Chinese government actually deserves for China's economic success. Every other old-world power that has embraced capitalism has achieved similar success. China has also had the benefit of playing their economic catch-up from 1980-present, starting from an essentially pre-20th century economy. Is there really some amazing government wizardry (that couldn't be replicated by any of the governments of developed countries) in achieving immense growth by applying highly advanced (relative to yours) foreign technology to your gigantic populace through a market system?

Is censorship, stoking nationalism, and violation of human rights really the magic formula? I'm really skeptical there.

c) It's easy to overlook the immense inequality in China, both in economic terms and in terms of human rights. If you're a Han Chinese living in a first-tier city, you likely have a very different experience with the government that a Uighur or Tibetan. The CCP, to stay in power, really only needs the support of the Han population (they make up 90% of the population). This distorts incentives for treatment of minority groups significantly. If it's good for Han, it's good for the CCP.

On the other hand, the whole "censor the bad news" thing means that Han Chinese don't necessarily hear about how minority ethnic groups in Xinjiang or Tibet are treated... removing the historically most powerful feedback mechanism for improving the treatment of the oppressed. Which, obviously, is the dominant ethnic group being aware of the plight of minority groups, feeling human sympathy, and calling for change.

Worse still, as China's sphere of influence grows and yet the censorship remains, the same dynamic will occur--the CCP is incentivized to keep the Han Chinese population happy, and the Han population feels none of the guilt that a population with a free press provides when reporting on the its government's less-than-acceptable actions elsewhere.

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I'm happy for the Chinese people and their economic success and progress so far, but it's dangerous to overpraise the its government model given the misaligned incentives that exist. I understand that rapid change can be dangerous and believe steady progress may be preferable, but that's a very different position than promoting China's governmental model as something to be praised and replicated.

I'm still on the fence if it is superior governance (corruption is common). Although the same could be said of the USA's economy. Most of the growth in the USA is just random luck from the end of world war 2 and then riding the wave of growth without screwing it up (much).

The point I was trying to make is don't expect a revolution any time soon. They are fairly happy since life is generally improving for "most" Chinese people.

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