Buzzfeed journalist denied China visa following coverage of Xinjiang crackdown
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If they plan to stay in bed with China and all that entails, it might not be a bad idea to formally separate HN off from YC (for the sake of YC and the sake of HN). The Chinese authorities are extremely sensitive about certain things, easily insulted, and unforgiving about the lack of compliance. They've barred far larger targets for far less than the discussions that go on here.
God forbid they allow Chinese moderators on HN or some type of Chinese-centric oversight
>They've barred far larger targets for far less than the discussions that go on here.
Can you give any example of China successfully censoring any large media companies outside of their own territory?
Certainly a scary future.
Is there an example of a western brand that has yet gained significant traction in China? My understanding is that unless you are a Chinese company, your chances of competing in this “number one” market are slim. Businesses obsess at the population numbers but ignore the reality.
https://www.google.com/search?q=buick+china+popularity&oq=bu...
The big European luxury goods brands are doing a wild business in China. [1][2][3][4]
If you want to make a lot of money on China as a foreigner, you want to be selling a luxury brand product rather than offering a local service (eg fast food chain). That might be an iPhone or a Gucci bag or a Mercedes. Owning certain intellectual property, such as characters, can be equally lucrative (eg Marvel and Mickey Mouse). Nike and Jordan Brand have done a great business in China.
KFC in China for example, isn't controlled by Yum Brands US. It's controlled by Yum China, minority owned by Yum US. McDonald's has a small sliver of its own business in China.
Disney only owns 43% of its big new $5.5b park in Shanghai, the most popular park in China. Wang Jianlin had touted that he'd personally chase Disney from China, and that his parks would dominate instead. Disney really had no choice but to acquiesce and partner up. They'll make a lot of money from it and they had to cede control to do that.
Tesla is building a factory in China for the same reason everyone else has, there is no great alternative. You have to give local Chinese partners their big cut, or else.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/l-oreal-g...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-20/hermes-ex...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-24/lvmh-shin...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/luxury-ba...
KFC and McD owned Chinese franchises for decades before spinning them out for financial reasons.
Yum and MCD were forced into partnering locally and giving up total ownership of those businesses.
If you're a German company you can freely set up a US version of your business and own it outright. Nintendo doesn't have to give up eg 70% of its stake in Nintendo of America. That's not the case if you're MCD trying to operate in China.
You said "Wang Jianlin had touted that he'd personally chase Disney from China, and that his parks would dominate instead. Disney really had no choice but to acquiesce and partner up." I pointed out that the partnership with Shanghai predated Wang's boast by many years. If you didn't mean to imply some kind of causal relationship between the two you may want to clarify.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
That's highly unlikely given the current state, as US consumer is is about 1/3 of the world's household consumption https://www.selectusa.gov/largest-market, and is growing 3% this quarter. China has alot of debt problems, and will suffer heavily in a trade war. About 45% of Chinese GDP is in 'investment', where probably half is waste (continued state investments into expensive-to-maintain, rarely used rails, bridge, and buildings). Whereas for a developed country like US, it's about 20% investment (70% in consumption).
Population wise, US is augmented by steady immigration and will increase to 400 million in 2040, 500 million in 2100. China hit its peak in birthing in 1970s, and has been experiencing a steady decline since, projected to hit max 1.4 billion people in 2030 and then go to around 1 billion or below in 2100. US average income is still 7 times the Chinese average income.
IMO, China's hit its peak already in 2008 and is in decline, whereas US has recovered from 2008 and is rising
This seems like almost the reverse of the conclusion you're trying to support. Investments in development and infrastructure are a good mechanism for long-term economic growth, and it's not clear that a trade war will hurt China worse than it hurts the US.
That's true up to a point where the infrastructure is facilitating economic movements and transactions. China has already gone past that point to where they are building infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure, not considering whether those rails and buildings will produce enough income to support maintenance in the next 5-10 years. There is such a thing as diminishing rate of returns (otherwise every economy would just keep building infrastructures forever) Currently, for every yuan Chinese government directly spends, it now only gets 1 yuan of return back, and it is declining.
As for the trade war, I think it is pretty evident who is winning, I won't go too much details into it; you can google every data around the aftermath of the tariffs.
That of course depends on the infrastructure situation in question. Japan vaporized trillions of dollars on infrastructure and it did absolutely nothing of consequence to boost their growth. Infrastructure wasn't their problem as it turned out, so each follow-on dollar they plowed into additional unnecessary infrastructure spending produced declining rates of return. China is guilty of plenty of that so far.
The US is the least trade dependent major economy. It would benefit from shifting some imports to increased domestic production, such as in the steel and aluminum industries. It's better to pay slightly higher prices if necessary and to produce domestic investment with quality blue collar jobs. That's not a universal of course, there's little benefit to the US trying to manufacture $20 toasters or $3 playing decks of cards or $1 shoe laces by hand.
It's ideal for the US to consume less and produce more. European nations boost savings rates with very high VAT taxes. Tariffs are another means to accomplish the exact same end, except it's even better because it bolsters domestic production at the same time that it reduces consumption by raising the cost of consumption.
So not only is there an extreme lobsided imbalance between the benefit in US / China trade due to the trade deficit there, the US would benefit from fewer goods pouring in from China in all scenarios because of the gains in domestic manufacturing (even if they're modest) + domestic investment, and lowered consumption. Less capital flows overseas, more stays home.
There's always the scenario that comes up of: what if China cuts off something that isn't easily replaced such as smart phone manufacturing, or similar. Other countries can easily pick up the slack, such as Vietnam which is a booming electronics manufacturer (and makes a lot of smart phones now).
On the flip side, China can't operate at all without US tech. They'd have to turn to stealing it. The rest of the world would largely proceed to banish those then-illegal Chinese products accordingly (particularly Europe, Latin America, Japan, AU/NZ, Mexico, Canada, etc).
Can we all just get off our high horse? We literally have concentration camps at our borders and have bombed hundreds of civilians. We don't get to claim the moral high ground.
And I wouldn't dare compare US's detention center for illegal immigrants with the camp for millions of people detained without violating any laws. For instance, most countries have detention centers for illegal immigrants.
I would imagine that muslims, people from Hong Kong and Tibet, Japan, Vietnam, people that would prefer democracies over authoritarian governments, libertarians, techies that treasure freedom on the net, would hesitate and would not apply to YC for moral reasons.
for each applicant do select count(*) from people_who_pissed_us where social_username = applicant.fb.username?
(1) search for the applicant on google/baidu
(2) if the searches reveal support or sympathy for dissident or seditious activity, deny the visa application.
I think it makes sense to separate local, state, and federal governments, but there's surprisingly little government data sharing between even federal government agencies, even when there's jurisdiction overlap.
i guess they are quite thorough only when it comes down to dissent (though my wife in gov job hit immediately career ceiling after marrying me and everyone around her even newcomers kept growing except her, sure just coincidence /s and we both can't still really publicly say what we want because she has there parents and rest of family)
After switching of The Great Firewall for ones own browser, that pesky thing blocks useful information.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/world/asia/china-internet...
I remember in the mid-2000s that online-journalists whose sites had millions of impressions per month were denied journalism visas because they weren’t traditional established print newspapers - then there was a debate about the difference between a blogger and a journalist.
I’d like to know if a non-journalist who maintained a very popular blog, such as an influential software engineer, who occasionally blogs about political or topical stories, constitutes a journalist or not. If they’re in the country for an industry conference but write about political events on their blog while they’re in the country have they violated their visa?
"The term "resident foreign journalists" means career journalists who are dispatched by foreign media organizations to be stationed in China for a period of not less than six months for news coverage and reporting."
http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/ywzn/mtyw/press_1/t944225.h...
A good question. Consider also that a blogger, lacking an influential institution such as Buzzfeed or the NYT at their back, may find themselves in much deeper trouble than a denied visa. Arrest, prison, espionage charges, etc. have happened to foreigners, including televised confessions:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/world/asia/china-confessi...
It's a high-tech surveillance state presiding over 1.5 billion people with a history of crushing (quite literally, sadly) or 'disappearing' any signs of dissent.
Anecdotally: I once partnered with a Chinese cultural institute for a big event and ended up having my Gmail hacked as part of the compensation. They gotta know you're not a Tibetan separatist after all!
Any idea how they hacked your Gmail account? MITM/intercepting your password? How did you find out? Did Google inform you some IP in a bizarre location signed in?
Yep, a warning similar to this one, but in Gmail: https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/Google-Extends-S...
Actually it’s just that if you want to be a foreign journalist and live in China, you need to apply for a special Journalist visa. The process of application for those is much more difficult than other types of visa.
Which makes it very easy to select which media to approve.
"But critics say [positive gestures from China towards Uighur] are overshadowed by the government’s more repressive measures, which have fueled the propaganda of a small number of extremists, including the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a radical Uighur militant group, some of whose adherents are believed to have been active in Syria and Afghanistan. According to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, TIP released an issue of its online magazine on Aug. 29, calling for its fighters in Syria to prepare for future battle against the Chinese state in East Turkestan, a name many Uighurs use to refer to Xinjiang.".
The last sentence there struck me as unusual given what that implies: [2]
"The medieval Persian toponym "Turkestan" and its derivatives were not used by the local population of the greater region, and China had its own name for an overlapping area since the Han Dynasty as Xiyu, with the parts controlled by China termed Xinjiang from the 18th century onward. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr, which means "six cities" in Uyghur.
Starting in the 20th century, Uyghur separatists and their supporters used East Turkestan (or "Uyghurstan") as an appellation for the whole of Xinjiang, or for a future independent state in present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (presumably with Ürümqi as its capital). They reject the name of Xinjiang because of an allegedly Chinese perspective reflected in the name and prefer East Turkestan to emphasize connection to other westerly Turkic groups. However, even in nationalist writing, East Turkestan retained its older, more narrow geographical meaning. In China, the term has negative connotations because of its origins in European colonialism and present use by militant groups."
[1] - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/the-police-stat...
She's lucky they were nice enough to wait out the rest of her visa instead of revoking it and deporting her on the spot. Shrewd move on their part for that, btw. If she was a citizen they would have just disappeared or killed her.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/22/why-are-people-disappear...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-deals-with-dissent...
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/11/28/chinese-dissidents...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/china-still-gathering-orga...
(full disclosure: I used to work with the reporter, but that was many years ago)
There's been an active contingent of China Twitter loudly saying for the past few months that academics and journalists should be speaking out more about Xinjiang because the likelihood of visa revoking has been vastly overstated. Recent reporting seems to have touched a special nerve and the reactions are far more extreme than other negative China stories that journalists have weathered in the past.
There were 3 at the time of this posting with the usual bothersiderisms, etc. One even went full "Sharia law in the US!"
I was unaware that discussing astroturfing, trolling, and propaganda on HN was prohibited. Apologies, I will refrain from calling attention to it in the future.
I know it looks and feels super obvious, but I assure you this is an illusion. On the internet, people are orders of magnitude too quick to leap from "random user with obviously wrong opinion" to "obvious bot/astroturfer/paid shill". It's a crazy bias. We look into this stuff all the time, and 99% of the time it's just that some people disagree with you. More than 99% actually.
Even when we ban an account for trolling, that's almost always someone whose sincere passions about a topic led them to violate the guidelines and not stop when we asked them to stop. That's not astroturfing. People are just very passionate about divisive issues.
This is “shocking”
It might come as a surprise by American journalists are not entitled for a visa from China and I wish more countries would crackdown on click-bate rags like Buzzfeed.
This is whataboutism. You might be suprised to learn that I can and do oppose both.
> click-bate rags like Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed's business model is to use the stupid memes and "Which Disney princess are you?" polls to subsidize serious investigative journalism and not have to keep it behind a paywall. You can agree or disagree with this choice, but it's an interesting alternative to requiring a subscription and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. The article in question, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/the-police-stat..., is not "clickbait" in any sense: it is well-researched, well-written, and informative.
Americans outraging that their journalist was denied is nothing but very imperialistic attitude.
It took me a long time after their move towards occasionally funding "real" journalism before I was willing to even click a link to their URL.
So what ? They are not entitled to a Chinese visa.