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Comment by ciguy | Hacker News Reader

No surprise that countries with the most oppressive internet surveillance and censorship also rank highly in self reported satisfaction. Chinese citizens probably got a boost to their social credit score for answering positively on this survey.

I was just in Beijing and Shanghai for a few weeks and almost everyone I talked to in private admitted that they expect an economic crash in the near future. So this survey is essentially useless for countries where privacy on the internet is not expected and dissent is punished.

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> almost everyone I talked to in private admitted that they expect an economic crash in the near future

That is currently the same in every country I talked to citizens. Not a very good way of measuring.

Your observations about China might very well be correct, but this is not an interesting point imho. When I speak to my friends in China they worry about the economy but they do actually believe their country is going in the right direction generally. Ofcourse my sample of the populous is limited: I speak to tech people only, but they do not care about the things you or I think they care or should care about. They are content with the way it is going.

There’s no way you can look at the social credit shit they have going on and say “uh yeah everything looks fine!”

People in cults also say they’re doing fine...

That's the whole point of the survey, as I read it. You can't look at it and say it's fine, but they do. That is important to understand.

As a counterpoint, the US polls the lowest concern in the world for poverty and inequality. Yet there's no way in my mind you can look at inequality in the states and say "yeah, that's fine", but over 4 in 5 Americans polled said exactly that.

Of course they say that it's fine. You would too if you could be punished by your government for saying otherwise.

How would the US government punish someone who complains about poverty and inequality in the states?

I'm not talking about the Americans, I'm talking about the Chinese saying things are going well, which is what the first part of the comment I'm replying to was referring to. Then they shoehorned Americans into the argument for some reason. I'm saying that I doubt this is just a matter of the Chinese being blind to the issues in China. It's a matter of them bring unwilling to risk speaking out.

Here is an observation that I have made: its always the worst countries that are the most patriotic. Nobody pledges allegiance to the flag in the Netherlands or Norway.

> There’s no way you can look at the social credit shit they have going on and say

I am not saying that, people who are born and raised and live there say so (the small sample I speak to a lot). I find it hard to judge as an outsider although it definitely does not look ok.

> There’s no way you can look at the social credit shit they have going on and say “uh yeah everything looks fine!”

Social credit is more than just a tool for oppression. (There's also more than one possible implementation currently in trial, but that applies to all of them.) Because the vast majority of Chinese citizens are not anti-government activists, any such survey will be dominated by those who can finally get a line of credit for their small business. Even a million Uyghurs in internment camps don't make a dent when you're just looking at average satisfaction.

The Uyghurs in prison were not available to participate in study. Nor to comment.

Even after factoring in the worst estimates of those detained in Uyghur reeducation camps, America's incarceration rates are still over 3x China's.

Uyghur population is less than one percent of China's population. Results won't change even if they are able to participate.

>People in cults also say they’re doing fine...

Yep, and people in religions say they're doing fine. Some of them probably are doing fine.

I admit that this survey could be biased because of people being afraid of their answers being monitored, and also that people in a country like China are probably somewhat brainwashed by the censorship in the media.

But you have to keep your mind open to the possibility that a human might balance all things in mind and with a calm disinterested choice decide that it's worth giving up privacy and freedom for a more peaceful, orderly, and efficient society. I know those aren't the values of many Americans, but Americans sometimes seem strangely unable to imagine that any human being could possibly have different values to theirs.

I am sure if you ask any current or past tirant, all of them will tell you that they just want a "more peaceful, orderly, and efficient society". Hell, even Genghis Khan would say that

You're missing the point. I should have left the anecdote out as it's clearly distracting from what I really wanted to get across. I'm saying that this type of poll is never going to be accurate in an authoritarian regime where citizens know they're being watched.

The anecdote was just an observation and as such should of course be taken with some skepticism.

They didn't miss the point. Yes your anecdote is "meh" because the economy being about to crash doesn't necessarily mean you think your country is going in the wrong direction. But claiming you won't get an honest answer from those people seems just as flawed. It's a pretty general question. If you download the PDF you'll see there were a bunch of more precise questions asked and in some of them China did rank Quite high, like the environment one.

I'd actually argue that just claiming Chinese people are brainwashed would be a better explanation, but as has been said in other comments here, I think it's mostly that they have very different priorities in life. For example, privacy traditionally never has been as an important issue even before the internet and everything, so things like that social credit system just don't appear as crazy to them as to us.

This different priorities argument comes out every time China is discussed. It's tired, simplistic and overused by people who want to feel culturally enlightened and hand wave away the possibility of issues in China. Anyone who's been to China knows they value different things, of course they do, every culture has different values.

Just because someone doesn't particularly care about censorship and surveillance doesn't mean they don't adjust their behavior accordingly though. If you read the PDF China ranked highly on precisely the questions which are officially approved government positions, such as the need for greener tech and better environmental management.

> This different priorities argument comes out every time China is discussed.

So you're trying to invalidate the argument by saying it's mentioned to often? I don't think this is how this works.

> Just because someone doesn't particularly care about censorship and surveillance doesn't mean they don't adjust their behavior accordingly though.

Of course they do, and if you knew Chinese culture you'd clearly see that. The average person trying to make a living might not, but it's the same in the west. Who even cared about the snowden revelations? Certainly not your bus driver. When bringing up the argument how companies like Facebook and google know more about you than your best friend, and government access is just one court order away, how many people counter you with "well I got nothing to hide"? I'd go as far as saying I can at least give the Chinese gvt the props for being upfront about their censorship and surveillance. Before snowden, if you claimed the NSA would be running a huge surveillance program tapping into the country's and world's largest internet exchanges, you got a confused look or were told to put your tinfoil hat back on.

Bottom line is, people in China genuinely think their country is heading in the right direction and the vast majority doesn't care about censorship and surveillance, anyone who's been to China for more than just a couple weeks quick travelling and didn't just spend time with other expats would quickly have learned that. Whether they truly understand the implications of this is an entirely different matter and not even part of the survey. But then again most westerners also don't, they just happen to live in a very free environment and don't realize what they got themselves there, or just don't care (Facebook point from above, voter turnouts).

Being a tourist is far from being an authority on a culture

When did I ever claim to be an authority on anything? I'm making the observation that citizens who know they're being surveilled online are unlikely to respond to this type of poll negatively, affecting the accuracy of the results.

I threw an interesting personal anecdote in there as an example but at no time did I make an authority claim. So I don't know what your point is.

He/she is trying to point out your hasty assumption that Chinese people share the same societal and cultural values as you. In reality they may not care much about surveillance and censorship at all.

Whether someone likes surveillance is one question. Whether it discourages them from expressing certain opinions is another.

When did I ever say that the Chinese cared about censorship or surveillance? I know you think you're culturally enlightened by bringing up this tired argument. You're not.

Anyone who's been to China knows that the average person in China doesn't particularly care about privacy, we're not arguing that here. What I'm saying is that regardless of whether someone cars about it, it does affect their behavior.

There are techniques to ask sensitive questions on a survey without implicating individual respondents and still obtain useful answers on the aggregate [1]. I can only imagine Ipsos, being a survey firm, would have used some of these techniques.

I would be careful about generalizing from anecdata. Unless the people you talk to come from every strata in society and your sample is representative, your conclusion may be prone to sample bias.

[1] https://imai.fas.harvard.edu/talk/files/PolMeth10.pdf

Whether there are techniques is irrelevant, whether people trust that they'll not face consequences due to their answer is much more important. You can reassure them as much as you want - who really would want to risk real-world consequences for a random survey?

Alternatively there might be somewhere in the fine print how Chinese participants were invited/selected - it wouldn't be the first such data where PRC manages to manipulate the sampled group to get a positive result (see eg PISA).

> who really would want to risk real-world consequences for a random survey?

Why not? We don't know the baseline behavior and expectations of the respondents.

I think we differ on where our subjective Bayesian priors are situated.

I'm more at the 50/50 mark in that I think the results could be biased but at the same time, there's no necessity that they must be. Whereas most people on this thread automatically assume a priori that the survey results surely are biased, because China.

>I can only imagine Ipsos, being a survey firm, would have used some of these techniques.

You're giving them too much credit. Unless this was explicitly mentioned in the methodology (there's a methodology section at the end, and it's not there), I'm going to assume that the questions were directly asked.

> No surprise that countries with the most oppressive internet surveillance and censorship also rank highly in self reported satisfaction. Chinese citizens probably got a boost to their social credit score for answering positively on this survey.

How would the Chinese government determine what citizens vote on in anonymous internet polls? Supposedly, Ipsos Online Panel uses https connections and encrypts them using tls. More importantly, does Chinese citizens believe what they vote on in anonymous surveys affects their credit scores?

It doesn't matter whether the government is able to do so, more important is whether citizens have a reasonable expectation that the government can and does do so.

Many Chinese people will respond with positive results knowing the survey is held by a foreign agency, not because they are being oppressed, but because they get suspicious and defensive when being asked, and they don't like to see their country "lose face".

Also the majority of Chinese people do think China is on the right path, especially after seeing what's happening now in the US and Europe.

An average Chinese person doesn't think about current oppressive scheme as "bad", because we've had worse no more than 2 generations ago. They may even think an authoritative regime is better than your democracy. Normally they don't feel oppressed in their daily life.

The well educated, and those who have the privilege, opportunity, and capability to talk to a foreigner like you, have different opinions of course.

> No surprise that countries with the most oppressive internet surveillance and censorship also rank highly in self reported satisfaction

You can look at other sources, like the "Global Livability Index" [1] - it's voted on by the residents of each city, and does a great job of ranking what it's actually like to live in various countries and cities.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Liveability_Ranking

One may also conclude that not all the people around the world care about the things that Westerners care about. People are generally happy if they have growing wages and access to good infrastructure.

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