In China, an App About Xi Is Impossible to Ignore – Even If You Try
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
>Many employers now require workers to submit daily screenshots documenting how many points they have earned.
That is some scary stuff.
They don't need to integrate it into the social credit system if employers use it and give them the same results.
The struggle session returns: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session
Scary indeed. Imagine a China as tightly controlled as NK but far far more powerful.
They write the software themselves. They make the devices themselves.
The West has 0 leverage.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/01/17/google-misses-out-on-billion...
Why? Someone should press Tim Cook about this.
This would do nothing to stop this, but might really be a problem for them.
How about trade policies that take into account human rights?
Unless you include western politicians and newspapers among "their tools". In that case, you're right, we have no hope of exercising leverage.
Well, we can think freely and innovate, a problem China seems to struggle with. You can't command people to be inventive. You can, however, command people to copy other people's ideas.
OTOH Soviet Union sucked at innovation everywhere else, which was costly. Inability to feed the population when still keeping up in the arms race is what killed Soviet Union.
China is seemingly quite far from such a situation, though.
Yes, in many industries they are still heavily stealing IP but the notion that China is just copying the west is outdated. An increasing amount of intellectuals stays in China instead of emigrating to the west. They already are world leaders in key areas like computer hardware (shenzen), and are working very hard at becoming world leaders in other areas.
There are two futures ahead of us: either the regime falling and China ruling over the world like the US did in the 20th and early 21st century, or the regime remaining in power and China's head of state ascending to global dictator.
Doubt it. To conquer the world these days, you'd have to have an anti-ICBM defense system that can stop thousands of nukes coming at you in every direction. The technological gap between the attacking country and the other one has to be absolutely massive for that too happen. I doubt the US with NATO would even risk that against north korea even with our massive technological advantage.
Edit: When I said "To conquer the world these days", i was referring to the original comment about one country becoming a "global dictator".
Yeah, nukes have led to a new phase of power conflicts where you don't have open style warfare any more amongst nuclear powers. I didn't mean that. The US didn't have to wage war against every country on earth after WW2 to become as powerful as it is now. The cold war, CIA, economic advancements, etc. were enough.
I just see two problems: Western economies being stagnant while China expanding influence across the world with the OBOR project.
It took hundreds of years for a small island north of Europe to build a global world spanning empire. But eventually, they were successful. China once had the capability to do this themselves but they decided not to, leaving the stage to the europeans. China hasn't even looked anywhere beyond their own country until a few years ago. They literally only have one military basis outside of the mainland, in Djibouti next to the bases of a bunch of other countries. They command far more wealth and power than England did when they started their colonial project so I'm sure that China will be able to pull it off far more quickly.
The US isn't even remotely close to a global dictator so what is your point?
> Western economies being stagnant while China expanding influence across the world with the OBOR project.
Western economies are definitely not stagnant and China's economy should be taken with a grain of salt.
> They command far more wealth and power than England did when they started their colonial project so I'm sure that China will be able to pull it off far more quickly.
Nominally sure, but relatively is what matters and China "has" 2/3rd the GDP of both the EU and the US currently. Add in other countries like South Korea, Japan, the UK, Canada, and Australia which are all more closely aligned with US economic policy and defense treaties like NATO and the Five Eyes; I find it hard to see China colonial projects having much effect.
Or you'd just need to do what the US did in the Cold War to become—for a time—the sole superpower: run a global race and have the opposition spend themselves into collapse competing with you, and swoop in and pick up the pieces; you probably need a couple cycles of that to establish durable de facto control, but if you've got the population and resources and aren't just leveraging an advantaged industrial position that the competition will close over time at the outset, being able to do multiple cycles while growing an advantage isn't implausible.
The US current superpower status is in no way what I would consider "conquer the world" nor the original quote I cited which was for being a "global dictator"
It’s not outdated. You’ve contradicted yourself in the same sentence. You would have be right if XJ didn’t cripple China with his own vanity. China’s destiny went from future global innovator to staying a giant copier as XJ’s power rose.
Innovation cannot exist with lack of free speech and free thought.
> In many schools and colleges across the country, viewing the Pariksha pe Charcha 2.0 event broadcast was compulsory.
> The University Grants Commission required colleges to upload information on students and teachers who viewed the programme — along with photo and viedographic evidence of participation — on its University Activity Monitoring Portal by 5 p.m. on Tuesday.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/do-not-treat-your-war...
> "I entered politics rather late. A lot of people are not able to accept it"
The inspirational stories he relates to children are based around how the BJP, his party, bounced back in his home state of Gujarat.
> He recalled how the Jana Sangh, the predecessor of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), lost all the seats in a Gujarat election. "They had 103 candidates. Whoever wanted to fight was given ticket. Out of 103, the security deposit of 99 was forfeited. "Four candidates survived. With their deposit money, they had a party and distributed sweets."
https://www.business-standard.com/article/current-affairs/no...
He also takes digs at opposition leaders by hinting that they are dyslexic (and implying that dyslexia entails mental retardation) when interacting with students who bring up dyslexia with him.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/pms-dyslexia-remar...
On top of this, the events are mandatory to attend. The punishment for not attending mandatory events in Indian schools goes beyond shaming. Students know they will lose every discretionary grade available to teachers if they push back.
I think the article has exaggerated the situation.
In essence they are the ones the party needs to somewhat pander to, coz the party relies on them.
> Chinese readers will enjoy the comments in the Issues section - there's some interesting debate and also shows evidence of the cat and mouse game that people are playing with authorities.
Hi! Could you, or anyone else, translate any one of the issues to give an example? This seems super interesting and I would really want to see it :)
Until I remembered the eye-gaze detection feature in modern phones.
Ugh. One day they will watch to see that you're smiling, looking properly at the screen, heart rate comfortable, vasodilation and skin-sweat reflectivity within expected ranges, and have a normalised emotional response to key messages. Not daydreaming about something else as you watch.
Who do we blame for developing this tech without safeguards, and how do we ensure it is not abused like this?
This sounds just like an example of biased sample fallacy, so I ask you to do this experiment with your Chinese friends. See if they criticize CCP or Xi and what their judgement about the policies are.
(1) As the frontier of democracy, Taiwan suffers from all kinds of attack from China every day, from physical to cyber ones. To counter that, a retired military officer wrote a series of blogs(2) to mentor all Taiwanese the right ways to fight psychological warfare against China. The main donts is exactly "don't criticize CCP or Xi ... it has no or even negative effects."
(2) The title of the series is somehow pessimistic: "Lost without a Fight: On Cross-Strait Psychological Warfare." All written in Traditional Chinese: https://www.thenewslens.com/article/105952
Chinese gov is just perfecting the tool.
It's true that it's not as pervasive, but the bigger the city, the bigger impact it has on renting and other activities.
I feel like people try so hard to find parallels they minimize systems that are far more evil.
But Its met with a weird “but hey OUR version was good!”
because only people named Muhammad would get accidentally found on the list
My world is a lot more collaborative so all parties can be criticized, I dont live in a world where I have to choose sides
Low consensus wouldnt be met with explicit responses
Credit score is dictated by usage of your lines, how regularly you pay back loans, and whether you've been late or defaulted on debt. It's a numerical function derived from your financial activities - what you do in your private life has nothing to do with it. While it may be uncomfortable knowing there's a number out there tracking how trustworthy financial institutions think you are, they exist for a good reason. Prior to credit scores, getting loans essentially amounted to knowing the right people (and more often than not, being white).
Edit -- dear downvoter: thank you for your dedication to the global supply chain. iPhones just got a few cents cheaper thanks to your diligent efforts. Let's all go back to US political camps calling each other fascists, and ignore the trading partner with the actual concentration camps.
Which is why they came up with the social credit system and this. It’s a desperation move. The Chinese aren’t stupid. The regime will fall sooner or later. They always do.
It’s a timebomb.
And you can’t have a capitalist economy while having a communist government. It’s a non sequitur.
It's possible, but vanishingly rare, outside the sense in which non-Leninist/Maoist socialists describe Leninist/Maoist regimes as “state capitalist”, but while there is a case that that is a legitimate label, it mostly relies on “state capitalism” being a different-but-related system to traditional capitalism (which one might label “private capitalism”.)
> China’s government isn’t very communist these days.
China’s economic system is more like the form of corporatism found in fascism (whether the political system is otherwise fascist is a discussion for a different time) than either communism or capitalism, though if one subscribed to the idea that traditional Leninist/Maoist systems are “state capitalism”, that form of corporatism could be seen as a hybrid capitalism that shares elements of both state and private capitalism, but again that requires a broader-than-standard definition of capitalism, where the standard definition is specifically private capitalism.
253%, 105% and 48% debt to gdp in the world's 3 biggest economies. Guess who's who.
https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-t...
Ironic that the very existence of this phenomenon is a show of weakness.
What's funny is that you need to do similar things when working in large US corporations. In some you have aggravating HR training videos, in others you have actual personality cults.
We know in the west that new ways to communicate have unseen negative consequences. I think there is real danger that stressing people like this backfires spectacularly against Xi at some point.
The 'central control' thing seemed to be working there for a while for a few decades, I wonder if we're seeing the end of the 'golden leap' what with lower growth, problems abroad, and internal shenanigans like this.
I also wonder how many Chinese actually 'get this' program, and how many see through it for what it is.
It's one thing to have bits of propaganda into film and TV, it's another thing altogether to force people to do some 'daily shenanigan'.
"We're sorry, but this URL is not supported by outline.com"
In India, we too have similar app based on our Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi, and the app is called as Namo App. On the other hand, The DTH providers have also launched a dedicated channel on him, known as Namo TV.
The use of the Chinese app is compulsary for many to teach themselves about Xi's ideology and propaganda. They gamify this by scoring the "player" and placing them on a leaderboard. The scores they receive on this app most probably are and will directly or indirectly affect their actual social credit scores. That is dystopic.
The NaMo app/television channel is just mode of communicate to the larger mass regarding the party's ideas and news updates.
How many Americans check Facebook or Twitter before they get out of bed on the morning?
It’s interesting to see how things are framed when they come out of China. Maybe this app is as bad as it seems, but things like the above quote make me wonder.
It's really not even close to equivalent.
How many western news media devices track your participation and score it to report to the government? Do you feel pressure to open up Twitter and say good things about the govt?
Not really sure what your point is, there's no western equivalent for this app and making any kind of comparison to any social media network is silly. It sounds like this app itself is nefarious in its intent and scope, and should be described in such terms.
Don't want to presume or attack anything about you personally, but your argument is despicable.
At least as far as I've seen, this is roughly the same general alarmist, sensational tone that you'll see in NYT's articles about the (very real) dangers of tech in the West.
> Should I ignore manipulative writing
Hard to, these days. Most news is manipulative, most news is slanted. We're all kind of stuck trying to extract facts from the morass of spin, and form our worldviews based on that. And of course it's fine to point out manipulation as you see it -- I apologize for calling that despicable.
But: reread that sentence you quoted. It's not talking about the "mundane event" of checking an app in the morning. It's telling you about the noteworthy trend of a state-run media in a fascist country celebrating such mundane habits. The NYT is calling out "stilted language" and "manipulative writing" as it were, albeit indirectly and without direct citation or translation, so it's the NYT's word against the People's Daily's. Whom do you trust more? (I'm as disappointed as the next guy in the NYT these past few years, but I really hope your answer to this question isn't a false equivalency).
Your claim was that the NYT was reporting on mundane events. In fact, the New York Times in that sentence is reporting on how the Chinese media manipulates and guilts the public by normalizing & praising extreme usage. Perhaps "manipulative" is a little strong, but it is indisputably an advertisement/endorsement, and all advertising involves some degree of scripting/manipulation.
The "whom do you trust more" is relevant only because the NYT did not quote from specific articles or broadcasts, so we're stuck trusting their synopsis. (And, as you've been saying, filtering out / correcting for their habitual biases).
And -- I wouldn't sign onto your strawman suggestion that one should ignore bias if the targets deserve it. The current US president deserves far worse than stilted reporting, but that doesn't stop me from being peeved at the media for throwing out their duty to truth whenever there's any slight chance to tear him down. My visceral reaction is to how you turn around the article with your initial "How many Americans...". This feels like deflecting the issue with a false comparison.
If you’re saying that they’re just repeating the People’s Daily in an attempt to show that China is manipulating people with weird language for mundane things, I think that’s way too subtle to belong in ostensibly objective reporting without something explicitly calling that out. I also don’t trust the translation to accurately portray the character of the original. It’s extremely common for English media to use stilted translations of mundane Chinese phrases (and I’m sure this happens with other languages too) in order to portray something as exotic or weird. See the recent “Breed Ready” nonsense for an example. That bad translation originated with the programmers, but none of the reporting mentioned that it was in fact a really bad translation of a fairly mundane term.
> bizarre language
Again, I contend that this is how NYT typically talks about all countries' social media these days, but this is of course my subjective impression.
> Too subtle a point
Point conceded, you're right. I was a little too eager to turn your own verbiage around on you.
The "BreedReady" translation is really bad, I agree. Hadn't seen that. What's the original hanzi? Like, if you're reporting on a country, you should know how its compound words are formed. But it's the nature of the 140-character dystopia that the most shocking translation is the one that goes viral.