Comment by kumosawa | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kumosawa | Hacker News Reader

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In China mainland, there is a censor tech named Great Firewall.(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall?wprov=sfti1) It just cut off the connection between China and the World Internet by blocking famous website like Twitter, Facebook etc. Only the people have eagerness of finding truth will use anti-blocking tech like VPN to find information by themselves. Of course, it’s inconvenience and sometimes not working because of outer server banned. Not sure how many people could get information by themselves. But it’s pessimistic for people living in China how willing to find the information.

Recently, because the propagation by gov, the citizens even think the GFW is protecting them from harmful information and the outside force want breaking up China rather than censorship itself. Especially, this time the protest is propagated as a riot planned by western country. Being lack of information, most citizens support gov’s standpoint.

So maybe not ignorant, just like not conscious, as a result of being accustomed.

> Being lack of information, most citizens support gov’s standpoint.

NO, because of the censorship, we do not know how many people actually support gov’s standpoint. Your statement is pure speculation and does not have any factual basis.

The Chinese government will not allow any professional organization to conduct and publish a survey like: "Do you support the censorship?", or "Do you support protest in HK?", or "Do you support shooting students in the Tianman Square", or "Do you support Xi to be the Chairman forever?"

Even the Chinese government itself does not know how many people support it and they fear the number is in fact not small, that is exactly why they need censorship in the first place.

One of the most commonly used words in their propaganda is "一小撮" [1, 2]. They always claim the people against them is only a few bad people. I never bought this even when I was in middle school. The reason is so obvious: if it is truly only a few people against you, why don't you just allow people to vote? Why don't you just allow people to speak up? The only reason you are so afraid is that you know maybe it is not just a few, and you know there is a good reason for people to stand against you.

1. https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%B8%80%E5%B0%8F%E6%92%AE

2. https://www.linguee.com/chinese-english/translation/%E4%B8%8...

I suspect you're being downvoted for the big shouty capital NO, and the fact you're trying to refute someone's opinion, when they were explicitly asked what their opinion was. This came across as being negative and confrontational. Reading your post more carefully I can see your heart is in the right place and are mainly just trying to provide context and comment but the initial confrontational tone drowns that out.

This is a very open and courteous community, where a bit of generosity in interpreting people's statements, and courtesy even to people we disagree with, is highly valued and it seems to me you have some very valuable views and experience to share.

OK. I didn't know the "NO" is that a big deal.

Thanks for your voice, and pointing out the defect in my thought. I came up with my view by my observation on Chinese SNS platform, and no factual basis like a professional survey or any data could support my view. It let me feel bad that in the political environment in China which is not allowed to talk about politics freely, it's hard to find factual evidence to support my stand.

This reminds me of a discussion that I've seen somewhere, with a Russian journalist who ran to the US after becoming a target for participating in the 2011–2013 Russian protests.

- What's the public opinion of Russian people on Putin?

- There's no such thing as public opinion in Russia.

- What do you mean, I can go out, sample 1000 people and ask them a question. That's what I mean by public opinion.

- You can do that, but the result is useless. There are studies on the topic - people will just say whatever was on last week's [state controlled] news.

> You can do that, but the result is useless. There are studies on the topic - people will just say whatever was on last week's [state controlled] news.

I doubt the correlation is perfect, which makes such polls non-useless. For example, comparing questions on which the correlation is more or less strong would allow identifying the degree of trust in the state media depending on the topic they're reporting on.

Yeah but the point is that >95% of signal is drowned in propaganda. And the other point is just how much is that inconceivable to someone with access to free press, as exemplified by your response.

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