When Chinese students were given the uncensored internet
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The censorship regime must have a hugely chilling effect. No-one wants to get sent to a re-education camp or have their social credit score crater. Why would a rational person run the risk of those consequences?
And if they were to learn the extent of their government's manipulation of their reality, what are they supposed to do with that information? The study says there were low rates of the participant's roommate learning censored information. If I'd been peeking at information I knew could harm my career and freedom, why on earth would I tell people about it?
To me, what this study is really saying is that internet censorship is not just a technological process, it's also a social process.
One day I'll translate this article into English: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%E5%B9%B4%E5%B8%9D%E5%90%A...
The gist of it is in 2016 January, many mainland Chinese VPNed onto Facebook to post curses on Taiwan politicians who support Taiwan independence.
It's not a big event but it's funny they VPNed out to do that. Also from my personal experience many oversea Chinese students, and first generation immigrants, many of whom tech workers, among which many of them working for FANNG, dont consider censorship a big deal.
1) The Facebook campaign is: a) cowardly on the government's part - why don't they just open up the GFW for a month and see what happens? b) somewhat expected even if done by real people out of their own initiative - what do you expect if Long Island decided to go independent? Obviously not equivalent but hopefully you get the idea. c) Censorship is a big deal to some or most of my best friends - but if it is, would they trust you enough to talk about it, especially given that it is a big deal, they still have family and friends at home, and the government has gone to some length to strengthen it?
To be clear I appreciate your comment and yes, that article is an interesting historical event that is worthy of an article on Wikipedia.
You may be investigated, however, if you use it to organize political activity or spread censored information to others.
China is a place where intent carries huge weight in determining whether or not something is legally enforced.
So only consume - not produce?
Hell, you can translate all the awesome startups on TechCrunch into Chinese and distribute it internally, that's also okay, just leave out anything about the HK protests and you'll be fine.
It's all made up to serve the party.
Trump does some dystopian things as well -- it doesn't mean the entire US government is bad, and it doesn't mean the entire Republican party is bad, either.
I'm not defending the dystopian things done in China -- I hate those things, like internet censorship, and extending Xi's term of office -- but "made up to serve the party" isn't exactly what's behind the scenes here. Rather, consider that some of their main goals right now are (a) stability (b) public safety (c) fighting corruption (d) maintaining economic power (e) supporting and balancing the resource necessities of 1.3 billion people. They chose a certain approach to achieving those goals.
The current approach may be highly disputable and there are lots of things that should be done differently in my opinion, and very likely your opinion as well. But China isn't North Korea. This stuff isn't exactly designed to "serve" president Xi or the party and if you think people are being forced to bow down to him like Kim Jong Un you have the wrong picture.
I work in a research institute that is government-sponsored, and I can assure you that our work relies on having access to censored foreign sites (Google, Google Scholar, etc.), and there isn't an official way to do so and we all use third-party or self-hosted VPNs.
All my friends and families always discuss incidents in the past history of PRC freely, and never have to worry about being surveilled. It has recently bothered me that the western media often see the issues in colored lenses, have strong beliefs in anti-China sentiments and yet provide no direct evidence relating to the claimed atrocities commited by the government. I tried very hard to find actual direct evidence and to justify their claims (e.g. [1]) but discovered none. The lack of evidence make those hard to believe and would urge you to take those with a substantial grain of salt, and not everything is abysmal in China.
Conflict of interest: I am a Chinese and I studied in the UK for 8 years.
[1]: https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/China-T...
It's not that everything is terrible in China, it's that the Chinese government is an oppressive regime with severe totalitarian bent. Those oppressive regimes which least interfere in the everyday are the most likely to continue existing - we've known this since ancient times.
But censorship, ethnic camps, totalitarian power and mass surveillance do a reppressive regime make.
Censorship is no secret, totalitarian power is hard to define, but ethnic camps and mass surveillance may or may not exist depending on the existance of direct evidence.
Edit: Evidence is universal, and I suppose we can all agree that it is not dependent on me.
I'm sure you've seen the infamous "tank man" picture, which provides direct evidence that the PRC rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square. The above picture isn't as iconic, but it shows what the PRC did with those tanks: they crushed and killed anyone in their path.
I am aware (as told by many, I was too young to know) that there were numerous deaths and many more injured in that year.
My best media-savvy sense is that all of the things you mention are in fact happening and that they are atrocities. For example, here's some good reporting the BBC did: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/resources/idt-sh/China_hidden_cam...
My broader point though is that you won't change your mind because your livelihood and freedom depends on you denying or ignoring the actions of your government. So just like in the VPN experiment, we can remove the wall, but you will not leave the prison. I feel sorry for you, individually and personally, though it's probably for the best that you're not interested in questioning these things too closely.
More importantly, you seem to be quite educated and tech literate, and use ok f vpn is natural for you. What % of the population would you think is able to access vpns and outside media and sites?
Things that actually happened: rural protests, corruption, razing houses by eminent domain, medical malpractice, even some obscure musician being blacklisted, things that can happen everywhere but happen with "Chinese characteristics" in a more volatile way because of the lack of rule of law and due process, often ending with violence or curtailment of basic rights. But these are not as trendy and nobody really gives a shit about how Chinese people live, people just want to feel morally superior.
Why? Because it's incorrect or correct?
> Worse would be to talk about reeducation camps, or organ harvesting
Ditto why - is it not happening?
> rural protests, corruption, razing houses by eminent domain, medical malpractice, even some obscure musician being blacklisted
I can believe this but it does not disprove the other stuff.
> and nobody really gives a shit about how Chinese people live, people just want to feel morally superior.
No. Listen carefully: we do care. I do, others do. Not all but most. I don't know why you suppose us so purely self-centred.
Historically, this extreme ideology comes from Western culture. Both Christian and Islamic are exclusive religions. Drives each other nuts for thousand years.
US played a very bad role in modern days and caused the situation out of control. Iraq war and other mediterranean wars, all of them are unethical anti-human-rights wars. They have destroyed so many families. That's why nobody in the world believe US's so called human rights propaganda even though there are some America truly care.
Chinese don't believe that US is able to solve their own extreme Islamic problem. They invented their own method. They believe that the fundamental reason for the extreme behavior is because they are excluded from the society and the economy. They want to reeducate them to get them involved. However, the approach is a bit harsh. Not quite sure whether they will succeed.
Frankly speaking, getting everyone involved in the society is the key for US as well. Rich people don't pay tax, don't participate in the economy, and don't care about poor guys. They have their robots. More and more poor people have left the economy completely for years. The middle class is vanishing quickly. The extreme behaviors are emerging fast these days.
Before we point our fingers at other people, we really should figure out our own issues.
My post had nothing to do with that. Mentioning it is irrelevant.
> US played a very bad role...
possibly true and I'm willing to slag off the US at the right time (and many americans do, and do so in safety), but this subject is about china.
> even though there are some America truly care
I'm not american, and even if I was it would make no difference. Ethnicity does not matter. Moral decency, consideration for others, does.
> Before we point our fingers at other people, we really should figure out our own issues.
We can care about both our own cultures and others, at the same time.
The American government being wrong does not make the Chinese government right. There's actually enormous pressure on Washington, both internationally and internally, to stop these human rights violating conflicts that only serve to further inflame sectarian violence. Right now, as some call for war with Iran, there are other voices calling for peace.
This is not a competition for which country's government is more right, rather it is an effort to promote global peace, prosperity and human rights. Rather than zero-sum thinking, people of conscience seek to lift all boats.
But the question is what is happening right now. The Chinese government has rather successfully made two ethnic groups minorities in their own homelands through an intense government-stimulated migration of Han Chinese to in particular Tibet and Xinjiang. Both used to be own states that were brought into China in the creation of the PRC. What you see in Tibet and Xinjiang is a direct result of that policy of forced integration/ethnic takeover.
Israel is a perfect comparison because the Israel conflict similarly stems from the creation of Israel itself: a country was declared by the colonial power (UK) of the Palestine territory due to a 2000-year old claim of that being the Jewish homeland. This was done without any care or concern for what the current citizens of those territories wanted. And those left in the territories are massively disadvantaged in all aspects of life. That is the source of the Israel-Palestine conflict and Israel's conflict with most Muslim neighbors. And the Uighur conflict similarly stems from the annexation of those territories - with different cultural and ethnic groups - by the PRC. The religious expression of this conflict is a symptom, not the cause.
Think of Chinese resistance against the brutal Japanese occupiers. Your people, from our perspective today, were fighting heroically against an outside enemy that wanted to assimilate them and steal the territory and resources. That's how Tibetans and Uighurs see the takeover of Han-Chinese and the PRC.
> Ditto why - is it not happening?
There are memes that everybody hears or passes around without any critical processing, like "in China they eat dogs" or "in Alabama they marry their siblings". Is it correct or incorrect? Is it not happening? You can ask yourself the same questions. When I say it has no bearing on reality, I don't mean that it has no reality, I mean that it has no bearing on reality.
Whether they eat dogs in china I don't know. Whether some americans marry in, I don't know.
> When I say it has no bearing on reality, I don't mean that it has no reality, I mean that it has no bearing on reality.
What does this even mean? (BTW that was a question too).
https://chinatribunal.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/China-T...
A government killing thousands of people absolutely has a bearing on reality, and nothing about it is "meme-like".
But I bet you'd be running a very different mental calculus before saying some of those things you'd say in closed circles on your widely-read blog under your own name.
That's the thrust of what the GP is talking about, which I think you're taking a very selective view of in thinking that by "chilling effect" they're talking about Stasi-like censorship. Even if can get away with certain speech 99.9% of the time in a totalitarian regime just having to worry about the 0.01% has a huge chilling effect.
I'm genuinely curious about this. There are witness accounts of forced organ harvesting, and it's not too long ago that the government announced that it stopped the practice[1], implying that it was happening at least up until that point, and the rumors were correct.
There's no way for external parties to verify that forced organ harvesting has ended as promised. When a government does not invite external observers to verify such an important matter, shouldn't anyone's gut feeling go on red alert? Has there ever been a case when a lack of gov't transparency wasn't a bad sign? Is it cultural bias on my end to assume the worst-case scenario?
Conflict of interest: Hong Konger
What were you trying to accomplish by posting that? Did you skim the first couple of pages outlining the claims, get bored, and assume their conclusions would match your beliefs? Or did you hope that no one would bother to read enough of the bloody dense thing to figure out what it actually said?
Either way, you're lying when you say you "tried very hard to find actual direct evidence but discovered none."
FWIW in 2009 China Daily, which as you may know is a party-owned newspaper, published an article on the practice of taking transplants from prisoners. Unfortunately the original article was not archived, but it appears in this listing of headlines: http://web.archive.org/web/20090828122112/http://www.chinada...
There's also plenty of reporting in Western media quoting the China Daily article, e.g. by Reuters https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-organ-idUSTRE57P0EN...
Now maybe what you're actually sceptical about is whether Falun Gong practitioners wre specifically targeting. I don't believe they were, it's just that there were a lot of them, so when membership was prohibited, a lot were sentenced to death and consequently had their organs harvested. They also had enough members abroad to complain loudly about it and get people to actually care, in contrast to most other human rights violations.
Being a Chinese living in the US, thoughts:
1) Kudos for doing this experiment - one of the authors works at Peking University and I imagine there must have been at least some pushback for him. I hope this indicates a greater trend where academics gets free passes from censorship but maybe not. That being said...
2) Maybe things have changed but a few years ago the GFW wasn't really a hinderance for me browsing YouTube or Wikipedia or anything. If asked in a survey "have you ever tried to get past the GFW" of course I would have answered no. Of course I am a computer person, but I wonder how valid the findings are given my anecdotal evidence.
3) There are fake news everywhere, both on pro and on anti Chinese government news sources. One thing I have observed is that in China at least among the educated population there's a lower level of trust in pro government news when compared to the trust level in anti Chinese government news in the US educated population (assuming HN is a somewhat representative subset of said population).
4) Chinese media quality is low at least IMHO. Gossips always win over important news, international news are not shown prominently. I would rather read NYT or WSJ or WaPo.
5) Side comment, a lot of the comments on HN are anti Chinese government and sometimes anti Chinese. I don't care about the former, but Chinese people are people and anti Chinese is not cool.
3) I think (I have no data! :() that HN has a larger majority of Chinese and Indian users than American ones at this point, I base this on what appears to be a larger investment in technical education by those two countries in the past few decades, and the attraction of those folks to the SV tech scene. I could be way off, but would love to see coarse geo-IP data from HN visitors :)
5) Agreed. I am all for being critical of governments behaving badly, not just China's, and it's a bummer when folks couple people to their governments. It's a sure-fire way to make those people support their governments.
Alexa and SimilarWeb both agreed US is still by a large margin where the most traffic come from, with India being in the top five. Can't attest to the accuracy but at least it's data.
Consider the fact that English is a (required in school but still) foreign language in China, it's probably not super popular (back) there, although I could be (happily) incorrect.
My only challenge which is just as pointless as the previous is that I believe these tools rely on data gathered from browser plugins and ISPs which might bid them to US audiences.
With that said the English speaking fact is very strong. India’s tech literate population is dominated by English so I’ll stand behind that assumption but you are almost certainly right that this would put Chinese visitors in a bit of a minority. Thanks so much for engaging. HN needs more of this good faith back and forth, as does the Internet in general.
Of course, that a wrong view to have, but it is the first impression. Even more so when you consider the culture and history of CHina.
It's not just an HN problem. I think there's a real danger of anti-Chinese Communist Party sentiment fanning anti-Han Chinese people sentiment.
I think the conventional Western stance is that the citizens of China are being oppressed by their authoritarian government and that they, as a whole, would prefer to live in an open democracy like we do. You say you "don't care" about criticism of the Chinese government. As a Westerner, I don't understand why you're (only) indifferent about it. I mean, there were a couple million people on the streets of Hong Kong this weekend that are presumably more than indifferent about the Chinese government.
So help me understand your point of view. Like for example, how do you feel about the U.S. actions against Huawei (in terms of being "anti-Chinese")?
As for "anti-Chinese" vs. pro something else - if I may, that's a false dichotomy. There are a lot more commonalities among people from mainland Chinese/Taiwan/Hong Kong/Macau than differences (practically none if/when the human race rises above this nationality bullshit). Ethnically speaking >90% of the population from those places are Han (there is an uncomfortable undercurrent of (at times reverse) Han chauvinism that I won't go into). I couldn't find (after searching through a couple recent HN threads) positively voted comments that are anti-Chinese so people and mods are doing a great job. OTOH, even downvoted and flagged posts are still representing opinions, unpopular as the content might be. Or maybe I am overly sensitive.
As for Huawei, I don't have love for any Crony capitalism or Plutocracy. They are doing some good research work though, and people working there are still people.
For many Chinese, "learning" is semantically equal to "emulating". e.g. Learning to walk, learning to write, learning everything else. It's natural that the most advanced technological countries should influence the rest, like the rich is supposed to fund the poor and the strong should help the weak. And "learning" fast should be praised, like in schools. It's like a teacher shows off its skills and told students it's forbidden for follow? Tons of Chinese can not get the hang of this.
One more reason many Chinese people lost hope for the US during this trade war, is because it's argued that China does not practice "rule of the law", then Rubio introduced a bill that would nullity all Huawei patents registered in the US. So for many people, the US laws are as manipulative as China's. This is explosive WTF.
If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments. It's getting late over here but we can answer your questions tomorrow.
For those of you interested, here's a link to the published research: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171765 (full text requires a subscription.)
And here's a draft of the research (PDF): http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-as/econ/documents/2018-fal...
I'm not sure what their choice of communication method has to do with anything.
Turns out he got 2.8 million yuan from 2015-01 to 2019-12 for research on behavioral economics, which I guess is broad enough that he could have done the research without telling anyone at the NSFC about it. I guess we'll be able to tell based on whether he gets a new grant approved from 2020 onwards.
[1] can't link, but you can find it with 批准号 71425006 and 批准年度 2014 at https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-li...
Just today, saw a column of 20 bridge layers and an escort of comparable size on the rail near Changping
https://site.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj8706/f/3586-19...
A quote: "An important — although need not be exclusive — reason why students exhibit low demand for uncensored information and hence are unwillingness to pay for access is their beliefs that such information is not valuable. Specifically, a key dimension of such belief is students’ assessment of the difference in value between foreign and domestic news outlets, and whether the value-added of foreign outlets justifies the cost to access."
I am not particularly concerned by a low interest in general( if we ignore the other flaws and accept this study for arguments sake).
In “free” societies not that many people are engaged in politics, activism, etc. If two percent of a population is paying attention and hollers when something gross happens, and then 30% of the population joins in, maybe that’s enough.
Basically everyone watches porn which is mildly taboo.
I'm sure there's some people that listen to far right podcasts (which is taboo local to this crowd) but they won't tell obviously.
As much as I believe in a free and uncensored internet, access to it isn't a panacea for fixing problems with a government.
Particularly funny is this piece: "Chen and Yang found that students who were consistently exposed to uncensored foreign media outlets became more informed of events that are usually unreported in Chinese media, such as President Donald Trump’s businesses in China and surveillance in Xinjiang."
You might as well say that encouraged exposure to Chinese media outlets help people become more informed of events that are usually unreported in Western media...
Next time when you do something like this, use the the abundance of extremely well-done and educational videos on Youtube that beat the crap out of your regular western media in both objectivity and healthiness, and might just save the monetary rewards entirely.
Any recommendations?
I spent the majority of my undergrad YouTube time on MVs, so there's that.