Dissidents Are Using Shortwave Radio to Broadcast News into China
defenseone.com
defenseone.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Europe/Radio_Libert...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia
>The station now uses more than 100 radio antennas located in countries all around China, such as Thailand and Taiwan, which trade the signal — in effect, playing a game of keepaway with the station’s broadcasting.
Shortwave broadcasters change transmitter sites and frequencies throughout the day as a matter of routine, because the atmospheric conditions that allow shortwave signals to travel beyond the horizon are constantly changing. Most modern shortwave transmitters are steerable and frequency-agile, so they can be reconfigured in a matter of seconds to provide the optimal coverage of the target area. Efforts to evade jamming are really just an extension of the normal operation of a shortwave station.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skywave
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALLISS
It's surprisingly difficult to jam a shortwave station within your own borders due to a phenomenon called beam skip - at typical frequencies, there's a large gap between the line-of-sight coverage area of a transmitter and the longer-range signals that bounce off the atmosphere. It's just about viable for a country the size of China, but it would require multiple overlapping transmitter sites and would be unlikely to provide consistent jamming.
With my radio, all I could receive were terrible religious stations. Shortwave is dead in the US.
If you listen carefully with the right space wether there’s all kinds of stuff. I think most amerature voice uses SSB which is harder to tune than AM (but I’m not totally sure) and that’s why you hear it less. Plus a lot of shortwave users like digital since a lot of it is about minimalism and there’s a limit to how small you can make a voice transmition.
Now if I'm China, and I'm looking at what Russia just did in the last presidential election, I'm thinking, let's just buy ourselves a pro-China candidate here in 2020. And I think our system is still vulnerable.
I don't even know how China got in the WTO in the first place. There were rumors that they had some significant influence in the Clinton administration, but I guess the promise of opening up the biggest market in the world to US companies was too shiny. Bush was too busy going to war to piss anybody else off. Who know's why Obama didn't do anything...
The press has its faults but the idea of openly accepting state propaganda seems like a low value proposition.
Also I'm not sure what you are referring to when you are talking about state propaganda. Do you mean BBC or abc or what?
Even if someone distrusts literally everything that modern press is putting out, they'd still prefer to live in a world where they're legally allowed to publish blog posts talking about how bad the press is. More to the point, if someone assumes the BBC is propaganda because it's publicly funded, why would they want to live in a world where only the BBC is allowed to broadcast?
Saying that one system has faults doesn't imply that it's a good idea for us to switch to a system that is strictly worse on nearly every axis.
> how likely would a British journalist have the best interest of China at heart?
More likely than the British government.
Additionally, under a free press, anyone in Britain can publish anything criticizing the BBC, and anyone can claim that it doesn't have China's best interests at heart. Heck, even China can publish information in Britain that criticizes the BBC. Under a state-propaganda system, only state approved actors get to publish information, which means that however slight you think it is that someone would call out the BBC, a free press is still the more-likely system for that to happen. China is better off because Britain has a free press.
In regards to China itself, the idea I gather you're putting forward is that China can't counter the BBC's propaganda on its own and therefore has to protect its citizens by shielding their ears. There are a lot of problems with this idea that boil down to, 'every time a nation has tried it, it's been awful for the citizens involved.'
But a more general argument against this idea is that it doesn't scale -- it is always easier to win an argument when you control what the other person is and isn't allowed to say. If China doesn't trust its citizens to hear news from other countries, there's not going to be a point in the future where it suddenly starts trusting them. It will always be easier to make the argument that we have to protect stupid people from hearing stupid things.
An indefinite state-propaganda system is in the long run almost universally worse for the world as a whole, and almost universally worse for the citizens of individual countries. We also have a lot of examples in the past of it being worse for citizens in the short term. But the fact that there is no off-ramp for state propaganda, and no check-and-balance system to prevent it from going bad -- that would be enough to make it dangerous even if that short-term data didn't exist.
But I disagree with couple things.
First, propaganda exists everywhere, in China its carried out through censorship, in the west people do have free speech, but whose voice gets heared is controlled by a few media moguls.
And I do think there are off ramp for censorship, and if I were to guess maybe in 20 years, when china's economic development matures into a developed economy and its opinions are no longer simply waved off as propaganda but carries concrete results to back it up.
If the Western media moguls actually controlled speech to the degree people think they do, Donald Trump would not be president. I won't even deny that there are competing interests in Western media, that there are prevailing narratives that arise in certain subgroups, and even broader cultural narratives that arise across the overwhelming majority of news sources. There are lots of broad problems to address.
But it seems weird to claim that media in the US and EU are entirely controlled by a few colluding owners during one of the most politically divisive periods in recent history. If there are a few moguls controlling the message, they're doing a really crappy job of it.
> and its opinions are no longer simply waved off as propaganda but carries concrete results to back it up
In theory, I guess I agree that could happen? But if someone spends all of their time lying, and practicing lying, and seeing large benefits from lying, I don't assume they'll get more truthful over time -- I assume they'll get better at the thing they're practicing.
In regards to the wider world, the order can't be, "people will respect Chinese government opinions, and then they'll open themselves up to criticism." That's just not how respect works. People put less stock in Chinese propaganda about its economic strategies because China has a large history of lying about human rights violations and censoring critics.
People assume (not without reason) that a government that's willing to lie about protesters and ethnic groups might also be willing to lie about its economic positions and strategies. If China is waiting for other countries to respect its opinions before it opens up to internal scrutiny, then it's going to be waiting for a long time -- because the lack of internal scrutiny is the reason people don't respect them.
Are they? These times are so divided, particularly because neither side can agree on anything and the "above the fold" news coverage is farcical. Decide for yourself whether the media companies are driving divisions for page views -> clicks -> ad money, or if there's coordination in dividing us so more of our collective energy is spent caring about tweets about Greenland or to argue the semantics of the phrase concentration camp.
There are things that matter more, like anything surrounding the fact that running concentration camps is outsourced to for-profit corporations, never mind the camps themselves. How about Amazon paying anti-union astroturfers to post on Twitter, or Walmart firing everyone they can who's pro-union. How about serious issues over climate change denial at the highest levels?
The greatest trick the media moguls ever pulled, was convincing the world their propaganda isn't propaganda.
> There are things that matter more, like anything surrounding the fact that running concentration camps is outsourced to for-profit corporations[0], never mind the camps themselves. How about Amazon paying anti-union astroturfers to post on Twitter[1], or Walmart firing everyone they can who's pro-union[2]. How about serious issues over climate change denial at the highest levels?[3][4][5]
All of these examples were found by searching just one site.
The issues you mention are covered in mainstream media. You don't even need to look hard to find them. Even CBS is covering this stuff. You can argue that by percentage we're spending too much time talking about dumb stuff, and I'd agree with that. But its not hard to find reporting that's more substantial. Check out the NYT's politics section, just as an example.
So I'm not sure I understand this point of view, at all, because none of these issues are fringe debates, they're all mainstream issues that are commonly referenced in popular media. We did have large amounts of coverage about stuff like family separation, and we've continued to have major coverage of it since. Even Fox covered family separation at the border (although they obviously weren't as critical as most other news sources)[6].
If the point of the media moguls is to get us to forget that climate change is happening; again, they're doing a really bad job, given that climate change and the Green New Deal has become one of the biggest talking points of the entire Democratic party.
The difference between how the US News and Chinese news covers institutional problems and rights-abuses is a really strong argument in favor of establishing a universally free press. Free press talks about internal problems. State press does not.
[0]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mbjq4n/the-immigrant-crac...
[1]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/59npad/amazons-creepy-twi...
[2]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb8y9a/the-walmart-subred...
[3]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nzp7ag/louisianas-climate...
[4]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bmev9a/kentuckys-climate-...
[5]: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/53vd7n/maines-climate-cha...
[6]: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/what-trumps-zero-tolerance-...
Limit the number of boards any one person is allowed to sit on. Those five media conglomerates that control the US media aren't even really all that distinct.
Hell, break up the media conglomerates. Update the sherman anti-trust in order to do so.
Give the FCC more power. The lack of power is partially to blame for our sad state of affairs. Fewer regulations haven't resulted in a good system, and I'll be bold - I think more regulations will.
I'm with you that state censorship of political views is right out, but there are some standards of decency that I do think we should keep such as gore, and hardcore pornography on TV even on cable. Especially right after school.
Fund the hell out of PBS.
More Mister Rogers, fewer 20-minute toy commercials.
The hypothesis was a wealthier China would become a freer, safer and more democratic and stable one. Ceteris paribus I still subscribe to that view. But the effect of modern technology on the scaling capacity of dictatorships was unexpected, among other things.
The Chinese government has a tremendous obligation to protect its citizens from external manipulative forces (history books list the primary belligerents) while navigating to a more economically prosperous and freer society (possibly).
Not a walk in the park, more like a tight rope... and regardless of whether we want to admit or not, our tax dollars help put sharks in the water under that tight rope.
You will never accept the fact of domestic resistance to your government's infringement on basic rights all people are born with - even Chinese people.
Hong Kong, Taiwan, and ethnic Chinese around the world live well with democratic governance, free speech, free press, and no communist big brother police state.
No doubt there will be a day when China could become more democratic but initiating this too early in development opens many attack vectors.
Anybody who truly cares about China doesn't want to introduce the risk of Chinese leaders being picked from outside its borders.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_...
Can you explain to me what Russia did that every other country didn't do? Please respond with evidence before you downvote.
Time to open your mind to reality, Hacker News.
Basically the ask for evidence is not a legitimate query for info, it’s usually disingenuous.
That’s why I don’t respond to people who say things like “what evidence do you have that global warming is real” or “what evidence is there that the earth is round”
But no matter how bad is this situation, it cannot be even remotely compared to authoritarian countries.
[1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...
[2] https://fortune.com/2016/04/04/john-oliver-congress-fundrais...
Especially since China's internal media companies are now run as for-profit businesses, just like Comcast, Disney, AT&T, FOX - not the parts that Disney bought, and CBS/Viacom, the five media conglomerates in the US.
It is necessary to do the comparison between authoritarian regimes and democratically elected governments where all citizens are subject to the rule of law, because if you squint, they can look similar, and in these trying times it is extremely important to be aware of the key differences, even if some things can't be 100% proven inside or outside of a court of law, or haven't been yet.
Both candidates give giant piles of money to Facebook and Google, and the real power isn't in pushing one or the other, the important thing is that we don't look too hard behind the curtain. I'm all for adding select Internet companies to the list with the five media conglomerates.
Amazon is paying people to post anti-union propaganda on Twitter. Walmart is firing people for making pro-union posts online. Google controls what pops up when I type in antifa and Facebook controls if I see my friends' activities about political rallies in my News Feed.
What's the principled, moral stand going on in Hong Kong right now standing against the Chinese authoritarian regime?
What's going on in Portland?
An extradition system strikes right at the heart of the private bankers' clienteles but the moment the popular protest starts turning towards societal or class problems like the lack of housing and breaking their House of Lords++, a _single_ tycoon bought out all the newspapers' front pages urging restraint for the protest [3].
[1] https://beta.washingtonpost.com/outlook/five-myths/five-myth... [2] https://chinaworker.info/en/2013/10/21/4789/ [3] https://asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight/Hong-Kong-protests/Hong-Ko...
That's a fairly extreme claim particularly in the context of discussing Chinese state run media and the near total control that state exerts over the flow of information. Here in the US, there has been a lot of reporting about how one media conglomerate (funny how that reporting is allowed in a country supposedly without a free press...) influences the current executive and his public policy [1][2][3].
There is also plenty of criticism over the consolidation in the media landscape and the slow death of traditional journalism [4].
[1]: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-... [2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hannitys-rising-role... [3]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/rupe... [4]: https://billmoyers.com/story/media-consolidation-should-anyo...
It is not very free.
It was communism, then terroism. The U.S. always needs an enemy. As an aside, 60% of americans supported to invade Iraq.
When it comes to WTO, the big money voted with their money.
VOA experimented successfully with using other MFSK modes that can be decoded asynchronously, quickly, and with fldigi, and its now a regular occurrence. https://voaradiogram.net/
I'm not suggesting JS8 is the ideal communication mode for dissidents, only that it's far better than FT8 for arbitrary text.
Just bought some am/fm/sw radio yesterday.
I was hopping to hear some SW radios, just like I did 30 years ago, when it was a good way to learn a bit more of other languages.
I'm having trouble finding any... Does anyone still do it? Any recommendations?
Make sure to go into an empty field or wood. Everyone running dimmer switches, homes full of IoT are blasting HF noise into your radio.
Another fun fact:
The intent of the legislation in 1948 was to protect the American public from propaganda actions by their own government and to have no competition with private American companies.
Unlike any other news agencies that I know of, VOA has an actual U.S. law in place that legally separates editorial control from any political influence or interference.
It's referred to as "the firewall" internally, and VOA's journalists receive yearly training on that. The 1948 legislation you've cited has been updated number of times, with the firewall codified in 1994.
The training isn't some random click here and sign this paper and we're covered thing. It's a well-developed, focused, small group training with comprehension discussions.
Here's an actual video of the exact training VOA journalists get. There is no political interference in the newsrooms: https://www.insidevoa.com/a/4533468.html
It also seems from browsing their site that most articles are summaries/commentaries of other sources.