Comment by guai888 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guai888 | Hacker News Reader

It feels kind of surreal to read an academic discussion on a subject that I have personally lived through my whole life. I was born in Taiwan in 1970. I emigrated to US around 1983. Before I came to the US I was thoroughly indoctrinated by KMT propaganda(KMT version of the history). I felt patriotic to the KMT regime and totally believed KMT narrative until the time I started my study in US university where I was able to read books and magazines which talked by history and issues that were banned by KMT. I was deeply angered and felt betrayed by the KMT government. The emotion that I experienced was a strong motivation for me to seek "Taiwanese identity". I wanted to point out that CCP(Chinese Communist Party) do have strong control over the Chinese students who studied oversea just like what KMT has done in the past. All major universities with sizable Chinese students have "Chinese Student Association" which keep track of the students on campus. There are Chinese students who got paid by CCP to file regular reports on their fellow students. These are a powerful tool for CCP to control what Chinese students can say or do while they study oversea.

A few interviews with Chinese students in Australia caused a cognitive dissidence in me I still can't throw off.

The meat of the story was the students who came to Australia had been fed a steady diet of propaganda, just like you, but after having been in Australia for a few years with no limitations on what they could read or see, they still thought (or at least said they thought on TV) the propaganda they were fed better reflected reality than the "fake news" they saw in Australia.

They can't all be that dumb, surely?

I'm guessing the real reason is they expect to go back to China one day and are over here to further their careers in China. One of the reasons for this belief is when a Chinese minority stage a protest in the capital outside of an embassy, these overseas students turn up like clockwork and stage an anti-protest.

This organised paid-for like protest is fairly rare in Australia, so it's caught a lot critical attention. The only time I recall it happening is Labour Union protests stages by workers for the Union itself, however even in that case the people doing the protesting were true Union believers.

I think a big part of it is that most (recent) mainland expats still mostly consume mainland (i.e. censored) news media and social media, and their friends in their destination country are almost exclusively other mainland expats. Reading and writing Chinese is significantly more comfortable for most expats and mainland Chinese media has cultural appeal for them as well for obvious reasons.

It takes an unusual and frankly relatively rare amount of independent thought and personal research to believe something at odds with a reality that your entire social network accepts as obvious fact. Especially when you start from the same manufactured reality that they did. And I would guess, even among expats, speaking about such doubts of the official CCP line probably is met with significant resistance among other mainlanders as mainlanders tend to be relatively nationalistic (as a product of their censored media and “patriotic education“). Why bother with it then? Which is also a part of contemporary Chinese cultural (no doubt nurtured by the CCP) — politics are is the business of the government, not the governed anyway.

So, in short, there’s a lot of political inertia for mainland expats, not a lot of incentive to consider other views, disincentive to adopt other views, and a lot of work to learn about other views anyway (must be in English in non-work hours, learning a whole alternate history and political philosophy takes a ton of time, your network of Western friends with sufficient knowledge to discuss these topics with is probably amounts to zero). So really, it would almost be more surprising if they were flipping views — even though, personally, I’ve spent significant time learning the CCP canon and find it rather obviously holey.

> It takes an unusual and frankly relatively rare amount of independent thought and personal research to believe something at odds with a reality that your entire social network accepts as obvious fact.

Let that be a lesson to us all.

I would like to point out that, Taiwanese people paid a heavy price to break KMT's stranglehold on Taiwan. The price that we paid is the blood of the innocent. Let me give you an example: One of the democrative movement leader Lin Yi-hsiung's mother and daughter were killed under suspicious circumstance while he was imprisoned. The KMT authority said it was a robbery went wrong and the killer was never caught. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lin_Yi-hsiung. There were many cases like that under KMT's martial law rule. People in China will also has to pay blood price in order to break free of CCP. We have already hearing story that CCP is assassinating people in Hong Kong right now to put down current unrest in Hong Kong. Please remember, authoritarian regimes kill. The lucky one like Jamal Khashoggi got killed without torture. The unlucky one like Lin Yi-hsiung has to live with the pain that his mother and daughters died because of him.

> Please remember, authoritarian regimes kill.

Exactly. Heck, even non authoritarian regimes will drone strike people if they get in their way.

This isn't the same but related, for many of us that have left religions, the inertia it took was immense. It manifested for me something that looked like 5 years of depression. But afterwards I had lost my network of friends, family, and invalidated a lot of my experiences about how the world worked.

I imagine leaving a cultural and national identity way of thinking would have similar repercussions. Many would lose family relationships, friendships, professional networks and could potentially burn bridges with their home country in such a way as to essentially be in exile. All of that for something they aren't even sure is more true than what they know or could be biased in another way (as most of history is more of a cultural collective of things composed of selected facts in such a way as to paint a narrative or map of what happened).

I still think it's wrong, and I'm not sure how to solve it, but I can kind of understand why someone wouldn't follow their curiosity down the first steps toward an open mind.

> They can't all be that dumb, surely?

Consider the Liberal and Conservative divide. People that grew up in the same country and with the same culture can still have vastly different beliefs.

Both sides will accuse the other side of fake news and propaganda.

I will point out that nowadays most Chinese Student Associations are comprised of Asian American students and the international Chinese student orgs that the spies are operating out of and that receive the funding from the CCP usually have other names now. Scholar societies, etc :).

Thanks for your comment - it isn't often I see the poignant connection of similarities between past KMT propoganda under martial law in Taiwan and current propoganda under the CCP in China. The things you mentioned have also motivated me to seek out and identify my "Taiwanese identity."

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