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Comment by knzhou | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly my point. You, an American citizen, call it "economic power being concentrated by foreign states". But Chinese citizens call it "ordinary people boycotting offensive speech". It's the NFL kneeling protests and boycotts again, except divided by country rather than by red/blue within the US. It's annoying to have people you don't know come in and tell you your speech is offensive, and if you want that to stop, then you want siloed national internets.

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Ordinary people boycotting offensive speech would manifest as people choosing to not watch NBA games because of this - which would be entirely within their rights if that's how they choose. However, if NBA is simply removed from the market, that's not a boycott by ordinary people, that's government sanctions.

Nobody, including Chinese citizens thinks this is "ordinary people boycotting offensive speech", this is government action.

How do you know? I see literally zero direct evidence for this in the linked post -- only that some people in China responded. Not everybody in China is working for the government.

When analogous statements are found offensive in the US, US citizens, US tech companies, and the US media can act with astonishing speed and coordination to stamp them out. That doesn't mean that the US government is directing all of it.

The Chinese consulate in Houston put out a statement condemning the tweet.

You have a track record of China using the heavy hand to dictate the messaging of corporations and individual citizens.

No coordinated message in China goes through without the explicit or implicit consent of the government, even if it starts "from the people". It's not hard to make the connection here.

> The Chinese consulate in Houston put out a statement condemning the tweet.

Okay, perhaps. But that could also be them jumping on a popular bandwagon.

I'm just raising this doubt because I've seen, many times on sites like this, enormous panics over supposed Chinese government actions, which actually boil down to totally innocuous actions from individuals. The most common cognitive bias when the West discusses the East is to think of it as a giant collective -- not being able to "tell them apart".

Here, the action was fast in a way that speaks of external coordination.

If someone in the US makes politically questionable speech, the fallout is stretched over days, and generally products aren't pulled immediately from retailers, etc. Here, we had many commercial actors respond at once (Alibaba, Tencent, Li Ning, China Basketball Association, etc.).

It reeks of state coordination and pressure, especially when Chinese government entities are making related contemporaneous statements. Even if it wasn't, it's overly reactionary; elsewhere, one tends not to immediately kill commercial relationships over a controversial statement by one executive, but instead see how the organization as a whole will react to concerns first.

try non-PC speeches in US, race, LGBT or gun related speeches you'll see

It happens all the time by the current President - and you see a diverse response from the American landscape. Some cheer, some ignore, some condemn. But if all the media simply decided they weren't going to air or even address the speech then I think you may have a point.

We have a lot of examples of that occurring in the past decade. There's no need to speculate (the "you'll see" part). The op's statement was obviously correct about speed of action. In the US protests about something tend to build and stretch out over many days or weeks more typically. See the prominent example of the famous Chick-fil-A protest (which went on for months). It took Walmart a month to take measures recently regarding guns (open carry in their stores) in reaction to the shooting that occurred in El Paso and it also wasn't government forced.

If it were Beijing, you'd have comprehensive action occur within a day or two and it would be a strict policy enforced by the government. All Chick-fil-A locations would be shut down immediately and whatever was upsetting would be removed (or the chain would never reopen); and while the authorities are at it, they might go ahead and engineer a forced ownership transfer for good measure.

I'll note that Chick-fil-A is booming in the US. It's now the third most successful chain in the US by sales behind McDonalds and Starbucks. That's despite their non-PC position on gay rights.

This has already been going on for months, though. It's gotta be front-of-mind over there.

The image of English-speaking westerners talking about "liberate hong kong" is a bit triggering for the average Chinese person, due to Hong Kong and England's history. It must be incredibly easy for CCTV to point at that and say that it's just the western imperialists trying to take HK away.

This is a strawman. Morey did not tweet anything containing "liberate Hong Kong". (That was subsequent, different events, by different people).

China promised 50 years of "one country, two systems"-- people in Hong Kong want to cash that check.

I wasn't trying to take sides on the HK situation itself, though, so it can't really be a straw-man on that topic.

The topic was whether the outpouring of sentiment from mainland China could be 'organic' rather than some immediate government dictate.

Picking something that is more extreme than what was said, and asserting that this could prompt swift Chinese organic reaction... does nothing to address whether the reaction to what was actually said was organic.

> Okay, perhaps. But that could also be them jumping on a popular bandwagon.

How could there be a bandwagon when twitter is banned in China (so no one could have ever seen the tweet), and immediately after the tween all Chinese social media blocked any posts related to the Houston Rockets? There was zero way for anyone in China to even know it was a thing or to be angry.

I see tons of tweets that I’m supposed to be outraged about every day, and I don’t have a Twitter. People spread around screenshots in posts, articles, messages...

Lots of people in China (more than you'd imagine) use VPNs. If you want to verify this is true, ask anyone who's used Tinder in China.

A lot of Chinese people have Twitter and Facebook accounts FWIW.

And now, according to Adam Silver: "We made clear that we were being asked to fire him, by the Chinese government, by the parties we dealt with, government and business,"

The Chinese government is heavily intertwined in every single business of some size in China. They ultimately do Xi Jinping’s bidding.

Have you been on any Chinese social media?

I'm going to take a wild guess that you're not a Chinese citizen and you are not on any forum that they frequent.

I find it truly stupid that Chinese government intervened, but if you think this move wasn't popular in China you're dead wrong.

If nobody is allowed to express support for Hong Kong on Chinese social media do we really know what their sentiments are?

I would love to truly know the sentiments, statistically, of what the Chinese citizens perspective on HK was. I've asked a few people but they dont want to talk about it or dont seem to really care. A lot of Chinese I know are nationalistic but dont care about the day to day to news. Plus I imagine the bulk of people would only know whatever news they were plugged into. It somewhat analogous to Americans who I talk to and wonder how they came to the conclusions they did and then it all makes sense when they tell me they are only plugged into one network or media outlet. And both parties dont want to look deeper at all and have no desire to. It's a shame.

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