China Bans Americans Working for WSJ, NYT, WaPo | Hacker News Reader

China Bans Americans Working for WSJ, NYT, WaPo

wsj.com

298 pointsbig_chungus171 comments

All: This thread is terrible and violates the spirit of this site in too many ways to list. HN is not a place for nationalistic flamewar or accusing each other. Please don't do that damage here. The container is fragile.

If this epidemic continues, we're going to do less "please don't" and more "we've banned". I don't mean the coronavirus— I mean the epidemic of violating HN's guidelines. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here.

The vast majority of the community come here for curious conversation, not to hear people bashing each other and their countries in the same few ways over and over again. That's not only nasty, it's tedious. Please take it elsewhere.

More explanation in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22605365

I truly don't understand why "expel Chinese journalists" was even considered as a reasonable course of action by the US.

It may not explicitly violate the letter of the 1st Amendment, but it certainly violates its spirit, not to mention invites reciprocal action like this that only deepens the fog of war over our most dangerous adversary power.

There are many, many legitimate ways to punish foreign governments, but the expulsion of reporters should never be among them, unless we are at war with that government.

"But China did it first!" Well, then we should highlight how outrageous and unacceptable that behavior is, and sanction them some other way. Not reciprocate.

> "But China did it first!" Well, then we should highlight how outrageous and unacceptable that behavior is, and sanction them some other way. Not reciprocate.

You're falling squarely into the trap that I believe China plays so frequently: the belief that every other group of people shares a compatible value system and culture and any disagreement can be resolved with diplomacy, but never force.

To be frank, the Chinese view us as dumb by setting restrictions on ourselves, in an effort to inspire them to do similar self-restraint measures.

This methodology is flawed and outdated, the Chinese are not the Russians.

It's kind of ridiculous all the way around. On the one hand, the U.S. should probably be more pragmatic in cases like this. On the flip side, I'm frankly surprised that they're simply being banned/removed from the country.

I'm all for calling out a lot of the issues on both sides of the ocean on this one, even if I do feel that the actions of one country are far worse than the other. Two wrongs do not make a right.

The U.S. should never have allowed more than half of any given industry (especially medicine and other essential infrastructure) to be produced overseas to begin with. The trade war was bound to happen, still, civility should always remain at the table.

America will surely retaliate.

Here's a timeline for those who haven't followed this:

Feb 3rd: WSJ publishes opinion piece titled "China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia"

Feb 19th: China expels three China-based WSJ reporters

March 2nd: America limits journalists from Chinese state media from 160 to 100

America will surely retaliate.

No.

There are thousands and thousands of journalists working for foreign governments, friendly and hostile, in the United States. Some hostile foreign governments even operate domestic broadcasting operations in America. (China, Russia, etc...)

The worst thing that's ever been done in recent memory is requiring those operations to register as foreign agents. And I think at one time there was a move to limit the Kremlin's cadre to something like 1,000 people. But I might be remembering that part wrong.

Mike Pompeo on March 2nd:

“Our goal is reciprocity. As we have done in other areas of the U.S.-China relationship, we seek to establish a long-overdue level playing field,” Pompeo said in a statement to CNBC about the cap. “It is our hope that this action will spur Beijing to adopt a more fair and reciprocal approach to U.S. and other foreign press in China.”

Reciprocity = you limit our journalist we'll limit yours.

I expect a ban on those 100 remaining Chinese state media journalists.

What a ridiculously stupid goal. If we had a goal of reciprocity with every authoritarian dictatorship we'd end up enacting their policies until our government looks no different from our adversaries'.

Assuming it’s done on a per-country basis, how else do you not get taken advantage of?

The way it was done in the past is by being ridiculously stronger than the other participant. So you let your Pakistani or Iraqi counterpart make a big show to appear strong to their people and you do nothing because you still have them under your thumb. Unfortunately, China is now one of America’s peers so it’s necessary to establish the level playing field.

You can't force other countries to behave how you'd like. Some countries don't have freedom of the press. The United States should not be in the business of restricting freedom of the press in order to pressure other countries to respect it.

The goal is for the United States to follow the principles laid down in the Bill of Rights. Throwing those out in order to pressure other countries is a terrible idea.

Just wanna emphasize that there's historical contest with the words Sick Man of Asia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sick_man_of_Asia

The phrase reminds any Chinese about China's darkest history in 500 years.

Feb 2nd: US designates 5 Chinese media companies as outlets as government entities.

It's widely believed the expelling of the three WSJ report was retaliation to that.

Aw, WSJ videos covering China were some of my favourite content. China is really lashing out.

Nothing is surprising since they banned Zedd from China simply for liking a South Park tweet, he's a very popular (and harmlessly generic) pop musician:

https://twitter.com/Zedd/status/1182376966495838208

For thousands of years, tyrants and small-minded people have always tried to shoot the messenger. It seldom stops the message.

Supposedly, but we'd never actually know about the times where the message died with the messenger, would we? For all we know it's incredibly effective.

I don't believe this is true, I'm just pointing out we'd have no way of knowing.

We do. There is seldom a single messenger.

You are referring to the examples where we found out about the message. But it's impossible to know about the times we did not find out about the message, because we never found out! This could be because it never happened, or because the message was contained.

It's theoretically impossible to know. This is just a fun thought exercise though, not trying to have a real argument.

I think there are two different kinds of messages to consider here.

The first is an ideology. For an ideology to even be a threat there has to be a lot of believers in the first place.

The second is a secret. Killing someone before they can spill the beans is viable.

There are plenty of cases where the message was contained in the short term, but became public later on to no great consequence.

For example the president maneuvering the US into WW2 would have been a scandal at the time, but after the war WW2 was seen as inevitable so the now pubic records didn’t cause an uproar.

Or the MKUltra declassified documents. If it has come out at the time, it would have been scandalous, but 30 years later it’s seen as not worth pursuing criminal charges, or even stopping similar things from being done in the future.

"Shooting the messenger" refers to envoys, emissaries, ambassadors, and other official agents and representatives. Harming them has led to some devastating consequences for the people doing the harm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mongol_conquest_of_Khwarezmia#...

Suppression of the press is unfortunately very effective in the short term. Historians may eventually uncover the truth but it will be far too late.

> Suppression of the press is unfortunately very effective in the short term. Historians may eventually uncover the truth but it will be far too late.

As Frank Herbert said: "History is written by historians"

The US and China are at war. The last Cold War kind of gave us the internet so hopefully we fund some big ambitious tech this time too.

Ubiquitous surveillance and facial recognition seems to be the tech innovation from this one. I wouldn't be so hopeful about "ambitious big tech".

Nice war, given the amount of trade between the countries. Sure they call each other names but when it comes to money the rest be damned.

Given their threat this week to withhold ingredients for pharmaceuticals, we should be seriously reconsidering the amount and kind of trade we do with China. We'll see whether they continue in this, but it has a whiff of Faustian bargain at the moment.

> Given their threat this week to withhold ingredients for pharmaceuticals

Source?

Most mainstream sources buried this, but search for "mighty sea of coronavirus".

Well then cut the trade and declare them official enemy. For now big corporations from either country laugh all their way to their banks while we conduct holy battles on HN.

Probably a mathematical model of human societies accurate enough to predict how they react to carefully tailored messages inserted into popular media and how to use this to control their behaviors. The world's most advanced militaries are useless when their societies refuse to use them or turn them on themselves in civil wars. As individuals, the effects of such a weapon would be almost invisible as it targets the behavior of humans when they interact as a group. Even if you consciously knew this is going on, society as a whole would still unconsciously follow the playbook planted for it.

This is a big hit for journalism about China. A lot of very good quality reporting on (among others) Xinjiang came from these people. We will all be much less informed about China in the future.

The subtle shift in confidence that this action implies is that China is confident in itself after "beating" the virus while the west is struggling.

A "media war" between China and the US might be worse than a trade war. While a trade war is just about numbers, this will be about ideology and there will be no middle ground.

There's growing resentment against Western media for the way the news reported. Take a look at following links. I saw one of them personally on NYTimes couple of days ago. The one from CNN below the banner reads "California prisons" but the picture is from a mosque in Istanbul. One incident is a mistake, but multiple times same "mistake" only show malevolence.

https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fpbs.twimg...

https://img.piri.net/mnresize/840/-/resim/imagecrop/2020/03/...

Those who downvote should comment so that we hear your argument as well. In the end all this thread is more or less about freedom of speech.

Those content platforms use keywords to automatically find pictures to help journalists.

All of those photos would show up for "coronavirus" regardless of the context. It's just a...non-issue?

I don't think so at all. A prison in CA from inside or outside looks completely different than a mosque in Istanbul. Here's what you get from Google for "coronavirus prison".

https://www.google.com/search?q=coronavirus+prison&tbm=isch&...

Also, how does this merit a downvote. I know life is not fair but I hold HN community to a higher standard. Maybe things changed a lot here as well.

Seems like a weird mistake that somehow got propagated to multiple platforms at once. What would be the ulterior motive of portraying Californian prisons as ornate places of worship? I don't see any political angle here, so it seems reasonable to assume it was a mistake.

(I didn't downvote you. As far as I'm concerned, CNN is frequently sloppy and deserves criticism for that.)

When people coming back from Iran were getting COVID-19, all the articles reporting on it were pictures of the New York Chinatown. It wasn't even to showcase people wearing masks either, in one instance it was literally just a picture of the exterior of some local Chinese Restaurant.

Seems like a trend of incompetence.

"... whose press credentials end in 2020" is a significant part of the headline missing from the HN title.

All reporters must renew visas every year so it is inconsequential. It's a blanket ban.

It's difficult to have compassion and empathy without discussion. These sorts of maneuvers tend to have horrifying butterfly effects.

I'm surprised they didn't start with outlawing receiving money from NED or subsidiaries first.

This signals to me that the outlets are good sources of information

In reality, it's just that these outlets are the only ones with large bureau operations. There are plenty of other independent reporters and smaller sources with much better coverage.

Note that they are also banning from working in Hong Kong and Macau.

Can't read the article behind a paywall, but this is China's side of the story:

https://www.fmprc.gov.cn/mfa_eng/xwfw_665399/s2510_665401/t1...

Seems this is part of an ongoing diplomatic spat.

EDIT: FYI, couldn't read the article due to a paywall, did a search, found out some about the history. Thought this added information to the conversation. Yes, this is clearly propaganda, but I still thought it was interesting. You're all of age, you can read this sort of propaganda without being harmed.

This is an information war. The US is also banning Chinese journalists. In the end, everybody is losing and I don't see anyone here doing the right thing.

I wonder if they're under-reporting their COVID-19 numbers to win propaganda points.

Naaaaah... impossible.

I definitely suspect that might be the case. In order to push back against local public anger, the Chinese government have invested a lot of credibility in the idea that their handling of Covid-19 is a shining model for the rest of the world, but it just doesn't feel like it should work. Exponential growth being what it is, if it failed it'd be possible to remain in denial for a while and cover it up for a while longer but sooner or later...

I can't blame them..

China sucks.

China is going to face a deep recession as corporations rethink supply chain. The communist party needs something to blame and US is a perfect target.

@dang, please ban all accounts involved in this thread.

:) Including yours? Buy why?

Paywall

https://archive.vn/N2AqW

What a coincidence, I'm subscribed to most of those!

It's war (of words) The Chinese Virus vs US bioweapon. Plus China might be hiding something

Also those newspapers were publishing propaganda pieces accusing the Chinese Government of acting in bad faith during the epidemic. That doesn't go over well at all.

Don't forget that the US Government has sought to pursue charges against journalists under the espionage act for reporting on government misconduct, and that America's great firewall (Facebook) started suppressing RT after the 2016 election. Also, Al Jazeera is not carried by most US cable providers.

Facebook is hardly a firewall and certainly not aligned to the government much less the current administration.

RT is a full on naked propaganda machine and troll farm.

Al Jazeera is not carried by most US providers because they ran out of cash and mostly went online.

If you think about your reply, you'll realize it is nothing more than name calling and does not refute the data points that I mentioned.

People on HN engaging in whatboutism - can you please find a single article from the CCP state media that criticizes the CCP? I could literally go on WSJ/NYT/WaPo right now and find many articles criticizing US government.

That's what free press means. China has no tolerance for truth if it collides with the CCP image.

Please keep canned arguments like "whataboutism" off this site. It's a catchy name that masks a logical fallacy, pretending that comparables aren't relevant. Of course they're relevant. If something is comparable, it's legitimate to bring up. If it's not comparable, refute it by explaining why, not with a generic label.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

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