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Comment by tly_alex | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see what's wrong with this particular article that's not true. From what I am reading, most of the piece was based on the the doctor's experience.

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Propaganda is not about what's true and not true, but about what's amplified and not amplified. I'm sure literally every word of this moving piece about a brave Chinese doctor overcoming adversity to help heal her countrymen is true.

I suspect an article in Western-style media might have been a little less quick to let the government off the hook though:

> The main problem wasn’t poor preparation, but the sudden influx of patients that would have overwhelmed a stockpile even 10 times the size available

That sentence is probably true, but it also doesn't mention the ham-fisted approach by authorities at the beginning which exacerbated the problem.

> but about what's amplified and not amplified

Makes Chinese ownership in reddit even more concerning, no?

Yes. Frankly I’m surprised the CCP influence on Reddit is not very visible.

Tik Tok scares me quite a bit more though.

not visible, been recently to r/worldnews ? everything criticisng China downvoted into oblivion if not straight deleted/banned

Occam's razor says this is bots rather than anything being done via "official" Reddit channels.

That's a defining feature of "plausible deniability."

The hatred of China in Western media is amplified to the max. Sometimes I think we're the ones being washed.

> The hatred of China in Western media

That’s a very broad brush. I can see why you might say that about US media, but can you justify saying that about “Western” media?

Brit here, and we are being spoonfed plenty of anti-Chinese FUD by the mass media too, although certainly not to the same extent as in the US. Corona virus hasn't helped, with plenty idiots blaming China and even calling for revenge. As usual, it's anything to detract from problems closer to home.

I work with colleagues in multiple European countries, and have had this conversation - similar anti-Chinese sentiment appears to be being spread in Spain, Norway, Sweden, France and others.

Whenever the US picks a boogeyman de jour, Europe is often not too far behind, but always to a lesser extent.

It's unfortunate that HN is still plagued with posts like this (and worse) about "Chinese", "China", "CCP" or even "MSS" that would (I hope) not be tolerated for one second if the words were, say, "Jewish", "Israel", "Zionist" or "Mossad".

> Propaganda is not about what's true and not true, but about what's amplified and not amplified.

could you show a single article that is not propaganda, according to this standard?

don't get me wrong, I actually agree with you. however, I would refrain from jumping to assertion too early.

I'm not providing a definition of propaganda, I'm describing a _characteristic_ of effective propaganda. The test for whether something is propaganda is nicely defined in Wikipedia, which is "[whether it] is used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda".

OK. so is there any article is not to written to `influence an audience and further an agenda`.

Everybody's playing the game But nobody's rules are the same Nobody's on nobody's side

You've omitted the word "primarily" in your quote, and it was an important one. But let's take a British tabloid like the Daily Mail. The Daily Mail has a distinct agenda, but the _primary_ purpose of content in the Daily Mail is to sell copies of the Daily Mail. The Economist has an unrelenting neo-liberal agenda, but again the primary purpose of content in The Economist is to sell copies of The Economist. These publications are rarely considered to be propaganda.

Some commercial or semi-commercial publications explicitly have aims of propaganda. The Guardian was founded to explicitly push an agenda, for example. Generally one tends to refer to this as "media bias" or "editorial slant" to distinguish it from propaganda pushed by governments.

This doesn't necessarily imply that all state-owned or non-commercial news outlets are propaganda, although I think one's starting assumption should be that they are. The BBC's World Service definitely serves (served?) the British Government's aims abroad, and was explicitly funded as such. _However_, good-faith accusations of it publishing propaganda are pretty rare, presumably because it's considered more useful by the UK to be a publisher of news that people will believe, rather than pushing a specific angle.

do you mean all the entities you listed above publish propaganda according to your definition, e.g. to sell copies, to explicitly push an agenda, although someone prefer to give them other names? do you want to revise your definition of propaganda?

Kid, referring to it as “my” definition makes you look like an idiot arguing in bad faith. Buy a dictionary.

Disclaimer: I don't agree with the opinions presented on Sixth Tone or any other publication for that matter.

We've now progressed to the point where even objectively true information that isn't prefaced with "I HATE THE CCP" is considered propaganda. Imagine if somebody told you that NPR was Democrat backed liberal propaganda not because it provided false information, but because it wasn't as critical of progressive social policies as Fox News would be. That's not propaganda, that's disagreement. If you literally can not comprehend that somebody might legitimately disagree with you, and will dismiss objectively true information on those grounds, then maybe you should apply the same critical judgement you've displayed here to the media you do trust.

"where even objectively true information"... do you have an example of this? What kind of recent news do you have in mind?

So far, all the Covid19 stats out of China proofed to be fake. But I am happy to stand corrected. What numbers proofed to be correct in hindsight?

> So far, all the Covid19 stats out of China proofed to be fake.

I keep seeing people confidently claim that the numbers out of China are "fake" but I've yet to see a credible source. Could you please provide some?

> So far, all the Covid19 stats out of China proofed to be fake

Can you provide a source on that? The only "proof" I have seen people confident of is speculation based on the urns delivered to funeral homes - which IMO can be attributed to non-Covid-19 related deaths continuing during the lockdown.

> So far, all the Covid19 stats out of China proofed to be fake.

Citation needed. Which numbers have been proved to be incorrect? So far, all I've seen is everyone saying the equivalent of "it's China so they must be lying".

You know very well that it is impossible to get accurate numbers at this point. Even the graveyards in Wuhan are currently locked and guarded.

So what kind of source do you expect me to link to?

So how do you know that the graveyards are locked? Care to share?

> We've now progressed to the point where even objectively true information that isn't prefaced with "I HATE THE CCP" is considered propaganda

No, you just made that up.

That's what GP's position is. He agrees that the content of the article is correct (or can not prove otherwise), but considers it propaganda simply because it is not as critical of the Chinese government as he would prefer. Notice how no comments here have been able to point out any objective falsehoods with the article's content when asked to do so.

I find it incredibly ironic that from the current voting patterns we can clearly see that you have a point (yes, it's bad etiquette to refer to voting, but in this case it's topical), even with people claiming that you literally made this up.

> what's amplified and not amplified

Euphemistically this is generally called spin, and is practised by every large company and every large paper with any kind of state involvement (in a very real sense they all do, even in the west). Criticising a Chinese publication for containing propaganda while being mired in it constantly ourselves is just another example of picking "what's amplified and not amplified", because it's part of a broad push to demonise China (the big scary Other).

I think political bias at FOX can diminish their reporting substantially. But government propaganda truly is a different thing. It's as if you are comparing a natural disaster to a genocide - yes, the issue with both is that people die, and humans dying is with us no matter what we do. But even a serial killer acting as maliciously as possible isn't the same as a government dedicated to killing. There exists a meaningful ethical distinction and it's strange to hear people pretend it doesn't matter.

What I was implying is that the aggregate effect of corporate spin and government pressure is not materially different (in theory or in practice) from what might be happening in China. They're both very very bad and we should talk about how to fix that, what we shouldn't be doing is pointing fingers and pretending one is bad (while neglecting to mention the other).

Yes, it turns out we disagree.

I am no defender of Western media, but this is a textbook false equivalency. There is massive material and theoretical difference between corporate spin and government propaganda. Corporate dishonesty is possible in the US precisely because we protect the press's freedom. China, on the other hand, jails jails more journalists than any other nation. Sure, they're both "bad," but fundamentally different.

> I would love to see what's wrong with this particular article that's not true.

May well be nothing.

The gotcha here is not what is being said, but why it is there in the first place.

Also what is not being said. I do think Sixth Tone's writers are trying to do write informative articles instead of bland propaganda, but some topics are conspicuously absent.

E.g. if you search for articles about Uyghurs: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uyghur+site%3Asixthtone.com There's not much wrong with those articles, except for what's missing.

Compare with the South China Morning Post, which is also sometimes accused of being propaganda, but it does cover critical topics: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=uyghur+site%3Ascmp.com

FYI, Jun Mai lives and works out of Beijing, and seems to be doing that with ease. It is near impossible for HK journalists to get journalist visas for mainland China.

Second, he does political reporting, in fact, he specialises on it. A foreign person is simply not doing political reporting in a country like China. Absolutely inconceivable, beyond some fully choreographed potemkin village tours.

Third, what he puts in his writing, and very overt innuendos he makes from time to time feels very much like somebody doing a "write about this, and that" job. The logical, and thought flow simply doesn't feel like a news report.

From the very beginning of his articles, he already has an argument given almost like a statement of a fact, and then he steers the reader towards that with random supporting arguments. In other words, he knows, from the start, reliable facts about current events he writes about.

Fourth, where does his info comes from? A lot of things he wrote before could've only come from a first party source. How he gets access to state events to which even internal party press is not allowed?

It is 100% clear to me that he is a part of a leaking operation, and very clumsily ran at that.

Why it is there? It sounds to me that you think the Chinese people do not have the right to write a blog and post it on the Internet. Then why are you posting here? Is there any particular reason that makes you NOBLE enough to write down your words and show them to people?

> It sounds to me that you think the Chinese people do not have the right to write a blog and post it on the Internet.

baybal2 can be quite trollish, but he gets accused of pro-China bias much more frequently. This is actually the first time where I've seen the opposite accusation.

One time, dang (who moderates the discussion here, in case you're not aware) even commented specifically to defend baybal2 and clarify that he's not a "pro-Chinese agent": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21195898

Impressions based on single comment threads can be very misleading about the character of individual participants here.

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