After killing investigation, Bloomberg News sought to silence reporter's wife | Hacker News Reader

After killing investigation, Bloomberg News sought to silence reporter's wife

npr.org

809 pointskyleblarson237 comments

The article that Bloomberg refused to publish, that was later published at NYT, is here (no prior discussion at HN):

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-a...

Thank you for the link. I find things like this fascinating. I really wonder what life is like for the super-rich and politically connected. It must be a different world. I think the NYT piece does a fair job of not making unfounded and sensationalist claims, instead just pointing out connections.

I do wonder what went into Bloomberg not publishing it. This is what I bristle at: China being able to exert influence about what is and isn't published, what movies are and aren't made and so on.

It's even more problematic when China doesn't even need to exert that influence directly but instead rely on self-censorship from companies hoping to do business in China. Particularly news organization should never compromise themselves that way in the hopes of pleasing China (or at least not angering it). I hope Bloomberg didn't do this.

>I do wonder what went into Bloomberg not publishing it.

China kicks people out that criticize the government. We saw it recently with the WSJ, WaPo, and NYT reporters recently. If Bloomberg wanted to continue operating in China, it had to pull back on critical reporting. It is an offensive calculation, but very clear what happened.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diplomacy/article/3075647/ch...

To be fair, the US government does engage in similar things. The DoD lending equipment for film only if the script is favorable enough.

Fortunately you can still release/publish films in the US that are critical of the DoD (provided you don’t use classified material to do so, such as in the case of Collateral Murder, because then, legal or not, they will do their best to torture you to death).

Laura Poitras, for example, is still basically free, having released the film about Snowden.

I am not so sure that is the same thing as revoking a business license for saying something the government doesn’t like published.

It's similar in the same way giving people stuff if they do what you want is similar to breaking their knees when they don't.

Calling that "similar" is absolutely ridiculous. Propaganda is much less bad than wholesale banning unflattering speech.

non-paywall link:

http://archive.is/npL70

Off-topic, but I decided to finally make that free account NYT insists on, and NYT returns the error "Please enter a valid email address." It's a @fastmail.com address with no weird characters. Anyone else had that trouble before? Even more interesting is that just changing the domain to a personal one that uses one of the new gTLDs makes it work. I would have maybe expected the opposite to happen. Are they blacklisting Fastmail?

I have had my personal domain (that I manage through Fastmail) that I use almost solely for mail rejected by Carmax before. Emails sent from them just fine, just couldn't use it to sign up.

It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) bother blacklisting Fastmail – isn't Fastmail a paid service (i.e. less likely to be used by freeloaders, or by people making throwaway accounts)?

In any case, no matter how much they want to squeeze money out of new users, the NYT has more incentive to not have a super strict blacklist, or overly onerous sign-up process. Signup numbers are still metrics that a company vice president/middle manager can brag about, and NYT's initiative of mandating free registration seems much too new (e.g. as a comparison, they had totally free access for more then a decade, then a leaky paywall for several additional years) for them to already have hard enforcement policies in place.

> It'd be strange for them (or a third-party customer management service) bother blacklisting Fastmail

If it's not a blacklist, I think it'd be even stranger for it to be a whitelist, precisely for the reasons you mentioned. mzkply's comment makes me think that it might have to do with Fastmail's email aliases, which is the closest thing they have that's like Mailinator (an email provider that is frequently blacklisted for signups), but I don't think it's similar enough that this makes sense.

I agree with everything you said about NYT's incentives, but that leaves the question raised by this experience.

I opened up a chat with NYT to ask about it, but I was left waiting for an agent there for an hour before I decided to just close the chat.

Safeway.com won’t let me use an email address @pobox.com. I have no earthly idea why and their support is untrained to discuss it, but they have server-side tests that are rejecting it.

I had the same issue yesterday signing up in the McDonald's app. Please don't judge.

probably, and mailinator

One could write this article about Bloomberg ... or one could write this article about China. I think the China part of the story is more relevant and newsworthy at this point, considering how things have unfolded in the years since. The news company probably didn't decide all on its own to pursue this remarkable effort to kill a story that had not much to do with itself.

On the contrary, that is a separate issue, although an important one.

This story is about the integrity of reporting from Bloomberg. An important tradition in journalism is the firewall between the money making and the news reporting parts of an organization. Yes, that firewall is breached entirely too often, but many new media organizations simply don't have the tradition at the management level.

That is important to know, no matter who is applying pressure on the money side.

Exactly. Bloomberg employs many fine reporters and writers, and often does good work. I like Mark Gurman, who often has accurate scoops of unannounced Apple products.

However, Bloomberg should be read knowing they are owned by a company and owner that does not respect their journalistic independence. Readers should know if it comes down to journalism or their billion-dollar terminal business [1], the terminals win.

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/bloombergs-business-...

When Bloomberg News refused to cover any Democratic nominees because they didn't want to have to potentially cover anything negative on Michael Bloomberg, they lost most credibility with me:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/04/bloomberg-journalists-free-t...

They could have tried to cover it by hiring outside reporters to talk about both sides, I've seen my local newspaper do that.

NY Times isn't independent either. They were long and famously a mouthpiece for the US Federal government's war machine.

Most papers aren't independent.

You're absolutely right. But bending the integrity of journalism to appease authoritarian governments is nothing new. We've been doing it with Saudi Arabia for decades.

Didn't we recently find out ABC buried a story about someone in the British royal family fucking kids? It's not just the likes of Saudi Arabia.

Do we think this is THAT much different from the Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos), Time Magazine and related (owned by Marc Benioff), etc? I mean, is there any major news outlet (short of possibly PBS) where we shouldn't assume some level of benign (or not so benign) influence from the money making side?

Qualitatively different? Probably not. Quantitatively? Yes, I think so. Bezos fooling with the Post's news-covering editorial activities would be a major scandal that would likely end with him having a very bad reputation and possibly start with a large number of the Post's journalists publicly taking a walk. But Bloomberg doesn't have that kind of integrity or reputation to maintain; this story is just another day at the office.

That doesn't mean Bezos does not have influence, nor that he won't, hasn't, or isn't exercising it inappropriately. But what Bloomberg did is discussed to great lengths in Journalism 101. That's hard to keep quiet.

Indeed. Making the headline here about Bloomberg smells of the exact kind of tiptoeing around the CCP that the article discusses. The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government.

>> The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government.

...with the full cooperation of western corporations.

...and the full cooperation of the western elites and the government.

Probably because elites in china enjoy a huge advantage, and elites in the west would want that kind of advantage. If you got the power and money in China, with the right kind of connections you can literally get away with murder.

Or CCP is a shell for communist westerners to try out their social experiments on other nations. Communism is itself a western import to China, not an indigenous worldview.

I've got to congratulate you. I've been a conspiracy nut for decades but I've never heard anyone suggest that the Chinese Communists are a front for Western control.

* slow clap*

But no. Study the history of the Middle Kingdom. They invented totalitarian bureaucratic central government centuries ago.

Well, communism is not indigenous to China. It is a western idea imported by western educated Chinese intellectuals, who then indoctrinated Mao.

Whether the western control is direct or indirect, it is indisputable that the CCP is not an indigenous movement. It is a product of western ideological imperialism.

As a very visual example, go travel around China, visiting areas with greater and lesser CCP control. The less the control, the more elements of traditional China are around. The greater the control, the more it looks like a replica of yet another Western metropolis.

I saw this very clearly when visiting Xinjing province near Tibet and hiking through the villages. The normal part of the village has traditional, hand made housing, beautiful craftsmenship, great food. Then, on the outskirts of the villages, were towering, empty apartment blocks. The CCP planned to move the villagers out of their traditional homes into these huge apartment blocks they could more easily control.

So, yes, most clearly the CCP is a product of the west, not ethnic Chinese culture.

Your earlier comment sounded to me like you were saying that current Western communist elites are somehow controlling the CCP, and that's why they are going along with "the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government." But that doesn't make sense to me because there aren't any Western communist elites anymore, are there?

But if you're just pointing out the Western origin of the foundations of Chinese Communism them, yes, I agree the whole thing could be seen, from the POV of the West, as being confronted with a kind of social/political prodigal son. I'm so used to thinking of communism as an Eastern thing, but you're right (again).

There aren't any obvious communist elites, but there is a weird whitewashing of communism going on. And, a communist china fits the purposes of capitalist west quite well. So, I would say if there are western elite controlling China, they are doing it for personal gain, not ideological.

> There aren't any obvious communist elites, but there is a weird whitewashing of communism going on.

Well the CCP is stumping hard on the propaganda front. They've shoved the Dalai Lama out of the spot light, etc., and they're working hard to influence Western media, and IMO too many are happy to go along with that to make money. Don't get me started on tech companies. I just don't think that there's a lot of secretly pro-communists in the West.

> And, a communist china fits the purposes of capitalist west quite well.

How?

> So, I would say if there are western elite controlling China, they are doing it for personal gain, not ideological.

Ah but isn't that true of all elites globally? I'm not trying to "whataboutism" here, I just assume that most if not all elites are ideologically agnostic.

The Chinese government seems more than happy to exploit its people for western money, up to strip mining their citizens' organs.

Exactly. We can blame China ad nauseum but at the end of the day we are wholly responsible for allowing the situation to unfold as it has.

Who is we? I've never made a decision that compromised my beliefs or my country to benefit China.

If we go along with companies that do that, and aren't aware of the potential and looking out for it, then everyone can be complacently complicit.

It's intellectually dishonest to wax philosophical and paint the consumers as the problem. Powerful people have made conscious decisions to short sell their countrymen in the interest personal gain. My witting or not engagement with their company is not the problem. It is ridiculous, to the point where I must question the motives behind your comment, to offload the moral responsibility of every company onto their customers. It is impossible for every person to vet every company and their adjuncts. I did not tell Amazon to work their employees so hard that the only way they can keep their job is by wearing diapers. No. The responsibility for decisions like this rests solely on the few people at Amazon who have the power to change such conditions. Whether I shop at Amazon or not is immaterial. It is the responsibility of government to step in and try the greedy tyrants at every abusive company for their wholesale abuse of Americans. The fact that government has not arrested these abusive people is a reflection on the quality of people in position to effect real changes.

I not sure what you are getting it. My position is I should consider the way businesses I use treat their workers. If a business treats them like shit then I may likely choose to stop doing business with them, even if it inconveniences me.

America. That's quite a grand claim, I wonder what your voting record looks like. And if you've seen any Hollywood movies lately, shopped on Amazon, etc...

I made this comment on a sibling and it is as relevant in response to you as it was to the sibling. Perhaps more.

I finally found someone that never bought any "Made in China" product!

See my sibling comment. These cheap punches are hollow and detract from the matter at hand. I imagine low effort comments like this are prohibited here.

You mean said corruption which is only possible by the willing cooperation of western corporations and institutions?

Corruption isn't a one way street here. The real story isn't 'the CCP is trying to infiltrate western governments!' because everyone remotely aware of the geopolitical game already knows this. You and I aren't going to be able to do anything about this and it's just avoiding things we CAN do.

Which is pressuring our local governments and companies to not engage in this obvious corruption. Which means going back to the original point of the article which is Bloomberg purposely burying stories for the sake of appeasing foreign powers.

You know, that's a very fair point. I suppose the actual surprising part is just how successful the CCP has been at this, which, as you say, requires participation. I do think it is worth highlighting that it is happening, because so many people still regard such statements as "conspiracy theory". I think I agree with you that the actual lever for combating it is pressuring our own institutions, though.

As an aside, your comment is nearly dead only 3 minute after posting.

It happens, some people might think I'm not hardline enough on the CCP, others might think it's not worth discussing. That's just the nature of HN posts around topics like this.

As for the surprise factor, if you look at the history of the CCP and the way they use capitalism against itself it makes a lot of sense. China is a huge country worth its weight in gold to corporations, many of whom are now deeply embedded because of how much profit it generates. If they rebuke China, that means losing (a lot) of money which goes against how our system works.

In this sense, it's the free market working as intended. Which is easily gamed by political powers by tossing more money and incentives into the system.

> The real story here, and probably of this decade, is the corruption and subversion of Western institutions by the Chinese government.

And that “real” story has been covered by the quoted NY Times article, and is not the major subject of this story. This also shows that only some western institutions are corrupted by China, including Bloomberg, but not all.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/29/world/asia/wang-jianlin-a...

Further irony in this article generated another comment thread discussing how criticism of CCP is silenced, which itself was detached by the HN mods.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867474

It's time for you to stop breaking the site guidelines. I've posted four long explanations in this thread, and hundreds if not thousands of previous explanations over many years. You can easily find them by following the copious links to past moderation comments that I always include.

It's fine if you don't want to read them, it's fine if you read them and disagree, it's not fine for you to continue flouting the rules here, and this has zero to do with liking or disliking China or communist parties. It's about having a site that doesn't devolve into flamewar tirefires. Please stop now.

As a counter to the other poster, though I do not always agree, I appreciate your efforts, dang. It is not an easy job, and probably quite thankless, but necessary.

Thanks for saying that! I really appreciate it. It's not so common in the context of an interaction like this.

Heh, I felt bad after it is clear you are trying very hard to be fair yet firm. Kudos for all you do!

Agree that the China angles are important and newsworthy (though it's important to note that Forsythe's reporting was eventually published by the NYT).

This article isn't about that, though: it's about companies with deep pockets trying to silence not just their (former) employees, but their employees' family members as well. Considering that companies like Bloomberg have the resources to financially ruin people if they don't comply, and seemed like they were fully ready to exercise that option, this is incredibly troubling.

This is China's story of kicking out news reporters: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals-wo...

It all comes down to money and how much you want it or need it.

- Sign this NDA, get the money you want or need.

- Don't publish critical articles about the nomenclatura if you want our money (via terminal sales in the Chinese market)

It's actually https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomenklatura

Aside from Bloomberg's scummy behavior, this story highlights the eternal dilemma of journalism. To write good stories, you need access to the subjects. But if the stories make the subjects look bad, you lose access.

Coupled with the fact that newspapers don't always make a lot of money these days, and often rely on wealthy benefactors that make their money in other ways, you can end up in an awkward spot where one wrong story can damage a newspaper's base of information but also it's financial foundations. I don't think there's any good answer to this question.

They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link.

A second point (that actually justifies the practice of paywall bypass,) is that who is willing to pay for news when news outlets function frequently as PR organs for the constituencies they “cover?” The idea that you have to be nice to subjects in order to cover them is nonsense. What that actually means is that reporters lack courage or even basic training on how to get stories from confrontational subjects. So what if China gets pissed off. Publishing Xinhua-approved stories isn’t journalism, it’s PR. It’s not different than publishing DNC or RNC talking points. If all the journalists in China get kicked out, that still doesn’t preclude covering China — it just makes it harder — but it’s already hard, so there isn’t any difference. By letting China dictate coverage, that’s worse than no coverage at all since only an approved version of the story is all that gets out and people then are inclined to accept that “truth” without challenge because $some_international_media_outlet reported it.

China’s obfuscations and outright lies during the Coronavirus situation makes this topic even more noteworthy — outlets promoting and parroting the CCP official line have been deadly; one example was China officially reporting that the Wuhan Coronavirus wasn’t human-to-human transmissible even after they knew that to be completely false and they themselves instituted mitigation for human-to-human transmission that, according to them, couldn’t happen. Even more ridiculously, the UN appointed China to a human rights panel on free speech.

>They likely don’t make a lot of money because people, including many people here, do their best to block ads and bypass paywalls. Without fail, someone here will always paste an archive link or some other paywall-bypassing link.

As a paid subscriber of several digital-only newspapers, I only want them to publish their news as publicly as possible, so I and others can know better. Walls don't help.

When we stop pretending that the news must be rarified to be of value, then we may start supporting actual journalism for what it does best: investigate and publish, instead of sell the news as a product. So as the readers, we should support them, not buy them.

Why would Bloomberg need to continue selling terminals to China for the journalists to research and publish?

Because in order for their journalists to research and publish, Bloomberg must continue to exist.

I suspect even if they lost the China market, Bloomberg would get along fine.

Did Bloomberg change his opinions on China when they OK'd the "The Big Hack" in 2018?

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

The controversy that unfolded from that was massive.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2018/10/...

It's really not the same things - in some lights that story makes the CCP look good. Not in a good-vs-evil way, but it makes it look like they have far-reaching powers, and are an entity to be feared and respected.

A story about CCP leaders becoming filthy rich off the backs of the oppressed majority though, that just make the CCP look bad.

After refusing to print a correction, retraction, or apology, they've lost all credibility in my eyes. This new scandal isn't a surprise to me at all.

It's unfortunate, because I used to consider them one of the most neutral mainstream news sources.

You would think they would have fired the reporters who faked that story.

Did they fake it? Or were they mistaken?

Apparently they still stand by the story, hard as that is to believe at this point.

Are you asking if there is evidence that it was intentionally wrong reporting?

No, AFAIK there was no such evidence.

Are you asking how, in good faith, such a factually wrong story could have made it to publication?

We also don’t know.

Are you asking why BB has not retracted it after being called out multiple times?

Maybe hubris, maybe profit motive.

At the end of the day, why would we trust anything BB publishes about China? They have Terminal licenses to sell and they don’t want to jeopardize their market.

Yeah that's pretty much what I was asking.

It was a weird story with weird reactions from the companies involved ... but at least I never ran across anything that explained how the reporting played out / if there was anything 'faked" or anything like that.

The whole thing seems to not have many answers.

One of them has since been promoted.

It really brings home the importance of freedom ... elsewhere.

It seems like a very real likelihood that China would choose to track people's sentiments about China elsewhere ... and at will pressure outside companies to remove or simply not hire people who they wish to punish / discourage.

Post a winnie the pooh pic / are on the list? Good luck...

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” ― Martin Luther King Jr., Letter from the Birmingham Jail, 1963

Pretty apt for our global society, too.

This argument is one that the left fails to make perennially. That improving the conditions of one necessarily improves the conditions of all and that policy that focuses on the most vulnerable helps everyone more still.

The left will win Wall Street (and thus elections) when they finally show that social programs provide mitigation allowing Wall Street to minimize losses and a multiplier to increase their earnings.

I feel like most folks you'd be talking about when it comes to whomever is "Wall Street" just care about next quarter ... and the next, and whatever tax advantages they can mange in the meantime.

As a group they're not interested in long term outcomes at least as far as government policy goes.

I think they should, but I don't think it motivates them.

Agreed. The left should learn from the Trump campaign, who put a positive, constructive spin on a fundamentally anti-establishment platform. Trump’s MAGA vs. Bernie’s angry finger-pointing

So much to learn there. It's clear who the beneficiaries of that fraudulent platform are. Quite similar to China's tack, isn't it?

You can admire some aspects of the campaign/platform without agreeing with the people/policies.

A major Australian publisher was pressured to delay publishing a book about CCP influence in Australia.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-australia-china/australia...

I was a long time Bloomberg Businessweek subscriber until last year. Starting around 2017 China started taking out multi page ads at the beginning of each issue. (Or at least that's when I noticed).

The editorial slant became predictably sympathetic to China as well. So much so that by the end when I canceled my subscription there were many outright pro-China propaganda pieces.

Interestingly the editorial slant also went much further left, politically. Not sure if the two are related.

The cover of one of Businessweek's editions this February is literally "Fragile China; Handle with Care", which had the following stories:

* Coronavirus Stress-Tests China’s Fragile Financial System

* The Death of a Doctor Poses the Greatest Threat to China’s Xi Yet

* China Navigates the Latest Threat to Its Debt-Fueled Boom

* China’s Silent Factories Fuel Workers’ Fears of Virus

https://www.bloomberg.com/magazine/businessweek/20_09?sref=l...

Is that somewhat unprecedented to have a government post ads in a publication which are not related to spreading the word about hiring or something. What exactly did those full page ads have as content?

I dob't know if it is the same content but China Daily, a daily newspaper owned by the Publicity Department of the Communist Party of China, has purchased full page ads in American news papers that look like news articles.

https://freebeacon.com/national-security/china-flouts-fed-la...

Plain text version:

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=828565428

> "They assumed that because I was the wife of their employee, I was the wife," author and journalist Leta Hong Fincher says. "I was just an appendage of their employee. I was not a human being."

I understand she sees it that way, but I keep coming to the exact opposite conclusion. They knew she was a respected journalist with enough clout to be heard and a riveting story of fleeing Beijing for fear of their lives. They were clearly afraid of her as an individual.

I'm not defending Bloomberg, but I don't see any easy answers here. Publishing the second investigation would (in their estimation) have shut down all their reporting in China, put more reporters in personal risk / fleeing, and significantly hurt their core revenue.

Maybe we should rethink this idea of billionaire presidents.

The proposition is that their immense wealth makes them immune to pressure and corruption.

To the contrary, they have much, much more to lose than any normal citizen.

What would President Bloomberg, or any other billionaire president, sell us out for to protect their pile and its increase?

I'm not an alt-righter but the news media seems almost as corrupt as our politicians.

FWIW, Chomsky's "Manufacturing Consent" et. al. is from the left.

It's almost like they serve the same people

The far right and far right behave similarly -- except the language used differs.

It's not one dimensional.

China has been kicking out Western news reporters from highly respected organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost. See article: https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-bans-all-u-s-nationals-wo...

> highly respected organizations, including WSJ, NYT and WashPost.

Highly respected by whom? And I believe it was in response to Trump's ban on chinese journalists.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/china-journalist-associa...

It's not shocking that we'd ban chinese state propagandists and china would ban US state propagandists. It's silly to allow enemy propagandists in your country during a trade war.

I am very confused by the events and timeline detailed in the article.

Bloomberg (Edit: Bloomberg News) published a story on the Xi family wealth in 2012 and were banned for it. But this article says they were still investigating and writing that story in 2013. And that they buried it. And that they did so to avoid upsetting the CCP etc.

They even have quotes:

"late Oct 2013":

>"It is for sure going to, you know, invite the Communist Party to, you know, completely shut us down and kick us out of the country," Winkler said. "So, I just don't see that as a story that is justified."

Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for already publishing this story!?

Has someone just massively screwed up their dates?

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-censorship-bloomber...

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

There is a lot to discuss here:

* The extent that spouses' activities effect employee NDAs

* When and whether NDAs are appropriate both in Journalism and other industries

* The CCP and Chinese governments abuse of economic powers to silent dissent, in this case internationally and US and other governments compliance with that policy.

* Connections between wealth and political power, both in China and the world

* Whether being part of the larger Bloomberg entity strengthens BBG News or makes them more liable to external pressure

I also think Winklers position (assuming it was his position, since apparently all this happened after it had already happened?) was very sensible:

>Winkler alluded to that in his remarks. "There's a way to use the information you have in such a way that enables us to report, but not kill ourselves in the process and wipe out everything we've tried to build there," he told the reporting team. Bloomberg News and Winkler declined to comment for this story.

Aka: we can't publish this as we do too much business there, but we could leak it to someone else without the same exposure

Sadly the article seems to make a bad job of covering the basic facts and it's can't help but quote emotional projection instead of giving clear outlines of events. Good luck with this one (gender non-specific) guys!

> Bloomberg published a story on the Xi family wealth in 2012 and were banned for it.

...

> Except apparently Winkler, "founding editor in chief" didn't know that bloomberg news was already banned in China and had been for a year and for already publishing this story!?

No, the Bloomberg News websites were blocked. Bloomberg News reporters were not thrown out, Bloomberg Terminal sales were not terminated. Blocking the websites is a far cry from "kick[ing] us out of the country".

>After the first investigative project ran in 2012, the Chinese authorities had searched Bloomberg's news bureaus, delayed visas for reporters and ordered state-owned companies not to sign new leases for Bloomberg's primary product: its terminals.

That would make some sense, though it seems like they were pretty damn close.

So why not mention the 2012 article and set all this in its context?

The story here is "Once bitten twice shy", so why mash it up so badly I can't tell if they've been bitten already or they're hesitating after the bite.

And why open it all with quotes like "I was not a human being"?

It's like the intro to a story about sexism has been pasted in instead of the intro to the story about CCP censorship then someone hit publish without proofing it.

I was kind of close to Forsythe's first investigation was published and his next one was silenced. The New York Times's similar, and subsequent, investigation into Wen Jiabao's corruption gained it a Pulitzer in 2013. Bloomberg journalists widely and correctly thought that the Pulitzer process showed a clear bias toward the NYT in favoring the paper's derivative work on an outgoing politician, rather than the trail-blazing work on the man who is now China's leader.

Here's some context: In 2013, after decades of reporting, Bloomberg News had never won a single Pulitzer. It ate at Winkler. One of the reasons Bloomberg employed Forsythe and funded the investigations of him and his team was in pursuit of that prize. The news organization and the company showed a lot of courage in publishing Forsythe's first investigation. And it suffered huge economic consequences. Its terminal sales to banks in China slowed considerably after that.

Bloomberg won its first Pulitzer two years later, in 2015, for a series of explainers on corporate tax inversions. That was after it had re-organized and some would say eviscerated the projects and investigations team that Forsythe worked on.

https://www.poynter.org/reporting-editing/2015/bloomberg-get...

What Bloomberg realized, of course, as Bezos has realized with the Washington Post, is that owning a real news organization makes doing business complicated, because the best news stories contain information that someone wants to keep quiet. Bloomberg News has learned to toe the line on China, and that should scare people. It's a microcosm of how China intimidates individuals and businesses (and non-profits like the WHO) around the world.

> Last month, a Bloomberg corporate spokeswoman told The New York Times that Forsythe stole "Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property and gave it to his wife." The spokeswoman, Natalie Harland, said that Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg News never pressured anyone to sign a nondisclosure agreement.

The good ol' we never pressured we just warned we'd harass them to no end and ruin their lives.

It was rather entertaining to see an old billionaire who rarely hears "no" from those around him being put on the spot during the primary debates by Elizabeth Warren. All those millions spent on his advertising campaign didn't help, and there were no lawyers and PR spokespeople to draft responses for him.

Yeah, he eventually agree to release a few women who had NDAs signed if they requested. I think one might have gone through the process. But I can see being afraid to go through the process since a week later they could be sued for other things like "stole Bloomberg L.P. intellectual property" and then having to sell their homes to defend against it.

It's just so bizarre how he got any support at all. Look at the things he was saying: "...and that upon learning that a female employee was expecting a baby, he responded: Kill it!" from https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/21/politics/michael-bloomberg-no...

> It's just so bizarre how he got any support at all.

I mean... Donald Trump is our president, so if Bloomberg gaining any support is bizarre, we've already been in bizzaro world for the last 4 years.

It's not like the Democrat side of the house is squeaky-clean when it comes to its candidates not doing shitty things.

> Donald Trump is our president,

Good point. And I am thinking people who supported Bloomberg are the ones who protested for the last three years then a decent amount of them turn around and follow another old white billionaire from New York as a viable candidate. Not only that one with who was telling his employees to kill their babies. You'd think 3 years would be plenty to come up with well ... someone else.

Yeah, I find it incredibly bizarre that the DNC can't field a decent slate of relatable, electable candidates, even if you "only" consider the massive number of politicians with experience on the national stage. But I guess they are more incentivized to get their friends into positions of power than to do right by the country and party (though I assume they've convinced themselves that what they're doing does indeed fulfill that duty).

It's interesting how this is the same Bloomberg who have published the completely fake "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies" story.

From Alcibiades https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcibiades to Michael Bloomberg, it's always the elites who sell out their country. Of course it's only the elites who have have something of value enough on that scale to sell. Love of country is for the hoi polloi.

I vehemently disagree with the blatant partisan lean of almost every news company, but this crony, spineless cowardice is a far greater sin in my opinion.

I do not understand why any body would think that Bloomberg could do political stories in China. I do not understand why Bloomberg would be embarrassed about spiking political stories in China.

I am not defending the press and political climate in China, but it is what it is. The Chinese make up their rules. Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions of dollars in business for the sake of some political journalists work? I am glad they got their story published - good work. But Bloomberg would be insane to publish it.

> Why should Bloomberg sacrifice billions of dollars in business

Maybe they shouldn't. But for that reason, maybe they shouldn't be in the Journo business?

Journalism is basically about disseminating information that is novel, relevant and, most importantly, truthful. If the profit motive becomes incompatible with those ideals, Bloomberg can certainly choose to pursue the profit motive instead. But as soon as they choose profit over truth, readers with some level of critical thinking ability should understand that Bloomberg News is no longer doing journalism, they're doing something else.

The best news organizations are built entirely on their reputations, so a strategy that pursues profits at the expense of quality is, to me, probably not one that is good for an organization's longevity.

How does it work for an NDA to gag people over criminal activity?

>"It has to be done with a strategic framework and a tactical method that is ... smart enough to allow us to continue and not run afoul of the Nazis who are in front of us and behind us everywhere," Winkler said, according to the audio reviewed by NPR and verified by others. "And that's who they are. And we should have no illusions about it."

NPR's publication of this will surely lead to CCP pressure against Winkler, who will see him as a spy intent on leaking reportage out through other channels. And the world may lose still another channel of factual info out of China.

One wonders how NPR management rationalized inclusion of this particular quote as being in the public interest.

You can't trust "the news" anymore. Everything is just clickbait doomsday nonsense every day. It's incredibly hard to separate fact from fiction, opinion from fact, and reality from fantasy.

This might be an unpopular opinion, but I think we generally expect too much from media outlets. Readers also have a responsibility to understand the context of what they're reading, and that's been true for as long as newspapers have existed.

Take everything you read with a grain of salt, know that a story might later be retracted or edited, and follow different outlets with different perspectives. I think the homogenization of media consumption is far more dangerous than the fake and false stories that get out.

Seems reasonable enough to expect the following:

Five Core Principles of Journalism

1. Truth and Accuracy

Journalists cannot always guarantee ‘truth’, but getting the facts right is the cardinal principle of journalism. We should always strive for accuracy, give all the relevant facts we have and ensure that they have been checked. When we cannot corroborate information we should say so.

2. Independence

Journalists must be independent voices; we should not act, formally or informally, on behalf of special interests whether political, corporate or cultural. We should declare to our editors – or the audience – any of our political affiliations, financial arrangements or other personal information that might constitute a conflict of interest.

3. Fairness and Impartiality

Most stories have at least two sides. While there is no obligation to present every side in every piece, stories should be balanced and add context. Objectivity is not always possible, and may not always be desirable (in the face for example of brutality or inhumanity), but impartial reporting builds trust and confidence.

4. Humanity

Journalists should do no harm. What we publish or broadcast may be hurtful, but we should be aware of the impact of our words and images on the lives of others.

5. Accountability

A sure sign of professionalism and responsible journalism is the ability to hold ourselves accountable. When we commit errors we must correct them and our expressions of regret must be sincere not cynical. We listen to the concerns of our audience. We may not change what readers write or say but we will always provide remedies when we are unfair.

https://ethicaljournalismnetwork.org/who-we-are/5-principles...

This sounds ideal but in my opinion is far from reality.

I think this is a reasonable position. In general, the media itself has convinced us of its importance and at times. Which it is, but I think that less scrupulous entities have abused this privilege to a truly distasteful and disappointing degree.

I agree, we often overlook that media companies are private businesses just like any other private enterprise. And like it or not, private enterprises have agendas agendas that typically involve increasing profits.

There aren’t a ton of incentives within the media industry for those companies to not act like purely capitalistic enterprises even though we expect them to.

If publishers didn’t have special protections under the law for the false and defamatory things that they say, they wouldn’t have a special responsibility to only print the truth.

I don’t know about that.

What’s so strange to me about the state of media in the US is that most people don’t seem to pay for it anymore. Online publishing outlets are largely funded by advertising, which we on HN know is one of the more unsavory monetization strategies out there. Of course it’s going to perverse incentives.

Those complaining about how fake news is these days likely expect a perfect product that they refuse to pay for while simultaneously demanding that they not use the perverse advertising/CTR models that encourages things like clickbait titles. How is that supposed to work? That’s like expecting Facebook to remain free whilst not selling user data.

Of course you can.

Like life you just need to take some time to think about who you choose to belive.

I find people's description of "the news" or "the media" are often absurdly broad and sometimes they take exception for what IMO are minor issues.

I might find a clickbait title unseemly, but that alone is hardly a reason to not read the article.

Also some garbage media outlet sucking is not a reason for me to not belive anything from far better sources.

And even just being "wrong" now and then is not a reason to just quit on any sense of truth or reporting.

Historically there was no golden age of truth - the important thing is to not trust. Before Hearst got his blood money lying into a war newspapers were literally arms of political parties. The hard truth is you can't reliably delegate away critical thinking.

Spent a few minutes trying to decipher why Bloomberg would go through such hoops to silence his own wife.

We've changed the title above to that of the HTML doc, which fits the 80 char limit.

(Submitted title was "Bloomberg Killed Investigation, Fired Reporter Then Tried to Silence His Wife", which I'm sure was cut to that to try to fit the limit.)

This issue comes up a lot. As a sibling comment says, if it is so common an occurrence for the character limit to lead to misleading headlines because they were overly condensed, you may want to consider slightly expanding the headline length limit (perhaps to 120-140). But I appreciate that it's a balancing act, because making it too long dilutes the punchiness of the HN front page itself. No easy answer here.

It comes up somewhat regularly but it's quite rare for there to be a case where there isn't a natural solution. For example in this case the HTML doc title not only fit the limit nicely, but was more neutral and thus better for HN. I think HN benefits from this limit.

Please consider extending the limit to 120 or 140 characters. 80 often forces me to produce a misleading condensation in my submissions.

In the alternative, add a "privileged comment" pinned to the top of the page which cannot be replied to, where an extended summary of the submission can be added by the submitter. But just changing the character limit of the title is probably a lot easier.

Her name is Ms. Placedmodifier

I believe this is what’s called a “Garden Path” sentence, because it leads you to the wrong conclusion initially.

Originally thought it was an investigation about a killing, made the second half of the title all the more sinister.

Nixon's Attorney General, the horrible, horrible man, John Mitchell, had his wife silenced by drugging and sequestering her.

"If you guys could get John Mitchell, that would be beautiful." (Quote from All the President's Men)

There's an interesting 1994 BBC documentary, "The Watergate Affair" that talks about it. Mitchell was one of the few players in that sordid saga that didn't speak on camera. They're such a bunch of smug bastards, the lot of them, except for John Dean; he's only half an ass.

But, yeah, what was the elephant doing in your pajamas?

That agents of President Nixon kidnapped and beat the wife of one of his cronies to silence her seems unbelievable, but it's true. E.g.,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Mitchell#June_1972_kidn...

This was also covered in season 1 of the Slow Burn podcast, which was excellent.

Nixon personally blamed Martha Mitchell for the scandal and impeachment.

The same guy who told Frost, "Well, if the President did it, it's not illegal."

Clearly, his grip on reality was a long time gone in service to his power-seeking for his constituency.

Even a president can be a data point in Dunning & Kruger's "too stupid to know how stupid they are" category.

Now, we have a mobbed-up slumlord 1000x more stupid and infinitely more amoral. He is a true credit to the GOP's fundamental guiding principles.

It’s interesting to think what Nixon could’ve been if he wasn’t so paranoid and vindictive. Arguably the shenanigans in Watergate weren’t even necessary to secure a victory.

I've seen it here in small amounts before, but it's rather shocking to observe so much obviously biased downvoting and flagging in one story. A number of anti-CCP posts already dead, and others on their way...

I suppose it's rather predictable that people can't post something about the CCP on a meta-story about the CCP killing news stories, without their posts in turn being killed.

What you're seeing is an artifact of the topic being divisive. Equally routine: users imagining sinister scenarios because they don't like the straightforward explanation, that people are simply in disagreement.

The same pattern plays out on every divisive topic: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme.... The truth, as far as I can tell after studying the data closely for years now, is that this is pure cognitive bias. One easy way to see this is to notice how people who like and dislike the opposite things have precisely opposing pictures of the bias they think dominates here.

Somehow people find it difficult to understand how someone else, with a different background, might have a very different view. It feels like it can't possibly be sincere—it must be dishonest and disingenuous, such as communist agents under the hood (or shills being paid to astroturf, or whatever lingo fits the theme). In reality, this is how a non-siloed internet forum works: you encounter others who believe very different things than you do.

If it feels weird or odd, that's because we're good at siloing ourselves into places where we don't rub shoulders with such people with such views. HN isn't like that, because it's the same set of stories and comments for everyone. There are millions of people here, all over the world. If a topic is at all divisive, there's at least a million people who strongly disagree with you about it. That's all you need to explain the comments, votes, and flags you dislike.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

One thing to add to that:

People are not just wildly different in their opinions but also in their demeanor. I used to develop a fairly popular app (GeeTasks), and I had fans in my forums overflowing with enthusiasm for the app and hostility towards an occasional detractor. I would have assumed they were paid to do it, but then I most certainly did not, and I can scarcely imagine that my competitors would.

Having witnessed this first-hand I given up on my formerly impeccable shill-detecting skills.

It's simply that some people engage in and encourage censorship, others call it out. That's the division.

The other side has an equal and opposite formulation of the division.

I came to this thread to observe the same behavior, without any plans to comment, expecting any comment that is even mildly anti-CCP to be heavily downvoted. But I just had to second your own observation at the peril to my own karma.

Your comment has been extremely heavily upvoted, as has the GP. That's because the actual pattern here is the opposite of what you guys are saying.

What's happening is that you're falling prey to the notice-dislike bias: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Fortunately we dont live in a country where you online karma is relevant. Yet...

> Platforms like Arya — which says it’s been used by Home Depot and Dyson — go even further, using machine learning to find candidates based on data that might be available on a company’s internal database, public job boards, social platforms like Facebook and LinkedIn, and other profiles available on the open web, like those on professional membership sites.

https://www.vox.com/recode/2019/12/12/20993665/artificial-in...

I think we are going to come to a time where it does. I only hope that the algorithms will eventually recognize that the best things we say are always polarising, rather than seeking a bland conformity.

Polarising topics are usually very important. The things most people say about them add little value though. HN is IMO quite a bit better in that area. This is the only place where I sometimes skip a headline and read the comments on article to see if it's worth reading.

I wonder how many people here change what they say depending on whether it will get them more karma. Karma doesn't even do anything so I'm not sure why people would care.

This kind of light censorship is in some ways also dangerous because it shapes the discourse in a non obvious way, giving entities like the CCP control over the perceived consensus.

What do you call your credit score?

False equivalence. Credit scores measure failure to honor financial contracts. They’re not about honoring arbitrary social norms

But you should be worry if they can manipulate yours but not the other way round. When next virus come they would how to control more. Good luck.

The CCP must be destroyed.

Maybe so, but please don't post unsubstantive comments to Hacker News.

>it's rather shocking to observe so much obviously biased downvoting and flagging in one story. A number of anti-CCP posts already dead, and others on their way...

And which posts would that be? I have show-dead on, I see four dead posts, and I struggle to see any substantial criticism of CCP in their rank.

All of the top comments are anti-CCP.

There are four dead comments in this thread.

* Two are entirely unrelated to the article at hand.

* One is a plea to not have this kind of content on Hacker News.

* One is meta-criticism that HN is fragile.

None of them match your criticism.

To be fair you commented hours after this was posted. What was shown and downvoted changed greatly from that point in time. When I first saw this thread the exact issues the OP was stating were in fact playing out.

A thread on a sensational topic tends to fill up early with reflexive, a.k.a. thoughtless, comments simply because those are the fastest to write and because the people with the strongest feelings on a topic have the most activation energy to comment. Unfortunately such comments tend to be superficial ones that merely repeat pre-existing positions—usually angrily—about the generic theme (China is a popular one these days but it can be anything people feel strongly about). Sometimes they come with pre-baked talking points that sound detailed enough, but are still superficial, generic reactions because they're being pasted in from previous places.

It takes time for reflective, a.k.a. thoughtful, comments to emerge, especially about the specifics of a story.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Reflexive/generic/superficial comments get downvoted, but not because communist agents are manipulating the threads or because the bulk of the community disagrees. They get downvoted because they're high-indignation-low-information, and tedious. In other words, they're flamebait, which is against the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

The users who post and upvote such comments, unfortunately, draw exactly the wrong conclusion from this. They take a flying leap into feeling certain that the community (and/or mods) is biased toward the view they dislike and stacked against their own view. They somehow manage not to notice the countless posts that support their positions and are upvoted just fine. Then they start a meta flamewar about the site being clearly biased / obviously infiltrated. That flamewar is even more reflexive, angry, and off topic than the first one.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

> What was shown and downvoted changed greatly from that point in time.

Which is exactly why the moderators frown upon comments that mope about astroturfing - they add nothing but noise to the discussion. Any weird voting biases will even-out over time. If you suspect astroturfing, send an email to the mods instead of degrading the quality of conversation.

I don't know if "nothing but" is fair. They add noise, certainly. But if astroturfing is happening, to pretend by fiat that it's not significantly distorts the discourse.

If astroturfing were happening, the best course of action would be to alert moderation. Baseless accusations of astroturfing help literally no one, and poison discourse.

I saw it within ten minutes of it being posted, it didn't reflect reality. I drafted this when it said it was posted thirty-five minutes ago. I sent it after an hour of the post being up. I sent mail to the site's moderation about this post's title when there were only four comments or so, not including the one we're discussing. At none of these points was what the person said true.

I think I've had a fairly-conclusive watch on this post; the accusations in his post don't reflect reality and haven't.

Which comments were "rescued" but initially unfairly dead?

I was thinking about how many low quality Bloomberg News stories have generated complaints on HN. They keep getting posted and upvoted and are just junk.

The quality used to be there. The stories were well researched and more business on-topic than other places like the Wall Street Journal, but now that’s over a decade ago.

Besides this CCP thing, one wonders what else they are watering down. Why would Bloomberg report anything negative about their major customers?

Why would Fox News report anything negative about GOP or CNN about Democrats? Media checks and balances are other orgs of different beliefs. Dangerous to rely on only 1 source or even 1 partisan community.

I agree that it's vital to consume heterogeneous media, but as for 'why would they': Because they should not be mere propaganda machines.

Incidentally, I have seen anti-GOP coverage on Fox and anti-DNC coverage on CNN. Not enough, but a non-zero amount. Maybe the motive is simply to give the false impression of impartiality, I don't know.

which of the dead comments should have stayed in your opinion?

Yours is currently the top comment, does that disprove your point? And downvoting your comment would prove your point - very well played!

It is really out of control. I'm not sure what can be done, but it seems like something a motivated group could find a technical solution for, if even just to shine a light on the phenomenon.

I've personally found that saying critical things about the Chinese Communist Party on this website results in people quickly conflating said attacks on a government with a non-existent ethnic group (ignoring the fact that China has multiple ethnic groups instead of just the dominant Han majority) and suddenly you are flagged for being a bigot. It's pretty obnoxious behavior that is very dominant in Silicon Valley. I view it as primarily driven at the bottom by people who see all bigotry through a purely Western lens (and are therefore blind to the fact that "white" privilege is actually "dominant ethnic group" privilege and changes depending on where you are), don't know anything about China other than it being an Asian country, and equate criticizing the country as being Western imperialism.

From the top, it's money money money, because hey, who cares about Uighurs anyway, I just got a billion from some dude whose dad fought for Mao and is now a high-ranking member of the Chinese Communist Party. Now I'll go talk about how much I value diversity while my company is funded by a country which imprisons people because they are Muslim, or criticize the government, or, you know, tell the truth.

There are plenty of critical comments about China and the CCP which don't get downvoted or flagged. In fact, there are massive numbers of them. What gets downvoted and flagged are mostly meta deviations (into this sort of off-topic morass) and flamewars. Please don't post like that—it's against the site guidelines, for good reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867280.

Why is this comment thread off topic?

The underlying reason for the Bloomberg story is the CCP silencing dissidence.

Ironically, this comment thread about the silencing of CCP dissidence is itself silenced...

Because the more generic it gets, the more tedious it gets, and because this is not a site for flamewar.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Would you please stop posting this sort of grandiose, generic rhetoric? There are plenty of comments in this thread representing the same view you adhere to. The requirement is simply that people post thoughtfully and reflectively, rather than from a knee-jerk reflex or flamewar place.

No, that's not because we're secret communist sympathizers. It's because on HN, we want threads not to be predictable. Readers come to HN to have their curiosity gratified. There is zero curiosity being gratified in angry, repetitive comments.

This is an area where the interests of readers are not aligned with certain kinds of commenters—the kind that want to do ideological or political or nationalistic or religious battle on the internet. The site guidelines explicitly ask you not to do that, so please stop doing it.

I understand your mod decision. I would also recommend looking into the OP's claim. I have to agree, the downvoting on this topic is much more than I am used to, and I get downvoted often! So, it appears there is more than the normal HN audience at work here.

I'd be happy to look at specific links that anyone is worried about. That's part of the contract we have with users: the guidelines ask people not to post insinuations about astroturfing but they also ask people to send the concerns they do have to hn@ycombinator.com.

Based on everything I've seen, though, the null hypothesis is that what you're describing is explained not by a difference in the audience, but by the topic. China was already probably the single most divisive topic on HN in the last year. Obviously the covid crisis has accentuated that. This isn't an HN thing—it's all through Western media and no doubt a symmetrical version is running through Chinese media as well. HN can't possibly be immune from macro social trends ( https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... ).

You can see that I've been making this point, including about China, for a long time:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19219091

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18758864

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18227719

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18413084

Also, note how those commenters have the perception of exactly the opposite bias on HN? That's how this goes.

This has been happening for a long time, and when we moderate both sides, each side takes it as proof that we're biased against them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18214378

That is a good point. The uptick in downvotes I see could maybe explained by the topic's high profile and divisiveness, instead of astroturf. But, that still leaves the question as to who is in favor of the CCP? Or is it just a reaction to short, dismissive posts on the topic? Must be interesting as a mod to get to quantitatively analyze these questions!

This is a disturbing trend I've seen on the left. Any criticism of a foreign country is construed as racism, or talk around immigration policies. That's obviously conflating issues, and it serves to shut down conversation rather than promote it. I hope people stop being so woke and wake up to the harm they're causing with that kind of extreme attitude.

It's unfortunate, because I think those people are largely motivated by good intentions and don't realize the damage they do. With apology for the pejorative, this is the entire problem of the "useful idiot".

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

> This is a disturbing trend I've seen on the left.

It’s not just the left, it’s both sides, and often there have been incidents of actual racism that can be accurately cited as prior examples of racism.

I haven't seen this on the right, I think the left is far more guilty of invoking racism falsely. The right tends to be guilty of actual racism sometimes.

* Except Russia

You can insult, malign, and attack Russia all you want because "it's all Russia's fault!"

One can't look at Russia and say they're the good guys - but I have a lot of empathy for how they're treated by the West. I don't think it's always fair or justified by any means.

Governments seem to find it useful to have a bad guy to point to, for various reasons, and Russia has served this purpose a lot. That's a shame, because we should be trying to get along peacefully rather.

A paranoid, but still quite possibly true, reading of that is that Chinese government "influencers" are part of that knee jerk reaction.

Uighurs are not persecuted "because they are Muslim". Hui, the second largest Chinese ethnic group after Han, are Muslim too. And they are not persecuted in any way.

Uighurs are persecuted for the same reason the CCP tries to destroy the Tibetan ethnic group.

Both these groups have strong independence movements that want to break away from China.

What would motivate them to desire independence from China?

That's a long story in both cases.

For the Tibet case, a great book about the history of China-Tibet relations and the role the British played in it is "The Snow Lion and the Dragon", free to read online: https://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft2199...

For the Xinjiang/Uighur case, I don't have a book recommendation. Uighurs are a Turkic people, so they don't really fit into China culturally. Xinjiang became Chinese about a millennium ago, but Uighurs continue to fight for an independent "East Turkistan". The movement's headquarter is in Munich, afaik.

Do you think the state enforced atheism has any role?

Unfortunately this conflation may have even contributed indirectly to early spread of Coronavirus in SF. After the virus was spreading but before the US lockdowns, there was an article in one of the SF papers that accused people who were deciding not to eat out in Chinatown of being racist.

So I think this conflation doesn't originate here on HN, and it is very difficult in general to discuss some political/governmental issues without triggering the conflation.

Reminds me of this tweet [0] from the chair of the NYC health council committee.

He wrote, "If you are staying away, you are missing out!" - called those who stayed away from Chinatown "racist" - then tested positive for COVID-19 a week later.

[0] https://twitter.com/marklevinenyc/status/1226566648729133056...

Did he get infected in Chinatown? Were there good reasons to assume there would be more infected there? Recent reports suggest the majority of Corona imports into NYC came from Europe. Joining a large event full of people seems like the bigger issue.

Around here, somehow people got scared about Taiwanese that haven't left Germany in years, but not their buddies that have been traveling a lot.

> Joining a large event full of people seems like the bigger issue.

Which is exactly what he did...in Chinatown.

It can be both. Neither situation excludes the other.

Yes, people that refused to eat out in Chinatown were racist, because those people in Chinatown weren't the ones travelling. And the people that were refusing to eat out were still eating at other places which had travelers from all over; they weren't self-quarantining or trying to limit the spread of the virus.

There's nuance to discussion where you can discuss a country without being racist, but at the same time I've seen people make obviously racist remarks while trying to pretend it's meant as a criticism of the country and not the people.

It is never racist to not eat in a district labelled a certain way. Thinking that way makes you part of the problem.

What if people avoided little Italy? Or little Canada. Racist?

If you're avoiding little Italy or little Canada because you think they're diseased then yes, that would make you racist.

If you avoid those places because you don't feel like having Italian or Canadian food right now then no, that's not racist.

In this case, the reason why people were avoiding Chinatown was because they were avoiding a group of people they were afraid of due to the coronavirus. That's racism. They weren't trying to avoid the virus because they were still going out, eating at other restaurants and still being in the general public.

You feel avoiding little Canada would make you racist?

Against what race would that be?

I feel like the word racism has lost it's intended meaning if people believe not going to little Canada (for fears of getting a virus) is somehow judging a group of people based on their skin colour. A Canadian can be white/black/asian/native or anything else... A Canadian isn't a race it is a term that includes many races. Unless you are now racist against all races by not going to little Canada I can't imagine how that term applies.

Maybe you want to say.. prejudice (to pre-judge) rather than racist (to pre-judge based on race).

People were pre-judging when making decisions to go to chinatown. They thought with all of the international travel between China and little China perhaps they would be more likely to get the virus.

Calling people who made a decision based on belief of likeliness of getting the virus racist is wrong. They didn't make a decision on race they made it on some other factor that didn't include slin color.

Calling them racist makes you racist. You have pre-judged a group of people based on race (little China) when everyone else were basing it on geography. I hope you can accept responsibility and change your views for the future. The world doesn't need people judging others based on race we need to get away from that.

The definition of racism has included nationality for very many years now. This is from UK law from 1965: https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1965/73/enacted

In other words, early on, it wasn't unreasonable to believe that P(travel to china|inside chinatown) > P(travel to china|outside chinatown), especially in a city with strong trade ties and relative geographic proximity to the Pacific ocean.

Would you ask GrubHub to not send anyone Chinese or Italian to your door? Did you inquire about the nationality of any service worker you interacted with, and ask for someone who's not Italian or Chinese? What if they're only part Italian or part Chinese, do they only get half infected?

Starts to sound kind of racist when you assume person of certain race = infection.

>'ve personally found that saying critical things about the Chinese Communist Party on this website results in people quickly conflating said attacks on a government with a non-existent ethnic group

Been banned for it under the guise of flamebait. Didn't say anything inflammatory.

What's worse is that we know the CCP employs a "troll army" for astroturfing all over the web, but on every major platform a pro China post would simply never be silenced - so the CCP in short is playing our own institutions against us because we increasingly cannot separate criticism from intolerance.

Ironic since communism is itself a non chinese idea forced on the population through western indoctrination of Mao.

Let's not forget that this company published the largest fake news about China that one could conceive:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-10-04/the-big-h...

I haven't seen any retractions of this piece of garbage that has been denied by any and all Western companies that were supposed "victims".

Sorry, where is the refutation to this?

Apple and Amazon produced detailed statements[1] explaining that they never found what the reporters say they found. And nobody has yet produced any concrete evidence of the spy chips existing; no example, no picture, no documents referring to them. It's impossible to definitively refute anonymous claims that some secret thing exists, but I think it's unreasonable to believe them.

[1] https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/4/17936968/apple-amazon-den...

> this company published the largest fake news about China that one could conceive

Was this particular article based on evidence? We don't know.

Was it 100% plausible and done by governments all the time? Absolutely.

Are IPMI, BMC and managemnt engines complete garbage from a security standpoint? Absolutely.

So I find the strong language very over the top. If you know the history of weakening security equipment, then you wouldn't even bat an eye over this.

You know how bad Zoom security is? It's actually 10x better than any IPMI or BMC code. I'd get worked up about that, which is on every server motherboard already.

Sorry, yes, I didn't mean to give a misleading impression. It's very plausible that a government might intercept hardware in this way. I'm just skeptical of this specific way (there's got to be a subversion both easier and less obvious than planting a magic spy chip), and don't believe that Apple and Amazon would issue such strong denials if they had in fact found such a chip.

My eyes have been open to China’s influence in US media, especially with covid-19 outbreak, where they’re rallied various institutions to change the narrative around the name and origin of the virus.

For example, Dreamworks carrying water for the CCP government by including the 9-dotted line prominently on a map in their movie[1].

Who thinks this inclusion was by accident? Their influence in US media and politics is out of control.

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/abominable-dreamworks-movie-...

It's somewhat amusing all the fuss over the legitimacy conveyed through maps, as if the map illustrator consulted some gold standard reference of truth. There was a time some centuries past when maps were approximations of reality. I think this comes down to the play on human nature of: when you say something frequently enough it's assumed to be true. Where is the relevant international law assuming there is one that expresses territorial waters.

It may not convey legitimacies, but it often reflects realities such as the one illustrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fASh2_RzMuE

Maps often illustrate who owns whom, and how.

Wow.

> When asked about Taiwan, WHO Dr. Aylward first pretended not hearing then awkwardly cut the line

They call him abck and ask about Taiwan again and he literally says, "well, we've already talked about China. ... when you look across all the different areas of China ..."

The Top Gun movie that's not yet released went through similar editing.

https://www.businessinsider.com/top-guns-maverick-appears-ch...

The Taiwanese flag was replaced with some generic triangle. Taiwan sovereignty is considered a very “delicate” issue by the Chinese government, which is to say the language and depiction of it is greatly censored, both at home and abroad apparently.

The Japanese flag appears to have been replaced with a red triangle, the Taiwanese flag with some other design.

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