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Comment by enriquto | Hacker News Reader

> I work with a lot of folks from China and they (...)

What you say represents about 50% of Chinese researchers in my lab. Those that immediately return to their country after the PhD and you never hear from them again. The other 50% are the complete opposite: they cannot wait to get their family out of the country and never look back, explaining that the country is ruled by a bunch of crazy psycopaths. Curiously enough, there's almost no interaction between both groups, they politely ignore each other (and they are really polite and professional towards everybody also).

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Once upon a time I used to spend way to much time on Omegle (worldwide random 1:1 chat).

Once a chinese girl was online, we chat about our countries, I explain how much I like china as a kid for martial arts, food, aesthetics, it was friendly and casual (chinese people on omegle often expressed worries about the value of their country, I wanted to make her feel at ease).

Quickly though she started to say it's not all rosey, rules are strict, internet firewall.. suddenly she stopped talking. She typed a bunch of omg omg omg i shouldn't have said that omg sorry disconnect.

It was nothing yet I felt fear in her behavior. All that for expressing very mild discontent about her country. First time I ever felt the impact of politicians on people's mind.. also a 'freedom of speech' felt different after that.

This thread is nothing but personal anecdotes.

So, with enough anecdotes we'll reach statistical significance

No, because anecdotes suffer from sample bias since they are self-reported.

You fail to see the 12 month of 24/7 presence on this site and interaction with all countries. To hell with stats.

It's ultimiately a matter of dependency i.e. econmically well-off Chinese people who have dependencies with CCP (e.g. official party member (6.6% of the population), or owning a family business that interfaces with CCP, even if unofficially, etc), V.S. well-off Chinese with little or no dependencies.

To be where they are now (outside of China receiving education, etc), the former group (or their parents/relatives) fought hard to get benefits from their relationship with CCP, while the later group (or their parents/relatives) fought hard to find a path out of this CCP madness.

And thus the contrast.

My grandfather was a minister and a proud CCP member. But he was the type who believes in doing the moral things and never took bribe. He worked crazy hours and get paid penauts. Most of my relatives saw him as foolish because he basically didn't fight to "get benefits from his relationship with CCP" and stayed poor for all his life. And most of his colleagues and superordinates don't like him because you can't help one another to climb the rank (or generate wealth) like this.

Thanks for this post. Every support or opposition towards authority boils down to economic incentives. Glad to hear from some one from the inside.

> And most of his colleagues and superordinates don't like him

they don't like him not because of the ladder climb, but because him being a goody-two-shoe means that their corrupt activities are more likely to be shown as "wrong", and therefore, more risky for them.

it's like being a good cop in a department where the other cops are bought and paid for.

The question is, are their psychopaths crazier than our psychopaths.

I politely refuse to partake in this kind of questions :)

Maybe, maybe not, but our psychopaths are restrained by a government designed to be inefficient and to frustrate tyrants.

We just had an attempted fascist coup in the USA and it failed hilariously. The swamp is a good thing. It’s there to bog down tyrants in mud. Efficient government is dangerous.

Even though I agree with what you said in terms of internal politics, I think when it comes to geopolitics, things start to get much uglier and multiple times more cruel. And since this topic is about foreign politics, I don’t think the US is any better than China. An American might think different, but I’m not one.

The US is better than China internally, but I mostly agree that China is not substantially worse than the US in terms of foreign policy.

My intention was to point out the irony of Chinese nationals wanting to immigrate to the US, ostensibly because China is ruled by a bunch of "crazy psychopaths". When the reality is that the US is also run, at least in part, by a bunch of crazy psychopaths.

But my point was not well taken.

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