Hacker News Reader

Comment by zarzavat | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the situations are similar. Peng is not a dissident, she's a tennis player. And Assange has not been erased, his trial has been covered even in the mainstream media.

The real difference, as the old story goes, is in the quality of the propaganda. The west has managed to convince its people that Assange is a bad person, a rapist even. Whereas China has not managed to convince many of its people that Peng is a bad person, rather they are simply crudely prevented from talking about the issue online. The west is much much better at propaganda than China.

View on HN

People think Chinese propaganda is clever and insidious but in truth Chinese propaganda is extremely clumsy to the point of being essentially harmless in the west.

This is the typical level of Chinese propaganda: https://twitter.com/manyapan/status/1454346638596743173

> being essentially harmless in the west.

Is their aim to be harmful in the west? My impression has always been that they’re pretty ambivalent about that, they’re more concerned with the internal effect.

I don’t know that people even do think Chinese propaganda is clever! In my mind their skill is overarching control over communication. It’s dumb and brute force but it seems to work.

They aren't aiming to be harmful.

But I've seen plenty of people paint everybody who have a non-mainstream opinion on China, as paid undercover propagandists.

You don't have a non-mainstream opinion on China; you hold every Chinese (domestic) mainstream opinion and parrot them on this Western forum. One only needs to look at your post history to see that all you do here is post CCP propaganda.

Who would do that but a paid shill?

HN is one of the few places online that both allows free speech and isn't riddled with bots/spammers/shills. I'd like to keep it that way, meaning you should fuck off. No one is buying your shit, anyway, as you might have found from the replies your posts get. It's a lost cause.

No. There are a lot of things from the mainstream Chinese discourse that I agree with, but also things I disagree with. For example I tell mainland Chinese that anti-US conspiracy theories (e.g. Fort Dedrick) are wrong.

I compare arguments from both sides and I make up my own mind. I have my own agency and my own opinion, thank you.

If you're gonna call me a "paid shill" even though I have 20 years of online history in a different field, you're gonna have to prove it.

If you don't like what I have to say, then fine, don't listen to me. But don't prevent others from listening to me and don't prevent me from speaking.

Ultimately I want peace and understanding between both sides.

Actually he’s convinced me. He does have a non-mainstream opinion on China. The boots on the ground, lived reality and perspective of Chinese domestic experience is literally a non-mainstream opinion on China.

You’re being extremely rude here, accusing people of being shills and telling them to literally “fuck off”. If anything goes against the HN ethos and rules, it’s terrible behaviour and bad faith behaviour like that, not a veteran Hacker News member with an account that’s twice as old as yours arguing a refreshingly non-mainstream perspective.

Fuck off, "veteran."

Posting like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29352983 is a bannable offense on HN. You can't attack another user like this, no matter how strongly you disagree with them. Please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29739415 for a longer explanation.

The West's propaganda is just as clumsy, civil servants everywhere are far removed from real people (the stuff the US used in Iraq/Afghanistan is comic, I believe they are used leaflets drops in Syria too...you could also include public health campaigns and "nudges" in this, lots of comic nonsense).

The difference is that the West has the media which puts its own propaganda, people on the internet putting their own propaganda, etc. There is a market. In China, that market is limited.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com