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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

Getting the actual opinion of anyone in China (or Hong Kong if you’re a worker and well integrated) is very difficult.

There is a lot of reading between the lines necessary because of the network of reporting from other Chinese that’s worldwide.

Note: those actual opinions are not necessarily “life is baaaad what a niiightmare”, they can be quite nuanced just like anywhere else. Something as simple as “I kind of liked that unsanctioned rendition of the Chinese national anthem” could have the same consequences for them and their family as a total denouncement of the Party.

Single party control, coupled with a constitution with articles that undermine all the other parts of the constitution, can really impact the experience to express anything.

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I’ve had regular contact with my relatives in FJ during the pandemic and there’s no lack of complaints. So I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Most Americans who do not have relatives in China think it is almost literally 1984.

oh you mean like this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_Credit_System

Everything I could possible write about that is covered on that page, especially the Misconceptions section.

The nearly non-existent line between public and private sector in China really derails all possible discussion and comparison to equivalences outside of China, but regardless I just don't find what goes on in China to be different enough when we tolerate the same things from the private sector that runs our daily life. It isn't different enough for me to draw the line at "but our government isn't doing it".

That's a pretty clear line... On the one side, even if the US government is not adequately regulating private companies today, it could begin doing so tomorrow, or if it's a question of legality, any individual or group could bring a case against those companies, and have it decided on by a judge who can actually make an impartial decision.

On the other side, you have a single entity which answers only to itself, and makes the law. There is no-one "above" that entity, even in principle. If you don't like the things it's doing... tough.

Honestly the problem in my experience was the opposite: many American friends who visited me in Beijing expected it to be just as free as the west and were surprised when Google Facebook etc… didn’t work. This was well beyond the years where the GFW blocks were implemented. Come on, they expecting China to be openlike Japan or Thailand?

> Getting the actual opinion of anyone in China ... is very difficult.

Is it really that different in America (or the "west" in general)? Most of us have become very guarded in what opinions we share in the past few years.

That's not a coincidence. The same tactics that lead China where it is now are being used here.

That’s because people are aiming for single party control right now, in the US.

The difference is that expressing an opinion to another American abroad just means you cant sleep with them. It doesn't cause the federal or municipal police to track down your family for intimidation, or the private sector to galvanize excision of them either. For the individual that voiced there is just a small risk of being disassociated with the person you said something to, and if it was digital there is a small risk of getting fired or disassociated from institutions you were a part of. Very small risk. Maybe greater over the following decade, for something you said now.

Of course you have a point, but I just think that's a conveniently selective interpretation of the reality. I mean just take blackness for example, you don't even have to say anything for your life to be fundamentally undermined by the federal and municipal police. But what I think is more significant is Western foreign policy, freedom of self-determination exists in the weakest sense of freedom to adhere to Western hegemony. Just take Hong Kong for example, the only reason it exists is because the Chinese refused to continue the opium trade with the British. That's where the Opium Wars come from. And that continues to be the modus operandi; silencing of indigenous voices, funding of anti-communist sentiment in South America and South East Asia, arms sales to the Middle East, fabrication of evidence of WMDs to start wars, funding of anti-capitalist sentiment in Africa.

Of course us western, middle-class white people think we're free, we think what we have is normal. Nothing's prodding us to question the status quo.

I chose examples also available to black Americans. Of the example I chose, the biggest risk is just not being able to sleep with the American that person met abroad. The federal and municipal police are not going to track down their family stateside for harassment.

I think you extrapolated waaaaay more than either of us were talking about beforehand. We're talking about the comparisons to what happened in the article.

Its a tricky discussion since many of us want to make these comparisons between the countries, its very tempting to, but without narrowly tailoring the conversation it just derails everything.

Like I say I think you have a point, which I agree with, I just think it's conveniently selective of its viewpoint