The brainwash has been going on for 70 years, when internet became a concern, the great firewall covered for that.
You ended up being brain-washed in no time.
There is no doubt CCP made infrastructure a priority, and did 10X better than the west socializing countries as a whole, but if you curse Xi just for fun on any street for 3 minutes you will be in jail quickly without access to attorneys. When you have absolutely zero individual rights where it is needed the most, you will miss your Germany dearly.
Democracy was never meant to be as efficient as a dictatorship. In fact, inefficiency is baked in by design to hedge against bad leadership (at the cost of good leaders having their potential impact massively reduced). Think of democracy as a political system with an expensive but effective insurance policy.
That’s so not true. China has long been relying on critical resources like oil, hell even pork. Russia fit this better.
https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20211221-human-cost-of...
"If i could vote for the CCP here in germany, i would."
You could not vote for a system like that - if you did, you'd stop having a right to vote for a different system RIGHT after. 'nuff said.
It's unfathomable someone in 2021, that is not a Xi-paid troll (precisely what this article is about) would advocate for more authoritarian control, rather than less. The people you spoke to (including your farcical example) didn't exist or were fully brainwashed by propaganda. Again, IF they exist, THEIR PERSPECTIVE would have necessarily been skewed and manipulated by their internal propaganda, which is again, what this article is about.
China pretends to exist in a vacuum, but it does not. Many of its citizens and residents seem to, but they are wrong.
China workd. I lived there for years and people were happier than here in Germany.
I am just sooooooo sick and tired of those anti-China sentiment here in HN. EVERY SINGLE TIME a china article is posted, you just read shit. If it was balanced, i would not care, but it is so predictable. I just want to rant and vomit.
HN is a highly international community but it is also highly Western. You can't expect attitudes on topics remote from Western understanding to be either balanced or informed—especially not when the topic is politically and nationally charged. The same would be true of any group of HN's size and regional composition. That's a baseline condition we can't change. The question is how we should handle it.
I've expended a huge amount of effort trying to protect this place for minority voices (including about China - here's a list I put together for another user some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod). I regularly get accused of being a communist agent and all the rest of it (which expresses the stupidity-of-the-collective in a way that would be scary if it weren't so trivial), and I can tell you for sure that accounts like yours, making the opposing case in a name-calling, ranting way, are a big part of the problem on this. So please stop.
Anyone who wants to represent a minority view to a majority (especially a highly-charged majority) has a special responsibility not to "rant and vomit" in a wake-up-sheeple fashion. If you do that, all you achieve is to recharge the majority and reinforce its righteousness in precisely the places you want to see change. Should you happen to be arguing in favor of the truth (or some aspect of the truth), then you discredit the truth, which hurts everybody. I've been trying to make this point to people for years, on a wide range of topics: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
Arguably it's not fair that the minority has a greater burden than the majority, but it's the way these conversations work, and we can't change that either.
If somebody came onto HN posting obviously dumb stuff about how American people feel and think, they'd be downvoted, because everyone can see the obvious falsehood.
But when it's Chinese, majority vote of Americans decides the truth! They will tell you the real deal on how things work inside China. And if someone calls them morons, we have you to come in and keep things civil.
Re what you've "seen happen several times over the last decade": I'm sure you've seen some dots, but how you connect them into the picture you've got is not a thing you've seen, but something you yourself have made out of the dots. If you started with different priors, you'd collect different dots and build a totally different picture—and believe me, people do.
Your (and others') dot collections are smatterings of datapoints out of which, like magic beans, you can grow whatever beanstalk of bias you want. People with different priors have different tastes in datapoints and "ignorant morons", therefore collect different beans, and therefore grow different visions of massive, outrageous bias—and they're all just as angry about it.
I'll believe it when I see "anti-China" posts being removed from the first 3-4 pages with as much enthusiasm as much as "anti-US" posts. Or when flags are removed from posts related to death of Kobe Bryant (or conversely, discussion about the death of a nobody like Bill Gates' father demoted by moderation action).
You'd probably like to ban the topic entirely, but it'd be weird to have one banned topic and you've said that doesn't work, so that's out.
So what's left, being even-handed, I guess. Except it's a 10-1 ratio, so being even-handed, ban people from both sides leaves you with a 9-0 ratio.. congrats? Even if you're really, really, really trying to be even-handed with regards to content, most people would bias towards handing out 50-50 to feel fair, while 10-1 (or whatever ratio) is actually statistically fair. But that would feel quite biased if you did it! Practically taking a side! So we get a phenomenon where a bad Chinese-adjacent comment (or even a polite one) is super likely to be moderated, but you can't possibly moderate all of the really bad anti-China comments in this thread, there's too many, they rule the day and they establish truth for passersby.
Tech is one of the few industries with a large Chinese minority during this time of rising tension. It would vastly improve the intellectual tone of the site if we had more of them explaining their viewpoint and less of people telling them they're brainwashed.
Failing that, I think the actual real-world answer is to pro-actively push down the repetitive anti-China stories that hit the front page multiple times a week, and then just deny it if anyone asks. They're not intellectually interesting, they're hostile to a significant tech minority, and you don't like the flamewar. Why keep them?
I agree with you that it would be better for HN if Chinese users, and users of Chinese background, could share more of their experiences and observations. I've been arguing that for a long time, as I believe you know. But it's not super cool of you to be making that argument as long as your own contributions to HN are undermining that possibility. We're each responsible for how we individually affect the collective situation, and pointing the finger at others—even if they're behaving badly, and even though they're benefitting from an unfair, lopsided fight—is not helpful.
HN will continue to trend towards having 2-5 content-free "china bad amirite" threads a week with an echo chamber of people who don't know any history of the region saying completely nonsensical things. People who know a little more, or who point out things like "the belt and road initiative isn't a literal road and can't be used to invade someone" will be banned for contributing to flamewar.
For example, in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29655341[1]. You can't be everywhere, there will always 10x comments like that for every 'bad' comment going the other way, and your even-handedness means that 9/10 of them are implicitly judged as fine, acceptable and encouraging intellectual something-or-other.
[1] Check that guy's history, he writes Xi Jinping as Hsi Chunping.. his commitment to ideology is so strong that he wade-giles'd Xi, lol
This is a good example of how people jump to conclusions and assume the worst about each other. It's no more ok when you do that than when other users do it, even if you are (or feel you are) part of a minority that gets treated unfairly.
I understand and empathize about how frustrating this is—but lashing out at the very people who are bending over backwards to try to bring some semblance of tolerance and neutrality to an impossible situation is neither nice nor helpful.
I've discussed the lopsided dynamic of these conversations with you many times. The question is how to deal with it. No matter how frustrating it is, it's important not to respond to ignorance by losing your cool, becoming abusive, and so on. When you do that, you're reinforcing the very situation you deplore, and by that you actually make yourself responsible for the status quo. Each of us has a small quantum of energy to contribute, and it's important not to use yours to cause further harm (even when it's for deep reasons).
It's much better to respond to ignorance patiently and with good information, seeking points of connection and opportunities to treat the other person better than they expect and maybe better than they deserve (or you feel they deserve). Then you're investing your quantum in a good way. Also, it's good to remember that we're all ignorant, just about different things, and we all share the same hard-wiring that causes people to project bad things into dark spaces and thus treat each other poorly. If you happen to know more about $topic and thus can see how ignorant others are, that's not because you're better than them, or any different from them in the end. It's an accident of circumstance.
I didn't start posting to whine about being banned a few months ago, I was more concerned about the immediate thread.. but since you brought up my posts, you specifically told me while banning me that civility wasn't "good enough". I was doing this exact recommended pattern of responding patiently and civilly at the moment that you banned me.
Maybe I'm just really oblivious, or a congenitally bad poster, but what would be good enough? It's irrelevant since I'm banned but I always like to self-improve if I can, there must be something I'm missing here. If you're busy or don't see this, no biggie.
At the overall account level, an account needs to be using HN for its intended purpose, which is intellectual curiosity. It's not ok to post primarily on battle topics (like nationalistic ones or ideological ones or partisan ones), because curiosity doesn't work that way. If the primary use of one's energy is for nationalistic or political battle, that pretty much guarantees that curiosity is not part of the mix. I've written extensively about this in the past:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
and about how/why we use this as the litmus test for banning accounts:
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
If you take a look at those links and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be interested to know what it is.
Past tense. Things have been getting worse in china. Many of us who are shitting on china are doing so out of love and out of pain because it looked like there was a chance it would have become an awesomer place.
This same power is also allied with another major anti-western power, the russian federation, forming an alliance meant to disrupt and expand. An empirial mindset that is threatening global stability.
China is very good at pretending that everything is OK.
I wish we had visa-less travel so more people could visit and see that it's not a scary place. It's a different system for sure, and you can be jailed for saying certain things, but that's true for almost everywhere except America. Germany jails holocaust deniers.
No thanks for the visit. Not to mention how china is detaining foreigners lately with death penalty sentences to blackmail other nations into obeying them (most recent example I can think of was Canada)
State driven kidnapping and extortion really kill tourism
I have no idea what it is like generally, but this video[1] (which I admittedly cannot confirm the authenticity of) depicts a man who has been arrested for comments he made on social media. He is chained to the table and his arms are restricted as he tries to apologize for comments he made about the police to a WeChat group with 75 people in it.
I was responding to this point:
> i wonder how people here inte west think of china. do you really think that GESTAPO will come and beat the shit out of you just because you were talking shit?
My point is that it does appear that the police in China will come and arrest you if you speak negatively about them. My point is not "The American system is better than the Chinese system". We should speak candidly and truthfully about the failings of each system.
Does that make sense?
Edit: I just now realize you were the original poster. You made a comparison between Germany and China and when an inconsistency was pointed out to you, you responded by pointing out faults in the American justice system.
It would likely do you good to reflect on this. When flaws with China are pointed out, why would you jump to point out wrongdoings in America? It had as much relevance as pointing out police brutality in Brazil or some other unrelated country. You should try to better understand why you have reacted this way.
Why is everyone afraid to talk in this video?
He didn’t even know there was a protest nearby until he was ‘visited’ all day by police and had to sing the praises of the ccp.
A concept unfamiliar to westerners are “open secrets”. Things that everyone knows, everyone talks about with each other, and never get mentioned in any official capacity. If someone asks with a camera, the answer is whatever it needs to be. If an official asks in the line of duty, the answer is the correct answer. If the same person asks as a friend 3 hours later, you both talk shit.
Kinda like schoolyard rules. We can be fighting to the death to the death but if a teacher asks, we’re best friends having fun together.
A man yells in the street: "Nicholas is a moron!". He is taken away by the police on charges of lese majeste (insulting the monarch).
He tells the policemen "Please let me go, I meant another Nicholas!".
The police chief replies: "Do not lie. If you said 'moron', you certainly meant the Tsar!"
And people wonder how Hitler came to power in Germany.
China is turning on more coal plants and sacrificing their lungs to build gadgets for the world.
It’s sad in a way.