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Comment by siva7 | Hacker News Reader

What is going on here with the comment section? Seems like it's flooded with pro ccp activists

I didn't read the comments but 1. it could be flooded with pro cpp activists, it's a known fact that China pays people to influence forums 2. It may be difficult to understand for Americans, but (I think) some people here are "pro-china" as they see China as an alternative to US imperialism, or at least something that can be less harmful.

Personally, my wife is Taiwanese so I'm extremely concerned about China in a very concrete way. I'm not sure the people who advertise themselves as "pro-China" really have a sense of what's going on.

I must offer another data point. I'm British, and often find myself in these threads criticising criticism of China. Not because I'm being paid by the CCP, but because I believe that mainstream anti-Chinese sentiment tells us more about the West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.

> West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.

oh come on. we criticise China because it’s whole political system, that was set up very recently btw, fights against basic rights we take for granted in the West. not because of what the romans or european empires did hundreds of years ago, but because of what China is doing right now.

Those rights are available domestically in the West, yes, at least for the time being. Those same rights have never been extended to the citizens of the countries whose democratic governments were toppled or subverted by what we call the West. But hey, here in the imperial core we are quite comfortable. So this state of being must represent our ideals!

>Those same rights have never been extended to the citizens of the countries whose democratic governments were toppled or subverted by what we call the West.

Well yeah, isn't that precisely what's being criticised?

Also not all the evil in the world was created by the West.

Whilst I readily admit that focussing my attention on the West's criticism of China depletes my limited resources to affect positive change in China, I actually believe I am ultimately having a greater impact.

What I'm saying is that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism — its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.

To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.

We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.

you are cherry-picking history in order to further your narrative about exploitation.

in reality, humanity has been at war for millennia. the chinese have been at war with all their neighbours for centuries. slavery has been the status-quo until 200 years ago.

you are also assuming just because some politician is immoral than people will also be immoral. this is false.

does this have anything to do with how the chinese government treats its citizens in the present? not at all

Just for the record, and to be 100% clear. I hereby explicitly denounce the Chinese government's murder of innocent students at Tiananmen Square, and the genocide of the Uighurs.

But I think you are completely missing my point.

I don't believe the West actually wants to improve the world. It wants so much power that it can avoid looking at its own past, and present for that matter.

Your context is where everyone already is as and your example appears to be wholly unrelated to your claim.

I don't think you are having a positive influence here.

Could you give more details?

I like to think that anybody who has heard about the Vietnam war already knows what the West does in terms like colonialism.

I finally understood that your example related to self-consistency and that Boris' binges are not the definition of colonialism, so my suggestion about influence should be discarded.

That's very interesting. So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China are due to the West's psychological struggles (?), and not due to actual suffering caused by the Chinese government?

Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend China from the biased Western media, despite all the real world evidence painting a very clear and unbiased picture.

> So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China

I think that generally western news have a tendency to misrepresent countries that are culturally different.

E.g. as a Russian, reading western news about Russia makes me think that journalist play a broken telephone game, misrepresenting marginal stuff as some kind of insane norm, in a completely unnuanced way, without any context.

I wouldn't be surprised if the same was for China. Probably even worse, as verification is even less accessible.

Dramatic news get clicks and there is no accountability for spicing them up. I guess, in the age of AI-delivered clickbait media, the old saying "Don't believe everything you read in the papers" was never as true.

I agree, this rhetoric is true for western news about India as well. The BBC for example known to be awful at times, actively misrepresenting and hiding facts to suit their narrative. I guess they have to cater to their population with colonial mentality which can't bear the fact that some ex-colonies are on track to surpass them in the Asian century.

Surpass in what exactly? Authoritarianism? Idiots spewing nonsense to collect their paychecks.

Your argument basically boils down to “you should trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government because I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government.” It’s not very convincing.

> Your argument basically boils down to “you should trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government because I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government.”

What? Why? How? Where does this extreme binary logic come from? When have I said that he should "trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government"? When have I said that "I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government"?

You don't need any "propaganda" to leave the house and live a life. I have all the empirical evidence I need to competently state "well, that's not how it works IRL" when I see some weird journalism full of factual errors and false assumptions.

Why are you acting as there is no personal experience?

Because Russia doesn’t have a free press. So your “personal experience” is one filtered through what the Russian government allows to be printed.

I am 100% British. You misunderstand me. I am saying that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism, its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.

To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.

We can split hairs about Boris Johnson throwing private parties or Joe Biden not wearing a mask or something equally trivial, but at the end of the day, I know of only one major world power which is systematically rounding up its citizens and sending them to reeducation and sterilization camps. It frustrates me when people try to defend China in such roundabout ways when the proof is in the pudding. If anything, humanity would be better off if we were _more_ harsh on China, and willing to call out its grave, grave sins, rather than absurdly shifting the discussion to Western colonialism.

The CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! And lying about it! Why is it even worth discussing the context of Western colonialism when there's a true and honest legal genocide being performed at the hands of the government? This argument is no different than saying that if we just understood the context of Germany's situation in the 1930s better, perhaps we wouldn't criticize the Nazi regime as strongly. There are some acts which transcend cultural context because of how barbaric they are, and in my opinion, what's happening with the Uighur peoples is beyond forgiveness.

This is a misunderstanding of my viewpoint that I often get. I'm not defending China, and I'm not engaging in Whataboutism. Although I certainly understand how it seems like that. My point is that words are more effective when the speaker of those words lives by those words. Of course the metaphors of Boris Johnson's parties and Joe Biden's lack of mask wearing are trivial, it's just an example.

Yes, the CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! But also yes, the entirety of the Americas and Australia are already ethnically cleansed. The West has set the precedent. We simply have no power to, as much as it's the ethically correct thing to do, admonish China.

Have you ever spent time in China? If you had, I suspect you wouldn’t be writing this comment.

I lived there for 18 months

Most people criticizing China and the CCP in those forums haven't spent time in China either. I suspect many wouldn't even be able to place China on a map.

I've been to China.

The series of high resolution pictures of me throughout the streets, hotels, places I was during my time there - these all appeared on the screens used by the guards as I was being scanned to leave the country.

So yes, I have been to China, I can place China on a map, and it is the most terrifying reincarnation of Nazi Germany - being defended by people who will say "we didn't know any better" after the concentration camps are freed.

> So yes, I have been to China, I can place China on a map, and it is the most terrifying reincarnation of Nazi Germany - being defended by people who will say "we didn't know any better" after the concentration camps are freed.

Oh, good to know that. I didn't know prisoners could left Nazi Germany just like that, only getting a scan. I had a completely different idea of that regime.

> I didn't know prisoners could left Nazi Germany just like that, only getting a scan.

The prisoners in the Xinjiang labor camps sure can't leave. You're making a false comparison, intentionally or not.

Prisoners in jail, in my country, or every other country you can imagine, can't leave either. It's called conviction. China invented a lot of things, but surely not this.

Precisely my point - you were making a false (in?)equivalence by trying to say that xinniethepooh's point was invalid because they were able to leave China while prisoners in Nazi Germany could not - while it's pretty clear that they weren't a prisoner in China, just a traveler.

> Not because I'm being paid by the CCP

But you _are_ being paid by the CCP?

Doxxing myself, check my comment history and website https://tombh.co.uk

I would humbly suggest that you don't post personal information just because someone on the internet is making a comment in extremely poor form - you don't have anything to prove to them. Flag their comment (it's a pretty egregious violation of the HN guidelines) and attend to the people who are making good points.

HN may be one of the best places for discussion on the internet, with some of the best moderators, but even here, you get people who aren't interested in having civil discussions.

What does criticism of authoritarian censorship today have to do with imperialism? Sounds just like an attempt to muddy the waters tbh

I believe the psychological process involved is the malignant form of projection[1]. To give a metaphor: when I know myself that I've not been productive enough at work (and I secretly berate myself for it), I mis-perceive perfectly normal gestures of encouragement as personal attacks.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychological_projection

Not being OK with the myriad of human rights abuses the Chinese government commits - sometimes "silently" and sometimes very opening and outright proudly - is just because I struggle with my own regions history? What the actual fuck... I have to call your "theory" what it is: stupid and dangerous - and whataboutism on top.

To give a metaphor, I think it is perfectly reasonable to criticise my project lead when she criticises me for not meeting my targets but turns up hungover and spends the whole day on Facebook.

I am criticising her because I want her to be effective at her job. Not because I disagree with her about our team's laziness.

We are not equating missed targets with atrocity... A terrorist attack does not miss the target of benevolence. It is something that should never, ever happen but this planet is such a soul-crushing clusterfuck that it is like water under a bridge.

Human life has value. It's not effective value or an estimate of value. It is absolute.

My metaphor is not to pointing to project management as an analogy, it's pointing to how criticism of one side does not automatically mean support for the other side. Unless I've misunderstood your point?

I'm suggesting that we do comparison with things conductive to the act of comparison. With the atrocities we are discussing there is nothing to be gained from comparison because things are already maximum bad: The numbers just vary. Comparison can take away the weight of that, which in our fuzzy wetware translates to dissipating motivating energy that could have gone into action.

I do agree with your point and I am not a believer in the law of the excluded middle.

And I criticize the Chinese government because I want the Chinese people to live a life that is free and void of the constant danger of abuse (while at the same time I can as well recognize that we in the West have a big list of problems and abuses we have to tackle).

Neville Chamberlain had similar thoughts about Germany.

Perhaps when dictators start doing things like rounding up undesirables into camps and pushing ideological uniformity at the point of a gun the reasonable response is to condemn the behavior? It doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboots, it's despicable to appease, condone, or enable the ones stepping on the throats of human beings.

In Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust[1] it is argued that the Holocaust was not merely a tragic aberration of the ideals of modern Western civilisation but rather a logical realisation of it. Hitler himself, in both Mein Kampf, and Zweites Buch, wrote of how he was inspired by British concentration camps in South Africa. Maybe I haven't studied history enough, but I simply do not understand how dismissing the terrors of WW2 as merely a German problem is not also appeasing, condoning and enabling the terrors of the British. The Holocaust lies at the feet of Europeans, not merely the Nazis.

The problem isn't about who did what, the problem is the idea that horrors can only possibly happen outside the borders of the nation to which I belong.

> The Holocaust lies at the feet of Europeans, not merely the Nazis.

Why stop abstraction there? You should continue on with all humans, then all life... that would be logical; this isn't.

I'm British. I was specifically taught the gruesome details of the Holocaust in school. But I only learnt about the horrors of British colonialism much later in life, and through my own efforts. British genocides are conspicuous by their absence from both our education system and our political discourse.

I don't think this makes it truly an European issue...

In general history as it is taught is almost a total loss for how biased it is, meaning that since we dropped the ball on writing it down we are doomed to repeat it until we do. So far we have only been playing at historical account, because the truth undermines national borders. But this is a global issue.

unprecedented? The PRC is still pursuing Imperial Qing claims to this day.

It's curious that you say 'historically unprecedented imperial past' - imperialism typically has to do with having a ruler, and exerting diplomatic or military force to influence other nations.

Why do you say this is historically unprecedented? China has been imperialist since its beginning, and continues its imperialism with Hong Kong, South china sea, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Myanmar ...

What 'historically unprecedented imperial past' are you referring to that isn't preceded by China's?

> imperialism typically has to do with having a ruler

No, it doesn't, unless by “ruler” you mean the metropolitan state.

Just one example: the entirety of the American continents are culturally European. Imagine if North America was North Chinese speaking Mandarin and South America was South Chinese speaking Cantonese. Not to mention the entire concept of a nation state is a European invention. That Europe drew the borders in Africa, the Middle East, India. Then there's Australia and New Zealand. It's unprecedented. Yes China have/are imperial to an extent, but it seems like apples and oranges to me.

BTW, not to dismiss the other countries from your list, but you should really understand the history of Hong Kong, specifically the Opium Wars. The British took it when the Chinese refused to continue buying their opium.

People have different opinions and are free to voice them. I’m not pro ccp (but here I feel the need to clarify up front), but it’s not hard to understand that some people view china more favorably than most in the US. At the very least it shouldn’t be hard to understand why some people would reject the more extreme anti china stance.

edit: long way of me saying, I don’t think anyone that defends china should automatically be labeled ccp propaganda.

Can you provide some examples of this alleged "flood of pro CCP activists" in this comments section?

I'm reading some minor disagreements. Is this activism in your worldview?

Anytime someone says the CCP there is a post saying the west does the same thing. It is tiring since we aren't talking about the west.

Not everyone who disagrees with you is an activist. It's possible for people to have different information than you or have different values than you.

I am European and not affiliated in any way with China. And don't want to whitewash them.

Still, there is a double standard regarding China vs the Western World. While China gets (IMHO deserved) criticism for their territorial claims and human right abuse, the Iraq War (over 400k deaths) was "business as usual".

The same goes with anti-pandemic restrictions - when it happens in China, it's an authoritarian rule. When in the West - it's social responsibility. When China started vaccinating children, I saw an article with "child soldiers" and a photo of a crying kid. The same action in the West had a picture of a smiling kid, and a more welcoming title.

Or even when it comes to pollution and worker's rights, the West is hypocritical. Blames China, while happily outsources most heavy industry there, due to lower costs. (When was the last time you bought some electronics and there were not "Manufactured in PRL"?)

We're not discussing the US, we're discussing the latest abuse of power by the CCP. That's where the link goes. Would you like to next make a false equivalence of US prison labor to slave labor in China? Because that's where this goes, every thread.

Submit a link of the US' latest atrocity to HN. A world of tolerance allows and accepts the stories of violence perpetrated by all actors. The reason you are seeing so many related to China is we have some new flagrant human rights abuse happening from the CCP every week, sometimes multiple times a week, that's why you see so many of these stories percolate to the top. Just two days ago, the CCP tore down the statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre in Hong Kong. [1]

This is the screaming of the machine doing its work of control, every day of every week. The memories of them will be inhaled whole and exhaled as dust, a phantom of a thing that never truly existed.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59764029

The commenter you replied to seemed to be comparing 2 situations. That seems normal to me. Comparing things seems to be great way to understand complex issues.

What makes the comment a wrong way to discuss? Is it a bad form of comparison for some reason?

Providing common knowledge on the topic rehashes things everybody knows so it is seen as noise and not signal.

If you have uncovered stuff few people know, please share. Then finding comparisons is more insightful.

Not really. The Iraq war was horrible and unnecessary and I doubt you’ll find too many people here who’ll say otherwise.

But it was the past and it’s settled. China is happening now.

Aren't Guantanamo Bay and other torture camps (black sites as they are known now) still open?

They are, and it’s horrible.

But they key difference is that you won’t really see anyone downplaying them or outright denying their existence.

I don't know, running torture camps doesn't sound much better if you can talk about them and yet they are not closed.

Could be worse, you could run a real risk of getting disappeared for talking about them. Which is obviously a non-issue in the west.

To me the key difference is in the way the propaganda is done.

Pro-CCP people are posting comments on the Internet to try to convince western people.

Pro-Russia people are paying celebrities of western countries to promote their culture, they are also creating news networks in the west to do the same.

USA is using the global western culture (Hollywood, singers...) to promote their agenda.

Since we're talking about torture, in the last two decades, the USA produced dozen of films or TV shows where torture is depicted as a necessary evil for the good guy to win over the bad guys. Just look at Jack Bauer. They don't need to go an Twitter saying "no, that's not what happens, we're the good guys, see...", because in the mind of (almost) everyone, it's already accepted, since they saw a good guy doing it in a movie.

The propaganda machine from CCP is just not as evolved as the USA's, they are trying to catch up. But all in all, it's a same. It's just more obvious for the CCP guys because they haven't the right tools yet. But given how they are investing in cultural services, I'm sure they will soon be better at it and we won't have those kind of discussion anymore. It will not be "propaganda", but just people arguing against each other on topics on which their favorite state has different opinion.

That’s whataboutism. Most liberal democracies didn’t invade anyone recently and have free press and a history of little recent human rights abuse.

It’s possible to criticize China on its own merits without somehow excusing anyone else.

I’d happily pay more for goods from manufacturers saying they avoid China. Hopefully this will be easier and cheaper in coming years.

On hn, we should try to engage with peoples ideas, and be careful about attributing motives and dismissing people.

That said, I’ve seen a lot of pro ccp posts in the last few months. If we hypothetically say there are state manipulators on hn becoming active, what is the most mature way to respond to the situation?

The most mature way would be to debate their claims with logic, data, sources, etc.

...and, if you suspect that there's actual manipulation going on (as there are a lot of Chinese nationals, real people, who earnestly believe in the points that they're making, on HN), then email hn@ycombinator.com and they'll use their admin powers to take a look at it.

Really? As somebody constantly accused of being a Chinese bot for not agreeing that the Chinese government is a manifestation of absolute evil that the world needs to destroy in order to save, these threads all seem to be filled with anti-Chinese hypernationalists.

Standard practice anywhere you have Chinese people, most are perfectly reasonable but many are deeply indoctrinated nationalists.

Unfortunately the rest aren’t willing or able to do anything about the genocide cheerleader squad.

The communist party party has successfully managed to associate love of China with loyalty to the party and government, and criticism of the party with being “anti-Chinese”. So being pro-democracy in Hong Kong is being anti-China, and opposing the ethnic and cultural suppression in Xinjiang is China hating.

My wife is Chinese and we have a Chinese friend here in the UK we have to be careful what we say to. She gets upset if anything critical of the Chinese government comes up, because she “loves China”. We love China too, just not the communist party.

> We love China too, just not the communist party.

I lived in singapore for 10 years until recently moving to Taiwan, this is basically the view of everyone from China I met. “I love China but I hate the government, that’s why I left”

It’s a shame because the actions of the CCP are making people blame Chinese people. But the majority of people from China that I’ve met are awesome.

Well yeah, you're self selecting for people who

a. Left China b. Are talking to a foreigner about politics

CCP maintains considerable support among the mainland population.

Well we don’t know what the support is truly like inside China. But I think it’s safe to assume that there are a lot of people inside china who unfortunately do not have the luxury of being able to move their family overseas.

> a. Left China b. Are talking to a foreigner about politics

This is a weird form of racism I see from a lot of people coming from a Chinese perspective, and it's very arrogant and abrasive.

When a Chinese person is outside of China, they are the foreigner. Walking around the U.S. and calling people laowai is really a... questionable choice.

It’s simply writing about Chinese attitudes and experiences when abroad, and therefore using phrasing from the point of view of the person in question.

Thank you.

It’s more of a lost in translation - we use _laowai_ as a convenient word. When I just came to US, I sometimes still “translate” what I want to express from Chinese first, so I even called the other fellow US students “foreigner” once when talking about a cultural difference. “Foreigners tends to do XXX while we(Chinese) do YYY”

He laughed and thought it was funny

Some in the mainland population are smart enough not to give their real opinions. It’s not safe unless you no longer live in China (and even then, it’s not safe, as the government can retaliate against the person’s family).

I don’t doubt that the CCP maintains considerable support, but considering they control the media, that’s less impressive than you think it is.

>CCP maintains considerable support among the mainland population

How much of that is genuine support vs saying the party line to avoid persecution?

Standard practice anywhere you have... people, most are perfectly reasonable but many are deeply indoctrinated nationalists.

Just a cursory reading of the comments in any topic about China will show you that their western counterparts are alive and kicking here

Bullshit.

Shit like this is almost exclusively a Chinese activity https://www.propublica.org/article/purdue-president-condemns...

You can find countless examples of groups of Chinese people engaging in downright horrible behavior like this, good luck finding many western counterparts.

Where are the western nationalists SWATting families of people who dare to say critical things of their governments?

Nobody will send the secret police to harass my family if I dare to criticize my government, but if I was Chinese they certainly would.

I’m sure it would be possible to indoctrinate westerners to behave in a similar way, but the fact remains that currently it’s the Chinese who are uniquely indoctrinated.

I dont know if you are being naive or a troll. In any case, for the benefit of other people reading this thread:

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

https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...

https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...

https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/5/13533838/history-...

This is bad. But the fact that you can post links to articles written by journalists here is proof enough that this was not okay and unacceptable.

Do you have articles about similar things happening in China by Chinese media?

The first article is from Wikipedia so you are being highly disingenuous. The second thing is that it is pretty much okay and acceptable since this has never stopped. You seem to believe that if the US does something wrong and it is reported then everything is fine in the world, well, no. This guy went to jail for revealing that the drone attacks were ineffective and amounted to criminal actions:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/27/former-intelli...

I can read about it, that does not make it even 0.0001% better.

Since you asked:

https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3160705/year-chin...

The problem with most westerners is that they just simply dont understand China. Just read this, relax, it is from Harvard, not from Xi's wumao army

https://hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china

The fact that you had to link to COINTELPRO is pretty revealing :)

Grasping at straws, no?

Tell that to all the people that got their lives ruined. How is the pay rate going on here?: https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/441480-ins...

I only get paid 50 cents by the yellow menace and I am not a rapper.

How do you tell that?

You'll find the same with any article critical of China.

The party is paying people (quite well) to defend China online. It's another kind of misinformation campaign.

You can also check the comment history of these people to see if they are outright government trolls or brainwashed university students. Sometimes it is pretty clear.

It's not always brainwashing and indoctrination, it can also be the threat to family social standing, political scrutiny, and the ability to travel freely. If they have family or close friends that already have trouble with the state, China makes exquisite use of those factors in controlling people.

Always interesting to see what kind of mindblowing absurdities they come up with to defend the horrendous acts against the Uighur people. I also see it in German comment sections at this point.

There are definitely signs of them here. I have another thread that had someone trying to steer my comment into a East vs West argument just for mentioning China. It seems like they are trying to pick fights out of nowhere as if they are getting paid. And if you notice, they come at certain hours like there is suddenly a wave of them all at once.

"It seems like they are trying to pick fights out of nowhere as if..."

...that is what people generally do on the internet, when they disagree.

Yes and no. When you disagree you usually have a point to make, but when you purposefully try to steer a conversation into a confrontational topic, then it does become suspect.

Can you point me where to sign up to get paid to defend China online?

Here's a starting point: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/20/technology/ch...

I checked, and you don't have sufficient social score.

I guess you mean my credit score/background check. We don't have a social score in the UK. Though I wouldn't be surprised it if something akin was secretly compiled by GCHQ et al.

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