If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
If anyone cares, one reason why such perceptions are notoriously unreliable is that people generalize based on what they notice, and what they notice is conditioned by what they agree/disagree with, like/dislike, and so on: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
The truth is that HN is divided on divisive topics the same way that society at large is divided (or rather, societies at large, because this is also a highly international site, although mostly Western). You can't take the appearance of opposing views as signalling anything other than that a topic is divisive. As for perceptions of "HN is more X" or "HN is less X" - in my experience over many years, they're mostly random.
Not that I was around for the Red Scare or Cold War, but China feels like it replaced Russia as the Boogieman.
The current "Two Assemblies" meetings in Beijing are likely only to exacerbate this trend, with, e,g. all control of the security agencies shifted away from the State Council to Xi Jinping himself.
It happened with the Japanese in the 80s/90s as well where American media vilified Japan because it thinks Japan will become more powerful than the US.
China is trying to climb its way out of the "cheap labor" economy and into a developed economy. The US and the west are trying its hardest to prevent this from happening and this includes using every tactic possible including propaganda, sanctions, etc.
"Apple Services Shut Down in China in Startling About-Face"
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/22/technology/apple-no-longe...
So, too, Wolf Warrior tactics against South Korea over China's anger at U.S. THAAD system, including the destruction of Lotte's entire business in China.
"One company [Lotte] is bearing the brunt of China's anger over U.S. missile system"
https://money.cnn.com/2017/03/07/news/china-lotte-thaad-sout...
Ironically, China adopted Wolf Warrior tactics in large part because the claim you make about the perceived threat of the U.S. treating China like Japan in the 1980s is now a commonplace cliche all over China, used to justify a host of aggressive policies. This hostile posture, overseen by Xi Jinping, has helped achieve the near impossible: political unanimity in the U.S. Congress against China.
That's probably only me. I've been more pro-China on HN because I believe western media is spreading way too much anti-China propaganda. I believe it needs better balance. The truth is always somewhere in between the propaganda on both sides.
It is disinformation to say "both sides", but it is in some extent true. The real way to stop disinformation is teach information literacy, but that would stop propaganda being effective for everyone.
On both sides...
Whatever the topic, they don't have to be right. Just by obsfucating, delaying, misdirecting, going off on tangents, quoting dodgy research, burying the topic with downvotes whatever...the subject matter just gets turned into a muddy swamp with no clear conclusion and then everybody moves past it to the next new thing. Mission accomplished.
It is important to remember the near-global admiration for China's lockdowns during the first year of the pandemic. Highly manufactured. Twitter was a huge incubator for it.
During the same period, I've noticed a huge increase in anti-Chinese sentiment and rhetoric, and an agreement among nationalists that China must be stopped, and that military conflict must be prepared for. An extreme escalation of Western chauvinism even after years of Uighur extermination stories.
What did you think would happen?
Note that Uighurs are majority Muslim and they aren’t all being exterminated (certainly some are), but the primary efforts seem to be making that region and ethnicity much more similar in culture to Han-Chinese. It rings of the “white genocide” and “Jews will not replace us” slogans.
The Chinese government seems to use the 9/11 style “we are monitoring them so they don’t become radical Islamic terrorists”. The government efforts are to destroy practice of Islam, to restrict / deter the spread of Islam and criticisms of the government.
Interestingly the most anti-Chinese people in the US are the ones with the biggest intersection with these policies and claim the US is doing the exact same thing to them.American Christians who claim they aren’t able to practice their faith in the US, while simultaneously insisting that the US is a Christian nation, that Islam shouldn’t be practiced in the US, that Islam creates terrorism, that civil liberties should be rolled back in the efforts to reduce terrorism, and insist that Islamic Sharia law is endemic in the US.
American Anti-Chinese sentiment of the social type seems like a cry bully. There are some far more valid criticisms of the wider social controls and economic policy in China.
This is quite the impressive paragraph. What are you even saying?
The same idiotic argument of “extermination” is used by some people in our society.