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Comment by danielodievich | Hacker News Reader

Growing up in USSR, my mother would take us for a summer in some mountains/vacation destination and work there as a guide. One time in Kandalaksha gulf in White Sea near Murmansk she was a wilderness guide for a few rounds of tourists from elsewhere in Soviet Union for a 8 day hiking in mountains/sailing on the White Sea trip. We had such wide range of people - from experienced outdoors people to the elderly pensioners who were hardly mobile. It was wild, remote with sun endlessly circling and never setting, salmon fishing in rivers/herring fishing in the White Sea. I got to see a nuclear sub float by once, and we came by a remote nuclear-powered remote listening station festooned with antennas, but otherwise it was really remote.

Since then and until recently most people go to Turkey, though. White Sea was hypothermia inducing within a minute even in the height of July.

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There is so much amazing beauty in the world, including the largest country on the planet, Russia - and then especially areas in China, which I would LOVE to visit, but the governments of each country kinda suck, so its not a place I'll likely go (imagine mtn biking through some of the amazing landscapes of either)

With that said, I'd love to hear Lex Fridman's opinion on all of this.

It's not difficult to visit China (except that you'll probably have to apply for a visa, but Chinese people have to do that to visit Western countries too).

You won't experience much about the government while there. Police aren't really that present in public. Border control is like any other country. The only issue you're likely to run into is the Great Firewall, for which you can just install a VPN before arriving in country.

Many Westerners experience a sort of shock when they first visit China, because the dystopia they're expecting to see never materializes.

Very much this. The only area where I felt uncomfortable was in Xinjiang, as two friends in that region have effectively been “disappeared”. While I am skeptical of much of what has been written on this topic, due to its obvious use as propaganda, many of the tours I had there reminded me of those in DPRK. There was an obvious level of orchestration designed to show you a face of Xinjiang which lacked any warts.

When were you there? Did you choose to have a tour instead of freely traveling on your own, or was it not a deliberately choice?

This was right before COVID. I was there as part of an economic cooperation summit, so the tours were part and parcel of that event. I am supposed to visit again later this year.

So presumably you can wander out into town in the evening after work? Maybe you should try doing that next time.

Even bog standard tourist bus trips in literally every country have obvious levels of orchestration designed to show you a face of that region which lacked any warts.

I did visit parts of the area on my own. My issue was with the discordance between what the Chinese press and my more militant Chinese friends say and what I saw in the totality of my time there. I had no less than 6 seemingly non-extremist Uighurs express their desire to live in the states for religious freedom reasons.

The dystopia is right in your face. VPNs don’t work well and with them turned off there is a ton of stuff you can’t access.

You may be surprised to find out that outside of HN, not many people use Internet freedom as a prime measurement of dystopia.

As a techie I am personally also very annoyed at the lack of Internet freedom. But as a Chinese I also recognize that there are many more aspects in life and society that are more important than Internet freedom, and that China scores pretty high at (especially in historic context).

Like the right to protest?

Well people protested against 0-covid during a time that the media reported as "Xi wants to maintain 0-covid forever because he wants more control". Mere days later, 0-covid was lifted. Sounds like a prime example of "the expected dystopia never materializes" to me.

Uhm, people were protesting 0-covid in China for almost a year before Xi lifted it. It wasn't like there was a protest, and Xi lifted it right away. It took the CPC sometime to figure out they were doing the wrong strategy.

I'm sure people that protested were taken care of. Like the one that just got out of jail after 3 years (he reported the spread in Wuhan).

BTW. How is Wikipedia looking from China, blank spots?

When you dismissively say “internet freedom”, what you really mean is “free expression”, “freedom of association”, “right to peaceably assembly”, and “right to petition your government for a redress of grievances”.

Even this photo is still censored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

I'll give you something much simpler than all of those things: having enough food, having housing that doesn't leak, having running water, having electricity, having access to schooling, having toilets, not having nearly every street in the city be a dirty mud pool full of trash, having safe streets mostly devoid of violent crimes.

None of those things were a given when I grew up. Those things ard still not a given in many countries in which the west tried to forcefully introduce western liberal democracy, where they all focus on things like "freedom of association" at the expense of freedom from poverty.

When you are poor, you are not free, no matter how much you can voice your opinion.

I am sorry but seeing my parents and grandparents working their asses off in a society where your next meal is not guaranteed, lifting 800M people out of poverty, seeing my hometown stop being a trashy mudpool and seeing the elimination of child abductions, count for much more to me than any amount of VPN annoyance. In the grand scheme of things, these are still literally the best 30 years out of 3000 years.

Why are you pretending these things are mutually exclusive?

You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.

Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism. We’re discussing basic human rights, not “VPN annoyance”.

If you truly want to know what I think and why I think it, feel free to email me and take this discussion off HN. You can find my contact through my profile.

If you can’t make the case for China’s authoritarian capitalism here, I don’t see how picking it up over e-mail is going to help.

It’s also counterproductive to take the debate offline, as further discussion would be for the benefit of anyone else that might read this thread. I’ll never agree that lifting people out of poverty requires authoritarian control over the populace.

It's not necessarily that it requires authoritarian rule, but rather that if you grew up in a rich country, you have a very different view on what is important.

Internet censorship generally ranks very low on your list of concerns if you're struggling to put food on the table. People in China have seen a complete transformation of their lives for the better, in just a few decades. They've gone from bicycles to electric cars, from not having reliable electricity to paying for everything with 5G-connected smartphones. From the point of view of how people live their everyday lives, things are better than ever.

Issues like censorship will become more important over time, but right now, they're still secondary. There are other issues at play as well, such as the legitimacy the Party still enjoys from the revolution and from its management of the economic boom of the last few decades, and people's fear of the sort of chaos that consumed China for much of its modern history.

It's not a case of not having arguments. HN moderators told me not to talk too much about China on HN. It's just me following the rules.

> You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.

> Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism.

You mean the half of the world that enriched itself by inflicting "authoritarianism" on other populations - or indeed, their own populations too - unless you don't consider the treatment of Black and Native people in the US to be authoritarianism, or the Irish in the UK, etc etc?

...said the Russians. Until they got drafted into an illegal war...

I am not Russian and China is not Russia

What protections does China have from an abusive government that Russia didn’t?

My stron belief is that freedom of speech (free internet) together with democratic elections are the only things that combined can prevent the government from coming up with their own rules when it so suits them.

And when they eventually do, you will have nothing to say about it

Just like the russians today.

They too have a rich culture of writers, poets and composers that they should have the right to be proud of.

Said the Americans. Until they got drafted into an illegal war in Vietnam or were given no other chance to earn a living than getting paid to kill in illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And let’s not even talking about all the coups the State Department and the CIA nurtured across countless countries

And here you are. With the possibility, and legal permission, to say just that.

Good that you are.

Just because I pose no real threat to the system and by being allowed to ineffectively ranting I help to build the illusion of freedom. Now, try being Chelsea Manning and watch in awe the speed of the boot coming into your face the minute you really threaten the system.

American police are actually much more scary tbh. Physically, many Chinese cops are fairly scrawny and usually don’t carry guns, maybe just handcuffs and a baton. Their main weapon is their body camera. Sometimes they do carry guns but it’s not the norm imo.

I will add one more aspect is the almost complete absence of traffic cops. A lot of the most dangerous situations with cops in the US have been at traffic stops. But in China there are cameras that send out tickets automatically. I’m sure there are due process concerns with that implementation, but there is also a zero percent chance you will be killed by police at a traffic stop.

Every cop I saw in Guangzhou had at least an old makarov in an aging holster, except the metro police.

If you bring your own cell data plan you won't even need to futz with VPN. Cell data tunnels back to the carrier and the Great Firewall doesn't block anything.

I still can't forget how the immigration tried to disassemble my camera lens in Shanghai (not just remove them from the camera, but also tear them down), so visiting China might lead to some unexpected bad impressions. Also being barely able to see sun in Beijing due to fog/smog everywhere when arriving from pristine New Zealand looked very unwelcoming.

Is it allowed for foreigners to travel to where the forced labor re-education camps are? I’d assumed it was not.

> XINJIANG, China (AP) — The razor wire that once ringed public buildings in China’s far northwestern Xinjiang region is nearly all gone.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...

To the extent you are all you'll see is buildings. This illustrates the limits of using personal observation to learn things if you aren't an expert.

A lot of the forced labor involves people involuntarily working alongside voluntary workers at ordinary factories. As a foreigner you won't see anything notable there.

If you ask Chinese people outside of China, they also really don't care. They know what happened, its like the Kent State shooting for them.

The west severely exaggerates every bad thing that happens over there then pretends like every misstep is solved with execution. Sure there's censorship but its exaggerated to a level of fiction in the west, like a movie that's "based on real events".

More than likely if you ask a Chinese person in China about Tiananmen, they'll see you like one of those Nazi streamers who call girls whores in public. Just a weird edgelord looking to stir up trouble.

No, I mean the person I had in mind knew full well about it. Just thought of it as something that was bad, but not an indictment of an illegitimate state like people talk about it.

Most people know what happened, but nobody refers to Tiananmen Square because 1) that's a pretty notable place on its own and 2) the protests were a nationwide movement, of which international journalists only ever saw any of it in Beijing. Akin to calling the January 6 protests the Capitol Hill protests. You'd call the Tiananmen Square protests June 4, or if you're being rather cheeky, May 35.

Are "many Westerners" really expecting China to be a dystopia? I'm a westerner and my impression of the Soviet Union (and now Russia) was intuitively dire (probably exaggerated compared to reality) but my intuitive expectations of China isn't really.

I feel like "westerners" today treat China like they used to treat Japan in the 70s/80s, not like they used to treat the Soviet Union. There's plenty of positive reporting about how things "just work" in China compared to the west (especially constructing infrastructure) and strong economy development.

I encourage you (barring safety concerns) to travel to countries whose governments are considered illiberal. Some of my most enlightening trips were to DPRK, Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Brunei. You learn a lot about how the western media tends to exaggerate for political ends.

No, you learn a lot about how illiberal governments treat foreign visitors from wealthy western countries, and how they leverage their power to control what you as a tourist see and hear.

The first country you list is the DPRK, who are famed for carefully stage-managing any visit by western tourists.

If you want an honest view of those places, you have to speak with people who aren’t risking their lives or livelihoods if they tell you the truth.

North Korea is an exception, since it’s pretty hard to talk to actual locals.

Having lived in one of those illiberal countries for a while (China) I could clearly see how the US media distorted everything, reduced Chinese people to a monolith, downplayed or simply ignored all of the genuinely good things happening, and took every opportunity to highlight the negatives. It is to the point where every positive, interesting, or beautiful thing is reflexively shot down and dismissed.

Maybe you should have gone to China last year or the year before to enjoy the authentic Chinese experience of living in a cage without food because grocery shopping was verboten.

With sufficient repetition, propaganda embeds itself into a person’s core belief system. This makes it self-replicating in ways that no state alone has the resources to accomplish.

Very quickly when people travel (even if within their own country), they realize that their worldview has been shaped by what others want them to see. Maybe it is a benign travel ad that crops out the favela in the background, maybe it is genuinely lovely people colored as backwards or belligerent. There’s a reason someone has chosen to post that video or show you that picture.

Oh, I've been to China many times. Enough times to appreciate not having been born there. Western media about China, while somewhat one-sided, isn't particularly unfair in my experience.

You and I must have different definitions of “unfair” if being one-sided isn’t at odds with fairness.

For example, I could say that Mao ordered the killing of all of China's sparrows, leading to a massive famine. Is it one-sided to not mention that this was under the mistaken belief that the sparrows were eating all of the food? Maybe. I don't think it's unfair, though. It was idiotic and it had disastrous consequences.

One could also mention that the one-child policy was kept in place for years after China's looming demographic issues became apparent, and the silliness of replacing it first with a two-child, and then a three-child policy before its abolition. Perhaps it would be one-sided to not mention the massive bureaucracy of the family planning commission consisting of millions of workers at both the central and local government levels who would have to find other work without it (of which I even have family who used to coerce women into getting abortions), but I don't think that makes it any better.

Or ghost cities, which appear in Western media, but rarely mentioning that most of the apartments in these cities end up getting bought because of a real estate bubble in which Chinese citizens pour their savings into buying empty apartments in empty cities. It is 'one-sided' perhaps to not mention that the apartments have owners, but it is factually true that they are empty and the ghost cities exist.

Is Western media sometimes unfair? Sure. The BRI gets painted as a debt trap, but the reality is the projects really are intended to be profitable. Will travelling to China help with that? I don't see why, since the BRI is investment in countries outside of China.

The biggest misconception most Westerners have, though, is that they are under the illusion that the Chinese are yearning to be free from their oppressive government. And perhaps that is the 'distortion' you are thinking of. Is this a result of the media? Perhaps. But in my opinion, it is a factor of Westerners implicitly believing that all people are just like them, when in reality tyranny is only possible because the people who live under it accept it. Every nation gets the government it deserves.

This is exhibit A of how the media in the US and Europe misrepresent China. The fact that you think this is how things were perfectly illustrates the problem. If zero-CoVID had really meant endless lockdowns, Chinese people wouldn't have put up with the policy for nearly 3 years.

There were lockdowns in China, but they were limited in time, and before mid-2022, they were relatively rare (as in, nobody I knew was subject to one after CoVID was eliminated in China in March-April 2020). For most of 2020-21, life in China was more normal than in the US and Europe.

> endless lockdowns

Didn't say that. It's a fact that some parts of China were locked down for months, and that people were going hungry because they couldn't get food. That was all over Chinese social media.

Some tiny border towns were. Long lockdowns of major cities were very rare: Shanghai (2 months), Xi'an (a few weeks), and then the list gets pretty thin. There were sporadic lockdowns, but nothing like what one would imagine if, say, CNN were one's only source of information.

IOW nothing I said was wrong.

> Maybe you should have gone to China last year or the year before to enjoy the authentic Chinese experience of living in a cage without food because grocery shopping was verboten.

That's the bailey, the wide-ranging generalization about China as dystopian hellhole that you want to make. When you get pushback, you retreat to the defensible motte of: Well, there were some lockdowns for limited time periods in some places in China. The second the coast is clear, you go back to occupying the bailey.

Motte-and-bailey: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motte-and-bailey_fallacy

And? Was there anything I said that was strictly wrong?

Yes. The "authentic Chinese experience" is not living in a cage without food. The "authentic Chinese experience" is living in a massive, bustling city with great cuisine, terrible traffic jams and awesome public transit.

Ah, the videos of Shanghai I saw on Weibo last year must have been part of a CIA psyop, then.

That's an extreme outlier within China, and it was for a limited period of time. People were not kept in cages: they lived in their apartments. It was difficult to order food at first, but people managed, and the initial supply problems were alleviated.

Truly their experience must have been an inauthentic one, then.

> People were not kept in cages

What a hilarious nitpick at an obvious turn of phrase. Do you think I actually meant to say people were literally kept in little cells with bars?

Everything you said was ridiculous hyperbole. That's not a "nitpick." You took the most extreme thing that ever happened anywhere in China during the pandemic, wildly exaggerated it, and then presented it as normal life in China.

I said it was the authentic Chinese experience. Would you say the twenty some million denizens of Shanghai had an inauthentic experience?

The lockdown was a difficult but highly unusual event. However, it also wasn't nearly as extreme as you describe: people didn't live in cages and they didn't starve.

> US media distorted everything, reduced Chinese people to a monolith, downplayed or simply ignored all of the genuinely good things happening

The media I follow generally acknowledge that Chinese adopting capitalism led to the greatest increase of standard of living in entire human history (in terms of how quick it was and how many people were affected). That's not downplaying.

That is a fairly simplified view which is very convenient for particular Western political interests but I don’t see it as a reflection of reality.

The Chinese have “capitalism” with significant public investment in infrastructure and education. Bullet trains can take you everywhere on the cheap. Few foreign companies have been successful due in some part to protectionism (but also failed business models). Their markets are highly regulated, preventing mergers and IPOs of large companies. Ant Group for example. Jack Ma was severely punished for even suggesting that bank regulators ease up. They also have strict data regulations.

On the other hand, workers’ rights are a lot more curtailed. A lot of tech works 996, and unionization is pretty rare. Getting 2 days off per week isn’t the norm like in the US. And forget about OSHA. So in that sense they are almost hyper-capitalist.

The point is, I don’t think it fits cleanly into the ideologies that many would like to apply to them.

The question is if the regulation and intervention is for the greater good, or is it because someone in the CCP took a bribe or saw an opportunity to steal the company from the rightful owner.

There’s always the kind of article that suggests that Chinese academic achievements are not that impressive because for some reason Chinese graduate students are just some kind of robotized academics incapable of independent thought, creativity and are just ver good order followers, which is something that everyone who has actually worked with Chinese folks know it is a stupid generalization.

> Some of my most enlightening trips were to DPRK, Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Brunei. You learn a lot about how the western media tends to exaggerate for political ends.

I am not a Westerner, and I highly doubt you could get an understanding of what it is like to live in such countries by merely visiting them as a tourist.

When I went to DPRK, the entire visit was completely orchestrated - but I still got to see people go about their daily lives (even tho I had no idea who they were and had no way of interacting with them). I saw peasants carrying bundles of sticks along empty roads and witnessed how impoverished they really are. I got to kick a ball around with some kids and see locals enjoying a sunny Sunday in the park. I also looked out my hotel window at night and saw a city in darkness.

When visiting Turkmenistan, I was completely unsupervised - and it was eye-opening and completely bizarre. I actually interacted with the locals and got to hear their stories - same in China and Uzbekistan.

Funny, I have been to China many times visiting family and have never felt that western media has been particularly unfair in its portrayal.

I would rather not ever go back while Xi is still in power if I can help it (unfortunately I may have to one or two more times for familial obligations) and would recommend against going to anyone on the fence. Don't get Brittney Griner'd.

Why Xi in particular, and do you have reason to believe his successor would be any better?

> Why Xi in particular

His rule has corresponded to a more authoritarian turn in China, especially in the last few years with his abolition of term limits. It was hardly a liberal country before, but the fact is it has gotten significantly worse, and I have no confidence of that situation improving as long as Xi is in power. I have no desire to end up like, say, Saad Ibrahim Almadi.

> do you have reason to believe his successor would be any better?

No. But it is the bare minimum.

Absolutely enlightening, but be prepared to be made very sad by the truth about how many people actually live in illiberal countries.

Also unless you make a very concerted effort to get to know what is going on, you often will be blissfully ignorant because tourist areas are abnormally nice, and the workers in the tourist areas can be very motivated to present a happy face, and usually a language barrier.

You do get a slight feel, but what you don’t get to see is usually the part that matters e.g. why uncle Bob is dead or in jail; the difficulty in getting healthcare in Cuba; police abuse; the hidden constraints on “normal” freedoms.

Russia and China are large but not even half of our planet. There are plenty of amazing places to visit to fill your entire life.

this has got to be the most reddit thing i have ever read

guarantee you it's a r/worldnews poster

Is he wrong though? No way I'd set foot in russia and I'd probably just avoid china as well. Plenty of other places to see in the world.

> I'd love to hear Lex Fridman's opinion on all of this

why?

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