Xi’s Security Obsession Turns Ordinary Citizens into Spy Hunters
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
All this campaign will do is generate a ton of false positives. They'll end up duplicating Russia's practice of reporting people you don't like as unpatriotic. The US also has some experience with the practice [1], but fortunately those days are way behind us.
Though, maybe he counts on this push not to work. He might see it as a temporary measure that will fizzle out quickly, giving him some time and not many headaches down the road. He'd be an incurable optimist then...
If this incitement works, it'll leave a mark on society for many decades into the future. In the best case, people will enjoy the ride for a few years and then tacitly agree not to speak of it. In the worst, there will be widespread lynches, pogroms, bloodshed on the level of Stalinist purges, then either a revolution or Great Terror for years to decades, and it'll take a century to fully (if that's even possible) heal.
What does Xi want to get out of it, really? Surely he's not stupid enough to think he'll catch any of the actual spies that are bound to be there anyway? Is whatever he wants to gain really worth playing with this particular fire? It would be safer to start an actual war, like his buddy did...
"Well, did it work for those people?"
"No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude themselves into thinking it might... but it might work for us."
Autocrats' egos are bigger than history lessons, I suppose.
Most nuclear armed nations are now ruled by old men with quasi autocratic power concentrated like at no time in the last 80 years. Even the US had a brush with an authoritarian coup attempt and languishes on whether to roll the dice on that again.
You must have been in a coma for several years after 9/11. There's also the recent anti-China initiatives by the Justice Department / FBI indicting dozens of professors and researchers, the majority of which have failed to secure any convictions for spying or espionage.
The way a totalitarian government thinks, false positives are a feature, not a bug.
Better a hundred innocent people are kidnapped by the secret police and tortured to death than a single person who disagrees with the CCP is allowed to live. -- Xi Jinping, probably
When making decisions about my security forces, I will bear in mind the example of East Germany's supposedly all-knowing and all-powerful Stasi...and of how utterly useless they proved to be. Better to be accidentally killed by the Hero's comic-relief Sidekick than to have my Evil Empire collapse without the Hero having had to lift a finger.
Worse than useless. Consider the social and economic utility of people that piss others off.
No actual harm caused. Not bad people. Just those neighbours or colleagues or friend’s significant others that, through selfishness and lack of awareness or simply bullheadedness, question everything and come up creative (sometimes not totally legit or invited) workarounds.
Those people do not survive such regimes. And the societies blighted of them show it rather quickly.
> 208. Members of my Legion of Terror will attend seminars on Sensitivity Training. It's good public relations for them to be kind and courteous to the general population when not actively engaged in sowing chaos and destruction.
East Germany collapsed on the account of persistent information inflow from the West (TV, radio, zero language barrier against West Germany), plus its ideological allies (the Warsaw Pact led by USSR) abandoning them. A country of 17 million isolated in a sea of non-friendly powers would be unviable. Once USSR dropped the Brezhnev Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty and Poland started introducing democracy, GDR was in a very tight spot.
China won't become isolated anytime soon, and there isn't really an efficient way to supply dissenting news to Chinese people in Chinese en masse. Unfortunately, I believe that Chinese secret service can stay efficient for a long, long time.
What exactly would you like to tell them? A large percentage of Chinese have access to VPNs, travel to other countries, and talk with people from all over. The trade offs that Americans have implicitly made, accepting high street crime in exchange for “freedom” won’t universally be accepted as better. They are a cultural choice.
The average Chinese isn’t eating grass or cowering from Big Brother. Economically, they’re doing significantly better than their parents. The red hot post-war economy Americans reminisce about? Chinese have been living that reality for 40 years now. In America we have recessions once a decade, but up until this year the average Chinese never even knew what a recession was.
If you don’t trust Chinese crime stats, check Singapore’s which are even lower. Singapore is a city bigger than LA but with low crime rates due to cameras and police that know how to do their jobs. Singapore also gives the death penalty for peddling drugs which is a lesson conservative states might have directed at the Sackler family rather than giving them a free pass.
Shootings are common in the U.S. and American politicians have accepted this reality. Even after children are slaughtered, politicians do nothing. Those children pay for American “freedom” with their lives. Other cultures choose to put children first.
Are you sure about the really young cohorts? AFAIK youth unemployment in China is so bad that they stopped releasing the stats.
Sure, China has a bunch of advantages (large scale, distinct ethnic/national identity, etc.) that the GDR didn't have. But Chinese history records ~4,000 years of dynasties, emperors, generals, etc. with similar authoritarian ambitions - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history
Saying "This Time Will Be Different, Because $Yet_Another_New_Reason" also has an extremely long history.
And just because the ruling class is overthrown in a country doesn’t mean the material quality of life for everyday people changes. One autocrat replacing another isn’t much better.
don’t laugh - it’s vastly more accurate than xKeyScore and other keyword reliant systems and it has the ability to catch meaning, even if you speak somewhat obfuscated. Not perfect by any means, but a vast improvement on the state of full time surveillance. Regulated industries are already racing adoption for compliance scanning, in combination with Whisper it’s a clear pivot point in surveillance capabilities for anyone who isn’t the NSA
One of the reasons it’s a mistake to withdraw on “the technology is flawed, it hallucinates” - A bit of inaccuracy, an occasional execution of a wrongly accused person isn’t a dealbreaker for countries. What matters is the improvement over the status quo
But when China does it there's actual outrage. I wish people here had the same outrage about us doing the same thing in the West, where that outrage could actually possibly have an impact on the real world other than just propping up two-minutes hate on the official enemies. Getting mad about China's numerous repressive measures achieves literally nothing, because they don't care about our opinions at all, whereas getting mad about all of the same stuff being done here could actually change something.
“He turned out to be a you-know-what,” one user who knew the group wrote on social media app Xiaohongshu, named after Mao’s Little Red Book that was used to compel the nation’s population to inform on each other. China offers up to 500,000 yuan ($68,160) to citizens who successfully report spies.
That post, which Bloomberg hasn’t been able to verify, garnered some 16,000 likes as users enthusiastically exchanged tips for spotting spies. Not knowing slang popularized by the annual spring gala broadcast or mnemonic devices taught in math class could all be hallmarks of a spook, they said.
Are things like this happening in the West?
This portion of the article loses even more credibility since the author clearly doesn’t understand the Chinese social media landscape, nor what “Mao’s Little Red Book” is actually called in Chinese.
Isn't there something about abortion snitching in Texas?
Of course it is? The CIA was openly crying in the press a couple years ago about their Chinese network getting rolled up, and later touted the establishment of a "China Mission Center."
https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-ex...
https://www.npr.org/2021/11/16/1051170999/as-u-s-spies-look-...
Edit: just skimmed your comment history. You're one of those "America bad" people. Good luck.
Other than that, sorry to break it to you, but "America" (the USA govt, more specifically) is really bad for almost everyone other than US citizens. Which is expected - officials routinely say they have their own citizens and industry well-being in mind. The US has had almost 40 years of monopoly in what you could call a "protection racket" if it wasn't already called a NATO charter. As a result, as with all monopolists, the price of belonging to the club was very high (both economically and politically, and in other areas, too). And that was even before Trump, when a lot of trust in stability of long-term commitments went down the drain.
To many countries it's still worth it, of course. To many, though, it's just the only option, irrespective of the costs. To them, "America bad" is an obvious statement of fact. And I'm speaking about nominal "allies" here! Imagine how it looks to Iranians or Afghans.
I'm not "against America", I'm against exploitative monopolies, no matter where they come from. The fact that every other option is even worse, doesn't really negate the fact that America can, and many time is, objectively "bad" news to others.
Low trust societies are the worst for the citizens and the best for the corrupt in power. These activities are great for keeping the status quo.
Really the USSR lasted as long as it did because the Great War had a lasting mass perception of survivalism, and the power vacuum bringing the Warsaw Pact under Russia's economic dominance. Eventually it fell apart.
Somehow Putin reversed that (likely because of oil revenues), but the oil age is coming to an end, and Putin is allegedly failing in health. When he dies or is deposed, Russia will fragment I think.
But this time, there is a military power that is greater than Russia, at least in conventional terms: Ukraine. It will have a trained, battle-hardened, motivated, fully NATO-supplied army, with deep NCO-deep ties to NATO militaries, equipment, officers, etc. It will have trust of its allies and a critical mission to NATO of being the new line of defense with Russia.
What will likely happen once Putin falls is that Belarus will effectively become allied with Poland, Ukraine, and the NATO-member Balkans. Ukraine will become a pivotal multi-decade military and diplomatic leverage over parts of crumbling Russia: George, Armenia, and/or Azerbaijan will align with them.
So what happens then? Kalingrad declares independence? What about the thin sliver of Russia between the Black and Caspian seas, isn't that where the oil fields are, or the Kalmyks decide the time is right? Bashkirs? Chechens of course?
What if post-putin results in separate power centers in Volgograd/St Petersburg, and Moscow all essentially dividing the spoils?