Fix: Hong Kong is not in China | Hacker News Reader

Fix: Hong Kong is not in China

github.com

70 pointsthrowaway_hkg34 comments

Very interesting to me that some users just go around and change all mentions of Taiwan and Hong Kong to China, as @alexobviously mentioned in the pull thread. I wonder if the people that do these things do so out of personal patriotism or some other force/factor.

The particular account in question [1] does enough unrelated stuff to make me believe it's just a patriot who genuinely believes those countries belong to China. Sounds strange until you remember that some people like to start confrontations online for the dumbest reasons.

[1] https://github.com/92hackers

this is not much different than many Isarel people genuinely believes Jerusalem is their capital.

Reminds me of Tom Scott's video on timezones [1], where he shows how what time zone a user is in can depend on things like ethnicity: apparently, when the West Bank goes on and off Daylight Savings depends on whether you're among Israelis or not (I might have the details wrong here, please correct me if so. I couldn't find much definitive information about this).

Luckily the problem OP linked to seems easier to solve.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5wpm-gesOY

Also reminds me of how Google Maps shows different borders depending on which country you’re viewing from

This is often due to legal requirements: in both India and China (and many other countries), it's literally illegal to display a map of the country that does not show the "right" borders.

And russia. And Ukraine.

The code in question was to decide if you need a proxy to bypass GFW.

Hong Kong does not have the (same) GFW, it is rightly to remove Hong Kong from that list.

That being said, use the locale to determine network connectivity is just.. wrong.

I was at a fancy hotel in Guangzhou that had internet through HK for some reason. It was nice not being behind the GFW during my stay there. I’m sure there is a better way to tell if you are behind the wall or not.

how much does China pay for that level of patriotism?

they pay right? Not just in social credit points I hope

You don't usually pay for that. For instance, as a gooner, I will go make fun of Man Utd fans utterly for free.

Prosperity is the most powerful propaganda of all.

I think few (non-Chinese) people in the US/Europe really understand the dramatic changes that have happened in the last few decades. I have Chinese family members that grew up under literally starvation conditions, only to grow up to find themselves multimillionaires. When Deng Xiaoping went to Shenzen it was a basically a small fishing village, and he said he would make it prosperous and change China's future. It happened. China went from developing nation to second largest economic power in the world in a life time.

For context I am not Chinese and not a fan of the CCP, but the zealous patriotism of the Chinese is not radically different than the zealous patriotism of American's in the immediate postwar period.

When discussing propaganda with Chinese citizens, it's vital to recognize this first. They aren't brainwashed masses, they are largely people who were told outrageous promises by their government, and in fact government policy really made those things happen.

this matches my perception, the patriotism looks the same

Yes that is all true, but much of it is CCP propaganda as well. https://www.cfr.org/blog/chinas-internet-trolls-go-global https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/05/19/meet-the-chinese-intern...

Per the original study, 50centers limited to PRC internet, they're bureaucrats without english fluency hitting comment KPIs on domestic social media.

Very different from the west where leaders make mediocre promises of marginal improvements, then fail to deliver on those promises and then they create new significant problems which we didn't have before.

You became a millionaire. But I, who had always ranked in the top ten in a small town of more than 100+k people before college, still did not own a house after working for 10+ years.

> I have Chinese family members that grew up under literally starvation conditions, only to grow up to find themselves multimillionaires.

The CCP was literally why they were starving in the first place

This is technically true but the Chinese viewpoint on this topic is net-gratitude for CCP taking control of their country back from foreign powers, particularly Japan, which murdered, tortured, and raped millions of people for years leading up to and during world war 2. Unlike Germany, Japan continues to largely pretend this never happened and has refused to publicly acknowledge or atone for it which perpetuates the political conflict there. This is something that is well understood in Chinese society and I think was personally fascinated that people were able to overlook the flaws and grave shortcomings of early CCP rule.

The PLA literally killed 500 thousand people in Changchun to liberate the city from the KMT. Mao and much of the past was a dead topic until Xi brought it all back to the forefront. I was really shocked that someone who suffered from the cultural revolution would worship Mao so much, even if he was effectively a princeling.

Yeah, I don’t understand it personally and I was also similarly shocked.

At least, after Xi, the last vestiges of Mao will be just history (the next Gen X Chinese leader will have been born after Mao died, or at least just a very little kid). This is why Xi becoming president for life was such a disappointment for me, I expect that the next generation of Chinese leadership will be much more modern (and Xi is the first monolingual/career politician leader modern China has had, hopefully that doesn't continue into the next generation).

The elimination of term limits is huge red flag for me. My hot take is that it’s setting Xi up to lead a China into a global culture war long-term and I think it’s likely we’ll similar misguided Putinistic behavior before he’s gone as he continues to build his trusted circle of yes people over the coming decades.

For a brief period around the pandemic period there was definitely a relatively short uptick in nationalist rhetoric but I believe that was more of a response to Trump’s sometimes contradictory statements on China and their leadership.

Largely, in my relatively average sample size in discussions with chinese-born expats (possibly a bias). Xi is not a very popular leader, particularly among the more affluent population.

Xi is much more popular among the masses vs Hu, Hu was a pretty weak leader, or at least, didn’t have much power. Affluent Chinese, you need to distinguish between northerners and southerners, the latter being much less nationalistic in general. During my last years in China (until mid 2016) I definitely noticed younger techies I worked with being more nationalistic than they were when I started my stint in China (2007)

> I was really shocked that someone who suffered from the cultural revolution would worship Mao so much, even if he was effectively a princeling.

Mao did (almost by chance) rescue Xi's father from execution by (other) Communists.

Chinese were much less patriotic in general 10-20 years ago. They would actually point and laugh at Americans saying they were smarter than that. Times changed a lot since Xi took office. Many are still cynically going through the motions (like when you have to take mandatory ideology classes in high school and college, lots of kids just used to use them for sleep but now they pretend to pay attention).

Not a lot.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

5 mao used to be able to get you a baked sweet potato on the street in…1999.

How much does Uncle Sam pay you to mention social credit points? Lots of trolls when you have 1 billion internet users.

The title is an unnecessary editorial of the PR title. Also, this highlights the importance of naming in software. Because, by any account and interpretation, Hong Kong is in China. But that is apparently not what this function is doing, yet it is named "isInChina". It should have been named something else, such as "shouldSetGoProxy", which would resolve any ambiguity.

It's the original PR title. Hong Kong is not "physically" "in" "China" in the same sense as a computer which is physically, or legally, in China, and therefore subject to Great Firewall rules.

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