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Comment by mapt | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, China tends to classify aerial survey photos as strategic intelligence assets.

Did a scientific project there. It was a whole thing. The local/city/regional CCP branch was not cooperative with even the most innocuous low altitude drone data gathering from foreigners for ecology studies, despite sponsorship by local & national universities.

There is even a random-geometric-distortion obfuscation layer that you have to apply to maps you're allowed to serve up publicly while doing business in China, like one of those distorted mesh grid paintings. Takes in WGS84 and spits out a nonsense projection a hundred meters away.

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Why did you expect local officials to stick their necks out for you?

They don’t make the relevant laws but can be punished by higher authorities for breaking them.

Unless it could be legally guranteed any potential punishment would be transferred to your team’s shoulders, it’s bizarre to expect someone else sitting in some municipal office to take the risk.

Why did you expect a foreigner who is not from China to realize that they'd be inhibited by the local authorities from doing work they were invited to do by those same local authorities? It's bizarre to think that it's bizarre that a foreigner might merely express some surprise by that.

Very common for one branch of a bureaucracy to be at odds with another branch.

not necessarily, it might just depend who is asking. You can get a lot done in general by having the right person/party ask for you.

Which would make sense if it was assumed there were only a few people in the entire bureaucracy… but doesn’t make sense when everyone involved knows, ahead of time, there are millions...

Probably thousands even in some random small city.

I’m guessing no one on the team had ever coordinated even a thousand people before on some complex legal issue. So it’s just bizarre to suddenly expect anyone capable of that would do so on their behalf and reach out with invitations…

Not all countries are like China.

Other places could have a helpful bureaucracy, or one that ignores the laws, or accepts bribes.

How does this matter when the country is known ahead of time, and the relevant laws, the details, etc., are all widely known to be nowhere near identical?

It’s not like someone could accidentally board a flight to China and clear immigration by happenstance, or without being informed that things may be very different from their home country.

They were probably optimistic, incorrectly. It's easy to think everything will work when you have a written guarantee from the government, and have never personally experienced a dysfunctional, authoritarian bureaucracy.

An invitation from a local official can not be a written guarantee of something beyond them?

It’s not even a guarantee of getting the relevant visa in time, that’s true for every big country I know of.

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