Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions
unseen-japan.com
unseen-japan.com
The whole article is based on two premises:
* that the Great Firewall of China blocking all instances of 六四天安門 in website text is expected and normal,
* that leveraging that behavior in any way (see Hyrum's Law) is unexpected and abnormal.
If the government seeks to filter any and all websites containing a given string, why would the Tokyo University be guilty of discrimination just by adding that string to their website? They are not the actor performing the filtering. One can argue it's the government of China discriminating against Chinese people who want to access information abroad in general.
If it's a Chinese run spider that flags websites that contain banned terms, does this mean that we can effectively block certain websites from China as a form of denial attack?
There are many sites which allow user submissions without a strong administrative overview. E.g. Could Booking.com be blocked to the Chinese audience by a listing including certain keywords on their page or in imagery.
Yes? That's basically why a bunch of western social media sites are banned in china, because people post subversive content there and the site's administration refuses the government's request to take it down. If you tried it on booking.com or whatever, it won't work, both because your comments will be taken down by site administration for being off topic, but also because the site is big enough that they won't take automated actions (hopefully). At best you can take down small to medium sites that don't have active moderation teams. Moreover, this isn't an attack that's limited to china, it can be used against any sort of content blocking system. Sites have been blocked from google browsers (via google safe browsing) due to malicious UGC, and you can even take down the whole site if you email the abuse department of their hosting provider.
The comparison was with how both the chinese censorship system and other blocking systems can be susceptible to the same attack (ie. people posting UGC to get a site banned). At no point did I imply that they were comparable in any other way.
I believe this is known. I have a file saved somewhere with a list of terms that allegedly trigger Chinese blocking.
I won't post it here :) It's pretty useless, in a practical sense. If I say anything the Chinese government wants to block, I'd rather their citizens see it.
Blame isn't a zero sum game. A swatter is just as culpable for someone getting killed/hurt, even if theoretically the actual act was caused by police negligence. Likewise, if the university added the keyword with the intention to dissuade chinese students from applying, they should be raked over the coals for doing so. The fact that actual block was implemented by chinese censors doesn't absolve them of any responsibility.
This sort of fallacious thinking happens a lot on the Internet. "X can't be the bad guy because look at what Y did".
One group doing something bad doesn't automatically make the other group innocent.
It's also true that terrible acts by members of a group does not (nesissarely) justify harsh punishment to all members.
That actually is a very good summary of your whole post, and it clarified a little bit for me. Thanks, I'll steal that quote for later.
...agreed...
> A swatter is just as culpable for someone getting killed/hurt, even if theoretically the actual act was caused by police negligence.
...but this is a horrifying and repugnant example. Police violence is not "theoretical", and the critical vulnerability in society which renders an anonymous, unsworn phone call as cover for one person to murder another is bound to be exploited, regardless of we sum the blame.
If we simply disband SWAT teams, there will be nothing to blame so-called "swatters" for because these murders and other acts of terror will be brought to a swift end.
Human rights are not granted for free, they are won and they protected collectively. If malicious actor is deliberately and intentionally undermines human rights they should not not be granted them themselves automatically. If some community works to devolve and degrade education, free speech and other rights for themselves, and then claims they are owed those same rights by the outside groups, they should not be granted them automatically, they should earn them. This should be a collective norm in the developed countries - treat outsiders just like those outsiders want to treat themselves. Instead of appeasing and losing those appeasements time after times. "When will we learn?"(c) Churchill about appeasing dictators
I don't get it. Who's the "malicious actor" here? The chinese? Is your point that because the chinese government doesn't respect human rights, that it's fine to discriminate against chinese students?
It’s too easy to fabricate criteria why they shouldn’t apply to certain people. The concept of human rights was devised to designate rights whose deprivation should be impossible by definition.
That is just the theoretical approach. The fact that someone says that human rights are unconditional and inalienable does not mean that they are so in practice.
It is the execution of those human rights, including prevention, education, and punishment, that makes them seem unconditional and inalienable. How do you execute human rights or facilitate their execution in a situation, where they are neither unconditional nor inalienable in practice?
The point is that you can’t say that something is a human right and at the same time define conditions upon which they don’t apply to some human(s), which the GP comment tried to do.
> Having a right and receiving justice are two different things.
That doesn't yet make sense to me. What good is a right if it stays theoretical, without an ability to execute that right in practice?
Or, in other words, if a person has a right but there are no ways to execute that right, how is this situation practically different from that person not having a right at all?
It is political, and it is satirical, and it is discrimination. Better to argue that it is righteous discrimination than that there was no discriminatory intent.
(this was satire)
Look, I'm on HN, I agree with looking beyond rules and freeing information. But universities and institutions generally don't want to be filled with non-conformists
Most Chinese are quite content with the CCP for improving their quality of life in China. Lifting that many people out of poverty in 4 decades is not a simple feat. I’m someone who doesn’t like the CCP. But we have to give credit where credit is due.
Another point - a lot of Chinese students and workers abroad are fair targets by their government to willingly or unwillingly engage in IP theft and industrial espionage.
You're never going to satisfy every humans need. It's impractical. But using that lens on an extremely small set of Chinese citizens to derive a world view based on that assumption is incorrect.
If you want to make a different point about the majority, or a very big majority, or two people, you should make that point instead. Obviously the Chinese with whom I interact are of a certain class and intellectual formation of which I must remain aware; in particular, the closeness of some to the party breeds a unique type of contempt. That is why I am not trying to generalise; seemingly, you are.
If this whole thing is true then this is not evidence that anyone at Tokyo uni stops Chinese students from applying. But it is evidence that CCP stops them. By not loading Tokyo uni's site.
What reason could there conceivably be for including that term into a meta tag of a thematically unrelated website, other than to trigger the well-known blocking of access from China?
To be clear, if you could remove someone's internet connection by emailing them a picture of Winnie the Pooh, that's all every junior would be doing with their free time. It's too stupid of a situation to leave alone.
I'm not about to be burdened by the ramifications of other people living under that much control. Part of being inside a shitty system is that it's going to suck for you.
Some would say not doing something to combat a problem is supporting a problem. Maybe some people think that state-induced amnesia is a problem. "nothing interesting happened in 1989"
> well-known blocking of access from China
it is not well known even for me who been to China a few times that China defeated HTTPS required to read the text of a website to determine whether it contains forbidden terms. I only knew that their censors maintained a blocklist
Sure Chinese Japanophiles maybe got in this crossfire but that's life. ordinary Russians like me get affected by sanctions even though we hate Putler and sometimes we get hurt in ways that cannot be worked around by just using VPN. If everything was just business as usual for ordinary people many of them probably would not even think about the war but now it is an issue impossible to hide
because we all can put 1 + 1 together and aren't stupid and understand that the intent here is to discriminate against Chinese applicants, secretly at that? The university of Tokyo is a public university, I'm pretty certain like most other universities in the world they have obligated themselves to not discriminate foreign students outside of what the law stipulates.
And if that's the case, isn't that a noble goal that all citizens and institutions of democratic societies should strive to do?
If all major websites did this it would severely degrade the ability of the CCP to function and they may be forced to stop denying the atrocities that they've committed.
No, the intent is to discriminate against Chinese people. I've lived and worked in Japan, stereotyping of Chinese and Koreans as the article points out is common. If you wanted to convince young Chinese students of democracy you'd probably take them up on the opportunity to educate and have a dialog with them. That is the liberal democratic way, instead of aiding their government in censoring them.
There's nothing democratic about some random person at a public institution pulling a stunt like this, they have no authority to do so. If they don't like what students are coming to their university, in a democracy they're free to vote for people who want to change that.
If so why is this particular instance not a good example of it?
And this case in particular, anyone who reduces an 18 year old Chinese kid, who had no choice in what system they grew up in to "the CCP", not even treats them like a real individual, they have a lot of poison in their heart and I think don't care about liberty, or education or democracy as much as the pretend to do.
I specifically mentioned the CCP to distinguish it from Chinese citizens who I consider to be oppressed by the parasitical CCP.
Your position regarding not using the tools of an authoritarian entity against them is untenable. Would you also refuse to use the the mass surveillance apparatus that the CCP has constructed to find weaknesses in their system to exploit with the purpose of bringing out revolution in China?
Given that US sanctions hasn't caused the CCP to change their behavior, I think it's fair to say that the actual impact of the CS department putting an anti-CCP keyword on their home page to be approximately zero.
>If all major websites did this it would severely degrade the ability of the CCP to function and they may be forced to stop denying the atrocities that they've committed.
China blocks major sites like facebook, most western media, and all of google, and they seem to be doing fine. Adding a japanese university to that list, can again be rounded to approximately zero.
They are building on it, and continue the discrimination. And the reason for this is also discrimination in itself. Or is there any other legit reason for adding this specific keyword in an unrelated site?
On one hand, it could be argued that they're innocent, and shouldn't be punished. It's not their fault, and they nave no real ability to change their state policies. They're the primary victims, we should be helping them, not hurting them.
On the other hand, any attempt to hold the government accountable for their actions will invariably impact their citizens. Tariffs, sanctions, war, all can punish a populace because of the actions of a corrupt leadership... and yet it can still be just (see the sanctions against Russia, for example). Being too precious about hurting their population just perpetuates the regime.
There is smoke there so it should be investigated. Alternatively maybe they wanted to admit more Chinese students who normally use or were willing to use proxy serves. Maybe because they think these students would be less effected or boxed in by propaganda, essentially giving more support to those they favor ideologically.
Not clear from the article if this is going to get investigated and cleared up though.
That said, I wonder: what's the motive here? Too many spammy applications from Chinese? Affirmative action to favor native students? Plain old racism?
This also makes me wonder if Taiwanese and Mainland Chinese people have different reputations in Japan given that Taiwan is a former Japanese colony and that the Taiwanese aren't shy about what happened in Tiananmen Square.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/12/certa...
Or more relatedly, the "Tiananmen Square" copypasta.
https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-tiana...
It's smooth brain stupid, like comments posting Tiananmen copypastas on reddit or youtube thinking it would kick out PRC users, who are on those sites in the first place because they're already using VPN to jump over the GFW. Ditto with PRC cohorts who applies to study abroad, who will invariably have VPN access and just switch on if a admissions page times out.
Like ~50% of Japan's international students are from PRC, and this is University of Tokyo who from anecdotes is very friendly to PRC applicants, and have one of the largest international student bodies in general. Quick search online Tokyo University has 4968 international students, 3232 is from PRC, or 65%, substantially higher than JP average, which is way more than I thought. So it's likely just some disgruntled racist who thought it was this one neat trick to block the chicoms, otherwise if it's formal policy, admissions could always just lowkey reduce PRC admission without any overt evidence and prevent drama.
I doubt this is effective to deter applications coming from China.
It's probably just a page admin trying to be an activist at best, or being racist at worst.
If they're really having a DDOS/spam problems, I don't think it's difficult for them to hire competent IT people to mitigate them (Cloudflare, captcha, AI spam detector, etc)
As I explain in my own post, to many Chinese applicants, period. A lot of Chinese students are very good, but since China population is huge and a lot wants to go abroad (student visa is a door for immigration) there simply too much demand to go in what is a smaller country in comparison.
Taiwanese are definitively seen in a different light than Chinese, however there isn't a strong awareness of the shared past between the two countries in younger generations.
This accusation is only a bombshell if you lived under a rock for the past decades. I have to admit that I have never been to Japan nor that I am a Japan or China expert, but I don’t read much positive things on their relationship.
China says Japan should admit their wartime crimes when they invaded China, and Japan says China should stop conducting assertive actions especially in the East China Sea. According to one poll, the country with the most negative view of China is Japan [1]. Chinese citizen have a similar negative view of Japan [2]. Still, both countries do trade a lot which I don’t understand. I’m curious if anyone here knows more about this.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Chinese_sentiment_in_Ja...
this goes directly against my understanding and also against all of my anecdotal experiences
for example, people I know who lived in China described to me that bad guys in TV shows are often Japanese war criminals
If so, I am not sure I agree that governments act in a uniform manner; they are comprised of many individual actors who act within the bounds of some system that's influenced by a number of competing factors.
I also don't agree that governments are rational or divorced from the emotions of the people who comprise them nor the populations they administer.
If I completely misunderstood your view please let me know :)
However, there are people that do care much more about these, in particular in the older generation from my personal experience. Probably the propaganda was more effective before China's opening up. In addition, Japan also have some conflicts from historical reasons with South Korean, which is an ally to Japan (and to the US).
This logic seems slightly strange to me. If it turned out that, for example, Harvard University was pulling some sort of html trick to attempt to block black students from applying, would that not be a bombshell because racism against black people is already known to exist in the United states?
What’s there not to understand? It makes money.
japan complaining about naval maneuvers pales in comparison. imperialists often continue to harbor resentment of those they attacked and lost against. china is supposed to be a subject, not an equal in their minds.
You have to remember that East Germany and Poland were both communist governments up until quite recently and during that time they were not allies with Germany and France.
The USA also brokered peace in Europe by providing military security and access to the largest free trade market in the world. It was a pretty good deal for European countries.
This may be pure speculation, but it also appears that China and Japan are culturally further apart than European countries.
Japan is for all of its faults a liberal democratic country with no interest in conquering anyone. China is an authoritarian dictatorship getting worse (under the later years of Xi) and threatening imperialist actions especially against the independent nation of Taiwan(some parallels to Russia getting worse under later years of Putin and starting an imperialist war against Ukraine).
I doubt this was done to specifically block Chinese applications, as this string is just a common reverse spam filter. The idea is that Chinese GFW will catch it anyhow or give such impression to spammers to scare them. Allegedly suspicious TCP reset or packet losses following responses including this type of text wasn't rare up until 2010s.
Legitimate traffic to Japanese websites is supposedly negligible, therefore resistance against even cutting off all Chinese IPs is quite small among savvy Japanese computer users, and so is to sprinkle this string.
Searching "六四天安門 スパム" should give you general public sentiments on this method, not specific to this case. It's at most considered a mildly questionable choice.
A history teacher saying idgaf and mentioning it in an article on a university hosted website is one thing. Putting it in meta tags, on a graduate admissions site, seems a lot less like free speech and a lot more like fuck you guys.
The thing is Japan universities have an issue with the number of (good) Chinese students applicants. They already have some special rules, but they can't be too special either. Which mean that without further tweaks, almost no other international applicants would get accepted. University already raised the requirement to the level of Japanese for exchange students a decade ago for that reason, but that didn't solved anything since Chinese writing and vocabulary plus education style give them an edge to reach the highest levels of JLPT easier than other foreigners.
I agree that the phrase shouldn’t be used to intentionally filter out Chinese students but this sounds like a horrible precedent. We shouldn’t adopt the same censorship outside of China.
Racism is so casual it was literally talked about outloud during meetings. Was quite the culture shock.
Also it's poor taste. If it was 'Xi looks like Winnie the pooh' with a hidden image of the yellow bear, they should have left it on.
Censorship goes away, problem goes away. End of story for me.
Not including it in meta keyword tag on the website for graduate admissions is hardly "suppression".
What gave you the impression that "blame-shifting" is happening? See my other comment. Blame isn't a zero sum game. The fact that the university is racist doesn't mean china is off the hook for censorship.