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Comment by science4sail | Hacker News Reader

That's actually kind of brilliant - akin to putting "David Mayer" into your documents to poison them for OpenAI [0].

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...

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>That's actually kind of brilliant - akin to putting "David Mayer" into your documents to poison them for OpenAI [0].

Or more relatedly, the "Tiananmen Square" copypasta.

https://knowyourmeme.com/editorials/guides/what-is-the-tiana...

The Taiwanese tourists seem to have a significantly more favorable reputation in Japan (in comparison to the Chinese tourists).

> Too many spammy applications from Chinese?

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.

Chinese academia use VPNs all the time to access foreign sites.

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.

It's not even activism, just a common snakeoil DDoS-away. Not to say it's okay but not rare.

This is Tokyo U though, one of the best university in Japan.

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)

>actually kind of brilliant ... >what's the motive here

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.

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