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Comment by zaik | Hacker News Reader

It is discriminatory because someone at the university acted specifically to block Chinese students from accessing the website.

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Maybe they want the Chinese students who are smart enough to open their eyes to the world.

You mean a Chinese student who bypasses government restrictions? Yes, surely such a student will be great at your university and follow all your rules...

A student who believes in the freedom of information and is curious probably will do great in school. A great institution understands rules are meant to uplift and protect us, and that a student who sees beyond black ink and chiseled stone for a better tomorrow is the very same breed of rule maker which creates such great institutions in the first place. I know first hand from colleagues, bypassing the censorship is common for intelligent youth in China. We must always ask ourselves what the best is we can do and always avoid the "dangerous slippery slopes"

Japan generally doesn't see rules as meant to uplift people, they are meant to instill discipline.

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

You're making a different point than you think...

Usually, users are not seeing the keywords. It's hidden from their eyes.

Still racism, even if there is a noble goal behind it. If an university in the US deliberately skipped over black schools when it came to recruitment drives, with the excuse that "they want the black students who are persistent enough", they would (and should) be raked over the coals for racism.

Japan is not US and Chinese are not black. Context is everything.

I'm not even sure what you're arguing for. Are you claiming that "racism" means different things in US compared to china? Or that "context" needs to be considered when determining whether an act is racist?

Yes, I’m arguing that. Japanese racism against Chinese (and vice versa) is very different from white-black in the states.

I fail to see how "context" can materially change whether an act is racist or not. There might be some edge cases around "dog whistles" or whatever, but hard to see how this act isn't an intentional act to dissuade chinese students from applying. That's racism. How does the history between chinese and japenese materially change this?

Think again what's happening.

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.

It is very well known that China blocks access to sites containing that term, there has been overwhelming evidence for many years.

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?

The fact that you can eliminate an entire country from the conversation due to their politics, just by including a place name on a website, is *hilarious*. This is something that would be amusing to just do, no matter the target.

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.

People were inserting "Ukraine" or "BLM" or whatever on tons of thematically unrelated sites

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

It's about the intention of who inserted that keyword into the page.

"remembering the victims of Tiananmen massacre" is an intention that has nothing to do with student admissions

Yes, I'm sure the intention was remembering the victims of the Tiananmen massacre when they put it in a non-visible part of the HTML of a student admission webpage.

Yes?

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

And they have every right to discriminate against anybody who isn't Japanese. It is standard procedure everywhere in the world.

They didn't block anyone. They're making a mockery of Chinese censors. It's a political and satirical act.

Yes, it's the famous satire and political stance that is invisible to people.

(this was satire)

They took an action with the intent of making the website inaccessible in China.

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.

I can't believe the question was even asked.

What if it was a Chinese dissident who is opposed to the censorship and authoritarian behavior of the CCP?

Are there any true Chinese dissidents? I know in the west there is this fantastical view of Chinese struggling against oppression. But in reality I don’t really believe that. Yes, Chinese will look to emigrate outside for better quality of life. It’s not because they’re feeling oppressed at home.

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.

There are obviously good reasons to doubt the cruder ‘fantastical views’ that circulate in the West, but I cannot see why those reasons would lead one to doubt that there is a single ‘true Chinese dissident’. Am I to believe that every Chinese overseas I have met who freely discussed politics in a régime-sceptical way was paid off by the CIA or just trying to please me? Is every overseas dissident really just an empty NED shell? (I am sure many take money, but that doesn’t mean they also don’t have their own beliefs.) Does survey evidence that most Chinese are satisfied really mean that /all/ are? Are living standards so improved that nobody could possibly oppose the central people’s government? Is 润学 completely fabricated or reducible to economic factors?

"ALL" is subjective. You're never going to find "ALL" American or EU citizens satisfied or "non-dissidential" (if that's a word) to their government. What fraction of 1.2B Chinese are is your statistical threshold?

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.

No, ‘all’ is not subjective. My threshold for ‘any’ is one, and threshold for all is, well, all of them. My threshold for a majority is the usual one, as is my threshold for eighty or sixty per cent. I am deriving the worldview that it would be absurd to deny that there is at least one dissident. It doesn’t matter whether I derive this based on an understanding of a sample that is representative of China as a whole so long as it is representative of a subset, since that is such a modest claim.

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.

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