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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

Well, at least we know the article is telling the truth now.

I always read the Chinadaily (or globaltimes, the two big English newspapers in China) in a contrarian way. If Chinadaily denies something, then it must be true; e.g., when they denied that Beijing was going to start rationing car plates, I knew it was going to be happen (and indeed it did). That's just how things work here, why would the government work to refute a rumor that wasn't true?

NYT checked their sources and they are known for being factual (and when that is proven not the case, their is holy hell to pay and lots of people get fired). This story is probably true, all of the Chinese officials do this, no one is not corrupt; if their was someone who tried not to do this, they would be kicked out of the party on the principle that it would make everyone else look "bad" rather than "normal."

That's a completely illogical conclusion to make. Whether it is true or not, blocking a page does not imply admission of guilt. If the article was complete bullshit, they still would have blocked it.

B (Admission of guilt) -> A (Truth) is not the same as A -> B.

It's not iron-clad proof that the contents of the article are truthful.

However, if the contents were not truthful, I think you would also expect the Chinese government to forcefully deny them. There is no mention of a denial in the referenced Times article...at least as of yet.

Therefore, I think the blocking of the Times can be taken as a reasonable indicator that the Chinese government wants to hide embarrassing information.

Is that really such a stretch?

The Chinese government is unlikely to deny claims about sensitive personal issues like this. This is especially the case if the public sentiment (both inside and outside of China) is considered. When people expect something to be true, denials can be perceived as lies and they will make things worse (for the parties being accused). The worse part is, more people will know it and more people will believe in the article.

Yes, it is a stretch, and that stretch actually has a well-established name: strawman.

I will admit that my reply was a little snarky. But I will tend to presume bodies that engage in widespread censorship are guilty.

Of censorship, sure.

No, it is not a logically sound argument, and is not proof. But in this world of imperfect information, sometimes you have to infer certain facts simply based on action and reaction. Also, truth (or fact) in such articles is very seldom a 1 or 0, there are many shades of it, many sides of the story. it's like there are a million other little letters between A -> B, sometimes its a guestimate where is falls on the scale. Another thing to remember, even articles appearing in the NYT are written by humans, who aware of it or not, write with some pre-bias, or with an intent.

I was only motivated to read the original article after I saw it had been blocked.

And it is not blocked in Hong Kong! Still one country, two rules...

And even when they blocked Bloomberg, the articles could still be read by anyone in China with a Bloomberg terminal..

If you have a Bloomberg terminal an article about money accumulation isn't going to be the type of article that would bother you.

But I believe that most Bloomberg terminal subscribers would argue that capitalist-style money accumulation (free markets, etc) is a good thing for an overall population, and that corruption-style money accumulation (which is the implication of the article) is a huge negative for a country.

But you can easily phrase it the other way and argue that corruption is good because it gives leadership an incentive to keep the capitalist system going instead of flipping back to Communism, and the cost of the payoff (a few hundred billion?) is far less than the increased welfare of the Chinese people (pulling hundreds of millions out of deep poverty).

Indeed, some have argued corruption is a good thing in general because people can buy what they want from the leadership instead of their running rampant over everything, which ameliorates any abuses: see for example Bryan Caplan http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2012/09/incorruptibly_e....

Many people here in Hong Kong don't regard themselves to be part of China.

We have our own legal, visa, financial, and political system.

Although Beijing occasionally steers the political system, censorship of any kind usually ends up in protest.

I can't imagine what would happen if they tried to do censor the internet here.

For that reason it's the one sort-of-part of China I'd actually like to visit one day soon - me and a lot of others I think.

Hong Kong's awesome. Love the food, love the people, love the incredible cityscape, love everything :)

I heard that Beijing's trying to phase out the Cantonese language in Hong Kong. Has it been enforced?

Doubtful - last I checked they were trying to shift the financial center from Hong Kong to Shanghai.

I really, really doubt that. They pulled back on “patriotic education” which is honestly something a relatively large minority cared strongly about. If they tried to phase out Cantonese everyone who didn't move from the mainland would go ape. Also, Mandarin isn't even an official language, Cantonese and English are it.

Matthewrudy is right. The legislation for regulating Cantonese in broadcast and print media was enacted in Guangzhou, not Hong Kong. My mistake.

No politicians would say outright that they want to eliminate a major language, but they could drastically reduce its usage by imposing specific restrictions. And not just on spoken Cantonese, but variations of written Chinese other than the official simplified characters.

I wish I could post an original article here with more details, but for some reason even the bilingual news sites don't cover this story in English. Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2012_Anti-Cantonese_regulations. The sources are all in Chinese (the only English link appears to be dead) but Google's translations weren't too bad.

They did this in Guangzhou, where the local TV channel switching from 100% cantonese, to 50% cantonese.

Mandarin use has increased in Hong Kong in recent years, but for economic reasons, as mainland visitors and businesses have flooded our small city.

No. We just know the article is unflattering.

Well put. On my way to read it now. More on the topic though, censorship at the pressure by the government is a slippery slope we've been on for some time. There is almost no country( citation needed ) that can vouch to be free from it.

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