Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future | Hacker News Reader

Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future

nytimes.com

I was one of the victims of this system. Lucky me i got the hell out of the system a few years ago. I am a software engineer in Vancouver ,Canada browsing this news now.

My files has been sitting in a cabinet of a government official build over 8 years and no one just care.

The interesting part was I had to pay the government for keeping my files. I just left 8 years ago and i thought i would not need my files anymore (not looking for a job anymore in china , at least a government job ) so i just stopped paying them.

Would they just throw them away if you stopped paying a 'storage fee'(?)?

After reading this article... Apparently they'd "recycle" them.

First that article on North Korea and now this. It's so sad that people live like this in the 21st century. And there's no way for us to do anything about it since their governments so actively block any real information.

"People's Republic" my ass. China's government is no government by the people for the people. It's just an evil empire. And we're supporting them with every Chinese product we buy and every attempt Obama makes to improve our relations.

After reading stuff like this, I'm not so sure we should be. I'm not advocating sanctions or anything of that sort, I just feel like we should take a harder line against such human rights violations.

China may not be democratic, but it's no evil empire. Boycotting Chinese products or freezing them out diplomatically won't fix corruption problems; in fact, it's likely to have the opposite effect. China has improved a great deal since Nixon went to China, and there's no reason to believe that continued engagement won't further the same process.

Sorry, I guess what I said came across wrong. I'm certainly not in favor of any boycotts, sanctions, or diplomatic freezings. Economic aid in the form of buying their products can't do anything but help. But that being said, I really don't have any elegent solutions for how to fix the current problems.

Things like this and the iPhone incident (and the pressure put on the poor man because of an innocent mistake), simply make me worried, that's all. Sure, the conditions have improved, but for the huge percentage of the world's population that is, just by chance, born into these conditions, I feel like we should be doing something more to advocate for their rights.

My grandparents were lucky enough to get out of China back in the 20s and 30s to give me the fortunate life I have now. I just wish more people had that chance.

The world is complex. Even if Chinese manufactures are not exploiting cheap labor, the computers that we are using also includes materials from Africa, where warlords sell minerals for making our phones and computers.

We live in North America, Western Europe and Japan are all similar to ancient aristocrats in the world economy. We are spoiled to death compared to people in country side China, Africa. While we sometime sympathizes their hardships, but we are unable to break free from the way we are living now. It is a big problem and I suspect we are unable to find out solutions.

This doesn't mean we can't try to solve it. But I guess after thousands years of inequality in different economic/social class separations in the world, I suspect we can reach a peaceful solution that may against something that are deep inside our genes.

China has progressed economically tremendously. But in terms of freedom for its citizens, it looks like it hasn't progressed much and in some cases has worsened. In fact chinese govt. now uses technology to hamper free thought and expression by its citizens.

It is still an evil empire and a draconian state. Just because some (a lot?) of its citizens lives have improved in the last decades does not mean that the govt. has become any less draconian

China's freedom seems to come in cycles, but the general trend seems optimistic.

In the 50s after the revolution, to justify the new regime on ideological grounds, Mao sanctioned freedom of speech against the state. But after a few years when the party failed to deliver some of its promises, criticism began to pile up, and the party responded with a massive crackdown of the witch-hunting and labour camp variety. This lasted through the cultural revolution of the 60s and 70s, and was enforced by the cult-of-personality campaign initiated by Mao's wife.

After Mao died and his rival Deng took over, there was quite a bit of freedom during the 80s in reaction to the economic reform and the end of cultural revolution, where pro-democracy activism accumulated that eventually led to the Tiananmen Square protest. The government again responded with a crackdown.

After the crackdown, government became more paranoid in the 90s, "patriotic education" were ramped up in public schools, though it paled in comparison to the Mao era (no more witch-hunting, correction camp, public humiliation, etc.).

Then in the 00s the internet became popular for the middle class, and cell phone for the peasants, but the government hasn't loosened its grip, so rather than ideologically-backed student activism, grassroot vigilantism were organized by regular folks against anything from corrupt local officials to animal cruelty cases. These usually come in the form of protests numbered upward of tens of thousands. To let off the steam in a controlled manner, the state sanctioned these protests (not the case before) as long as they are focused on the "local" bureaucrats (provincial and lower). In the mean time, the press are gradually given more freedom to cover these topics, as long as they are "localized" as well.

Overall, eventhough the state is using ever more sophisticated methods to maintain control, it's usually in response to greater pressure from the citizens, and the state seems to be losing ground.

PRC's government is known to be relatively insensitive to external pressure, but is scared shitless of its own people. China doesn't rely on foreign aids, and contrary to popular beliefs, value from export accounts for a very small percentage of its GDP. This is part of the reason China is relatively unaffected by the current downturn.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1052429...

If there's to be any changes, it has to be from within. That's why the government is so paranoid about protests and is spending loads on censorship. Recently it has been going after public interest lawyers, but these guys are much tougher to crack than angry peasants.

http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_i...

I don't disagree overall, but I thought that China was relatively unaffected by the current crisis because of its massive currency reserves, which allowed it to ramp up spending and cheap loans.

That's another part of the reason. :) If the hole is too big you won't be able to bucket out the water fast enough.

You've got to be living under a bridge if you don't think the current crisis is affecting the chinese. It hasn't hit Beijing or Shanghai in a major way but all the manufacturing cities across the southern and east coasts are taking it pretty hard. There has been a sizable exodus of laid off workers leaving the cities.

I don't know what counts as a small percentage to you but exports make up 35-40% of their GDP since 2008. There has been a precipitous drop and changing from an export economy to self-sufficiency doesn't happen in a day. Luckily, the gov't has loads of reserves to weather that storm. But it's still a storm.

One of the reasons unemployment is not higher in the United States is because we have effectively outsourced much of our manufacturing needs to China. When manufacturing needs dropped dramatically, Chinese factories were impacted directly.

At one point, China considered a 9 percent annual growth rate the bare minimum it needed to maintain to accomodate the migrants going from country to city and/or to prevent social unrest (if those migrants could not find jobs). I don't know what their revised minimum growth rate is now - but it is clear China was dependent on its biggest customer, the American consumer.

You want to stop buying Chinese products because local officials in China are corrupt? By the same logic, the rest of the world should not buy US products because cops have wantonly used tasers on civilians.

Every system like that should have checks and balances built in to the system. The fact that there is no backup of this crucial documentation is quite amazing, that there is no way to reconstruct it even more (because after all, you did live that life and there are countless people that could testify to that).

His files had vanished. But with his story in the NYT, how long do you think it will take for him to vanish? :(

Why do you think that will happen ?

Because China is a Communist dictatorship which routinely kills people whose continued life is an embarrassment to the regime.

The education system is an attempt at creating equality for over a billion people. It's implemented by people for people so there will always be corruption. It's sad that there are no checks for when these things do happen. The media would be a good check but alas, not in China where the state controls it.

A good lesson for those who think governments should be trusted with managing dossiers of any kind about their citizens (e.g. health care records).

Yes, because thoroughly corrupt officials in remote parts of China are exactly like Government officials in the US.

My God! Your post is a good lesson for those who think Internet commenters have anything valuable to say.

I find the whole idea of the scenario this article describes horrifying, is this portrayal of highly centralized sans backup documentation true? Is there a technological solution to this that can become culturally accepted or is deeper reform needed before even this problem can be fixed?

The problem itself is not technological but political. The system that has evolved is pretty bad and the only reason it has evolved is because of the government. Unless there is some third party (free press, independent justice system) that oversees the government, there is no easy solution.

I wonder - has there ever been a case of an organization that big voluntarily giving up power? I can't think of any, & in fact the opposite situation (eg regulatory capture) is quite common.

Depends on what you mean by "voluntary", but maybe half of the British Empire was ceded without bloodshed.

Can you clarify which half was ceded without bloodshed?

has there ever been a case of an organization that big voluntarily giving up power

It depends on what you mean by voluntarily, but here's one example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_Day_(South_Africa)

Cant think of any. Power corrupts and the only way to change it is via political action or (sometimes) via armed revolution.

I remember what my father told me when he was in england. He was a friend of a Girl from east europe. She never talked about her live there. One day she said: I can't talk to you about it, because if I talk, there are going to go against my family, who is still living there.

Ten years later when he was working with URSS scientists, they behave very strange, very serious, never smiled, never talked about life. One of them told him: If we talk bad about the country we can't work because the state is the only employer.

So I don't want communism(too much power in too few hands), and I don't want the macro-capitalism we are living today in witch a few companies control everything(and when they fail they are too big to fail).

economically support chinese companies that treat their workers well and thus put pressure on the rest of the country to improve.

reform won't come from protests, it will come from the economy.

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