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Comment by roylez | Hacker News Reader

As a Chinese I would prefer to believe our government is behind this. Do you know Beijing (or even the whole country) has a serious smog issue which was first uncovered by American embassy in Beijing? The incident makes the government lose their trust in public, and for quite some time people only want to trust forecast from NOAA in stead of Beijing. If Chinese government hacked NOAA, it would be out of their intention to contain domestic reactions. Actually, our government has greater problems at home than abroad.

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>Do you know Beijing has a serious smog issue which was first uncovered by American embassy in Beijing?

So no one in the Chinese government or citizens had noticed that they can't see across the street until the Americans mentioned it?

People could see the smog for sure, but official forecast would report nothing unusual or indicating the hazard to people's lives. It was till Americans embassy spoke it out that the majority realised we breathe highly polluted air.

The official forecast in China is presumably controlled by the government. That's what makes it "official". You can't possibly argue that because the US is not publicly shaming the Chinese government into release accurate heath-relevant information to its citizens, that that same government has the right to hack US systems to determine weather information. If that is actually what occurred.

Don't Chinese citizens dream of making their country a two-party or multiparty democracy like US or India, respectively?

This one-party autocratic rule will one day make people insane.

We can talk about this all day without moving anywhere. Remember tanks in 1989 Tiananmen Square? From primary school people are brainwashed with CCP-is-holy thing. Many understand what is going on, but the attitude is "survival comes first". There are still plenty are too well brainwashed to know why life in China could be so hard. Yes, people can dream, but communism has its tradition, brutal tradition. People become realistic, you know, pay the bill and feed their children.

The vast majority of Chinese I meet here have zero interest in democracy, the few students I do meet who advocate it generally have very little idea of what it actually is.

They have no end of complaints about the government and are quite vocal about it- but huge divisions (to put it mildly) between provinces, as well as urban and rural people mean that the idea of letting "those people" have a say in how things are run is unthinkable.

I don't think anyone dreams of a 2 party system like the US. There's probably more factions within the Communist party...

That's like asking: "Why don't orphans just buy new parents at a mom and pop store?"

What is Communism?

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