tonylinn80

Agree! I'm so glad that I don't live in US anymore

The second amendment is much more ridiculous than this

She's traveling under either a normal Chinese passport or a Hong Kong passport

Plenty of democratic countries are also poor, hostile and struggling in all aspects. China, for example, are doing much better overall compared to democratic India, and arguably Taiwan at this point. India has been democratic since long time ago, but the government had been heavily corrupted. Little improvements can be done under their democratic system. Taiwan basically entered a downward spiral in all aspects since it fully adopted democracy. The recent elections are full of shit shows like that in US. People are getting more and more angry with their government. If Singapore and China were operating under a democratic government like US, there's no way they can achieve what they achieved so far, and they'd probably be just irrelevant right now.

The target is making them look older, because images created long time ago usually have less quality and resolution.

It is similar to antique furnitures being made to look old and crappy

As a regular Chinese citizen, freedom of speech is at the bottom of list of things I care about, and I would happily sell that for profit if it is sell-able.

I lived in US for quite some time and travel to US regularly. But seriously, I feel much less safe or comfortable when I am in US, and a lot of things Americans care so much about doesn't mean anything

'cause it has no reason to copy what US government would do

Can't agree more

They're indeed also very biased, just in the opposite direction. You just can't get unbiased views.

Well, when it comes to stories about China, you can rarely find English articles that are NOT extremely biased.

I also suspect someone from hackernews are manually promoting such content

Not surprising at all. I've been actively logging into Google and confirming my visits at various restaurants. I've been using it to track my past activities, and I hope it can provide more accurate restaurant recommendations for me. It has been quite useful. Video recommendations on Youtube are also way more accurate than any other service I've ever seen. If you don't mind sharing your personal data, you do get better service over time.

So, even though most people cannot understand some southern dialects when they hear it, they can fluently understand other dialects without explicitly learning to do so when it's written down. Even when you explicitly write down exactly what you say in the dialects (like the Cantonese version of Wikipedia pages), people can still understand it, without much difficulties. And yes, there're some words used differently from standard Chinese, but the difference is not much bigger than the difference between UK and US English.

For that reason, we define them as dialects not languages. We can "speak" other dialects but we can certainly "read" and understand them.

If you find that definition unsatisfying, sure you can call them different languages. We just call them dialects and that's not going to change.

Sure, I love the fact that I can speak many languages. Why not.

If you don't like the translation form 方言 to dialect, should I just call it fangyan or 方言? Or is there a more precise linguistic term for that?

Our definition for "Language" is also different then. Should we call it "Yuyan" instead?

It's funny to see how westerners talk about dialects in China. Western propaganda worked pretty well I guess :)

And yeah, most Chinese are bi-lingual by default. Now I know I can speak tons of northern Chinese languages. That's a big upgrade!

We all learn classical Chinese at school, and that must be a completely different language. Wait, are "classical Chinese" a single language? Should we count each of those spoken in different dynasty and different regions all as different language? Oh man, I can't even count how many languages I can speak

I speak a branch of Wu myself, and it's ABSOLUTELY not a different language from other dialects of Chinese. There are small parts (also commonly used) of the dialects that's dramatically different from Mandarin, but most parts are still the same. Especially if you need to speak about things in a more formal context, or describe concepts that are more abstract, the dialects has no difference with each other if written down

A few dialects are unintelligible indeed, and they're mostly spoken in southern parts of China. But most people can understand dialects spoken in central and east (north of Changjiang river) fairly easily even though they cannot speak those dialects.

This is off-topic, but since you strongly encourage using grids for layout. How do you deal with browser support issues? I found even IE11 is still very buggy in supporting CSS grid properly.

Plenty of comments on HN are posted by green accounts :) and I stand by all my comments

I believe you're right. What I am against is really just pushing China towards American style democracy right now, at this moment. As one of the reasons, the danger of "elect me and we'll take Taiwan back by force" right now is not hypothetical, based on what I know about other fellow Chinese, this is a very real possibility.

We also don't want anything like the deadlocks in American government for sure.

What you said is also true. The opinions of Chinese immigrants differs a lot based on when they immigrated out of China. Was it 70s, 80s, or 90s?

People immigrated out before 90s tends to be more pro-democracy. (At least from my impression)

I'd totally support that if it's working as designed. Having a level of indirectness is very different from having everyone vote for who becomes president.

NPC has thousands of members, and I'd expect them to be much more educated and rational than general public overall (again, if the system actually works). They could be elected for various reasons and do not need majority vote of the entire population to become a member of NPC. Their opinions would be a lot more diverse.

The way Chinese government is supposed to work, is actually another form of democracy: People elect representatives to become "National People's Congress", which is supposed to have highest power in China, and decides who the president is going to be. The reality is that NPC do not have real power and the voting process to elect representatives are very flawed.

However, if that actually work as designed, it's not entirely non-democratic, and it's a form I think would be a better fit for China at least in foreseeable future.

It'll take too much time to talk in details. Democracy in general in better than totalitarian in general, i don't disagree with that. However, establishing American democracy in China at this moment, most likely won't bring anything good or solve any problems China is facing now. And it's dangerous: If a presidential candidate say "Elect me and we'll take Taiwan back by force", the most likely outcome is that he'll get a shit ton of votes for that stance.

lol, it's not a long history anyway. I'm glad you read. I came to read tech news mostly and didn't feel the need to create an account to post comment until a few days ago

democracy, to begin with... at least American style of democracy

You'd be surprised how many people in China are seriously pro-amendment, and agrees that Xi should have a 3rd term or more.

Though it's probably also true that tons of people are shocked by the news

Not surprising at all. In fact, many of the Chinese expats (visitors of mitbbs.com) are pro-china in general. They become less agreeing to western values after spending years in US. (I am one of those examples myself)

I'm not denying China doesn't have problems. It has tons of problems in fact. Aggressive blocking is annoying. But let's take a break and see:

Do you think you have to be super careful if you are in China and not to call Xi "Steamed Bun"?

Do you seriously believe anyone in China would get blocked of loans because a credit system is in place that assigns low score to anyone talking ill of the government?

That's what western media wants you to think. The truth behind these stories are usually a lot more complicated, but it's not in the interest of the media to unravel all the truth.

In fact, tons of people calls Xi "Steamed Bun" in China, it's like his nickname, I also do that myself.

And yes, a government blacklist do exists in China. It's totally reasonable you'll at least be denied of applying for loans if you made your way to that list. I couldn't find the reason why those Xie is on that blacklist (the article certainly downplayed that part, at least), but the article also said "Hu said the central government has not assigned any social credit scores to its citizens yet, but eventually there will be a financial credit score".

Did you see what that mean? At least these cases in the report do not have much to do with credit system because it doesn't exist yet. How things would turned out eventually is a guess, at most.

I've lived in US for quite some time, and saw tons of shit show. Why do American news media split into "Left" and "Right"? If you read reports from both sides, you'll almost see two entirely different world. And yet most Americans do not do so, they chose one side and read only what they want to believe. Is either side lying? Maybe, but not necessarily. News reporters just need to selectively report the truth that can reinforce what they believe. Magnify problems of the other side, and downplay anything that they found hurtful. That's just human nature

lol, interesting read. I used to work on a graphics project with a state machine at its core, and user actions are defined to trigger state transitions

I've lived in China, Singapore, and US for a long time. And I have to say Singapore government is apparently the most reasonable one out of the three. It most likely also have highest approval rate.