Seriously. What did she think was going to happen?
She's lucky they were nice enough to wait out the rest of her visa instead of revoking it and deporting her on the spot. Shrewd move on their part for that, btw. If she was a citizen they would have just disappeared or killed her.
That's a bit much. It's unlikely that even if she was a citizen they would have disappeared or killed her. More like give her a firm warning and lecture and a vague threat or two of what may be to come if she keeps it up.
they don't kill for stuff like this anymore, more likely regular prison, but she is lucky to be foreigner, so they could just restrict her traveling rights to Xinjiang and wait until her visa run out
She's been there for 6 years. It doesn't sound like she or Buzzfeed is shocked, per se, but her recent story is far from her first investigative story critical of the Chinese government.
(full disclosure: I used to work with the reporter, but that was many years ago)
Actually, it's pretty surprising. Western journalists/academics have always been given a fair degree of latitude for reporting inside of China as long as they only wrote in English for foreign press.
There's been an active contingent of China Twitter loudly saying for the past few months that academics and journalists should be speaking out more about Xinjiang because the likelihood of visa revoking has been vastly overstated. Recent reporting seems to have touched a special nerve and the reactions are far more extreme than other negative China stories that journalists have weathered in the past.
China has changed their thinking, literally. Their constitution no longer has term limits for their leader and the constitution was altered with their leader's personal philosophy.
Xi Jinping, and thus China, no longer tolerates dissent. Go ahead, refer to Taiwan the wrong way even outside of China. You'll find a small army calling you out, much like any public criticism of Trump on twitter brings out a strange and chaotic assortment of random accounts that spout a variety of common talking points. If you're a company with a good bit of money in China, dissent is dangerous because China is getting quite skilled at using finance as a means for exerting global control. Not that this is shocking, the US did so for decades and still does so to a mighty degree, but it doesn't try to financially destroy you for criticizing the US.
One would think, but at the same time knowing the bureaucratic garbage that happens at tech companies (and I would think communist party HQ is a bit worse), I imagine their system is likely a giant mess and it probably took a number of months to get back about the visa.
Yes but it's also the primary source of a lot of government waste (the same type of waste the conservatives are against).
I think it makes sense to separate local, state, and federal governments, but there's surprisingly little government data sharing between even federal government agencies, even when there's jurisdiction overlap.
not that integrated, as matter of fact until last few years and maybe still even nowadays labor bureau database was not linked to Visa EEB database, so i could get work permit on invalid visa although they should be strictly linked
i guess they are quite thorough only when it comes down to dissent (though my wife in gov job hit immediately career ceiling after marrying me and everyone around her even newcomers kept growing except her, sure just coincidence /s and we both can't still really publicly say what we want because she has there parents and rest of family)
It's not that hard. When you apply for a visa you must state if you're a journalist or not. After that, a quick Google should suffice, especially if the articles written by her became popular.
I remember in the mid-2000s that online-journalists whose sites had millions of impressions per month were denied journalism visas because they weren’t traditional established print newspapers - then there was a debate about the difference between a blogger and a journalist.
I’d like to know if a non-journalist who maintained a very popular blog, such as an influential software engineer, who occasionally blogs about political or topical stories, constitutes a journalist or not. If they’re in the country for an industry conference but write about political events on their blog while they’re in the country have they violated their visa?
That's a very valid question and from their documents, it looks like they define journalist as someone who does it professionally as a career:
"The term "resident foreign journalists" means career journalists who are dispatched by foreign media organizations to be stationed in China for a period of not less than six months for news coverage and reporting."
> I’d like to know if a non-journalist who maintained a very popular blog, such as an influential software engineer, who occasionally blogs about political or topical stories, constitutes a journalist or not.
A good question. Consider also that a blogger, lacking an influential institution such as Buzzfeed or the NYT at their back, may find themselves in much deeper trouble than a denied visa. Arrest, prison, espionage charges, etc. have happened to foreigners, including televised confessions:
It's a high-tech surveillance state presiding over 1.5 billion people with a history of crushing (quite literally, sadly) or 'disappearing' any signs of dissent.
Anecdotally: I once partnered with a Chinese cultural institute for a big event and ended up having my Gmail hacked as part of the compensation. They gotta know you're not a Tibetan separatist after all!
Any idea how they hacked your Gmail account? MITM/intercepting your password? How did you find out? Did Google inform you some IP in a bizarre location signed in?
Other replies seem to suggest that China is amazingly good at filtering out dissidents in their visa application process...
Actually it’s just that if you want to be a foreign journalist and live in China, you need to apply for a special Journalist visa. The process of application for those is much more difficult than other types of visa.
Which makes it very easy to select which media to approve.
An indirect reminder that now that YC China is a thing @sama and @paulg and any other affiliated will have to avoid saying anything negative about China in order to keep doing business there.
If YC China succeeds and becomes big there, it'll inevitably draw Chinese attention back to YC US including news.ycombinator.com. I would expect they'll have to begin blocking sensitive discussions on HN in the near future. The wave of one hand is all it takes to destroy YC China, because of one upsetting thread on HN getting back to authorities in China.
If they plan to stay in bed with China and all that entails, it might not be a bad idea to formally separate HN off from YC (for the sake of YC and the sake of HN). The Chinese authorities are extremely sensitive about certain things, easily insulted, and unforgiving about the lack of compliance. They've barred far larger targets for far less than the discussions that go on here.
If that time comes it will be interesting to see how the owners of ycombinator react. China's anger has made many high profile companies fold at the earliest signs of tension. Remember the guy who got fired from the hotel chain because he was logged in to the hotel social media account and simply like a pro-Taiwan post? Within days China had put pressure on the hotel to get rid of him. Remember when the clothing company put out a shirt that showed a map of the world and had Taiwan as its own country? Chinese pressure made them completely pull that piece of clothing and redesign it to remove Taiwan.
God forbid they allow Chinese moderators on HN or some type of Chinese-centric oversight
They should issue public statements condemn China's terrible rights violations now and promise they won't retract them. Establish integrity and refuse to give it up in the name of Chinese money.
Tell that to the people decrying tariffs and saying we can never bring back American manufacturing.
The only reason for the state of things is that we've tolerated both utilizing industrial era labor standards and outsourcing all of our manufacturing.
If China is forced to bring its labor standards to 1st world levels, there is no reason why we can't both purchase goods from them at a better rate, while improving our buying power by revitalizing dead industries within our nation.
We can't keep buying dirt cheap goods from the east while also complaining about our economic woes. If we could get people to understand that moving to this quasi slave labor is the reason we are now having to depend on it maybe we could break this feedback loop.
But as things are now, we are in a catch 22. We dont have a strong economy because we have outsourced our manufacturing, and now can only afford to keep relying on that labor.
China is going to have to deal with actually developing their economy. They have become an economic superpower by essentially being allowed to cheat the system. It is now negatively impacting global economies and their business model is utterly unsustainable.
We are seeing things improve with their labor standards due to public outcry, and now we are starting to rebuild by reintroducing stateside manufacturing and tariffs.
We shouldn't need to rely on China for anything other than rare earth minerals and luxury goods that can't be produced in the west.
Is there an example of a western brand that has yet gained significant traction in China? My understanding is that unless you are a Chinese company, your chances of competing in this “number one” market are slim. Businesses obsess at the population numbers but ignore the reality.
The trick isn't whether these brands can access China, it's in what manner. Western brands sell very well in China, who gets the proceeds is the issue.
The big European luxury goods brands are doing a wild business in China. [1][2][3][4]
If you want to make a lot of money on China as a foreigner, you want to be selling a luxury brand product rather than offering a local service (eg fast food chain). That might be an iPhone or a Gucci bag or a Mercedes. Owning certain intellectual property, such as characters, can be equally lucrative (eg Marvel and Mickey Mouse). Nike and Jordan Brand have done a great business in China.
KFC in China for example, isn't controlled by Yum Brands US. It's controlled by Yum China, minority owned by Yum US. McDonald's has a small sliver of its own business in China.
Disney only owns 43% of its big new $5.5b park in Shanghai, the most popular park in China. Wang Jianlin had touted that he'd personally chase Disney from China, and that his parks would dominate instead. Disney really had no choice but to acquiesce and partner up. They'll make a lot of money from it and they had to cede control to do that.
Tesla is building a factory in China for the same reason everyone else has, there is no great alternative. You have to give local Chinese partners their big cut, or else.
Disney's partner is the Shanghai government, not Wang. And the partnership was many years in the making. Wang only made his boast after the park openned, to draw attention to his own properties.
KFC and McD owned Chinese franchises for decades before spinning them out for financial reasons.
I never said Disney's partner was Wang. I said that Wang said he was going to chase Disney from China with his own parks.
Yum and MCD were forced into partnering locally and giving up total ownership of those businesses.
If you're a German company you can freely set up a US version of your business and own it outright. Nintendo doesn't have to give up eg 70% of its stake in Nintendo of America. That's not the case if you're MCD trying to operate in China.
You said "Wang Jianlin had touted that he'd personally chase Disney from China, and that his parks would dominate instead. Disney really had no choice but to acquiesce and partner up." I pointed out that the partnership with Shanghai predated Wang's boast by many years. If you didn't mean to imply some kind of causal relationship between the two you may want to clarify.
The entire comment, like so many others, is just pure nonsense. This is not about understanding the reality it's about validating a narrative and so you get completely made up "facts" like Disney being forced to partner up when nothing of the sort has actually happened.
That's highly unlikely given the current state, as US consumer is is about 1/3 of the world's household consumption https://www.selectusa.gov/largest-market, and is growing 3% this quarter. China has alot of debt problems, and will suffer heavily in a trade war. About 45% of Chinese GDP is in 'investment', where probably half is waste (continued state investments into expensive-to-maintain, rarely used rails, bridge, and buildings). Whereas for a developed country like US, it's about 20% investment (70% in consumption).
Population wise, US is augmented by steady immigration and will increase to 400 million in 2040, 500 million in 2100. China hit its peak in birthing in 1970s, and has been experiencing a steady decline since, projected to hit max 1.4 billion people in 2030 and then go to around 1 billion or below in 2100. US average income is still 7 times the Chinese average income.
IMO, China's hit its peak already in 2008 and is in decline, whereas US has recovered from 2008 and is rising
> China has alot of debt problems, and will suffer heavily in a trade war. About 45% of Chinese GDP is in 'investment', where probably half is waste (continued state investments into expensive-to-maintain, rarely used rails, bridge, and buildings). Whereas for a developed country like US, it's about 20% investment (70% in consumption).
This seems like almost the reverse of the conclusion you're trying to support. Investments in development and infrastructure are a good mechanism for long-term economic growth, and it's not clear that a trade war will hurt China worse than it hurts the US.
> Investments in development and infrastructure are a good mechanism for long-term economic growth
That's true up to a point where the infrastructure is facilitating economic movements and transactions. China has already gone past that point to where they are building infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure, not considering whether those rails and buildings will produce enough income to support maintenance in the next 5-10 years. There is such a thing as diminishing rate of returns (otherwise every economy would just keep building infrastructures forever) Currently, for every yuan Chinese government directly spends, it now only gets 1 yuan of return back, and it is declining.
As for the trade war, I think it is pretty evident who is winning, I won't go too much details into it; you can google every data around the aftermath of the tariffs.
> Investments in development and infrastructure are a good mechanism for long-term economic growth
That of course depends on the infrastructure situation in question. Japan vaporized trillions of dollars on infrastructure and it did absolutely nothing of consequence to boost their growth. Infrastructure wasn't their problem as it turned out, so each follow-on dollar they plowed into additional unnecessary infrastructure spending produced declining rates of return. China is guilty of plenty of that so far.
The US is the least trade dependent major economy. It would benefit from shifting some imports to increased domestic production, such as in the steel and aluminum industries. It's better to pay slightly higher prices if necessary and to produce domestic investment with quality blue collar jobs. That's not a universal of course, there's little benefit to the US trying to manufacture $20 toasters or $3 playing decks of cards or $1 shoe laces by hand.
It's ideal for the US to consume less and produce more. European nations boost savings rates with very high VAT taxes. Tariffs are another means to accomplish the exact same end, except it's even better because it bolsters domestic production at the same time that it reduces consumption by raising the cost of consumption.
So not only is there an extreme lobsided imbalance between the benefit in US / China trade due to the trade deficit there, the US would benefit from fewer goods pouring in from China in all scenarios because of the gains in domestic manufacturing (even if they're modest) + domestic investment, and lowered consumption. Less capital flows overseas, more stays home.
There's always the scenario that comes up of: what if China cuts off something that isn't easily replaced such as smart phone manufacturing, or similar. Other countries can easily pick up the slack, such as Vietnam which is a booming electronics manufacturer (and makes a lot of smart phones now).
On the flip side, China can't operate at all without US tech. They'd have to turn to stealing it. The rest of the world would largely proceed to banish those then-illegal Chinese products accordingly (particularly Europe, Latin America, Japan, AU/NZ, Mexico, Canada, etc).
We only "need" China because we are accepting 3rd world level labor, and we have allowed our own industries to die in favor of outsourcing.
If China is forced to adhere to 1st world labor standards, they lose all power over the US. There are few things produced in China that cannot be produced here.
The state of things is caused by a feedback loop. China needs the west to purchase its goods. Break that dependence, and China will have no choice but to play ball and end its parasitic relationship with the West.
American manufacturing used to be booming. Look at the 50s and 60s. Quality of life and buying power for factory workers was massive, and people bought American goods.
We have basically allowed ourselves to be dependent on China by accepting their horrendous labor standards and allowing our industries to die. There is no reason we cannot reverse course and reinvest in our nation.
If the us institutes tariffs and boycotts Chinese goods, they are fucked and will have to adapt.
China has undeserved economic power and is causing an imbalance within the global economy.
Can we all just get off our high horse? We literally have concentration camps at our borders and have bombed hundreds of civilians. We don't get to claim the moral high ground.
Not everyone is from US, miss. Most people from other countries sees a concentration camp for what it is, a concentration camp. Some have parents or relatives that lived (or died) through those camps.
And I wouldn't dare compare US's detention center for illegal immigrants with the camp for millions of people detained without violating any laws. For instance, most countries have detention centers for illegal immigrants.
I understand that not everyone is an American but YC is an American company, hence the hypocrisy of only calling out YC China when the U.S. is also complacent about human right violations, which is the point I was trying to make.
The difference is that YC in America is not afraid or hesitant to call out things that are inherently wrong in the US. They both write and fund companies and non-profits that address those issues. With YC China, the best YC can realistically do is fund and self censor.
I'm Taiwanese, and I would have second and third thought about applying to YC, given the relationship Sam wants to have with Chinese government.
I would imagine that muslims, people from Hong Kong and Tibet, Japan, Vietnam, people that would prefer democracies over authoritarian governments, libertarians, techies that treasure freedom on the net, would hesitate and would not apply to YC for moral reasons.
Why is this even a news on HN ? All governments including USA denies visa to foreigners for political reasons. I remember USA denying visa to an Indian chief minister in past because of lobbying by evangelists and Islamist.
It might come as a surprise by American journalists are not entitled for a visa from China and I wish more countries would crackdown on click-bate rags like Buzzfeed.
> I remember USA denying visa to an Indian chief minister in past because of lobbying by evangelists and Islamist.
This is whataboutism. You might be suprised to learn that I can and do oppose both.
> click-bate rags like Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed's business model is to use the stupid memes and "Which Disney princess are you?" polls to subsidize serious investigative journalism and not have to keep it behind a paywall. You can agree or disagree with this choice, but it's an interesting alternative to requiring a subscription and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. The article in question, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/the-police-stat..., is not "clickbait" in any sense: it is well-researched, well-written, and informative.
Irrelevant. Let us assume Buzzfeed is a paragon of journalistic virtue. Still does not mean the journalist deserves a Chinese visa. It is a privilege and not a right. Pretty much how a US visa is a privilege and not a right.
Americans outraging that their journalist was denied is nothing but very imperialistic attitude.
Foreign journalists based in China write critical stories about China on a regular basis. It's a bit bizarre to me why you're calling Buzzfeed a "click-bate [sic]" rag when we're talking about a journalist who had just published an investigative story about the Chinese police state involving Uyghurs.
I can understand calling Buzzfeed clickbait; "XX Best ways to N: number 6 will blow your mind" used to be their bread and butter. Even now, the #2 story on their website is "29 things that'll genuinely make people say 'OMG I love your outfit'".
It took me a long time after their move towards occasionally funding "real" journalism before I was willing to even click a link to their URL.
Not excusing YC because I don't care about them, but Jesus, stop trying to apply the standards of the liberal west to all the world.
Say what you will but they're finding a solution to the Muslim problem, something the west doesn't have the balls to do (and by the time we come up with something it'll be too late)
Something like this has probably been said at least once about every group of immigrants in the history of the United States. As far as I know the only time it ever became true was when white people displaced the Indians.
I'm not pleading for exceptions to human rights, I'm saying human rights is a concept that has to be abandoned because they are nothing more than a tool from the west to impose their will all around the world. That's why they are selectively applied: nobody bats an eye about Israel or Saudi Arabia or China[1], but Syria couldn't defend themselves, so bombs away.
[1] China are not friends of the US, that's why they are criticised by the "media", but nobody has the balls to bomb the place, and I'm the sure the US would love to!
Lots of people bat many eyes as well as organize against and boycott goods from those places. Saying that human rights are 'nothing more than a tool from the west to impose their will' is wrong on its face. Sure they can be used an excuse for intervention, but human rights have been a goal starting within the west itself (e.g. the struggle for racial equality in the US).
eahman07 has a point. Whether or not you truly believe China abuses fundamental human rights more than any other group, the reality is that the usage by the West has historically been a political tool used for political warfare. It tends to lose its credibility and legitimacy with the kettle calling the teapot black if the accusation gets thrown around liberally.
A much better way than mindless reactionism is to look at the complex situation unfolding there rather than to use the traditional leftist tactic of "calling every Trump supporter a racist". It seems like China is just taking a heavy-hand at trying to fight potential extremism and terrorism. Whether it's right or not is up for discussion, but pretending like it's a one-sided thing is just more political warfare.
You're absolutely right. The concept of human rights has been, is, and likely will be used as a smokescreen to disguise dishonest and greedy grabs for power.
All of this is true. All of this is real. All of this is tragic and painful and extracts a price in human suffering.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% right. In every possible way, with no exceptions whatsoever. There is much work to be done, and abuses make it harder than it needs to be. These abuses can, should, and must stop.
Yet, it's perhaps possible that none of these abuses should be understood as invalidating the very notion of basic human rights.
No, no, no. Terrorism is a problem, but a very small minority of Muslims are terrorists. If I lived in China, I would be at least as violent. Concentration camps are terrible. I've spoken with people who lived in them. Don't ever support them or call them a "solution" to the "problem" of an ethnicity, religion, or culture. That's what the nazis did.
Not refuting your comment at all, but I just want to point out one thing. If even 1% of a population is bad, 1% of a billion is 10 million. 0.1% is still a million. That's an awful lot of bad people.
Sure, but if you're talking about bad people in general (i.e. violent criminals), immigrants as a group commit far fewer violent crimes than the rest of the population. There are an awful lot of bad white, Christian people too.
This getting downvoted is why HN can be a complete wreck sometimes. My statement has 0 political or religious inclusion, it's simply stating numbers. Sometimes people hate to see the truth.
No, you're getting downvotes from me at least for 'if even 1% of people are terrorists' - great, citation needed. I have zero evidence that 1% of any population are terrorists. This is the stupid Don Jr. 'what if a bowl of skittles had some poisoned skittles would you still eat skittles' line. Without data on percentage of terrorists in the general population it's meaningless. Further, abusive, hardline policies tend to generate more discontent and ill will within a group leading to yet more terrorists. You take a marginal family (one that's not radical but in a region with radicals) and your oppressing power kills off half that family or sends them to the camps because 'terrorism in the area, 1% whatever' I'd imagine you've just radicalized half the city.
You're getting downvotes specifically because you have simplified a complex issue down to a root that doesn't line up with our decades of experience with terrorism in the middle east using numbers you made up.
I wonder how many pro-China green accounts, accounts used solely for anti-US sentiment, etc we will see commenting on this story. It seems the propaganda folks are turning more attention to HN.
There were 3 at the time of this posting with the usual bothersiderisms, etc. One even went full "Sharia law in the US!"
It's nice that the green name is there for easy screening, but eventually, that goes away. HN is still small enough that this kind of spam is easy to detect, but it may not always be that way. Botting/this type of spam on reddit has gotten increasingly sophisticated over the years, and some of the things the people implementing that stuff have learned there would work pretty well on HN too.
The green name goes away but if you aren't very active, you will then get automatically shadowbanned. I had a second account which I used to disclose specific things about the company I worked at but when I tried to reuse it after a while, all my posts went immediately to dead.
Please don't break the site guidelines by insinuating astroturfing or shillage without evidence. Someone having an opposing view to yours is not evidence. Neither is an account being new.
I wasn't insinuating, I was stating. These types of troll/propaganda/astroturf accounts are obvious on the left/right or pro/anti-US side of things on Twitter/reddit and are similarly obvious here. You banned the specific account I mentioned for trolling.
I was unaware that discussing astroturfing, trolling, and propaganda on HN was prohibited. Apologies, I will refrain from calling attention to it in the future.
I know it looks and feels super obvious, but I assure you this is an illusion. On the internet, people are orders of magnitude too quick to leap from "random user with obviously wrong opinion" to "obvious bot/astroturfer/paid shill". It's a crazy bias. We look into this stuff all the time, and 99% of the time it's just that some people disagree with you. More than 99% actually.
Even when we ban an account for trolling, that's almost always someone whose sincere passions about a topic led them to violate the guidelines and not stop when we asked them to stop. That's not astroturfing. People are just very passionate about divisive issues.
I found an interesting paragraph in the article [1] from Buzzfeed:
"But critics say [positive gestures from China towards Uighur] are overshadowed by the government’s more repressive measures, which have fueled the propaganda of a small number of extremists, including the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a radical Uighur militant group, some of whose adherents are believed to have been active in Syria and Afghanistan. According to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, TIP released an issue of its online magazine on Aug. 29, calling for its fighters in Syria to prepare for future battle against the Chinese state in East Turkestan, a name many Uighurs use to refer to Xinjiang.".
The last sentence there struck me as unusual given what that implies: [2]
"The medieval Persian toponym "Turkestan" and its derivatives were not used by the local population of the greater region, and China had its own name for an overlapping area since the Han Dynasty as Xiyu, with the parts controlled by China termed Xinjiang from the 18th century onward. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr, which means "six cities" in Uyghur.
Starting in the 20th century, Uyghur separatists and their supporters used East Turkestan (or "Uyghurstan") as an appellation for the whole of Xinjiang, or for a future independent state in present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (presumably with Ürümqi as its capital). They reject the name of Xinjiang because of an allegedly Chinese perspective reflected in the name and prefer East Turkestan to emphasize connection to other westerly Turkic groups. However, even in nationalist writing, East Turkestan retained its older, more narrow geographical meaning. In China, the term has negative connotations because of its origins in European colonialism and present use by militant groups."
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 226 ms ] threadShe's lucky they were nice enough to wait out the rest of her visa instead of revoking it and deporting her on the spot. Shrewd move on their part for that, btw. If she was a citizen they would have just disappeared or killed her.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/29/the-disappeared-china-r...
https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/22/why-are-people-disappear...
https://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-deals-with-dissent...
http://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2014/11/28/chinese-dissidents...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/china-still-gathering-orga...
(full disclosure: I used to work with the reporter, but that was many years ago)
There's been an active contingent of China Twitter loudly saying for the past few months that academics and journalists should be speaking out more about Xinjiang because the likelihood of visa revoking has been vastly overstated. Recent reporting seems to have touched a special nerve and the reactions are far more extreme than other negative China stories that journalists have weathered in the past.
Xi Jinping, and thus China, no longer tolerates dissent. Go ahead, refer to Taiwan the wrong way even outside of China. You'll find a small army calling you out, much like any public criticism of Trump on twitter brings out a strange and chaotic assortment of random accounts that spout a variety of common talking points. If you're a company with a good bit of money in China, dissent is dangerous because China is getting quite skilled at using finance as a means for exerting global control. Not that this is shocking, the US did so for decades and still does so to a mighty degree, but it doesn't try to financially destroy you for criticizing the US.
for each applicant do select count(*) from people_who_pissed_us where social_username = applicant.fb.username?
(1) search for the applicant on google/baidu
(2) if the searches reveal support or sympathy for dissident or seditious activity, deny the visa application.
I think it makes sense to separate local, state, and federal governments, but there's surprisingly little government data sharing between even federal government agencies, even when there's jurisdiction overlap.
i guess they are quite thorough only when it comes down to dissent (though my wife in gov job hit immediately career ceiling after marrying me and everyone around her even newcomers kept growing except her, sure just coincidence /s and we both can't still really publicly say what we want because she has there parents and rest of family)
After switching of The Great Firewall for ones own browser, that pesky thing blocks useful information.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/07/world/asia/china-internet...
I remember in the mid-2000s that online-journalists whose sites had millions of impressions per month were denied journalism visas because they weren’t traditional established print newspapers - then there was a debate about the difference between a blogger and a journalist.
I’d like to know if a non-journalist who maintained a very popular blog, such as an influential software engineer, who occasionally blogs about political or topical stories, constitutes a journalist or not. If they’re in the country for an industry conference but write about political events on their blog while they’re in the country have they violated their visa?
"The term "resident foreign journalists" means career journalists who are dispatched by foreign media organizations to be stationed in China for a period of not less than six months for news coverage and reporting."
http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/ywzn/mtyw/press_1/t944225.h...
A good question. Consider also that a blogger, lacking an influential institution such as Buzzfeed or the NYT at their back, may find themselves in much deeper trouble than a denied visa. Arrest, prison, espionage charges, etc. have happened to foreigners, including televised confessions:
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/22/world/asia/china-confessi...
It's a high-tech surveillance state presiding over 1.5 billion people with a history of crushing (quite literally, sadly) or 'disappearing' any signs of dissent.
Anecdotally: I once partnered with a Chinese cultural institute for a big event and ended up having my Gmail hacked as part of the compensation. They gotta know you're not a Tibetan separatist after all!
Any idea how they hacked your Gmail account? MITM/intercepting your password? How did you find out? Did Google inform you some IP in a bizarre location signed in?
Yep, a warning similar to this one, but in Gmail: https://news-cdn.softpedia.com/images/news2/Google-Extends-S...
Actually it’s just that if you want to be a foreign journalist and live in China, you need to apply for a special Journalist visa. The process of application for those is much more difficult than other types of visa.
Which makes it very easy to select which media to approve.
If they plan to stay in bed with China and all that entails, it might not be a bad idea to formally separate HN off from YC (for the sake of YC and the sake of HN). The Chinese authorities are extremely sensitive about certain things, easily insulted, and unforgiving about the lack of compliance. They've barred far larger targets for far less than the discussions that go on here.
God forbid they allow Chinese moderators on HN or some type of Chinese-centric oversight
>They've barred far larger targets for far less than the discussions that go on here.
Can you give any example of China successfully censoring any large media companies outside of their own territory?
The only reason for the state of things is that we've tolerated both utilizing industrial era labor standards and outsourcing all of our manufacturing.
If China is forced to bring its labor standards to 1st world levels, there is no reason why we can't both purchase goods from them at a better rate, while improving our buying power by revitalizing dead industries within our nation.
We can't keep buying dirt cheap goods from the east while also complaining about our economic woes. If we could get people to understand that moving to this quasi slave labor is the reason we are now having to depend on it maybe we could break this feedback loop.
But as things are now, we are in a catch 22. We dont have a strong economy because we have outsourced our manufacturing, and now can only afford to keep relying on that labor.
China is going to have to deal with actually developing their economy. They have become an economic superpower by essentially being allowed to cheat the system. It is now negatively impacting global economies and their business model is utterly unsustainable.
We are seeing things improve with their labor standards due to public outcry, and now we are starting to rebuild by reintroducing stateside manufacturing and tariffs.
We shouldn't need to rely on China for anything other than rare earth minerals and luxury goods that can't be produced in the west.
Certainly a scary future.
Is there an example of a western brand that has yet gained significant traction in China? My understanding is that unless you are a Chinese company, your chances of competing in this “number one” market are slim. Businesses obsess at the population numbers but ignore the reality.
https://www.google.com/search?q=buick+china+popularity&oq=bu...
The big European luxury goods brands are doing a wild business in China. [1][2][3][4]
If you want to make a lot of money on China as a foreigner, you want to be selling a luxury brand product rather than offering a local service (eg fast food chain). That might be an iPhone or a Gucci bag or a Mercedes. Owning certain intellectual property, such as characters, can be equally lucrative (eg Marvel and Mickey Mouse). Nike and Jordan Brand have done a great business in China.
KFC in China for example, isn't controlled by Yum Brands US. It's controlled by Yum China, minority owned by Yum US. McDonald's has a small sliver of its own business in China.
Disney only owns 43% of its big new $5.5b park in Shanghai, the most popular park in China. Wang Jianlin had touted that he'd personally chase Disney from China, and that his parks would dominate instead. Disney really had no choice but to acquiesce and partner up. They'll make a lot of money from it and they had to cede control to do that.
Tesla is building a factory in China for the same reason everyone else has, there is no great alternative. You have to give local Chinese partners their big cut, or else.
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-26/l-oreal-g...
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-20/hermes-ex...
[3] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-24/lvmh-shin...
[4] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-28/luxury-ba...
KFC and McD owned Chinese franchises for decades before spinning them out for financial reasons.
Yum and MCD were forced into partnering locally and giving up total ownership of those businesses.
If you're a German company you can freely set up a US version of your business and own it outright. Nintendo doesn't have to give up eg 70% of its stake in Nintendo of America. That's not the case if you're MCD trying to operate in China.
You said "Wang Jianlin had touted that he'd personally chase Disney from China, and that his parks would dominate instead. Disney really had no choice but to acquiesce and partner up." I pointed out that the partnership with Shanghai predated Wang's boast by many years. If you didn't mean to imply some kind of causal relationship between the two you may want to clarify.
https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
https://www.uschina.org/about/member-companies
That's highly unlikely given the current state, as US consumer is is about 1/3 of the world's household consumption https://www.selectusa.gov/largest-market, and is growing 3% this quarter. China has alot of debt problems, and will suffer heavily in a trade war. About 45% of Chinese GDP is in 'investment', where probably half is waste (continued state investments into expensive-to-maintain, rarely used rails, bridge, and buildings). Whereas for a developed country like US, it's about 20% investment (70% in consumption).
Population wise, US is augmented by steady immigration and will increase to 400 million in 2040, 500 million in 2100. China hit its peak in birthing in 1970s, and has been experiencing a steady decline since, projected to hit max 1.4 billion people in 2030 and then go to around 1 billion or below in 2100. US average income is still 7 times the Chinese average income.
IMO, China's hit its peak already in 2008 and is in decline, whereas US has recovered from 2008 and is rising
This seems like almost the reverse of the conclusion you're trying to support. Investments in development and infrastructure are a good mechanism for long-term economic growth, and it's not clear that a trade war will hurt China worse than it hurts the US.
That's true up to a point where the infrastructure is facilitating economic movements and transactions. China has already gone past that point to where they are building infrastructure for the sake of building infrastructure, not considering whether those rails and buildings will produce enough income to support maintenance in the next 5-10 years. There is such a thing as diminishing rate of returns (otherwise every economy would just keep building infrastructures forever) Currently, for every yuan Chinese government directly spends, it now only gets 1 yuan of return back, and it is declining.
As for the trade war, I think it is pretty evident who is winning, I won't go too much details into it; you can google every data around the aftermath of the tariffs.
That of course depends on the infrastructure situation in question. Japan vaporized trillions of dollars on infrastructure and it did absolutely nothing of consequence to boost their growth. Infrastructure wasn't their problem as it turned out, so each follow-on dollar they plowed into additional unnecessary infrastructure spending produced declining rates of return. China is guilty of plenty of that so far.
The US is the least trade dependent major economy. It would benefit from shifting some imports to increased domestic production, such as in the steel and aluminum industries. It's better to pay slightly higher prices if necessary and to produce domestic investment with quality blue collar jobs. That's not a universal of course, there's little benefit to the US trying to manufacture $20 toasters or $3 playing decks of cards or $1 shoe laces by hand.
It's ideal for the US to consume less and produce more. European nations boost savings rates with very high VAT taxes. Tariffs are another means to accomplish the exact same end, except it's even better because it bolsters domestic production at the same time that it reduces consumption by raising the cost of consumption.
So not only is there an extreme lobsided imbalance between the benefit in US / China trade due to the trade deficit there, the US would benefit from fewer goods pouring in from China in all scenarios because of the gains in domestic manufacturing (even if they're modest) + domestic investment, and lowered consumption. Less capital flows overseas, more stays home.
There's always the scenario that comes up of: what if China cuts off something that isn't easily replaced such as smart phone manufacturing, or similar. Other countries can easily pick up the slack, such as Vietnam which is a booming electronics manufacturer (and makes a lot of smart phones now).
On the flip side, China can't operate at all without US tech. They'd have to turn to stealing it. The rest of the world would largely proceed to banish those then-illegal Chinese products accordingly (particularly Europe, Latin America, Japan, AU/NZ, Mexico, Canada, etc).
If China is forced to adhere to 1st world labor standards, they lose all power over the US. There are few things produced in China that cannot be produced here.
The state of things is caused by a feedback loop. China needs the west to purchase its goods. Break that dependence, and China will have no choice but to play ball and end its parasitic relationship with the West.
American manufacturing used to be booming. Look at the 50s and 60s. Quality of life and buying power for factory workers was massive, and people bought American goods.
We have basically allowed ourselves to be dependent on China by accepting their horrendous labor standards and allowing our industries to die. There is no reason we cannot reverse course and reinvest in our nation.
If the us institutes tariffs and boycotts Chinese goods, they are fucked and will have to adapt.
China has undeserved economic power and is causing an imbalance within the global economy.
Can we all just get off our high horse? We literally have concentration camps at our borders and have bombed hundreds of civilians. We don't get to claim the moral high ground.
And I wouldn't dare compare US's detention center for illegal immigrants with the camp for millions of people detained without violating any laws. For instance, most countries have detention centers for illegal immigrants.
I would imagine that muslims, people from Hong Kong and Tibet, Japan, Vietnam, people that would prefer democracies over authoritarian governments, libertarians, techies that treasure freedom on the net, would hesitate and would not apply to YC for moral reasons.
It might come as a surprise by American journalists are not entitled for a visa from China and I wish more countries would crackdown on click-bate rags like Buzzfeed.
This is whataboutism. You might be suprised to learn that I can and do oppose both.
> click-bate rags like Buzzfeed.
Buzzfeed's business model is to use the stupid memes and "Which Disney princess are you?" polls to subsidize serious investigative journalism and not have to keep it behind a paywall. You can agree or disagree with this choice, but it's an interesting alternative to requiring a subscription and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. The article in question, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/the-police-stat..., is not "clickbait" in any sense: it is well-researched, well-written, and informative.
Americans outraging that their journalist was denied is nothing but very imperialistic attitude.
It took me a long time after their move towards occasionally funding "real" journalism before I was willing to even click a link to their URL.
So what ? They are not entitled to a Chinese visa.
Say what you will but they're finding a solution to the Muslim problem, something the west doesn't have the balls to do (and by the time we come up with something it'll be too late)
What will it be “too late” for?
2. Progressives embrace them
3. Muslims slowly acquire voting majority in specific regions
4. Muslims start implementing Sharia Law (aka religious law) in the US due to the number of voters and democratic voting principles of the US.
5. Progressives will complain about their slow loss of rights, but can't do anything about it.
6. The US becomes an Islam-controlled territory.
That's the problem.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We've banned this account. Would you please not create accounts to break HN's rules with?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
No. Please stop pleading for exceptions to basic human rights.
[1] China are not friends of the US, that's why they are criticised by the "media", but nobody has the balls to bomb the place, and I'm the sure the US would love to!
A much better way than mindless reactionism is to look at the complex situation unfolding there rather than to use the traditional leftist tactic of "calling every Trump supporter a racist". It seems like China is just taking a heavy-hand at trying to fight potential extremism and terrorism. Whether it's right or not is up for discussion, but pretending like it's a one-sided thing is just more political warfare.
All of this is true. All of this is real. All of this is tragic and painful and extracts a price in human suffering.
You're absolutely, completely, 100% right. In every possible way, with no exceptions whatsoever. There is much work to be done, and abuses make it harder than it needs to be. These abuses can, should, and must stop.
Yet, it's perhaps possible that none of these abuses should be understood as invalidating the very notion of basic human rights.
You're getting downvotes specifically because you have simplified a complex issue down to a root that doesn't line up with our decades of experience with terrorism in the middle east using numbers you made up.
This isn't a YouTube comment section.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17820928 and marked it off-topic.
There were 3 at the time of this posting with the usual bothersiderisms, etc. One even went full "Sharia law in the US!"
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I was unaware that discussing astroturfing, trolling, and propaganda on HN was prohibited. Apologies, I will refrain from calling attention to it in the future.
I know it looks and feels super obvious, but I assure you this is an illusion. On the internet, people are orders of magnitude too quick to leap from "random user with obviously wrong opinion" to "obvious bot/astroturfer/paid shill". It's a crazy bias. We look into this stuff all the time, and 99% of the time it's just that some people disagree with you. More than 99% actually.
Even when we ban an account for trolling, that's almost always someone whose sincere passions about a topic led them to violate the guidelines and not stop when we asked them to stop. That's not astroturfing. People are just very passionate about divisive issues.
"But critics say [positive gestures from China towards Uighur] are overshadowed by the government’s more repressive measures, which have fueled the propaganda of a small number of extremists, including the Turkestan Islamic Party (TIP), a radical Uighur militant group, some of whose adherents are believed to have been active in Syria and Afghanistan. According to a translation by the Middle East Media Research Institute, TIP released an issue of its online magazine on Aug. 29, calling for its fighters in Syria to prepare for future battle against the Chinese state in East Turkestan, a name many Uighurs use to refer to Xinjiang.".
The last sentence there struck me as unusual given what that implies: [2]
"The medieval Persian toponym "Turkestan" and its derivatives were not used by the local population of the greater region, and China had its own name for an overlapping area since the Han Dynasty as Xiyu, with the parts controlled by China termed Xinjiang from the 18th century onward. The historical Uyghur name for the Tarim Basin is Altishahr, which means "six cities" in Uyghur.
Starting in the 20th century, Uyghur separatists and their supporters used East Turkestan (or "Uyghurstan") as an appellation for the whole of Xinjiang, or for a future independent state in present-day Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region (presumably with Ürümqi as its capital). They reject the name of Xinjiang because of an allegedly Chinese perspective reflected in the name and prefer East Turkestan to emphasize connection to other westerly Turkic groups. However, even in nationalist writing, East Turkestan retained its older, more narrow geographical meaning. In China, the term has negative connotations because of its origins in European colonialism and present use by militant groups."
[1] - https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/meghara/the-police-stat...
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Turkestan
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
This is “shocking”