Inkstone editor of the piece here. I just wanted to add that his essay touched on much more than just China's removal of presidential term limits. He also called for the abolition of special privileges for Communist Party officials, disclosure of Chinese leader's assets and a repudiation of the official verdict on the 1989 Tiananmen protests (the Communist Party considered it "counter-revolutionary" in legitimizing its military crackdown.) Writing about each one of these is enough to land you in trouble.
See what happened to Leica:
Leica censored on Chinese social media over Tank Man video
>But online, Xu himself has been virtually erased.
>Searches for his name return no result on the Twitter-like Weibo. Any mention of him in the past year has been scrubbed from Baidu, a popular search engine.
The speed that they can digitally make someone's name unusable is pretty scary.
As far as I understand, censorship like this is primarily done by "incentivizing" internet platforms to patrol their own content. Some of this is done by algorithm, but a lot is done by human moderators who are very low on the command chain but have to exercise personal judgement on what to ban and what not to ban.
Many harmless words have already been banned in various platforms due to mis-classification errors, and if underground activism picks up pace, maybe it'll eventually crack the rather crude censorship method at scale.
> In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem. In the past year, the number of Internet addresses in China has more than quadrupled from 2 million to 9 million. This year, the number is expected to grow to over 20 million. When China joins the WTO, by 2005, it will eliminate tariffs on information technology products, making the tools of communication even cheaper, better, and more widely available. We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China.
> Now, there's no question China has been trying to crackdown on the Internet. Good luck! [Laughter] That's sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall. [Laughter] But I would argue to you that their effort to do that just proves how real these changes are and how much they threaten the status quo. It's not an argument for slowing down the effort to bring China into the world; it's an argument for accelerating that effort. In the knowledge economy, economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.
Looks like China has mastered nailing jello to the wall.
Anyone have a copy of the text of the article? The page itself doesn't include the article and only shows empty gray bars to tease the reader. I'm unable to get the javascript to execute and fill it in no matter what browser I use.
Thanks. That did it once I disabled CSS to clear their page blocking div. Here's a copy of the article text that doesn't require even that for anyone that is having trouble like I did: https://write.as/uiejj79fq4vxv.md
You realize I'm an editor of Inkstone, right? I've been sharing stuff I think would interest people here and on other sites. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.
Euh, Xi is probably more educated than a lot of Western leaders. Considering the books on his shelve about machine learning/A.I. and his actions ( I do not condone/like them, but I don't underestimate him).
At least he's not spending halve of the day watching Fox and being mad on Twitter.
Edit: OP claimed things about Xi not being educated. Changed his comment without appropriate edit text...
yes to be honest I should not post the original post, I still need go there for business trips, it's likely they can track me down and deny my visa if they want to, you don't know how powerful and bad they could be, it's lawless there when it comes to individuals. it's a shame, period.
Western countries have in fact denied visas to foreigners who publicly hold "inappropriate" views. Visiting a foreign country is considered a privilege not a right, so it's not something where there's much if any concern about supposed "rights".
Well, Xi stated explicitly that he demands absolute loyalty, being barred from leaving China is hardly news nowadays, but this certainly is a statement and warning made prior to the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests, in which universities palyed a seminal role.
A family in my small hometown had their 2 university sons vanished forever after that crackdown.
This is alarming. I think these kind of one-off things can feel somewhat boring or unimportant if it were some very underdeveloped tiny country with a small population.
But we're talking about a country with 1.5B people and a very sophisticated technology sector, a powerful military and a modern economy starting to act like a dictatorship.
Starting ? China has always been a dictatorship. Now it's also a technologically driven one. Although you could say that materialistic ideologies have always been acutely aware of technical means. See Curzio Malaparte's Technique
Of Revolution .
China is a huge problem, and we will have to deal with it at some point. She is seriously trying to become a world power equal to that of America or Russia, which is very dangerous and cannot be allowed to happen. She is toxic to liberty.
I'm currently reading the Three Body Problem by the Chinese Science Fiction writer Liu Cixin.
It starts right in the middle of the cultural revolution and does not paint the party in a positive light. It'd be interesting to know why this wasn't censored.
I heard something about China being excellent at manufacturing, but having trouble with creating new industries and President Xi noticed that in the west those creating new industries often liked and were inspired by Scifi.
I wonder if this gives Chinese science fiction authors a free pass? It'd be interesting to hear the perspective from someone who knows more about the culture.
The beginning of the book touches explicitly on the removal of professors that disagree with the party.
The Cultural Revolution is a special one, in which the party itself is the "bigger" victim, so it's kinda okay to criticize it "the right way", many movies and dramas have been made about it.
Cultural revolution was a political maneuver by Mao to suppress his competitors, he won that battle, but not the war. People he sidelined came back in power after he passed away, the biggest one being Deng Xiaoping.
Coz it was orchestrated by Mao mainly to persecute Liu Shaoqi and his kind by the hands of the people, Liu was of important position in the party and soured his relationship with Mao over the Great Chinese Famine.
The prolonged struggle affected a lot of high officials, including the Xi family, the Gang of Four was eventually deemed the culprit by those who survived, and "rectification" ensued .
Historically, speaking the party rehabilitated (I think that is the term) the reputation of a number of important leadership figures who the cultural revolution had pushed out for a time. It would seem that the mistakes of the cultural revolution are to some extent recognized / an acceptable topic.
Deng Xiaoping was a notable figure who was pushed out during the cultural revolution and then returned to lead the party. It was such a common thing that there were committees setup to address the cultural revolution and were receptive to petitions made by those who were pushed out.
China is setting a dangerous precedent for humanity as a whole.
Not caring about what's happening in China is not caring about humanity at all.
Whats different from the attrocities committed by organised terror like ISIS when compared to the atrocities committed by Chinese government towards Tibetians, Muslims, Prisoners etc. ?
For all the boasting about Privacy, Humanity by Apple it gives away data to Chinese govt for someone to rot in their prison or worse death. So is the state of all other companies doing business with China.
Now that it's a super power, it's been flexing its power outside its borders. It aided in the genocide of Tamil population in Srilanka during final Elam war just to get to India at south. It has a military base in Myanmar & we all know what happened there.
This is the thing I worry about, technology is making it easier to speak up against the power but its also making much easier to quash any rebellion before it gathers steam. Autocratic empires like china are using technology quite efficiently to do this. God only helps us if an AGI or near AGI gets into the hand of a regime like this before anybody else.
I've NEVER seen a post make it to the top of HN front page and then drop so quickly. It's almost like there is a bot network that detected keywords that may be negative towards the Chinese government and downvoted on masse to bury the story
If the data is open, it would be very interesting to see who and how this is being downvoted.
I've anecdotally noticed the same thing, but I have also noticed moderators asking users to refrain from conspiracy comments like this.
I guess we have to trust that the administrators of this site, with full access to account and posting data, would notice if a concerted network of accounts was flagging certain submissions. I'd hope that their findings would be discussed publicly, but until then I don't think there's anything you or I can do to prove that this effect isn't due simply to many HN users disliking China politics stories.
I've met quite a few of the YC team before and I know they don't have a person with this sort of speciality. There is a reason the top fraud detection analysts get paid so much on ecommerce companies - you have to be good at data science, behavioral analytics, and know enough tech to be able to spot this sort of patterns.
I wish YC would have something similar to FOI, where people can publicly request for specific anonymized data. This way, we can a clearer idea of how various actors interact with a forum... in this case HN.
If I could get anonymized data, I'd
1) filter first for all posts with keyword "China" that have made it any given point to the HN front page over last 3 months
2) Categorize articles as "positive towards", "negative towards", and "neutral" in content and tone
3) view upvote/flag rate before reaching the front page vs post exposure on the front page.
4) Compare across the 3. If people simply don't like China articles, then the pattern should be uniform. If it's not the same pattern, then you have drill down to specifically where the downvotes are coming from and when they start.
5) Since you can only flag but not downvote stories, is there an automated surge of upvotes for all surrounding posts excluding the targeted "negative" post?
There's a lot to look at, but based on my anecdotal experience, over the last few months, negative Chinese articles are simply flagged/downvoted rapidly which contrasts to just a months earlier where there were robust discussions on each article. Real people predictably comment/interact consistently over time- that's proven. The fact that counter-posts to China-negative posts have largely disappeared suggests a large degree of coordination in the first place. Almost like rather than trying to win the argument online, the default is now to bury all negativity in the first place by promoting everything else on HN rapidly.
If this is the case, there should be patterns of suspicious accounts. Key questions to ask: how did these accounts that downvoted get to the 400? karma threshold to vote. Was it a bot net where they upvote each others random posts? Or is it a manual process like the paid online trolls where accounts are created and provide interactions to reach the threshold, and then kept on ice storage until needed to downvote/flag?
Just looking at the metadata and interaction patterns will give you a clear idea if this is typical post interaction behavior, or something more sinister.
Something made the story drop nearly 30 places instantaneously. What exactly that was is unknown, but what we do know is that there exists some mechanism to move articles to a lower slot than their relative submission times and upvotes would normally place them.
i've spent nearly a decade in and around china (including some time at peking university which is down the road from tsinghua), for anyone trying to make sense of the contradictions that are china, i'd recommended picking up chan koonchung's (陈冠中) excellent novel the fat years (盛世 - 中国2013年).
although the way the novel wraps-up is a bit outlandish and disappointing... overall its does an excellent job of translating all the fascinating, bizarre, and creepy headlines we're constantly bombarded with these days into a plausible portrait of modern china (at least for me).
It's interesting we are not getting any Xi loyalists posting here. Not even any trolls who try to divert the discussion with whataboutism. Maybe they have finally realized they are not going to be able to persuade the world that Xi is great, or at least not any worse than anyone else.
57 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] threadThey are also scrubbing his name from the news and social media. Disappearing him is a very possible next step.
Edit:
dang I know you've said that vote/flag manipulation wasn't happening in the past when you've looked through the data.
But could you provide some insight on why this dropped from #1 to #26 in under a minute?
See what happened to Leica:
Leica censored on Chinese social media over Tank Man video
https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/leica-camera-censored-...
And what happened to three activists who put derivative images of the "Tank Man" on liquor bottles to pay tribute to the nameless protester:
They put the Tank Man on booze bottles, and got punished
https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/activists-who-put-tank...
Here's a link to a great translation of the Tsinghua professor's article. Imminent Fears, Immediate Hopes — A Beijing Jeremiad
http://chinaheritage.net/journal/imminent-fears-immediate-ho...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
>Searches for his name return no result on the Twitter-like Weibo. Any mention of him in the past year has been scrubbed from Baidu, a popular search engine.
The speed that they can digitally make someone's name unusable is pretty scary.
And this is just for being publicly critical.
China: "We can and will make you forgotten."
Many harmless words have already been banned in various platforms due to mis-classification errors, and if underground activism picks up pace, maybe it'll eventually crack the rather crude censorship method at scale.
> In the new century, liberty will spread by cell phone and cable modem. In the past year, the number of Internet addresses in China has more than quadrupled from 2 million to 9 million. This year, the number is expected to grow to over 20 million. When China joins the WTO, by 2005, it will eliminate tariffs on information technology products, making the tools of communication even cheaper, better, and more widely available. We know how much the Internet has changed America, and we are already an open society. Imagine how much it could change China.
> Now, there's no question China has been trying to crackdown on the Internet. Good luck! [Laughter] That's sort of like trying to nail Jello to the wall. [Laughter] But I would argue to you that their effort to do that just proves how real these changes are and how much they threaten the status quo. It's not an argument for slowing down the effort to bring China into the world; it's an argument for accelerating that effort. In the knowledge economy, economic innovation and political empowerment, whether anyone likes it or not, will inevitably go hand in hand.
Looks like China has mastered nailing jello to the wall.
Full transcript of his speech at Johns Hopkins: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/WCPD-2000-03-13/html/WCP...
You set me straight then and are proving it again that somehow, non-censored news is possible there.
I wish you the best of luck, I don't know if I would have as much balls as you guys.
I can't seem to find a rss feed somewhere ( on mobile...)? Is that possible?
Ps. Sorry for the previous comment a while ago.
PS2. Using cloudflare. Looks legit to hide the servers IP. ( Had to check the infrastructure used :p )
https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alanwong
https://www.reddit.com/user/alanwong
You realize I'm an editor of Inkstone, right? I've been sharing stuff I think would interest people here and on other sites. I hope you find it as interesting as I do.
At least he's not spending halve of the day watching Fox and being mad on Twitter.
Edit: OP claimed things about Xi not being educated. Changed his comment without appropriate edit text...
[EDIT:] I think there are ninja-edits here?
A family in my small hometown had their 2 university sons vanished forever after that crackdown.
Leica recently had an ad on it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWgLOSm1rQA
But we're talking about a country with 1.5B people and a very sophisticated technology sector, a powerful military and a modern economy starting to act like a dictatorship.
A surge of down votes from bots or state actors? No idea, but it was very fast and that rings alarm bells.
It starts right in the middle of the cultural revolution and does not paint the party in a positive light. It'd be interesting to know why this wasn't censored.
I heard something about China being excellent at manufacturing, but having trouble with creating new industries and President Xi noticed that in the west those creating new industries often liked and were inspired by Scifi.
I wonder if this gives Chinese science fiction authors a free pass? It'd be interesting to hear the perspective from someone who knows more about the culture.
The beginning of the book touches explicitly on the removal of professors that disagree with the party.
The prolonged struggle affected a lot of high officials, including the Xi family, the Gang of Four was eventually deemed the culprit by those who survived, and "rectification" ensued .
Deng Xiaoping was a notable figure who was pushed out during the cultural revolution and then returned to lead the party. It was such a common thing that there were committees setup to address the cultural revolution and were receptive to petitions made by those who were pushed out.
Not caring about what's happening in China is not caring about humanity at all.
Whats different from the attrocities committed by organised terror like ISIS when compared to the atrocities committed by Chinese government towards Tibetians, Muslims, Prisoners etc. ?
For all the boasting about Privacy, Humanity by Apple it gives away data to Chinese govt for someone to rot in their prison or worse death. So is the state of all other companies doing business with China.
Now that it's a super power, it's been flexing its power outside its borders. It aided in the genocide of Tamil population in Srilanka during final Elam war just to get to India at south. It has a military base in Myanmar & we all know what happened there.
Edit:Typo
If the data is open, it would be very interesting to see who and how this is being downvoted.
I guess we have to trust that the administrators of this site, with full access to account and posting data, would notice if a concerted network of accounts was flagging certain submissions. I'd hope that their findings would be discussed publicly, but until then I don't think there's anything you or I can do to prove that this effect isn't due simply to many HN users disliking China politics stories.
I wish YC would have something similar to FOI, where people can publicly request for specific anonymized data. This way, we can a clearer idea of how various actors interact with a forum... in this case HN.
If I could get anonymized data, I'd 1) filter first for all posts with keyword "China" that have made it any given point to the HN front page over last 3 months 2) Categorize articles as "positive towards", "negative towards", and "neutral" in content and tone 3) view upvote/flag rate before reaching the front page vs post exposure on the front page. 4) Compare across the 3. If people simply don't like China articles, then the pattern should be uniform. If it's not the same pattern, then you have drill down to specifically where the downvotes are coming from and when they start. 5) Since you can only flag but not downvote stories, is there an automated surge of upvotes for all surrounding posts excluding the targeted "negative" post?
There's a lot to look at, but based on my anecdotal experience, over the last few months, negative Chinese articles are simply flagged/downvoted rapidly which contrasts to just a months earlier where there were robust discussions on each article. Real people predictably comment/interact consistently over time- that's proven. The fact that counter-posts to China-negative posts have largely disappeared suggests a large degree of coordination in the first place. Almost like rather than trying to win the argument online, the default is now to bury all negativity in the first place by promoting everything else on HN rapidly.
If this is the case, there should be patterns of suspicious accounts. Key questions to ask: how did these accounts that downvoted get to the 400? karma threshold to vote. Was it a bot net where they upvote each others random posts? Or is it a manual process like the paid online trolls where accounts are created and provide interactions to reach the threshold, and then kept on ice storage until needed to downvote/flag?
Just looking at the metadata and interaction patterns will give you a clear idea if this is typical post interaction behavior, or something more sinister.
although the way the novel wraps-up is a bit outlandish and disappointing... overall its does an excellent job of translating all the fascinating, bizarre, and creepy headlines we're constantly bombarded with these days into a plausible portrait of modern china (at least for me).