The warning at the top of this article did not prepare me for the images, so I'll offer an additional one: the images are more disturbing than you think. Consider turning images off to read the content.
I think it's a good thing to include these images, we've become too used to content moderation that we're desensitized to a lot of the atrocities that are still happening daily around the world.
The images are worse than that. A picture taken at a distance of someone being shot in the head is easier to see or scroll by than a closeup of a head blown in half.
The photo of the woman whose head was blown in half by the rifle is many years (decades?) old. It’s profoundly disturbing, but it’s been widely available for a long time.
That doesn’t make it any less brutal or disturbing, but it serves as a reminder of how often we are willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities when it’s economically or politically expedient.
I see where you’re coming from, but perhaps something like “close-ups of mutilated bodies after execution by large-calibre weapons to the head” would give more of an indication. I didn’t expect the gore, just a wide shot of someone with a gun to their head, a bit like the famous one of the add-hoc execution in the street in Vietnam by Eddie Adams.
Quite frankly, I suggest the opposite. Most people in the west, and especially in the US, don't appreciate just how evil the CCP is. Our corporate media has given the CCP a free pass on mass murder because many of our wealthiest people have made their fortunes through trade with China. We should all look long and hard at these images so that we don't forget them.
It is fun to see criticisms of China get insta-downvoted to hell. Mine is fully referenced and went to -1 instantly... there is definitely some real denial about what the CCP actually do.
I honestly wonder whether it's that or just standard HNers who are in some sort of woke-led state of denial.
A totalitarian genocidal regime who has demonstrably lied consistently about everything of any importance but if you question whether, perhaps, they might have possibly done a little more about wet markets/traditional Chinese medicine given the 2003 SARS outbreak which clearly indicated this major risk area - and you get hammered for it.
Go further and suggest maybe covering up the outbreak to give the virus enough time to spread everywhere was maybe not a great thing and the next virus might have a higher case fatality rate than 0.4% and that's it you're done.
This is without even getting into the 'walked out of a lab' theory which would presumably get me banned off HN...
It seems criticising the US, UK etc. for the slightest thing is fine but criticising totalitarian genocidal sabre-rattling pandemic-unleashing states is beyond the pale.
On a meta note, I wanted to respond to your top-level comment to point out (playing devil’s advocate) that there are countries like Japan with conviction rates well exceeding 99% (but for different reasons).
I suspect that minor gotchas like this are capable of having the opposite effect: neutral people who care about nuance will feel like you are slightly adapting facts to suit anti-CCP narrative. Compounded by the fact that there is little verifiable information due to heavy censorship, this makes any argument on the topic quite challenging.
After your top-level comment got downvoted I didn’t feel comfortable expressing my opinion: some might think I downvoted you and/or others will mistake me for an astroturfer. Personally, I’ve upvoted it and I agree on general sentiment.
That's a good point to make, however it appears that the conviction rate in Japan comes down more to plea bargaining and only the most blatant cases being allowed to proceed forward [0].
I agree that kind of thing can erode the argument so thank you for pointing it out, I wasn't actually aware of that fact re: Japan and probably I'd put less emphasis on that knowing that there can be other alternative explanations.
I don't agree that it's a struggle to criticise the CCP more generally however as while they lock down as much information as they can, plenty leaks out (as always with totalitarian regimes) and there is overwhelming evidence including video, testimony, etc. as to treatment of Uighurs and Falon Gong. I intentionally added references to my original post as to avoid such criticism... for all the good it did me!
And please feel free to express yourself, I have upvoted you also :)
I do find the sensitivity on that phrasing hilarious given the absolute hysteria around US/UK politics and some of the phrasing used there. I won't make specific examples to avoid partisanship but it is just mind boggling.
would "gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" work better for you? [0]
"gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary"
So the Chinese government is acting like any other government?
err, no? This kind of (typically self-loathing) moral equivalence really bothers me. It's so entitled to think that govts leading countries like the UK and US which are nice to live in and have so many incredible freedoms and benefits which so many seem entitled and utterly unappreciative of.
China are literally harvesting organs, disappearing political dissidents and covered up the outbreak of a pandemic (to say the least you could about that), and their govt is responsible for 10's of millions of deaths of their own people.
Some nebulous Chomsky-ish nonsense doesn't rank against that, sorry.
Is that the cause of the riots in the US? Nice living and freedom?
Or are you comparing apples and oranges and ignore the true costs?
How is the living for the lower classes? They get exploited, imprisoned, killed.
Not for the communist party but for the market. Same same but different. And that are only their own people.
What happens to other nations is worse.
Strange enough that the victims of the US war on drugs and war on terror aren't attributed to the US government although they are the consequences of government actions and lies.
The Shah in Iran, the killing of Kurds by Saddam, the lies about WMD in Iraq, the hundreds of thousands killed in the Iraq wars, Guantanamo, the emergence of ISIS, etc. And that's only the middle east.
Is that cognitive dissonance or ignorance?
You probably enjoy the benefits of the "free world", that puts you in the top 10%, as it does me. I bet the top 10% of China are satisfied with the government too.
Do you have as much sympathy for the Muslims in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Libya, etc as you do for the Uyghrs in China? Or are they just terrorists or savages for you? Do you even know any of the names of the corresponding ethnic groups in these countries, or are they uninteresting because they are just collateral damage of the good guys?
And don't start with whataboutism, the West has the longer history in this respect.
> It seems criticising the US, UK etc. for the slightest thing is fine but criticising totalitarian genocidal sabre-rattling pandemic-unleashing states is beyond the pale
Yeah, because you are not calling for "criticism" but state level character assassination which is rather different
Just again the suggestion of conspiracy theories can be a topic of discussion if you want, but I don't believe you are interested on discussing specifics which is rather sad to me
It's a conspiracy theory that wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors? And that re-opening the markets and putting absolutely no controls whatsoever on them for 17 years after the SARS 1 outbreak is significantly increasing the chances of a pandemic?
And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab (since the SARS virus did multiple times before [0]) by accident? Though there is some real debate about that so I'm not blindly advocating that theory, only saying it's not entirely implausible.
I mean I'd love to hear your arguments as to the contrary, since you accuse me of 'state level character assassination' by... providing a large number of references to incredibly evil behaviour by the CCP? Please feel free to rebut any 'specific' which you accuse me of refusing to discuss?
I am making specific criticisms none of which I see you have chosen to rebut or discuss rather you are instead trying to smear me. Am happy to hear your actual arguments...
> wet markets and traditional Chinese medicine (in which raw animal parts are mixed together etc.) are huge pandemic vectors?
Ofc, that's why they were reformed, current meat and grocery markets commonly found are nothing like the markets of SARS
And yeah, huge reforms took place on Chinese Healthcare policy[0] alongside South Korean and Vietnamese Healthcare policy, which is why all three countries have been doing so well, they learned all the lessons from SARS which were ignored in the West
Overall sad to see that you are clearly not engaging in good faith, as these discussions are very important :/
> And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab by accident?
And no, once again you show the conspiracy angle, no, it is not the case because the virus has been genetically analyzed all over the world now and not datasets have been produced which could show manipulation, let alone the fact that patient Zero was found a while ago[1], but of course I am sadly not expecting you to actually accept it, as I am sure you will pivot to another branch of the broader "China == Evil" conspiracy-adjacent beliefs :/
You have repeatedly misrepresented me, spread misinformation and defended a state that organ harvests political prisoners and runs concentration camps.
You're either a troll, very naive, a patriot to the point of delusion or in the employ of the CCP. Think for yourself and think about what you're defending.
This sort of flamewar comment is not allowed on HN, regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are. Please stop posting before things get to this stage. No matter how important the issues are or how strongly you feel, you need to stay within the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. You broke them badly and repeatedly in this thread. That is not cool.
Please keep flamewar swipes like "once again you show the conspiracy angle" and "I am not expecting you to" and "I am sure you will" and so on out of your comments here. As this thread shows, the topic is extremely activating to people. Everyone needs to take responsibility for staying within the zone of curiosity and respect. As a bonus, doing that makes your posts much more likely to be heard. Perhaps you won't persuade the person you're arguing with, but there are thousands of other readers.
Please do not take HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar, regardless of how wrong others are or you feel they are, or how badly they are behaving.
I understand very well that there is extra pressure on a minority/contrarian view that feels embattled, but it doesn't make it ok to break the rules. When you break them it dissuades people from giving you a hearing anyhow, so individual interest and community interest are the same.
There do seem to be a lot of CCP apologists when the evident facts that they commonly lie to their people, strictly control emigration, and go as far as killing dissenters, should make it very clear that this is not a regime you want to live under.
The problem with the line of thinking that China deliberately engineered/created/released sars-cov-2 is that there's zero motivation for it. What could they possibly gain from it? What's the strategic value of it?
The argument is that they were profoundly negligent.
As for the lab side of things, the argument is that it was an accidental release (as happened multiple times with SARS 1).
My point is whether or not it walked out of the lab (by ACCIDENT) given they knew in 2003 that certain things were major risks, they should have come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fact they re-opened wet markets and took no further steps to tackle that makes them responsible through negligence.
The combination of facts is (I’m also giving some references to your points):
1) China is known to have contributed[0] to bat coronavirus research, my speculation is that Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab exists primarily for this reason.
2) There were documented lab escapes of original SARS-CoV from labs in Beijing[1] in 2004, as I recall resulting in at least one death.
3) WHO’s study starts this month, but they don’t seem to mention lab escape (not of some “engineered virus”, just straight up a natural sample escaping on a person) as a possibility[2]. I am not sure if they are playing politics or this is their sincere outlook.
I can’t stress this enough: China may have been unlucky to be struck by the original SARS-CoV, so it’s reasonable that they had the motivation to study its origins; that research is valuable and it’d be absolutely bonkers to criticize scientists for having done it. Even if lab escape did indeed happen to be the cause of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I am not sure this should be a basis for prosecution of a particular country (as opposed to e.g. tightening of BSL security practices): there’s human factor, and mistakes happen; if it hadn’t been China it could’ve eventually been another country.
What I find alarming is if an effort to obstruct the study of pandemic origins in order to save face (?) is taking place. If it was a lab escape, humanity’s future could be much safer if we knew how it happened—but how would researchers know it was a lab escape if they can’t look in that direction?
yeah I'm not unreasonable about the pandemic situation, and of course it's feasible it occurred through no fault of their own in the first place, however it is clear that they were WELL aware after SARS1 that wet markets/traditional Chinese medicine/etc. were major pandemic vectors and re-opened e.g. wet markets very quickly after both SARS and SARS2-CoV. This is actually insane (as in mentally unwell) levels of arrogance and negligence.
Secondly they covered up the outbreak. Had it been reported a few weeks earlier apparently up to 95% of deaths could have been prevented. That is really insane.
The lab side of it is interesting and it seems just so much of a coincidence that the lab was right next to the oubreak, of all the places in all of the huge country of China.
I don't doubt they were motivated to study bat coronaviruses, of course they were and there was in fact very big competition with the US.
The problem is China is such a corrupt country where health + safety + following protocols is something of a joke, as with most communist/totalitarian systems people always try to get away with as much as they can that I have zero trust in their BS4 lab being properly constructed and procedures followed correctly.
They also covered up the discovery of a very similar virus some years ago (they actively anonymised records around it after covid19 emerged) in a bat cave (no pun intended) which already appeared to have bat-human transmission.
It is something like 96% similar to covid19 though some scientists say it isn't feasible that it evolved into covid19 except in nature. However I wonder whether some form of natural evolution of the virus was experimented on or encouraged in the lab or whether this assumption is in fact correct.
So the lab thing is definitely up for debate, however the general attitude from much of the media and certainly China is to dismiss it as a crackpot theory. Absolutely don't think it is.
Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.
Keeping in mind the next virus might not be a 0.4% case fatality rate that mostly kills the very old, it's deeply frightening.
The fact that the BSL4 lab had a grant for "characterization of SARSr-CoV spillover risk" using "in vivo infection experiments" at around the time of the breakout is also a bit of a coincidence.
> Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.
I agree completely.
The reason I - and others - commented, is that your initial comments made it sound like you believed it was 100% on purpose, that it was some weird plan of the CCP to gain power, somehow.
Whether it's deliberate is besides the point - they clearly lied about it, misled the WHO, and let their people transmit the disease worldwide for months before starting to share what they knew.
I fail to see the value of this, China is not Sweden, I am not sure why you hold them to the same standards, that seems strange to me
But anyhow, I just wanted to add that the CIA and the US state department was aware of a new Pneumonia surging on China back in November and sped to warn NATO and Israel of it[0], after all, no one ever needed to actually listen to what the Chinese government says, that's what intelligence agencies are for
> I fail to see the value of this, China is not Sweden, I am not sure why you hold them to the same standards, that seems strange to me
Did a CCP shill/wumao just admit that the CCP should not be held to the same standards as other members of the International Community and is perplexed that even during a pandemic the refusal to disclose this information is
'strange' when trying to contain the pandemic that has ravaged the World and that ultimately the biggest source of confusion is from outsiders trying to grasp why that is?
If so, you just summed up why the CCP has been successful at indoctrinating a billion people and subjugating them with such ease; when this type of brainwashing being this effective one has to realize we are fighting a losing battle by engaging in discourse as some may never be able to question their reality even as countless deaths occur World wide due to the corruption, coverups and deadly negligence and belligerence from the CCP.
The truth is I think you may be doing this as a source of income and you really don't believe what you wrote, at least I really hope so, which makes me even sadder than if you did believe it as it shows just toxic so many people's existence is when it relies on the acceptance and dependence of totalitarian regimes is.
Edit: Keep down voting, I don't care about your fake internet points, unlike your social credit point system I gain nothing from the number associated to my handle and is irrelevant to my existence. But it proves you have no real points to make that aren't already obvious with these practices and further prove the criticisms more than any illogical rebuttal could.
Good grief. You can't violate the HN guidelines like this—neither nationalistic flamewar nor personal attack is allowed on HN, and you combined them. This thread is full of people breaking the guidelines that but your post may be the worst I've seen. Doing this will get you banned here.
> The problem with the line of thinking that China deliberately engineered/created/released sars-cov-2 is that there's zero motivation for it. What could they possibly gain from it? What's the strategic value of it?
I want preface that I agree that as of right now there isn't enough evidence to determine that the CCP deliberately released the virus. But they certainly gained a lot in the process and capitalized in every possible way and tried to cover their corruption and continued to dissapear physicians, journalists and anyone who tried to expose their incompetence and maleficence in regards to COVID. None of the death numbers or cases align with the population size and exposure rates and they can get away with it because 'It's China.'
Hong Kong and the yellow movement was created during massive protests in 2014 that escalated again in 2019 with the advent of the extradition bill, these protests were a complete throne in the side of the CCP as it put into question China's real power in the region. Hong Kong was in complete disrepute by the Summer and had violent protest that led to deaths on the streets until the outbreak of the pandemic in late December. While the CCP boarded up Wuhan citizens it didn't stop the outflow of mainlanders to HK despite public outcry from HK medical professionals who recalled the SARS pandemic that killed so many in Hk as result of CCP negligence and continued to overwhelm the hospitals and mainlanders got exemptions from mandatory quarantine measures put in place to reduce to the contagion of COVID, so the infection numbers kept up: but why is this important?
Because HK then went into lockdown and essentially stopped all protests in an attempt to stop the virus spreading, these protests were giving the Western powers the ability to expose the CCP's heavy handed retaliation and violence in its illegal annexation led by a clearly corrupt regime with Lam in place allowing that would lead to the the police to become paramilitary jack booted thugs and beat, jail and murder anyone that disagreed with it, as seen in the article above. The HK police force that committed those crimes had been exposed to have uniquely mainlander/Mandarin accents and traits as opposed to the Cantonese that is spoken exclusively spoken in HK. So it seems the PLA had been introduced as the local police force in HK, essentially leadin to a justified occupation of HK by the CCP.
This then allowed them to pass the National Security Law, suspend elections, remove all protections and civil liberties as the CCP sees fit and purge and put political dissidents in jail and essentially annex HK prematurely which was in direct violation of the treaty agreed upon by the UK that protected the 2 systems one country mandate that would be protected until a complete hand over would be completed in 2047--which would technically violate the process and may be actionable/trilable to return HK to British control. But none of that matters now as the rest of the World is reeling from the wide spread damage of financial crisis, lockdowns and mass unemployment due to the pandemic and in the case if the UK Brexit trade deals.
The CCP just issued an international manhunt for political protestors and activists who fled HK, even though many Western countries (where they reside) have since removed their extradition treaty with China, which means, or at least suggests, that the CCP is willing to use extra judicial means to capture or kill these people in countries they have no jurisdiction in, which in incredibly dangerous precedent as seen with US internationalism that only leads to more violence and death.
What this also did was consolidate the key Western leaning and affluent forward facing financial hub between the West and China (Hong Kong), in an attempt to allow places like Schenzen to act as the new hub which is in direct control of the CCP as China flexed its muscles as the indispensable gear in international supply chains of the World. If you dared to ques...
> But they certainly gained a lot in the process and capitalized in every possible way
What did they gain? How did they capitalize?
> and tried to cover their corruption and continued to dissapear physicians, journalists and anyone who tried to expose their incompetence and maleficence in regards to COVID.
100% agree here. But that they're desperately trying to cover it up, regardless of origin, doesn't mean they gained anything from it.
> I can go on, but this should at least give you some context to your frankly very ignorant position on the matter.
Did you confuse me with some other poster? Nothing in that wall of text has got anything to do with my position, or this specific argument, and you still didn't address my actual question.
That they violated international Law and got to illegally occupy and then annex a major financial Hub, isn't that alone enough? I mean I go into detail about how it all took place.
They then got to quell dissenters and hunted them down in order to re-affirm Pooh's (Xi) stance as the tough man of the CCP. 3 high profile activists have been jailed for nothing more than being involved in a protest, a previously Civil Right in HK, 10 of 12 Hongkoners were captured for non-crimes and sent to be tried on the mainland, essentially bypassing the need for the extradition bill that got rejected due to the protests as was intended, but worked anyway due to the perverse nature of the National Security Law.
I'm not sure what more to say to the rest of your response, and I'm wondering if you even bothered to read any of it; are you not familiar with amount of money that flows through Hong Kong's Capital Markets at all? The value of the real estate in the most expensive place on Earth?
Also, I properly used paragraphs: so it's hardly a wall of text. Lengthy perhaps, but not a wall of text as its properly structured.
> I mean I go into detail about how it all took place.
No, you haven't given any reason whatsoever how the coronavirus allowed China to do all these things. How, specifically, did the intentional or unintentional release of the virus aid the CCP strategically?
What did the virus allow them to gain that they would otherwise be unable to do?
This sort of nationalistic flamewar boilerplate is not welcome on HN, regardless of which country you have a problem with. This is not conversation, it's blaring through a megaphone, and it's not what this site is for. Internet battle rhetoric is off topic on Hacker News, because regardless of what the underlying topic is, it makes curious conversation impossible.
No, we're not communist agents or secret sympathizers; we're simply trying to moderate an internet forum that doesn't suck. Posts like this one destroy that like salt on a slug, so please fight your battles elsewhere. Edit: Sorry, I realize it probably sounds like I'm picking on you personally and I don't mean to at all—this kind of thing is unfortunately common, and it's a big deal.
Personal attacks and name-calling are also not ok ("your frankly very ignorant"), so please don't do those either.
There's loads of Chinese and Chinese-ancestry developers on here, some non-trivial proportion harbor nationalistic sentiment towards China and auto downvote anything critical of the CCP. I've worked with over 10 mainland Chinese devs who had emigrated out of China, and even though they're wonderful people and very talented (half of them PhDs from places like Tsingua or a college outside of China), they by and large were incredibly nationalistic and won't hear a single bad word about Mao etc.
Yeah in China the education system is hugely geared up to indoctrinate. I studied at university with many Chinese people, know people who have lived there and of course have read a lot about it. It is no surprise!
I've worked with several Chinese engineers, who are quietly critical of the CCP. Since they still have family in China they know better than to be openly critical of China.
I am mainlander Chinese diaspora and this is such a reductionist portrait of the variety of opinions held by emigrants from China about the CCP, which can differ dramatically depending on when you emigrated, what age you are, what part of the country you are from, whether you are religious, your own specific family history, and who is currently in power in China.
There is also quite a bit of dissonance and public vs. private attitudes that you have to sort through. The mainstream and tolerated view in mainland china is that the cultural revolution was a huge mistake - there are way too many families that were fucked up by it - but Mao was still a great guy.
This is some of what I've seen, each entry being from a distinct person:
- One dev has a twitter account that's a nonstop stream of pro CCP ("Tiananmen is Western propaganda") and anti HK propaganda. I found it because it's named the same as his stackoverflow page which is a very unique identifier with the same uppercasing on specific letters.
- Another doesn't believe there were famines under Mao (we were discussing the Wiki page on it) and calls it propaganda. This was from a Uighur emigrant.
- Another agrees fully with the CCP ocean territory claims in the SEA that take basically all the oceans to the west of Philippines etc.
- Another thinks China can't be a democracy because the logistics of over a billion voting are too hard
- Another left HK early on because of disdain towards the democracy protests (long before attacks on mainland businesses)
I'm sure you're right that there's heterogeneity there (that almost goes without saying and is true of any group of people) and a public vs private distinction but that doesn't contradict what I've said.
> I honestly wonder whether it's ... just standard HNers who are in some sort of woke-led state of denial.
I don't think there's any evidence for that. Every woke tech person I know would rather quit their job than do work that benefits the CCP. I think that's why all the biggest tech companies have tiptoed up to that point (e.g. project dragonfly) but haven't been able to cross it.
There is no evidence that the people downvoting the comments you disagree with are communist agents. The evidence is entirely that the community is simply divided on divisive topics, like this one. That's what's going on here, and it's destructive to post these inflated accusations to the contrary—it's poison, in fact. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to do it.
Calling for shock-porn rather than rationality and discourse is exactly the kind of things that receive downvotes on HN, not sure why you act so surprised
> see criticisms of China get insta-downvoted to hell.
Let's dissociate the country from the political apparatus. What's evil is the CCP, not China in itself - it's not like the citizens can vote the current regime out.
I really get extremely tired of this kind of thing. Obviously I mean the CCP when I say 'China'. Why does nobody say this when people criticise other countries?
In nearly all parlance talking about countries you reference those countries directly 'the US invaded Iraq' for e.g.
> Why does nobody say this when people criticise other countries?
because most other countries we talk about have some kind of representative system where the people actually have a say in who governs them. Of course it's all relative, no representation is ever perfect, but in a dictatorial regime there's no representation at all.
Yeah sure, I mean when people say 'Iran' did X or 'Venezuela' did Y those are fully representative govts that the people can overturn at any point. Oh wait.
Why aren't you saying نظام instead of Iran? Why not 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' instead of Venezuela?
> , I mean when people say 'Iran' did X or 'Venezuela' did Y those are fully representative govts that the people can overturn at any point.
For Venezuela, people did vote for Chavez in the first place right? Which then made the turn to dictatorship. Which is what you should expect when when you elect a Marxist.
it's to separate 'the Chinese people' from 'the CCP'... the Chinese people are the victims, CCP the perpetuators.
A lot of people confuse this distinction, and do racial behaviors thinking they're doing good for the world.
And yes, the same should go for Iran and Venezuela. But it's easy for CCP because they officially made the acronyms by themselves...
The name of a place is commonly used synonymously with its governance (e.g. "EU invests $X bn" is on the frontpage right now). It should be clear that it's not referring to the individuals living there.
If you don't have actual evidence of communist agents downvoting your comments, then you're breaking the rules by posting like this. Please review and follow https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Overwhelmingly, this stuff is just internet-style cloak-and-dagger fantasy, and cheap rhetoric. How do I know that? Because when I look at who the actual users are who make these votes, and I see they were, for example, commenting on HN about Julia in 2015, the odds that they are a communist plant round to zero. This reality is so absolutely remote from what comments like yours are insinuating that it's hard for me to believe that people are willing to go there. Yet here we are, with spies in every closet and foreign agents under every bed. The only word for this is cartoonish.
The truth is that this is a very large, very international community, with millions of users having all sorts of backgrounds and views, and they disagree on divisive topics like China. That is the extremely mundane—albeit emotionally charged—reality of what is going on here. Accusing people who hold different views of being spies and foreign agents is the fastest way to poison the community, so we don't allow it, especially when there isn't a shred of anything resembling evidence to support it.
This entire dynamic is determined by tribal identifications on both sides. That leads people to hate and ultimately want to destroy each other. That's not compatible with the value of this site, which is curiosity. People can't be curious with each other and want to destroy each other at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way.
We've already asked you not to post nationalistic flamewar comments to HN and you've continued to do it repeatedly. That's not what this site is for, so please stop.
When an account posts like this in various threads:
The warning should be absent. This is the reality of the CCP and could be the direction that pro-censorship and pro-communist nations laud. It’s all fun and and games when popular opinion vilifies the likes
of terrorists or pedophiles but it’s a slippery slope.
Next thing you know the executions start for DMCA violations and so called hate speech that will radically change in 40y.
As george carlin famously said we are all circulating the drain.
Well these people in particular need to toughen up and face reality so that they know what it means if the government executes someone, that it's not just a data point on a chart.
They need to feel it and toughen up. If we become a nation of cowards, then those in power are going to start doing this and nobody will have the courage to stand up to it.
Trauma is a real thing people experience, and having associated triggers is not particularly rare, believe it or not. I'm sorry if some particular political leaning convinced you that's only a thing on tumblr.
And I don't see how "standing up" in the US would ever do you any good, with the sheer force of militarized police and actual military. I hope this is not leading into a tired "if only Germany would've had guns" point.
I don't understand how 'being triggered' is a bad thing...
People who 'get triggered' are too sensitive. They have to train themselves. We are on planet earth, we live then we die. This is a fact. Emotions are tools to allow us to navigate our lives as members of society. They are useful, not something we should be shielded from.
We need negative emotions just like we need hunger to know we need to eat, thirst to know we need to drink, pain to know we need to avoid physical harm, etc...
IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
Happy to see your peer-reviewed work on this. In the unlikely case you haven't actually done any research, I'll go back to believing the scientific consensus of "retraumatizing does not work beyond phobias".
>IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
What is this even advocacy for? Voting rights only after you sit through a slideshow of graphic violence?
The purpose of these images is not to help individuals to avoid emotional discomfort, it is merely to teach individuals what a term means. In this case, terms like 'state killing' and 'execution' are supposed to create emotional discomfort when read.
The association with the horrible imagery needs to be created or else people will not understand what they're reading with the appropriate degree of emphasis when the term comes up in the future. We will be a nation of apathetic, sedated cowards.
In the old days, people actually saw these horrors with their own eyes, not merely seen pictures; so they understood very well what 'war' meant. Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.
> Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.
It is funny reading this after not even been two weeks since the last attack on the US embassy compound in Iraq after the US denied Iraqi calls to remove US troops of the country it invaded 17 years ago
This comment is extremely disingenuous. The annual number of state sponsored executions in the United States can be counted on one hand. Most (all?) of the EU has banned the death penalty altogether.
I want the shock and negative feelings. People need to get their head out of the sand and realize the true cost of your new iPhone 12 and all the other cheap Chinese junk.
We shouldn’t be supporting China, we should bring skilled work back to the USA.
Let me put it bluntly. There is a closeup of a woman with only half a head. It comes as a surprise as the first images are not as bad, and the article's content draws you in. I had to stop there even though I wanted to continue reading.
Personally, the images themselves do not particularly upset me. Maybe regretfully, but I have seen enough of the actual results of armed conflicts. Personally, I think the images of mass murders with piles of death (often naked) people from WW2 far more disturbing.
However, you do correctly point out how this article appears to draw people in and then goes for maximum shock effect. I'm sure that whoever created this article did that on purpose. Even if the cited numbers happen to be accurate, this kind of tactic is rather typical for propaganda. The same can be said about producing "facts" that are either hard or impossible to verify.
To be clear: I am not saying that this is propaganda, but it does at least raise a few red flags about potentially being just that. Further research needed.
EDIT: to be even more clear: I have no doubt that the CCP have committed horrible crimes. But that will not make me just believe whatever somebody might write about it.
Did not expect to see an image of someone with their head half blown off.
Trying to find my thoughts on this. The Einsatzgruppen pretty much started the Holocaust via mass shootings (before all other methods). They switched to gas vans (according to this article, China uses this too? What in the fuck) for some vile cognitive gymnastics where they convinced themselves it was too demoralizing for the goons to have to shoot that many people without being drunk all the time (to carry out the deed). They sought a more efficient, less taxing method, and that’s where the gas vans came in.
The Nazis did this to anyone that they could lump into ‘a national threat’ bucket, so Jews that were also communist Russians were instant kill (as opposed to German Jews who initially got put in labor camps).
If the CCP ever decides routine shootings is taxing or inefficient (like the Nazis), things wouldn’t be so far off to having an “efficient” death camp to just handle it en masse.
I tend to always over-fit the Nazi parallels, especially with China, but China’s prime issue is scale. Whatever they do, they must always consider scale.
Crackdowns will happen at scale (Hong Kong), censorship will happen at scale (speech/internet), imprisonment will happen at scale (Uighurs), and mass executions (if we were to ever get the numbers) will happen at scale.
As hard it is to not turn away from that picture in the article, I would sincerely like to know what that woman’s crime was.
I think the point of the article is that the choice to involve ordinary police officers in the killings is to give them a stake in the current regime (or at least to make them fear the consequences of any other future regime.) I don’t think more organised death camps fit with that motive, but it could be wrong.
The Einsatzgruppen were actually like ordinary police. They were never actually told to create death camps initially, it was just more ... efficient, so Nazi sub leadership switched to that somewhat independently.
This book makes an interesting point about the bottom-up theory of what really started the Holocaust (this is an unforgettable read, I feel like author literally accounted for every death batch (and yes ‘batch’ has to be used due to the scale):
Basically, it was simple broad directives that got interpreted by these disparate elements of the Nazis in the Eastern front. What does it mean if someone is not only a Jew, but also a communist Russian? Pretty much an instant threat, and forward deployed units liberally interpreted it into mass-killing vs forced labor camps. Once that genie was out of the bottle, you would look unproductive in the regime if you weren’t upping the ante.
What is the CCP creating here? You want units with blood on their hands ratcheting up new and interesting ways of currying favor with the regime? Hey bosses, I found a great new way to promote CCP Authority, forget Uighur camps, get a load of this. Suddenly you have a macabre competition within a peculiar institution that can only become darker if left to find it’s own logical purpose (be the very best ccp you can be, whatever that means, and oh John the guy you started with recently rose the ranks doing this, not saying you should too, but take some initiative).
> for some vile cognitive gymnastics where they convinced themselves it was too demoralizing for the goons to have to shoot that many people without being drunk all the time
Sadly mental gymnastics seem to do their work often enough. For example firing squad style executions also tend to use mental gymnastics, by introducing blank rounds the individual members of the squad are no longer certain that they will fire the lethal shot, making them less hesitant to aim and shoot correctly.
It's important to see the photos to properly absorb the content and message of the article.
This reflex to shield one's self from reality is extremely harmful for society and it's cowardly.
The fact that the images are a 'shock' to some people shows just how disconnected they are from reality. They are powerful images but they should not be shocking... The term 'killing' should already embody these emotions without the images.
The emotions that people feel when looking at these images, that's exactly what 'killing a person' means.
Maybe the thing is that we are so conditioned by having half assed censored media pictures and quotes like its graphic, that when someone finally delivers on it, we just get shocked. This is how it looks like when someone head gets blown off.
> Consider turning images off to read the content.
I'm sorry, I can try to understand the well-meant intent behind this, but what, and pretend the world is all roses and rainbows?
No. Leave the images on. You first world city folk need to SEE the horror that goes on beyond your ivory towers, some of it enabled by the very work that you do.
I wasn't always first world city folk, I've seen the horror and my family has been touched by it. I'd rather never see it again, though unfortunately news from my former home often makes it unavoidable.
If you need to see brutality to empathize with the brutalized, then go ahead and look at the gore. But I think most people are emotionally capable enough to realize that executions aren't pleasant experiences without photo evidence.
Turning those images off won't make them disappear from existence nor resurrect the victims. Stop being willfully ignorant - that alone enables any monster out there to do as they wish unaccounted for.
"and probably many more" is an understatement. There is mass organ harvesting from Falun Gong followers [0] and God knows how many die in the Uighur concentration camps [1].
There is a 99.9% conviction rate in crimes in China [2] (which is the same as basically having no rule of law) and political prisoners seemingly 'disappear' all the time.
China are known for lying consistently about almost everything and keep a tight lid (as much as they can) on anything that would cause them to 'lose face' both within and without the country so any estimates are likely significantly low.
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; Wikipedia and lots of writeups tracing back to the singular source of Adrian Zenz are not it sadly
Most of the claims have nothing to do with Adrian Zenz, and I’d love to know what you have against him since his reporting seem to be factually accurate.
This person is making the extraordinary claim that all the provided evidence is bullshit, but ironically delivers no substantial evidence themselves, besides asserting "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence".
In this context you cannot find any sources that cannot be construed as shady in some way since none of them are official. You of course know this, and you will just question any source thrown at you, as you did previously. So why are you even asking? What's your point? That we don't know for sure whether the CCP is bad? Constant lies and not letting people leave the country aside, how many more screaming indicators of abuse do you need?
For reference, the US DOJ has a 93% conviction rate. Japan has a 99.3% conviction rate. However, apparently in Japan prosecutors drop about half the cases they are given before sentencing, so the real rate would be about 50%. Do we have a similar stat for China?
I think the reason it stayed up is because the wumaos have been sleeping on the job. At least it took them a good hour to flag it off the site.. but yeah, the mods are complicit as well since they allow the wumaos to so easily censor content by abusing the flag system.
How else would you explain the rank 2 thread with 100+ upvotes, no flamebait comments (at the time) and only 1 hour old disappearing off the site (I checked 5+ pages)? All threads critical of China follow this pattern, and I highly doubt it’s dang personally removing them (because he sometimes reinstate them).
Please read and follow the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. They ask you not to post insinuations about astroturfing, foreign agents, and the like. If you don't have any evidence, the odds are overwhelming that this is internet users indulging in fantasy stories about how their enemies are sinisterly manipulating everything. That is an extremely low-quality class of internet comment—in fact, it's probably tied for last place. If you're trying to have an internet forum that doesn't go down the toilet—and we are—you have to minimize this kind of thing. Hence the rule.
In reality, the world is complicated, the community is divided, and the sinister enemies are overwhelmingly just normal community members who happen to have very different backgrounds and views than you do. People who want to participate in HN discussion need to be able to absorb and tolerate that fact, not try to erase it with cheap and lazy accusations, which is what the vast majority of these comments are. Unbelievably cheap and lazy, in fact.
I absolutely don't mean to pick on you personally—this is a system-wide problem and it's getting worse.
Also, in case anyone is wondering "what about real manipulation? doesn't that exist?" — that is addressed in the guidelines as well: if you're worried about it and think you might be seeing it on HN, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. We always look into it. It may take us a while to reply, but we will.
We've had to ask you many times not to break the site guidelines like this, and you're continuing to do it. I don't want to ban you, but it's not ok for you to destroy the site like this, which is what comments like this do.
If you want to use HN as intended, then please put sufficient effort into doing so. Follow the rules, and keep cheap name-calling, nationalistic battle, sinister manipulation fantasy, and all the rest of this out of the threads here.
> The PRC executes between five and ten thousand people per year
Anyone got a source for that claim? Amnesty estimates "1000's" but doesn't actually give a figure and claims to not know it. I'm guessing the worlds biggest human rights org would love to know Matt from substack's source?
For comparison we have the Saudis, Iraq, Egypt and Iran coming in with a few hundred executions each while certain other allied countries refuse to publish and are also hidden away behind government secrecy.
> I'm guessing the worlds biggest human rights org would love to know Matt from substack's source?
I would guess ramblings from some dark Falun Gong blog, as clearly he has no issues quoting them elsewhere on the piece, which on my eyes for as gruesome as the topic might be takes a huge amount of credibility away of him and the piece
These are the kind of numbers and narrative Tibetan/FLG NGOs from the west throws out. Read: outdated propaganda from a bunch of exiles from 20-30 years ago stuck in "immigrant time bubble" where their impressions of the country is locked in a outdated reality. Which more or less summarizes this entire article and most ridiculous amateur CCP bad analysis regurgitated by western "enthusiasts".
It's like whenever people insinuate Tianamen 2.0 will repeat for xyz events like China is trapped in some pre reform time bubble in terms of culture and capabilities. Somehow a modern China with 14T economy is going to have deal with problems the same way as post war China with 200B economy. I've never seen so many seemingly intelligent people go full smooth brain on this subject matter including in this thread. It's particularly hilarious to see people claim their very smart PhD Chinese colleagues being brainwashed, when theses colleagues have experience in both east and west - they're not the ones with singular perspective and the information deficit. It's not their brain washing, it's yours. Chinese diaspora reciprocate stories of how brainwashed their western coworkers are.. Queue reactionary 50c accusations when 50c doesn't operate in English inside or outside GFC.
China is ~50X wealthier since 89, a wealthier China with riot gear and information control doesn't need to Tianamen dissidents haphazardly. A wealthier China with lethal injection doesn't need to shoot people in back of head in open fields and bill family for bullet, nor execute as many when it's economical to lock them away. Which is largely what happens outside of most egregious crimes / drug smuggling charges. Not to mention much of China executes XYZ for bullshit reasons media reporting turns out to be China sentences person to "death sentence with reprieve" - a symbolic sentence that's functionally life imprisonment. Things aren't the best, but they are generally trending in the right direction.
The main difference I found between China- and Western-style brainwashing is that, in general, in the West people have much more negative attitude toward killing others, no matter what narrative is presented. Whenever USA tries to wage a war, there are many demonstrations against the war, and societies at large are anti-war and opposed to all forms of killing.
The Chinese, on the other hand, seem to believe in consequentialism to a larger degree. They argue that sometimes killing is necessary to prevent more killing, for example. This is presented in a way very accessible for a Western person in the wuxia Hero (2002) where it is the main point of the movie.
All in, I consider the Chinese more brainwashed because Western people have access to all kinds of propaganda - American right & left, Russian, Chinese - whereas the Chinese have much more limited sources because the government is putting an enormous amount of effort in controlling the sources of information, and given the size of the population, they're extremely successful.
Don't forget Chinese "peaceful expansion" which is just another way of saying "We're going to come over and set up in your backyard, and if you don't like it, you're just causing aggression." The Chinese government is the most opaque and two-faced system in the world. At least in America we (almsot always) give you a trial before we kill you.
Chinese/PRC "peaceful expansion" is resolving 12/14 (most) land border disputes with the most concessions, in shortest time period in human history. Chinese "peaceful expansion" is also being the 2nd last out of 6 claimants to conduct land reclamation or weaponize features in South China Sea disputes. Chinese "peaceful expansion" is _INHERITING_ all these disputes from ROC (Taiwan) i.e. they are not dispute of CCP's making, but hand me down disputes that must be resolved somehow... which China has done mostly diplomatically so far, with minimal blood shed.
Without exaggeration, PRC ascent and border resolution is unprecedentedly peaceful relative to human history. In terms of modern dispute management, it's has been the most peaceful. Japan has disputes with 5/5 her maritime neighbours. And she's an island.
> At least in America we (almsot always) give you a trial before we kill you.
lol what is this, modern China has trials too. Maybe one day China's foreign policy will use paperwork to make enhanced interrogation not torture, and droning combatants not random civilians.
Please keep nationalistic flamewar off this site, regardless of how right your country is or you feel it is. Comments like this are a major step into the hell we're trying to avoid here.
Moral calculus is clearer when growing up without basic needs met. But more or less.
>access to all kinds of propaganda
Access to information does not make one more informed. Chinese who live through daily propaganda inherently understands nature of propaganda. Very few trust official news sources. Outside extremely partisan media platforms, western manufactured consent is more subtle and sinister. Most global south diaspora in the west will tell you how absolutely bullshit western reporting is in general, a free fifth estate is frequently seemingly indistinguishable from state propaganda from those who know it intimately.
It's a matter of comprehension. There are more Chinese diaspora multilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.
Chinese information control doesn't generate brainwashed people as much as create political disengagement. The more ideology Xi pushes the less believers there are are outside of the inevitable proportion of fierce nationalists / new generation of little pinks. But much of CHinese society skew old, have through Mao/Deng - they've experienced the spectrum of propaganda and understands when the levers are being adjusted.
Modern western ecosystem generate extreme dogmatism without media literacy. Too many think access to information is the same as being informed. The debates people have on the effects of social media are similar lessons learned through the "lived" propaganda experience of just growing up in China. Recognition of the issue frequently doesn't generalize outside of the domestic realm, i.e. China issues. The fact that this story, a substack post by a non-subject matter expert using biased sources is generating this much engagement is more or less illustrative of the point.
Please make your points without crossing into flamewar accusations and name-calling ("brainwashing", "ridiculous amateur CCP bad analysis regurgitated"). You're badly breaking the site guidelines when you do these things, and it sadly also guarantees that what you say won't be heard by anyone except the people who already strongly agree with you. That's not conversation.
I know all too well what you're experiencing from "seemingly intelligent people", but fulminating not only doesn't help, it reinforces the very things you're complaining about. We all do this, and in that sense we're all creating our own enemies. It's a trap and it takes a lot of work to even begin to become aware of it, but what choice do we have? Certainly if HN is to be a place where people have curious conversation, everyone needs to work on this.
We will probably never know the real number. Please also remember we have under-estimated for a very long time the victims of the Soviet Union until we found out more about the gulags and all other repressive systems they had in place.
Because it can establish a lower bound. When we say "we'll never know the real number", we are saying "the real number is at least X, but it could be a lot more". If X is already high in our eyes, it can be useful for providing a view on the true magnitude of the problem.
If Amnesty International estimates it to be "1000s", which I think we can agree is a reputable source, and the Chinese government is extremely restrictive in news and data that it releases, it's quite possible it could be 5,000 people a year. What's unknown is if they still charge your family for the bullet.
While the methods employed by the PRC are, ahem, somewhat more pragmatic than those utilised in most other countries still having the death penalty, it is mere nuance - the state murdering its own citizens is a practice which should have been long abandoned - whether the state is Iran, the US, China, Saudi Arabia or any of the handful of others still having the statute on its books.
While Japan's legal system is certainly deserving of criticism, who's isn't?, this stat is thrown around without any understanding of what it really means.
What is the conviction rate in your country of residence?
What does conviction rate actually mean in the context of the legal process in your country and Japan?
If you don't know the detailed answers to those questions I suggest not making such grand claims about equivalence.
Here is a short radio episode explaining this topic.
The parent has for some reason edited their comment and now it looks like I was defending China's rate in my reply. They originally made an equivalence claim between Japan and China and I wanted to add information explaining that this stat doesn't necessarily mean what it's often at first glance interpreted to mean. The parent then replied to my comment with a reply that suggests their edit was in fact malicious. But I can't be sure of that.
Japan has quite a weird judicial system. I think from a western, common law eye, it probably seems worse. In the west a prosecutor will usually bring a case if they think there is a reasonable chance of getting a conviction whereas in Japan, a prosecutor will only bring a case if they are very convinced that there will be a conviction. I think there is also some societal pressure on judges to not find people innocent, which seems pretty bad to me. Also the police basically want to extract signed confessions out of people and may often keep suspects in custody for long periods of time (without access to a lawyer or anyone else) to extract confessions.
Obviously this sounds bad so in the interest of balance, let me point out that there are many problems with the US system but they are out of this comment.
While I don‘t share this train of thought, it‘s certainly easier to argue from several philosophical and religious backgrounds for a death sentence for a murderer than for a protester.
> No one has the right to kill another person unless someone's life is in acute danger.
That's a completely arbitrary right. Depending on wherever you are from it's not some kind of shared obviousness at all. Some countries actually execute people for possessing hard drugs (which I don't agree with, but that's the reality: don't assume 'rights' are universal). Most of these countries are in South East Asia and have suffered in the opium days so there's a history behind that decision too.
I think the key is whether one accepts that there is no free will.
If you did, then executing someone solely for whatever they did makes no sense, because:
1. If you were in their place, you would've done the same thing (no free will).
2. You can imagine what you'd feel if in their place you'd hear the sentence, (then empathy would kick in).
3. “No man is completely useless; he can always serve as a bad example.”
Then in an ideal world, we would have the knowledge, and resources to figure out what went wrong, and "fix" the abusive behaviour in the subject, making them a happy and productive member of society again.
Of course we are living in an imperfect world, so this is not yet a viable solution..
tl,dr: CCP involves as many ordinary people as it can into the judicial and extra-judicial killing process in what could be "life insurance" for the regime: too many have blood on their hands to ever face accountability.
Personally, the dissonance around China has come to an extreme. Is most reporting incorrect, or has CCP become the most efficient and durable totalitarian regime in history? Or is it a form of social engineering that has actual mainstream support in China? Or is it a doomed experiment, just like all other previous authoritarian regimes in history?
There is something quietly unsustainable building up.
> has CCP become the most efficient and durable totalitarian regime in history?
Not really, here are just forces at play which would benefit if you thought so
We are in due time for the US and Western public to have a new evil boogyman presented to them. People are getting too unruly these days, so this will help keep them in line
Your post seems to me that you intensely believe the creed that western-style “liberal democracy” is the most stable political regime. It is true it is very stable though you should try to separate the reality with the propaganda set up by those states, especially the US one. For example:
> Or is it a doomed experiment, just like all other previous authoritarian regimes in history?
The Pharaonic system which was may be the most despotic ever created lasted for nearly three millenia. The current age of all “democracies” (~ representatively guided states with some kinds of power separations) pales in comparison.
And regarding the robustness of those regimes the only continental country to not crumble when confronted to the shock of the blitzkrieg was the USSR (operation barbarossa lead to the death of 5 millions people in 200 days to give an idea).
I am not trying to defend authoritarian regimes but the questions of which political system is the fairest, which one is the most legitimate, which one is the most stable and which one is the most robust are not the same and should not be conflated
There's an unsustainable component to every empire, in that the premise is always growth-centric and stratified; empires do not "prosper together". Growth turns to killing when the psyche of the nation needs a boost, cleaving a harder line into the social constructs of stratification by informing everyone of who is clean and goodly, and who is guilty by default and deserves their punishments. It reallocates praise and blame such that the established in-groups get the most credit by their own reckoning. On this I see Heather Marsh's views as some of the most clear-eyed.
The thing about authoritarian impulses throughout history is that they flare up and, for time, keep a country firmly gripped. Then they relax, and are somewhat forgotten about, even reconciled, until something comes along to trigger it again, in a replica of the abuse cycle. And China is not going to be different in this respect - moments where things get more oppressed for a time, and then moments of relief. The Xi regime has been relatively more oppressive in most recountings by Western sources. This is believable yet also not meaningful, since clearly the apparatus was there before.
IMHO, just because China has gotten this far with its current model says little about tomorrow. There is propaganda coming from all directions these days, so I'm always a little hesitant about "real truth" coming from random sources, but simultaneously suspicious of the official ones too. It's that climate, in itself, that damages the credibility of all regimes; it leaves truth and credit up for grabs to those who can forge a new path that makes the world cohere better. It's hard to defeat the real truth in the long run.
> Is most reporting incorrect, or has CCP become the most efficient and durable totalitarian regime in history?
Neither. Most Americans and Europeans have zero idea what life is like in China. The media doesn't help. Anyone who knows something about the country has noticed the rising level of hysteria and propaganda about China since Trump was elected.
Throwaway because I don’t really want to taint my account with no-good discussions like this. (I’m an HN regular with some 8k karma.)
If you know the Chinese language, go to Weibo and find announcements of rulings on high profile murder cases, rape cases, etc. Most likely you’ll see that people overwhelmingly call for tougher punishment; comments expressing dissatisfaction with non-capital punishment are often voted to the top.
It’s a different culture, the majority or at least an extremely vocal minority (I highly doubt it’s a minority, but that’s a possibility) expect an-eye-for-an-eye punishment for murder as well as some other morally outrageous crimes. You may find it barbaric or whatever, but it’s a different culture.
See also (on the largest Chinese language Q/A site, like Quora):
You can gauge the relative popularity of opinions from the stats alone. Mind you, the user base of that site is relatively well-educated and progressive.
Oh I’m comfortable with commenting on political topics. I’m not comfortable with commenting on China topics, since (a) there’s a very good chance my comment would be voted to oblivion so no one would see what I wrote anyway (this one was instantly downvoted, then voted back); (b) I would be called a shill; (c) correcting people who use a circlejerk of questionable sources to support opinions about things they have absolutely no experience with yet feel very confident about is both exhausting and mostly pointless. This post is a good example. Zero references, but will be used as fact in the next round of discussions.
Even though the article’s claims are not sourced, I don’t see any mention of “protesting for democracy”, or protest of any kind. It’s just talking about executions in general. The first picture features a criminal with a “murderer” sign hanging from her neck. The video doesn’t have much context. The second picture is a stock photo from an article about global executions on the decline. The third group of photos have an outgoing link with invalid cert so I didn’t proceed (who knows if it’s rigged with malware). Did I miss anything?
Not talking about the article, just asking for your insight that you have by looking at Weibo. Just wanted to know if there are cases of political dissent announced, and if so, what are their reactions.
Disclosure: I don’t frequent Weibo. The conclusions I posted above come from a general understanding after having lived and worked in China for a significant period of time, plus some personal investigations into Weibo and other major Chinese social media services (e.g. Baidu Tieba, which was the top dog of a bygone age) after discussing such topics with Western friends in the past. I’m very confident in my conclusion that the death penalty is very welcome in China, random hearsay and conversation stoppers like “but social credit points” be damned (that’s a whole other topic I don’t want to get into).
With that out of way, I can objectively say that I’ve never seen cases of political dissent announced anywhere. If you ask me, I’d say such cases, if there are any, wouldn’t be publicized. Additionally, if there were to be such cases, I suspect (private) opinions would be more divided than murder cases but still tilt the “wrong” way. By my observations, people tend to sympathize with little guys adversely affected by corrupt officials or big corps, and you can see that kind of stories retweeted on social media, a lot, as people love to “spread the word to get the attention of higher-ups”; but “human rights activists” are usually met with sneer. The high profile activists tend to be the butt of jokes in my experience.
> If you know the Chinese language, go to Weibo and find announcements of rulings on high profile murder cases, rape cases, etc. Most likely you’ll see that people overwhelmingly call for tougher punishment; comments expressing dissatisfaction with non-capital punishment are often voted to the top.
You can see this on reddit too for american crimes.
How do I (as a westerner) realistically affect change?
China's been persecuting Mongolian, Moslem, Christian, Buddisht minorities for a while and I recently read about concentration camps for Uighurs minorities on the BBC.
I want change, will my purchase decisions have any affect and are boycotts even effective?
We need to prop up India as much as possible ASAP. Once China has a credible competitor in the manufacturing space, peaceful influence can be applied through economic means.
I have begun supporting Korean and Japanese products where I can.
Also I have a pretty big influence on procurement where ever I contract. I could bring to discussion the UK gov advisories on using Chinese network and IT equipment.
I just don't know if this is enough or I can do more?
This whole article reeks of Western propaganda against China. China is being turned into the new al-Qaeda to justify yet another Western military adventurism.
What's interesting is that, at least in the case of the Iraq War, there was no ought right public Iraqi diaspora calling for the downing of the Saddam regime, but in the case of China and Iran, it is very interesting to me how far right Monarchist groups such as the Iranian Tondar group which even did terror attacks on the nation call for quite literally an invasion of the country and setting up a literal Monarchy on it as opposed to the current Theocratic Republic
It is just so interesting this year seeing the Trump administration ratchet up the rhetoric pressure on the Chinese government and make strong use of Falon Gong, which are just renowned to be.... Unreliable in their narratives to say the least, as a spearhead and baseline to build a PR campaign against the country
But yeah, lacking a horse on the race, in my case, it is just interesting seeing how the knots of war are slowly tied
This essay is bs, and deceptive bs. But it's in plenty of company, and likely serves the market hungry for "China bad" tales.
Trigger warning: facts ahead. The lead image is a woman executed for "intentional homicide" (that's what the sign says, "intentional homicide - her name")
The article makes a handful of irresponsible accusations. It claims China is executing "probably many more via militarized kangaroo courts," insinuates China is doing "“social cleansing” of undesireables like petty drug abusers, liquidation of badly-behaved members of minority groups, or outright political murders of people within the CCP hierarchy", and mislabels China's legal system as "state terror", getting almost poetic with its description of how it imagines this operates: "Effective systems of state terror rely on a dance between the known and the unknown in the mind of the public," which seems like the opposite of the very obvious "known" of a public execution where the criminal carries sign expressing their bona fides, and flies in the face of the author's own description of "Regular judicial personnel handle identity confirmation and terminal legal dispositions".
So where could this invention of "state terror" and all these imagined tentacular bogeymen of "state terror" come from? Perhaps from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which the author neglects to mention. Or perhaps from the period of Japanese occupation and the mass killings and disappearances of ordinary folk that the author again neglects to mention. Where does the author get his (or her, it's hard to tell if it's a pseudonym or not) picture of China? One possibility is biased Western media which for the last few years has worked its readership into a frothy fervor of China hatred, mostly based on such misrepresentations and lazy accusations. Which if the author has his (or her) biased view of China from the media he consumes, presents a further interesting possibility.
It seems that a "dance between the known and the unknown in the mind of the public" would pretty well describe the constant state of confusion and conflict instigated and inflamed by the media apparatus of certain unnamed "free" countries. Perhaps the author is projecting his experience of such "state terror" onto a place he doesn't know about (but feels justified to misrepresent and smear), in some sort of "fantasy idyll dystopia" that lets him feel he has it lucky to be where he is?
The essay also expends a paragraph on Nazis and Soviets, and spends quite a bit of time imagining the dastardly inner workings of the state he fabricates, and how the dogma of spreading responsibility for illegitimate killings onto as many people as possible ensures their coercibility. Hmm, sounds like the typical blackmail-type coercion engaged in by state security and intelligence organizations, and their proxy sex crime rings, in many unnamed "free" countries. Again, possibly the author is projecting his own experience of this kind of "coercive covert control".
Especially likely given the vast majority of Chinese see their state's legitimacy as totally solid and, if anything, complain of the forgivingness of their punitive systems, rather than their harshness. To the reader unacquainted with Chinese history beyond the ancient anodyne depictions of flowery courts, silk-clad concubines, and scurrying sneaky eunuchs....this bloodlust (or "Justice boner"?) might seem unaccountable and odd. But a closer look at Chinese history (even 20C Chinese history) will quickly correct such ahistorical readers of their delusions. They gave the world the 20C's bloodiest revolution. And it was a popular revolution, not a "illegitimate tyrannical crackdown", so the people are pretty accustomed to using blood and death to reshape things how they want.
> There will be recriminations and retributive violence. It’s likely that some officers who participated in the decades of state sanction slaughter will face the same grisly, unceremonious end that they inflicted on others.
I'm not sure about this one, but maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in.
I would have thought the same thing, but my wife is from Slovakia and I was surprised to learn that no such thing happened. It seems that everyone was involved in government somehow, and everybody was just doing their thing to live a decent life.
The real violence came from grabbing the new opened up market, and so trying to grab as much of the newly opened market and money as possible. Not so much revenge of what happened because of the government.
I definitely want to know if this was the case in other countries too.
We as western countries should do a lot more to show these things happening in China to our citizens. We should stop giving our money to china businesses and make business decisions not only based on price...
All: this article was flagged by users, not moderators, for the obvious reason that both it and the title are extreme flamebait. Predictably we got a wretched flamewar out of it.
Nationalistic flamewar is not ok here. Slurring groups or individuals who disagree with you is not ok here. Cartoonish accusations about communist agents and spies secretly manipulating the thread is explicitly against the site guidelines. It is also, frankly, foolish and a little embarrassing—anyone reading this thread or any other, whose emotions aren't pre-inflamed on the topic, can easily see what's going on: people with different backgrounds and therefore different views disagree with each other and feel strongly. I've studied this problem in depth for years; I've pored over voting data, flagging data, and lots of other data, and I can tell you that the evidence not only confirms that, it's probably the most solid evidence of any kind I've ever examined [1].
The value of this site is curiosity [2]. The goal is curious conversation. When the needle goes this badly into the red, curious conversation is impossible. Worse, we get the internet thread equivalent of a world war. That's a grandiose analogy because internet forums are so trivial—but the emotional dynamics are not trivial. The anger and accusation here are the forces which, in the extreme, make people to try to destroy each other.
One can derive a significant conclusion: if HN is to have a chance at achieving its mandate—which is in all our interests, because it's only that which makes the place interesting—then we all need to work on these dynamics in ourselves.
Here's one way to do that: don't see the other person as an enemy, a demon [3], a communist, or a brainwashed Westerner. See them as someone who doesn't have the same information you have. Share information with the intention to communicate, not defeat the other. Don't expect to persuade them—deep things like this can only shift slowly. When someone responds with information that you feel is false or, worse, might have some truth to it, tolerate the painful flare-up that will inevitably surge in your system. Wait for it to subside—don't let it power your response. Remember that you're talking not only to one person who perhaps strongly disagrees with you—you are broadcasting to an entire community of readers. Practicing these skills is the only way to make your case to the community that can actually do any good, so even if there are brainwashed Westerners or sinister manipulators or communist spies, it's what we need to be doing anyway [4].
[1] As I've said elsewhere, the odds that someone who was posting about Julia in 2015 is a communist agent who was planted to manipulate HN round to zero. That, in the median case, is who you're talking to here.
Dang, there is no other venue to discuss this. There are massive human rights violations currently happening that rival those of Nazi Germany, but most news media and online discussion forums shy away from the topic because China is too economically powerful. We've accepted as a society that certain acts performed by the nazis were an absolute evil. Why then should we not be allowed to discuss similar human rights violations in the present day?
181 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 266 ms ] threadNot sure how this could be any clearer.
I think it's a good thing to include these images, we've become too used to content moderation that we're desensitized to a lot of the atrocities that are still happening daily around the world.
That doesn’t make it any less brutal or disturbing, but it serves as a reminder of how often we are willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities when it’s economically or politically expedient.
I upvoted, but I can only do so much.
A totalitarian genocidal regime who has demonstrably lied consistently about everything of any importance but if you question whether, perhaps, they might have possibly done a little more about wet markets/traditional Chinese medicine given the 2003 SARS outbreak which clearly indicated this major risk area - and you get hammered for it.
Go further and suggest maybe covering up the outbreak to give the virus enough time to spread everywhere was maybe not a great thing and the next virus might have a higher case fatality rate than 0.4% and that's it you're done.
This is without even getting into the 'walked out of a lab' theory which would presumably get me banned off HN...
It seems criticising the US, UK etc. for the slightest thing is fine but criticising totalitarian genocidal sabre-rattling pandemic-unleashing states is beyond the pale.
I suspect that minor gotchas like this are capable of having the opposite effect: neutral people who care about nuance will feel like you are slightly adapting facts to suit anti-CCP narrative. Compounded by the fact that there is little verifiable information due to heavy censorship, this makes any argument on the topic quite challenging.
After your top-level comment got downvoted I didn’t feel comfortable expressing my opinion: some might think I downvoted you and/or others will mistake me for an astroturfer. Personally, I’ve upvoted it and I agree on general sentiment.
I agree that kind of thing can erode the argument so thank you for pointing it out, I wasn't actually aware of that fact re: Japan and probably I'd put less emphasis on that knowing that there can be other alternative explanations.
I don't agree that it's a struggle to criticise the CCP more generally however as while they lock down as much information as they can, plenty leaks out (as always with totalitarian regimes) and there is overwhelming evidence including video, testimony, etc. as to treatment of Uighurs and Falon Gong. I intentionally added references to my original post as to avoid such criticism... for all the good it did me!
And please feel free to express yourself, I have upvoted you also :)
[0]:https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/468111?jou...
would "gross negligence, face-saving, cover up and delay resulting in over a million more deaths than necessary" work better for you? [0]
[0]:https://www.zmescience.com/medicine/china-coronavirus-coveru...
China are literally harvesting organs, disappearing political dissidents and covered up the outbreak of a pandemic (to say the least you could about that), and their govt is responsible for 10's of millions of deaths of their own people.
Some nebulous Chomsky-ish nonsense doesn't rank against that, sorry.
Yeah, because you are not calling for "criticism" but state level character assassination which is rather different
Just again the suggestion of conspiracy theories can be a topic of discussion if you want, but I don't believe you are interested on discussing specifics which is rather sad to me
And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab (since the SARS virus did multiple times before [0]) by accident? Though there is some real debate about that so I'm not blindly advocating that theory, only saying it's not entirely implausible.
I mean I'd love to hear your arguments as to the contrary, since you accuse me of 'state level character assassination' by... providing a large number of references to incredibly evil behaviour by the CCP? Please feel free to rebut any 'specific' which you accuse me of refusing to discuss?
I am making specific criticisms none of which I see you have chosen to rebut or discuss rather you are instead trying to smear me. Am happy to hear your actual arguments...
[0]:https://www.the-scientist.com/news-analysis/sars-escaped-bei...
Ofc, that's why they were reformed, current meat and grocery markets commonly found are nothing like the markets of SARS
And yeah, huge reforms took place on Chinese Healthcare policy[0] alongside South Korean and Vietnamese Healthcare policy, which is why all three countries have been doing so well, they learned all the lessons from SARS which were ignored in the West
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK92479/
Overall sad to see that you are clearly not engaging in good faith, as these discussions are very important :/
> And that it's not impossible that the virus could have escaped from a lab by accident?
And no, once again you show the conspiracy angle, no, it is not the case because the virus has been genetically analyzed all over the world now and not datasets have been produced which could show manipulation, let alone the fact that patient Zero was found a while ago[1], but of course I am sadly not expecting you to actually accept it, as I am sure you will pivot to another branch of the broader "China == Evil" conspiracy-adjacent beliefs :/
[1] https://amp.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3074991/coro...
You're either a troll, very naive, a patriot to the point of delusion or in the employ of the CCP. Think for yourself and think about what you're defending.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I understand very well that there is extra pressure on a minority/contrarian view that feels embattled, but it doesn't make it ok to break the rules. When you break them it dissuades people from giving you a hearing anyhow, so individual interest and community interest are the same.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The argument is that they were profoundly negligent.
As for the lab side of things, the argument is that it was an accidental release (as happened multiple times with SARS 1).
My point is whether or not it walked out of the lab (by ACCIDENT) given they knew in 2003 that certain things were major risks, they should have come down on them like a ton of bricks. The fact they re-opened wet markets and took no further steps to tackle that makes them responsible through negligence.
1) China is known to have contributed[0] to bat coronavirus research, my speculation is that Wuhan’s BSL-4 lab exists primarily for this reason.
2) There were documented lab escapes of original SARS-CoV from labs in Beijing[1] in 2004, as I recall resulting in at least one death.
3) WHO’s study starts this month, but they don’t seem to mention lab escape (not of some “engineered virus”, just straight up a natural sample escaping on a person) as a possibility[2]. I am not sure if they are playing politics or this is their sincere outlook.
I can’t stress this enough: China may have been unlucky to be struck by the original SARS-CoV, so it’s reasonable that they had the motivation to study its origins; that research is valuable and it’d be absolutely bonkers to criticize scientists for having done it. Even if lab escape did indeed happen to be the cause of SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, I am not sure this should be a basis for prosecution of a particular country (as opposed to e.g. tightening of BSL security practices): there’s human factor, and mistakes happen; if it hadn’t been China it could’ve eventually been another country.
What I find alarming is if an effort to obstruct the study of pandemic origins in order to save face (?) is taking place. If it was a lab escape, humanity’s future could be much safer if we knew how it happened—but how would researchers know it was a lab escape if they can’t look in that direction?
[0] https://virologyj.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12985-... (2015, two authors are with Wuhan Institute of Virology)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002–2004_SARS_outbreak#April_...
[2] https://www.who.int/publications/m/item/who-convened-global-...
Secondly they covered up the outbreak. Had it been reported a few weeks earlier apparently up to 95% of deaths could have been prevented. That is really insane.
The lab side of it is interesting and it seems just so much of a coincidence that the lab was right next to the oubreak, of all the places in all of the huge country of China.
I don't doubt they were motivated to study bat coronaviruses, of course they were and there was in fact very big competition with the US.
The problem is China is such a corrupt country where health + safety + following protocols is something of a joke, as with most communist/totalitarian systems people always try to get away with as much as they can that I have zero trust in their BS4 lab being properly constructed and procedures followed correctly.
They also covered up the discovery of a very similar virus some years ago (they actively anonymised records around it after covid19 emerged) in a bat cave (no pun intended) which already appeared to have bat-human transmission.
It is something like 96% similar to covid19 though some scientists say it isn't feasible that it evolved into covid19 except in nature. However I wonder whether some form of natural evolution of the virus was experimented on or encouraged in the lab or whether this assumption is in fact correct.
So the lab thing is definitely up for debate, however the general attitude from much of the media and certainly China is to dismiss it as a crackpot theory. Absolutely don't think it is.
Also I personally do not believe at all that any of this was intentional. I think it's a mixture of negligence, cover-up and face saving.
Keeping in mind the next virus might not be a 0.4% case fatality rate that mostly kills the very old, it's deeply frightening.
I agree completely.
The reason I - and others - commented, is that your initial comments made it sound like you believed it was 100% on purpose, that it was some weird plan of the CCP to gain power, somehow.
I fail to see the value of this, China is not Sweden, I am not sure why you hold them to the same standards, that seems strange to me
But anyhow, I just wanted to add that the CIA and the US state department was aware of a new Pneumonia surging on China back in November and sped to warn NATO and Israel of it[0], after all, no one ever needed to actually listen to what the Chinese government says, that's what intelligence agencies are for
[0] https://www.timesofisrael.com/us-alerted-israel-nato-to-dise...
Did a CCP shill/wumao just admit that the CCP should not be held to the same standards as other members of the International Community and is perplexed that even during a pandemic the refusal to disclose this information is 'strange' when trying to contain the pandemic that has ravaged the World and that ultimately the biggest source of confusion is from outsiders trying to grasp why that is?
If so, you just summed up why the CCP has been successful at indoctrinating a billion people and subjugating them with such ease; when this type of brainwashing being this effective one has to realize we are fighting a losing battle by engaging in discourse as some may never be able to question their reality even as countless deaths occur World wide due to the corruption, coverups and deadly negligence and belligerence from the CCP.
The truth is I think you may be doing this as a source of income and you really don't believe what you wrote, at least I really hope so, which makes me even sadder than if you did believe it as it shows just toxic so many people's existence is when it relies on the acceptance and dependence of totalitarian regimes is.
Edit: Keep down voting, I don't care about your fake internet points, unlike your social credit point system I gain nothing from the number associated to my handle and is irrelevant to my existence. But it proves you have no real points to make that aren't already obvious with these practices and further prove the criticisms more than any illogical rebuttal could.
光復香港，時代革命!
Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this again. If you want explanation, I've posted extensively in this thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616408
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615903
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616086
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616042
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25616205
and there are hundreds more past explanations at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
I want preface that I agree that as of right now there isn't enough evidence to determine that the CCP deliberately released the virus. But they certainly gained a lot in the process and capitalized in every possible way and tried to cover their corruption and continued to dissapear physicians, journalists and anyone who tried to expose their incompetence and maleficence in regards to COVID. None of the death numbers or cases align with the population size and exposure rates and they can get away with it because 'It's China.'
Hong Kong and the yellow movement was created during massive protests in 2014 that escalated again in 2019 with the advent of the extradition bill, these protests were a complete throne in the side of the CCP as it put into question China's real power in the region. Hong Kong was in complete disrepute by the Summer and had violent protest that led to deaths on the streets until the outbreak of the pandemic in late December. While the CCP boarded up Wuhan citizens it didn't stop the outflow of mainlanders to HK despite public outcry from HK medical professionals who recalled the SARS pandemic that killed so many in Hk as result of CCP negligence and continued to overwhelm the hospitals and mainlanders got exemptions from mandatory quarantine measures put in place to reduce to the contagion of COVID, so the infection numbers kept up: but why is this important?
Because HK then went into lockdown and essentially stopped all protests in an attempt to stop the virus spreading, these protests were giving the Western powers the ability to expose the CCP's heavy handed retaliation and violence in its illegal annexation led by a clearly corrupt regime with Lam in place allowing that would lead to the the police to become paramilitary jack booted thugs and beat, jail and murder anyone that disagreed with it, as seen in the article above. The HK police force that committed those crimes had been exposed to have uniquely mainlander/Mandarin accents and traits as opposed to the Cantonese that is spoken exclusively spoken in HK. So it seems the PLA had been introduced as the local police force in HK, essentially leadin to a justified occupation of HK by the CCP.
This then allowed them to pass the National Security Law, suspend elections, remove all protections and civil liberties as the CCP sees fit and purge and put political dissidents in jail and essentially annex HK prematurely which was in direct violation of the treaty agreed upon by the UK that protected the 2 systems one country mandate that would be protected until a complete hand over would be completed in 2047--which would technically violate the process and may be actionable/trilable to return HK to British control. But none of that matters now as the rest of the World is reeling from the wide spread damage of financial crisis, lockdowns and mass unemployment due to the pandemic and in the case if the UK Brexit trade deals.
The CCP just issued an international manhunt for political protestors and activists who fled HK, even though many Western countries (where they reside) have since removed their extradition treaty with China, which means, or at least suggests, that the CCP is willing to use extra judicial means to capture or kill these people in countries they have no jurisdiction in, which in incredibly dangerous precedent as seen with US internationalism that only leads to more violence and death.
What this also did was consolidate the key Western leaning and affluent forward facing financial hub between the West and China (Hong Kong), in an attempt to allow places like Schenzen to act as the new hub which is in direct control of the CCP as China flexed its muscles as the indispensable gear in international supply chains of the World. If you dared to ques...
What did they gain? How did they capitalize?
> and tried to cover their corruption and continued to dissapear physicians, journalists and anyone who tried to expose their incompetence and maleficence in regards to COVID.
100% agree here. But that they're desperately trying to cover it up, regardless of origin, doesn't mean they gained anything from it.
> I can go on, but this should at least give you some context to your frankly very ignorant position on the matter.
Did you confuse me with some other poster? Nothing in that wall of text has got anything to do with my position, or this specific argument, and you still didn't address my actual question.
That they violated international Law and got to illegally occupy and then annex a major financial Hub, isn't that alone enough? I mean I go into detail about how it all took place.
They then got to quell dissenters and hunted them down in order to re-affirm Pooh's (Xi) stance as the tough man of the CCP. 3 high profile activists have been jailed for nothing more than being involved in a protest, a previously Civil Right in HK, 10 of 12 Hongkoners were captured for non-crimes and sent to be tried on the mainland, essentially bypassing the need for the extradition bill that got rejected due to the protests as was intended, but worked anyway due to the perverse nature of the National Security Law.
I'm not sure what more to say to the rest of your response, and I'm wondering if you even bothered to read any of it; are you not familiar with amount of money that flows through Hong Kong's Capital Markets at all? The value of the real estate in the most expensive place on Earth?
Also, I properly used paragraphs: so it's hardly a wall of text. Lengthy perhaps, but not a wall of text as its properly structured.
No, you haven't given any reason whatsoever how the coronavirus allowed China to do all these things. How, specifically, did the intentional or unintentional release of the virus aid the CCP strategically?
What did the virus allow them to gain that they would otherwise be unable to do?
How did they capitalize on the global pandemic?
No, we're not communist agents or secret sympathizers; we're simply trying to moderate an internet forum that doesn't suck. Posts like this one destroy that like salt on a slug, so please fight your battles elsewhere. Edit: Sorry, I realize it probably sounds like I'm picking on you personally and I don't mean to at all—this kind of thing is unfortunately common, and it's a big deal.
Personal attacks and name-calling are also not ok ("your frankly very ignorant"), so please don't do those either.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
they have family/relatives in mainland... have to be careful even in abroad
There is also quite a bit of dissonance and public vs. private attitudes that you have to sort through. The mainstream and tolerated view in mainland china is that the cultural revolution was a huge mistake - there are way too many families that were fucked up by it - but Mao was still a great guy.
- One dev has a twitter account that's a nonstop stream of pro CCP ("Tiananmen is Western propaganda") and anti HK propaganda. I found it because it's named the same as his stackoverflow page which is a very unique identifier with the same uppercasing on specific letters.
- Another doesn't believe there were famines under Mao (we were discussing the Wiki page on it) and calls it propaganda. This was from a Uighur emigrant.
- Another agrees fully with the CCP ocean territory claims in the SEA that take basically all the oceans to the west of Philippines etc.
- Another thinks China can't be a democracy because the logistics of over a billion voting are too hard
- Another left HK early on because of disdain towards the democracy protests (long before attacks on mainland businesses)
I'm sure you're right that there's heterogeneity there (that almost goes without saying and is true of any group of people) and a public vs private distinction but that doesn't contradict what I've said.
I don't think there's any evidence for that. Every woke tech person I know would rather quit their job than do work that benefits the CCP. I think that's why all the biggest tech companies have tiptoed up to that point (e.g. project dragonfly) but haven't been able to cross it.
There is no evidence that the people downvoting the comments you disagree with are communist agents. The evidence is entirely that the community is simply divided on divisive topics, like this one. That's what's going on here, and it's destructive to post these inflated accusations to the contrary—it's poison, in fact. That's why the site guidelines ask you not to do it.
Let's dissociate the country from the political apparatus. What's evil is the CCP, not China in itself - it's not like the citizens can vote the current regime out.
In nearly all parlance talking about countries you reference those countries directly 'the US invaded Iraq' for e.g.
It's a shorthand for 'the govt of xxx'.
because most other countries we talk about have some kind of representative system where the people actually have a say in who governs them. Of course it's all relative, no representation is ever perfect, but in a dictatorial regime there's no representation at all.
Why aren't you saying نظام instead of Iran? Why not 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' instead of Venezuela?
Come on man.
For Venezuela, people did vote for Chavez in the first place right? Which then made the turn to dictatorship. Which is what you should expect when when you elect a Marxist.
And yes, the same should go for Iran and Venezuela. But it's easy for CCP because they officially made the acronyms by themselves...
You do realize that Iran is a republic right?
They hold legislative and executive branch elections every few years with different political parties and all....
Poor example, EU is not a country and represents a political apparatus, nothing else.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Overwhelmingly, this stuff is just internet-style cloak-and-dagger fantasy, and cheap rhetoric. How do I know that? Because when I look at who the actual users are who make these votes, and I see they were, for example, commenting on HN about Julia in 2015, the odds that they are a communist plant round to zero. This reality is so absolutely remote from what comments like yours are insinuating that it's hard for me to believe that people are willing to go there. Yet here we are, with spies in every closet and foreign agents under every bed. The only word for this is cartoonish.
The truth is that this is a very large, very international community, with millions of users having all sorts of backgrounds and views, and they disagree on divisive topics like China. That is the extremely mundane—albeit emotionally charged—reality of what is going on here. Accusing people who hold different views of being spies and foreign agents is the fastest way to poison the community, so we don't allow it, especially when there isn't a shred of anything resembling evidence to support it.
This entire dynamic is determined by tribal identifications on both sides. That leads people to hate and ultimately want to destroy each other. That's not compatible with the value of this site, which is curiosity. People can't be curious with each other and want to destroy each other at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way.
If anyone wants more explanation, there are arbitrary amounts of it at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
When an account posts like this in various threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25583482
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029414
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855732
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721883
...it's painfully clear that this is not curious conversation but a pre-existing agenda.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Next thing you know the executions start for DMCA violations and so called hate speech that will radically change in 40y.
As george carlin famously said we are all circulating the drain.
And I don't see how "standing up" in the US would ever do you any good, with the sheer force of militarized police and actual military. I hope this is not leading into a tired "if only Germany would've had guns" point.
People who 'get triggered' are too sensitive. They have to train themselves. We are on planet earth, we live then we die. This is a fact. Emotions are tools to allow us to navigate our lives as members of society. They are useful, not something we should be shielded from.
We need negative emotions just like we need hunger to know we need to eat, thirst to know we need to drink, pain to know we need to avoid physical harm, etc...
IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
>IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
What is this even advocacy for? Voting rights only after you sit through a slideshow of graphic violence?
The association with the horrible imagery needs to be created or else people will not understand what they're reading with the appropriate degree of emphasis when the term comes up in the future. We will be a nation of apathetic, sedated cowards.
In the old days, people actually saw these horrors with their own eyes, not merely seen pictures; so they understood very well what 'war' meant. Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.
It is funny reading this after not even been two weeks since the last attack on the US embassy compound in Iraq after the US denied Iraqi calls to remove US troops of the country it invaded 17 years ago
I don't know where you have been these last 70 years, but western powers have been "doing this" for a long, long, long time
What we really need is to listen to some Angela Davis speeches on what has been going on in the areas that The Media is too cowardly to report
We shouldn’t be supporting China, we should bring skilled work back to the USA.
However, you do correctly point out how this article appears to draw people in and then goes for maximum shock effect. I'm sure that whoever created this article did that on purpose. Even if the cited numbers happen to be accurate, this kind of tactic is rather typical for propaganda. The same can be said about producing "facts" that are either hard or impossible to verify.
To be clear: I am not saying that this is propaganda, but it does at least raise a few red flags about potentially being just that. Further research needed.
EDIT: to be even more clear: I have no doubt that the CCP have committed horrible crimes. But that will not make me just believe whatever somebody might write about it.
Trying to find my thoughts on this. The Einsatzgruppen pretty much started the Holocaust via mass shootings (before all other methods). They switched to gas vans (according to this article, China uses this too? What in the fuck) for some vile cognitive gymnastics where they convinced themselves it was too demoralizing for the goons to have to shoot that many people without being drunk all the time (to carry out the deed). They sought a more efficient, less taxing method, and that’s where the gas vans came in.
The Nazis did this to anyone that they could lump into ‘a national threat’ bucket, so Jews that were also communist Russians were instant kill (as opposed to German Jews who initially got put in labor camps).
If the CCP ever decides routine shootings is taxing or inefficient (like the Nazis), things wouldn’t be so far off to having an “efficient” death camp to just handle it en masse.
I tend to always over-fit the Nazi parallels, especially with China, but China’s prime issue is scale. Whatever they do, they must always consider scale.
Crackdowns will happen at scale (Hong Kong), censorship will happen at scale (speech/internet), imprisonment will happen at scale (Uighurs), and mass executions (if we were to ever get the numbers) will happen at scale.
As hard it is to not turn away from that picture in the article, I would sincerely like to know what that woman’s crime was.
Not just imprisonment, mass raping of Uighurs women as well: https://www.insider.com/uighur-activists-mass-rape-chinese-m...
This book makes an interesting point about the bottom-up theory of what really started the Holocaust (this is an unforgettable read, I feel like author literally accounted for every death batch (and yes ‘batch’ has to be used due to the scale):
https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stal...
Basically, it was simple broad directives that got interpreted by these disparate elements of the Nazis in the Eastern front. What does it mean if someone is not only a Jew, but also a communist Russian? Pretty much an instant threat, and forward deployed units liberally interpreted it into mass-killing vs forced labor camps. Once that genie was out of the bottle, you would look unproductive in the regime if you weren’t upping the ante.
What is the CCP creating here? You want units with blood on their hands ratcheting up new and interesting ways of currying favor with the regime? Hey bosses, I found a great new way to promote CCP Authority, forget Uighur camps, get a load of this. Suddenly you have a macabre competition within a peculiar institution that can only become darker if left to find it’s own logical purpose (be the very best ccp you can be, whatever that means, and oh John the guy you started with recently rose the ranks doing this, not saying you should too, but take some initiative).
No master plan, just a dark organic evolution.
Sadly mental gymnastics seem to do their work often enough. For example firing squad style executions also tend to use mental gymnastics, by introducing blank rounds the individual members of the squad are no longer certain that they will fire the lethal shot, making them less hesitant to aim and shoot correctly.
The fact that the images are a 'shock' to some people shows just how disconnected they are from reality. They are powerful images but they should not be shocking... The term 'killing' should already embody these emotions without the images.
The emotions that people feel when looking at these images, that's exactly what 'killing a person' means.
I'm sorry, I can try to understand the well-meant intent behind this, but what, and pretend the world is all roses and rainbows?
No. Leave the images on. You first world city folk need to SEE the horror that goes on beyond your ivory towers, some of it enabled by the very work that you do.
If you need to see brutality to empathize with the brutalized, then go ahead and look at the gore. But I think most people are emotionally capable enough to realize that executions aren't pleasant experiences without photo evidence.
There is a 99.9% conviction rate in crimes in China [2] (which is the same as basically having no rule of law) and political prisoners seemingly 'disappear' all the time.
China are known for lying consistently about almost everything and keep a tight lid (as much as they can) on anything that would cause them to 'lose face' both within and without the country so any estimates are likely significantly low.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go... [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps [2]:https://qz.com/246696/chinas-criminal-conviction-rate-is-99-...
Even if it is an optional thread property depending on the nature of the link posted, and is at moderator’s discretion.
You mean well educated?
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; Wikipedia and lots of writeups tracing back to the singular source of Adrian Zenz are not it sadly
This is what cognitive dissonance looks like.
Incorrect, that's what someone on mobile in public transport looks like, but thank you for the benefit of the doubt (?)
I would be still interested in non-Zanz related sourcing to the original comments if you have any
In reality, the world is complicated, the community is divided, and the sinister enemies are overwhelmingly just normal community members who happen to have very different backgrounds and views than you do. People who want to participate in HN discussion need to be able to absorb and tolerate that fact, not try to erase it with cheap and lazy accusations, which is what the vast majority of these comments are. Unbelievably cheap and lazy, in fact.
I absolutely don't mean to pick on you personally—this is a system-wide problem and it's getting worse.
Also, in case anyone is wondering "what about real manipulation? doesn't that exist?" — that is addressed in the guidelines as well: if you're worried about it and think you might be seeing it on HN, email hn@ycombinator.com so we can investigate. We always look into it. It may take us a while to reply, but we will.
There was a long discussion about this the other day if anyone wants more: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25597879.
If you want to use HN as intended, then please put sufficient effort into doing so. Follow the rules, and keep cheap name-calling, nationalistic battle, sinister manipulation fantasy, and all the rest of this out of the threads here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
More explanation downthread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25615903
> The PRC executes between five and ten thousand people per year
Anyone got a source for that claim? Amnesty estimates "1000's" but doesn't actually give a figure and claims to not know it. I'm guessing the worlds biggest human rights org would love to know Matt from substack's source?
For comparison we have the Saudis, Iraq, Egypt and Iran coming in with a few hundred executions each while certain other allied countries refuse to publish and are also hidden away behind government secrecy.
https://www.amnesty.org/en/what-we-do/death-penalty/
I would guess ramblings from some dark Falun Gong blog, as clearly he has no issues quoting them elsewhere on the piece, which on my eyes for as gruesome as the topic might be takes a huge amount of credibility away of him and the piece
It's like whenever people insinuate Tianamen 2.0 will repeat for xyz events like China is trapped in some pre reform time bubble in terms of culture and capabilities. Somehow a modern China with 14T economy is going to have deal with problems the same way as post war China with 200B economy. I've never seen so many seemingly intelligent people go full smooth brain on this subject matter including in this thread. It's particularly hilarious to see people claim their very smart PhD Chinese colleagues being brainwashed, when theses colleagues have experience in both east and west - they're not the ones with singular perspective and the information deficit. It's not their brain washing, it's yours. Chinese diaspora reciprocate stories of how brainwashed their western coworkers are.. Queue reactionary 50c accusations when 50c doesn't operate in English inside or outside GFC.
China is ~50X wealthier since 89, a wealthier China with riot gear and information control doesn't need to Tianamen dissidents haphazardly. A wealthier China with lethal injection doesn't need to shoot people in back of head in open fields and bill family for bullet, nor execute as many when it's economical to lock them away. Which is largely what happens outside of most egregious crimes / drug smuggling charges. Not to mention much of China executes XYZ for bullshit reasons media reporting turns out to be China sentences person to "death sentence with reprieve" - a symbolic sentence that's functionally life imprisonment. Things aren't the best, but they are generally trending in the right direction.
The main difference I found between China- and Western-style brainwashing is that, in general, in the West people have much more negative attitude toward killing others, no matter what narrative is presented. Whenever USA tries to wage a war, there are many demonstrations against the war, and societies at large are anti-war and opposed to all forms of killing.
The Chinese, on the other hand, seem to believe in consequentialism to a larger degree. They argue that sometimes killing is necessary to prevent more killing, for example. This is presented in a way very accessible for a Western person in the wuxia Hero (2002) where it is the main point of the movie.
All in, I consider the Chinese more brainwashed because Western people have access to all kinds of propaganda - American right & left, Russian, Chinese - whereas the Chinese have much more limited sources because the government is putting an enormous amount of effort in controlling the sources of information, and given the size of the population, they're extremely successful.
Without exaggeration, PRC ascent and border resolution is unprecedentedly peaceful relative to human history. In terms of modern dispute management, it's has been the most peaceful. Japan has disputes with 5/5 her maritime neighbours. And she's an island.
> At least in America we (almsot always) give you a trial before we kill you.
lol what is this, modern China has trials too. Maybe one day China's foreign policy will use paperwork to make enhanced interrogation not torture, and droning combatants not random civilians.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Moral calculus is clearer when growing up without basic needs met. But more or less.
>access to all kinds of propaganda
Access to information does not make one more informed. Chinese who live through daily propaganda inherently understands nature of propaganda. Very few trust official news sources. Outside extremely partisan media platforms, western manufactured consent is more subtle and sinister. Most global south diaspora in the west will tell you how absolutely bullshit western reporting is in general, a free fifth estate is frequently seemingly indistinguishable from state propaganda from those who know it intimately.
It's a matter of comprehension. There are more Chinese diaspora multilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.
Chinese information control doesn't generate brainwashed people as much as create political disengagement. The more ideology Xi pushes the less believers there are are outside of the inevitable proportion of fierce nationalists / new generation of little pinks. But much of CHinese society skew old, have through Mao/Deng - they've experienced the spectrum of propaganda and understands when the levers are being adjusted.
Modern western ecosystem generate extreme dogmatism without media literacy. Too many think access to information is the same as being informed. The debates people have on the effects of social media are similar lessons learned through the "lived" propaganda experience of just growing up in China. Recognition of the issue frequently doesn't generalize outside of the domestic realm, i.e. China issues. The fact that this story, a substack post by a non-subject matter expert using biased sources is generating this much engagement is more or less illustrative of the point.
This is a highly emotional topic on both sides, and that makes it more important to follow the rules, not less: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I know all too well what you're experiencing from "seemingly intelligent people", but fulminating not only doesn't help, it reinforces the very things you're complaining about. We all do this, and in that sense we're all creating our own enemies. It's a trap and it takes a lot of work to even begin to become aware of it, but what choice do we have? Certainly if HN is to be a place where people have curious conversation, everyone needs to work on this.
We will probably never know the real number. Please also remember we have under-estimated for a very long time the victims of the Soviet Union until we found out more about the gulags and all other repressive systems they had in place.
So then why use such numbers, when there's no expectation of accuracy?
My high school teachers would have been rather upset at me had I been so liberal with facts
The exact number is not important when considering the massive scale.
GDP is about the only thing we can measure objectively from this country, and air pollution when we point our satellites at them.
Run society like nothing is going on.
There's a reason NK and China made sure there were televised cities with people packed like sardines.
At 99.9% they do become the same.
What is the conviction rate in your country of residence?
What does conviction rate actually mean in the context of the legal process in your country and Japan?
If you don't know the detailed answers to those questions I suggest not making such grand claims about equivalence.
Here is a short radio episode explaining this topic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3s5
Edit for clarity:
The parent has for some reason edited their comment and now it looks like I was defending China's rate in my reply. They originally made an equivalence claim between Japan and China and I wanted to add information explaining that this stat doesn't necessarily mean what it's often at first glance interpreted to mean. The parent then replied to my comment with a reply that suggests their edit was in fact malicious. But I can't be sure of that.
https://qz.com/246696/chinas-criminal-conviction-rate-is-99-...
Why would you do that?
Obviously this sounds bad so in the interest of balance, let me point out that there are many problems with the US system but they are out of this comment.
The sword as they use in Saudi Arabia also seems rather brutish but certainly less painful
That's a completely arbitrary right. Depending on wherever you are from it's not some kind of shared obviousness at all. Some countries actually execute people for possessing hard drugs (which I don't agree with, but that's the reality: don't assume 'rights' are universal). Most of these countries are in South East Asia and have suffered in the opium days so there's a history behind that decision too.
If you did, then executing someone solely for whatever they did makes no sense, because:
1. If you were in their place, you would've done the same thing (no free will).
2. You can imagine what you'd feel if in their place you'd hear the sentence, (then empathy would kick in).
3. “No man is completely useless; he can always serve as a bad example.”
Then in an ideal world, we would have the knowledge, and resources to figure out what went wrong, and "fix" the abusive behaviour in the subject, making them a happy and productive member of society again.
Of course we are living in an imperfect world, so this is not yet a viable solution..
Personally, the dissonance around China has come to an extreme. Is most reporting incorrect, or has CCP become the most efficient and durable totalitarian regime in history? Or is it a form of social engineering that has actual mainstream support in China? Or is it a doomed experiment, just like all other previous authoritarian regimes in history?
There is something quietly unsustainable building up.
Not really, here are just forces at play which would benefit if you thought so
We are in due time for the US and Western public to have a new evil boogyman presented to them. People are getting too unruly these days, so this will help keep them in line
> Or is it a doomed experiment, just like all other previous authoritarian regimes in history?
The Pharaonic system which was may be the most despotic ever created lasted for nearly three millenia. The current age of all “democracies” (~ representatively guided states with some kinds of power separations) pales in comparison. And regarding the robustness of those regimes the only continental country to not crumble when confronted to the shock of the blitzkrieg was the USSR (operation barbarossa lead to the death of 5 millions people in 200 days to give an idea).
I am not trying to defend authoritarian regimes but the questions of which political system is the fairest, which one is the most legitimate, which one is the most stable and which one is the most robust are not the same and should not be conflated
The thing about authoritarian impulses throughout history is that they flare up and, for time, keep a country firmly gripped. Then they relax, and are somewhat forgotten about, even reconciled, until something comes along to trigger it again, in a replica of the abuse cycle. And China is not going to be different in this respect - moments where things get more oppressed for a time, and then moments of relief. The Xi regime has been relatively more oppressive in most recountings by Western sources. This is believable yet also not meaningful, since clearly the apparatus was there before.
IMHO, just because China has gotten this far with its current model says little about tomorrow. There is propaganda coming from all directions these days, so I'm always a little hesitant about "real truth" coming from random sources, but simultaneously suspicious of the official ones too. It's that climate, in itself, that damages the credibility of all regimes; it leaves truth and credit up for grabs to those who can forge a new path that makes the world cohere better. It's hard to defeat the real truth in the long run.
Neither. Most Americans and Europeans have zero idea what life is like in China. The media doesn't help. Anyone who knows something about the country has noticed the rising level of hysteria and propaganda about China since Trump was elected.
If you know the Chinese language, go to Weibo and find announcements of rulings on high profile murder cases, rape cases, etc. Most likely you’ll see that people overwhelmingly call for tougher punishment; comments expressing dissatisfaction with non-capital punishment are often voted to the top.
It’s a different culture, the majority or at least an extremely vocal minority (I highly doubt it’s a minority, but that’s a possibility) expect an-eye-for-an-eye punishment for murder as well as some other morally outrageous crimes. You may find it barbaric or whatever, but it’s a different culture.
See also (on the largest Chinese language Q/A site, like Quora):
https://www.zhihu.com/question/25084350 Why do you support capital punishment?
https://www.zhihu.com/question/25084336 Why do you oppose capital punishment in China?
You can gauge the relative popularity of opinions from the stats alone. Mind you, the user base of that site is relatively well-educated and progressive.
With that out of way, I can objectively say that I’ve never seen cases of political dissent announced anywhere. If you ask me, I’d say such cases, if there are any, wouldn’t be publicized. Additionally, if there were to be such cases, I suspect (private) opinions would be more divided than murder cases but still tilt the “wrong” way. By my observations, people tend to sympathize with little guys adversely affected by corrupt officials or big corps, and you can see that kind of stories retweeted on social media, a lot, as people love to “spread the word to get the attention of higher-ups”; but “human rights activists” are usually met with sneer. The high profile activists tend to be the butt of jokes in my experience.
You can see this on reddit too for american crimes.
China's been persecuting Mongolian, Moslem, Christian, Buddisht minorities for a while and I recently read about concentration camps for Uighurs minorities on the BBC.
I want change, will my purchase decisions have any affect and are boycotts even effective?
Also I have a pretty big influence on procurement where ever I contract. I could bring to discussion the UK gov advisories on using Chinese network and IT equipment.
I just don't know if this is enough or I can do more?
It is just so interesting this year seeing the Trump administration ratchet up the rhetoric pressure on the Chinese government and make strong use of Falon Gong, which are just renowned to be.... Unreliable in their narratives to say the least, as a spearhead and baseline to build a PR campaign against the country
But yeah, lacking a horse on the race, in my case, it is just interesting seeing how the knots of war are slowly tied
China is like a facelifted third reich turned inwards.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Trigger warning: facts ahead. The lead image is a woman executed for "intentional homicide" (that's what the sign says, "intentional homicide - her name")
The article makes a handful of irresponsible accusations. It claims China is executing "probably many more via militarized kangaroo courts," insinuates China is doing "“social cleansing” of undesireables like petty drug abusers, liquidation of badly-behaved members of minority groups, or outright political murders of people within the CCP hierarchy", and mislabels China's legal system as "state terror", getting almost poetic with its description of how it imagines this operates: "Effective systems of state terror rely on a dance between the known and the unknown in the mind of the public," which seems like the opposite of the very obvious "known" of a public execution where the criminal carries sign expressing their bona fides, and flies in the face of the author's own description of "Regular judicial personnel handle identity confirmation and terminal legal dispositions".
So where could this invention of "state terror" and all these imagined tentacular bogeymen of "state terror" come from? Perhaps from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which the author neglects to mention. Or perhaps from the period of Japanese occupation and the mass killings and disappearances of ordinary folk that the author again neglects to mention. Where does the author get his (or her, it's hard to tell if it's a pseudonym or not) picture of China? One possibility is biased Western media which for the last few years has worked its readership into a frothy fervor of China hatred, mostly based on such misrepresentations and lazy accusations. Which if the author has his (or her) biased view of China from the media he consumes, presents a further interesting possibility.
It seems that a "dance between the known and the unknown in the mind of the public" would pretty well describe the constant state of confusion and conflict instigated and inflamed by the media apparatus of certain unnamed "free" countries. Perhaps the author is projecting his experience of such "state terror" onto a place he doesn't know about (but feels justified to misrepresent and smear), in some sort of "fantasy idyll dystopia" that lets him feel he has it lucky to be where he is?
The essay also expends a paragraph on Nazis and Soviets, and spends quite a bit of time imagining the dastardly inner workings of the state he fabricates, and how the dogma of spreading responsibility for illegitimate killings onto as many people as possible ensures their coercibility. Hmm, sounds like the typical blackmail-type coercion engaged in by state security and intelligence organizations, and their proxy sex crime rings, in many unnamed "free" countries. Again, possibly the author is projecting his own experience of this kind of "coercive covert control".
Especially likely given the vast majority of Chinese see their state's legitimacy as totally solid and, if anything, complain of the forgivingness of their punitive systems, rather than their harshness. To the reader unacquainted with Chinese history beyond the ancient anodyne depictions of flowery courts, silk-clad concubines, and scurrying sneaky eunuchs....this bloodlust (or "Justice boner"?) might seem unaccountable and odd. But a closer look at Chinese history (even 20C Chinese history) will quickly correct such ahistorical readers of their delusions. They gave the world the 20C's bloodiest revolution. And it was a popular revolution, not a "illegitimate tyrannical crackdown", so the people are pretty accustomed to using blood and death to reshape things how they want.
I know it's a compelling and so...
I'm not sure about this one, but maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in.
I would have thought the same thing, but my wife is from Slovakia and I was surprised to learn that no such thing happened. It seems that everyone was involved in government somehow, and everybody was just doing their thing to live a decent life.
The real violence came from grabbing the new opened up market, and so trying to grab as much of the newly opened market and money as possible. Not so much revenge of what happened because of the government.
I definitely want to know if this was the case in other countries too.
I am still cautious because they are a centralized platform. But glad to see they allow this type of stuff.
Please review the site guidelines and use HN in the intended spirit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Nationalistic flamewar is not ok here. Slurring groups or individuals who disagree with you is not ok here. Cartoonish accusations about communist agents and spies secretly manipulating the thread is explicitly against the site guidelines. It is also, frankly, foolish and a little embarrassing—anyone reading this thread or any other, whose emotions aren't pre-inflamed on the topic, can easily see what's going on: people with different backgrounds and therefore different views disagree with each other and feel strongly. I've studied this problem in depth for years; I've pored over voting data, flagging data, and lots of other data, and I can tell you that the evidence not only confirms that, it's probably the most solid evidence of any kind I've ever examined [1].
The value of this site is curiosity [2]. The goal is curious conversation. When the needle goes this badly into the red, curious conversation is impossible. Worse, we get the internet thread equivalent of a world war. That's a grandiose analogy because internet forums are so trivial—but the emotional dynamics are not trivial. The anger and accusation here are the forces which, in the extreme, make people to try to destroy each other.
One can derive a significant conclusion: if HN is to have a chance at achieving its mandate—which is in all our interests, because it's only that which makes the place interesting—then we all need to work on these dynamics in ourselves.
Here's one way to do that: don't see the other person as an enemy, a demon [3], a communist, or a brainwashed Westerner. See them as someone who doesn't have the same information you have. Share information with the intention to communicate, not defeat the other. Don't expect to persuade them—deep things like this can only shift slowly. When someone responds with information that you feel is false or, worse, might have some truth to it, tolerate the painful flare-up that will inevitably surge in your system. Wait for it to subside—don't let it power your response. Remember that you're talking not only to one person who perhaps strongly disagrees with you—you are broadcasting to an entire community of readers. Practicing these skills is the only way to make your case to the community that can actually do any good, so even if there are brainwashed Westerners or sinister manipulators or communist spies, it's what we need to be doing anyway [4].
[1] As I've said elsewhere, the odds that someone who was posting about Julia in 2015 is a communist agent who was planted to manipulate HN round to zero. That, in the median case, is who you're talking to here.
There are years' worth of explanations about this problem at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme..., for anyone who wants more.
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] This is the "...