That includes making your substantive points without degenerating into nationalistic flamewar, ideological flamewar, partisan flamewar, or any flamewar. Edit name-calling and swipes out of your comments. Don't attack other users. Comment in the spirit of curious exchange, not smiting enemies. The latter is tedious and uninteresting, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
In 2019, Frances Hui, a student at Emerson College in Boston, wrote an opinion piece for the student newspaper titled "I am from Hong Kong, not China” (1) and she was subjected to doxxing and death threats:
The most jarring comment came from a Chinese student at Emerson, who made Hui’s personal Facebook posts public. In one post, he wrote a comment that translates to: “Whomever opposes my greatest China, no matter how far they are, must be executed.”(2)
The student should have been expelled and Emerson should have an unequivocal statement condemning this sort of harassment over any topic.
The Chinese government has seeped its way into nearly every facet of American life. This is most visible in Disney movies (see: the Mulan and Lion King remakes) but it is happening to many companies and universities where they use our own greed against us. I hope America will wake up and realize we have fighting a hidden war, but we are so divided I doubt we'll notice until we've lost, if we notice at all.
It's terrible but, it's brilliant too. Like, I don't like it but it's also amazing. It makes a confounding effect on how I should feel about these things.
It's like, don't hate the player, hate the game? I do hate the game tho.
Well, the old saying was that the communists would hang the capitalists with rope sold by the latter to the former. It seems like the capitalists always seem to keep ahead of the communists though.
You mean you want US to be even more jingoistic? It won't be an easy task for sure as I'm reading propaganda pieces almost every day for a last few years in a places that earlier were almost politics free (ars technica, hn...) - regular new sites not to mention.
If it requires fighting a war that has been "hidden" it's pretty jingoistic. Especially given the hand-waving everyone does here to call China a despotic autocratic regime despite the US having more prisoners overall and per-capita, and let's not even begin to compare foreign policies. Which country has overthrown more democratically elected governments? I've lived in several impacted by the US.
>China a despotic autocratic regime despite the US having more prisoners overall and per-capita
You A) don't know that, because stats coming out of China aren't to be trusted and executions and disappearances are common B) are conveniently ignoring the well documented reeducation/concentration camps where the only crime is being a Muslim minority.
China is modern day Nazi Germany, they're not even really communist, they have government controlled corporations and operate in a capitalist system. In many ways they're fascist and even revere Hitler in their school teachings. Taiwan at least has socialized healthcare, in China you have to pay for it. If they are "communist" they're doing a shit job of it.
On the surface, this seems like FUD or at least exaggerated. Anecdotally, Americans across the spectrum are at least weary of China if not openly hostile. China does have a lot of corporate influence at the upper levels and corporations do pull many of the levers of government here, but on an individual level, I don't think it's that's dramatic. Although this topic has been sensationalized a lot, personally I don't think China is as successful as they sometimes seem.
I feel compelled to clarify this: Hong Kong is part of China, and has been since 1997. Saying that Hong Kong is not part of China is like saying that Texas is not part of the United States because at one point they seceded. These days, Texas has no more right to secede from the US than Hong Kong from China, even if there are people in both territories who would prefer full independence. Consequently, to a Chinese person, hearing "I'm from Hong Kong, not China" would be like hearing "I'm from Texas, not the United States" as an American.
Granted, someone saying the latter should never be met with death threats, just like the former!
Note that the sovereignty of Hong Kong is not as clear cut, because history.
Hong Kong was given to the Britain by three treaties in the 19th century (1842 Treaty of Nanking, 1860 Convention of Peking, 1898 The Second Convention of Peking), and the true copies of all treaties are in the hand of Taiwan, which were brought to Taiwan by the KMT government during its retreat to Taiwan before 1950.
If the declaration behind Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China (the Sino–British Joint Declaration of 1984) is revoked, arguably it could be contested if Hong Kong should belong to the holder of the bearer shares of the three treaties, Taiwan. (See previous discussion [1]).
And in the most recent six-monthly report on Hong Kong published on 14 December 2021 [2], the UK government stated that China is not complying with the Sino-British Joint Declaration:
With China now in a state of ongoing non-compliance with its international obligations under the UN-registered Sino-British Joint Declaration, the UK will continue to work with international partners to hold China to its legally binding obligations on Hong Kong. Upholding the promises it entered into freely is in the best interests of Hong Kong’s stability and prosperity.
China is not-complying the declaration behind Hong Kong’s 1997 handover to China.
The way Texans talk of being independent is actually kind of endearing I think. I think being offended or threatened by such talk would require an incredible feeling of insecurity.
If you're intending to imply that the British didn't need to hand over Hong Kong because China changed rulers, I'm afraid that's not really how the law works. And, in any case, the negotiation of 1984 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-British_Joint_Declaration) between Britain and the PRC set up Hong Kong to become a PRC territory in 1997.
That's not quite the equivalence. This is more like you having a piece of paper from the old owner of a property showing that you're entitled to passage and showing it to the new owner.
The point is that no matter how many laws get passed, you could very easily see yourself as from Hong Kong, not China, and you shouldn't get death threats for saying as such.
This is totally separate from the point you were making. You can say you're from Hong Kong, but it's part of China. That you shouldn't get death threats should go without saying.
Texas does not have a special one country, two systems status and Hong Kong does until 2047. The fact that the communist party completely ignores this fact does not make it go away. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_country,_two_systems
Yes, thanks for the clarification. I was trying to make my comment specifically about secession - debunking the notion that Hong Kong is not part of China. The HK Basic Law, the same document that guarantees the "One country, two systems" approach, starts with the sentence "The Hong Kong Special Administrative Region is an inalienable part of the People's Republic of China."
I agree that the mainland government acted rashly. The forced implementation of the national security law definitely violates the spirit, if not the law here, and understandably a lot of people were alienated by this move. That said, the Basic Law does provide a provision for the implementation of such a law (Article 23), and there's ample wiggle room for the governments involved to argue that they haven't yet demolished the "one country, two systems" approach as yet.
While those in Hong Kong still enjoy more freedoms then China mainland... locking people up for only holding up signs and chanting (not excusing those who were violent)... has scared off Taiwan. No one wants to vote for the "Patriots" and now those in HK live their lives to try not to go to jail.
Nations are made by wars, not "Basic Laws". Read the history. Whether HK is a nation or not depends on how strong their people's will is to not be Chinese and to go to war for it - "Would rather be annihilated than being Chinese." Apparently they don't have it, but the jury of History might still be out.
I don't know why people single out China for this when the US has invaded, couped, bombed, and otherwise helped install right-wing military juntas globally. Where was self-determination for Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos?
China's priority is national security, and given the track record of western liberal democracies it is not unreasonable. As I recall we had a civil war the last time states tried seceding.
I’m not American, I don’t agree with the Vietnam war and I think the civil war was an ethical difficult decision. That was 150 years ago so not really sure why it is relevant.
Ha, I mean, that's not weird at all. Texans say that all the time.
Six flags theme parks are quite literally named after the six different flags that have flown over Texas as a nod to it being an independent entity regardless of which larger nation currently lays claim to it.
While I more or less agree with you, I think in this particular case using Hong Kong instead of China MIGHT have some validity due to the entirely different system a person grew up in.
Saying you are from Hong Kong gives you a ton of information that would be lost versus China
> Anecdotally, Americans across the spectrum are at least weary of China if not openly hostile.
I don't think so. Just look at what Americans buy. Money talks. Lip service doesn't count.
>on an individual level, I don't think it's that's dramatic.
the frog just doesn't notice the boiling. For example how discussing Chinese origin of covid got branded as racist in the public mentality - i think that branding is a great PR success pulled by China which as a result turned public attention away from and severely eroded public support for covid origin investigation especially in the earlier days of pandemic when evidence/witnesses may have still been available.
Discussing the Chinese origin of COVID got branded because racists were using it as an excuse to attack Asians in America, including those who weren't of Chinese descent or whose families had immigrated many decades ago.
Yes, if you accuse the waitress at a Chinese restaurant of being responsible for COVID, you are racist.
911 also was used as pretext to attack Muslims/MidEasterners in America, yet discussing Afghanistan/Saudi/Al-Qaeda/Islamic extremism origins of the attack didn't get branded as racist.
The firm association in the public mind between the attacks and origins, as your comment for example demonstrates, is the part of that great PR success by China.
Your memory of 2001-2007 or so is very different from mine. I recall the term "raghead", attacks, and the lovely picture of fully armed men in body armor "protesting" a mosque in Dallas. And yes, that was racist.
It is worse than that. We are in a pandemic that has already caused millions of deaths, billions of hours of manpower spent, trillions of dollars wasted and an immeasureable amount of mental anguish. It's negative effects can be said to be worse than many a war by any significant measure you can find.
Yet even just bringing up the leading consensus in science as to the origins of Covid and its transmission to humans is all but taboo in "educated" circles. Same goes for discussing the role the WHO played and all evidence we have as to why it played that role. Any discussion of why this pandemic happened and that the nation where it originated has blocked all independent investigation to investigate this; bringing it up is not done.
The "leading consensus in science as to the origins of Covid" is that it was a natural zoonosis. There's very little support for the lab leak conspiracy theory in the scientific community.
Yet this conspiracy theory is discussed ad nauseam in the American press, contrary to what you're saying.
The reason why this theory has become so popular in the US is that it distracts from the disastrous response to the pandemic in the US.
China essentially beat the virus by April 2020, and has had almost no cases or deaths since. Yet nearly two years later, the US is still struggling. As it says in Matthew, "first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."
>Yet this conspiracy theory is discussed ad nauseam in the American press
Please point to any major media discussing the Wuhan coronavirus GoF research involving human subjects (the EcoAliance's approved by NIH grant application is pretty clear about it).
> China essentially beat the virus by April 2020, and has had almost no cases or deaths since.
China has paid a huge economic cost for its zero COVID policy, not many other countries could or would afford such a solution. They aren’t the envy of the world (let alone America) in this regard.
The Chinese economy did well because of the zero-CoVID policy. The policy allowed China to reopen businesses in March-April 2020, and to avoid widespread lockdowns since.
> The Chinese economy did well because of the zero-CoVID policy. The policy allowed China to reopen businesses in March-April 2020, and to avoid widespread lockdowns since
Much of that GDP growth was still tearing down and building apartment blocks. It isn't real. Again, they are completely closed up now. They are "locked down" even if they aren't stuck in their houses anymore. I wouldn't want to be living in Beijing right now (where I was from 2007-2016), it isn't a very fun life these days.
This is just another variation of the old argument that China's growth is fake.
> They are "locked down" even if they aren't stuck in their houses anymore.
Beijing is not under lockdown. Pretty much everything is open, and has been for more than a year. There are testing requirements to enter Beijing (which is something that's particular to Beijing), but that's it.
> This is just another variation of the old argument that China's growth is fake.
China admits that a large part of their GDP is building and tearing things down. There is no "fakeness" about it, it just is what it is.
> Beijing is not under lockdown. Pretty much everything is open, and has been for more than a year. There are testing requirements to enter Beijing (which is something that's particular to Beijing), but that's it.
Beijing is not under lockdown, it just isn't an open city right now.
Given the latter half, I think that's *wary (cautious) rather than 'weary' (fatigued, fed up)?
I'm not American, but something I've noticed on YouTube is that 'import' is a euphemism for 'Chinese crap' - probably more prevalent because there's more of a US manufacturing base to begin with, but the funny thing is when it's imported from somewhere else that's respected it's a German tool, or Japanese for example, but 'import' seems to mean 'imported from China', heh.
(I'm not claiming I'm above it nor offended by it, just caught my attention because 'import' isn't an adjective to me and the usage amused me. It wouldn't really catch on in the UK I don't think, because so much is 'import' to begin with, whether Chinese or not.)
Watch back to the future. Doc brown from the 50s "no wonder it broke it's all from Japan". Marty from 85 says "what do you mean all the best stuff comes from Japan".
I remember when Vizio made garbage tvs. This is more of a delayed and earned reputation thing. Also product market fit.
As an anecdote in the 90s and 00s "import" cars usually meant Japanese cars, especially ones not available on the US market. This wasn't really a negative connotation, and there was a whole scene for high performance "import tuners". Just interesting to your point that in context "import" implies a specific country.
In years past, Japanese import was considered synonymous with cheap crap. That reputation changed over time, eventually becoming associated with high quality. Chinese imports now having that reputation doesn't really have much to do with how Americans feel about the Chinese government.
This has been the policy of the USA for decades (e.g. pentagon script approval, military subsidies for professional sports (in exchange for an antitrust exemption) etc. Is this really any different?
This comment is not intended to praise or support the CCP, but just to provide some context. I think the US government should be staying out of content as well.
You're right, from the point of view of Americans it is OK to influence every aspect of life in other countries, but if the reverse occurs it is the end of the world. Given that China is quickly becoming the richest country of the world, it is just normal they will have more and more influence in American society, just looking from the economic point of view. Consider for example how Japan started having a cultural influence around the world in the 80s. The same will happen with China.
I look at the underlying data. The news is full of excitable suggestion because that gets attention.
China's managed to lift a huge number of people out of poverty and deserves credit for that. They did it at a terrific cost in human life and rights and they deserve opprobrium for that, in particular for the continued and now increasing level. We have plenty of examples from history that such an approach is not sustainable.
Regardless, if you look at the numbers the odds of significant further growth are dubious. China remains quite poor on per capita GDP, even on a PPP basis it is in the lower half of countries. It has an enormous unemployment problem, and a huge demographic overhang. Corruption, false statistics, and cronyism remain dominant in the economy and government, more reminiscent of a small state than a massive one, and all of which make it very difficult to manage large shocks.
I'm not saying the PRC is some benign kumbaya entity. But they have deep structural weaknesses that are not discussed much because it's more useful to various people to point elsewhere.
> China remains quite poor on per capita GDP, even on a PPP basis it is in the lower half of countries.
This is exactly why China has such a huge growth ahead. Just to get to the level of countries like Australia this will make their economy several times the size of US.
By the way, US fertility rate is 1.63, far lower than the replacement rate of 2. This means that the US is also under a generational population decline.
China’s official fertility rate is 1.7, but there is evidence they’re (of course) lying about the data and it’s closer to 1.3 [1]. The US can support a lower total fertility rate with immigration and its existing wealth and dollar reserve status. China cannot.
Yeah it doesn't help there's like a 1:3 female to male ratio, even if they wanted to meet replacement rate, thanks to one child policy incentivizing parents get abortions or committing infanticide until they had a son, they don't have enough wombs to go around. A lot of angry desperate young males though, which is causing different societal problems, kidnappings of females from other countries, etc.
This cuts both ways. The problem is that the US is already developed and the lower fertility rate will only keep up what they have. China has a lot of people who are, in this generation, coming out of poverty, and this will continue for decades, until the possible downsides of fertility show up.
Moreover, the US is changing its immigration policies exactly at the moment they need it most, which seems to be another tragic mistake.
“Whomever opposes my greatest China, no matter how far they are, must be executed.”
originated from East Han (BC 35). It has been popularized by recent patriot movies.
"In my world there's always a place for you; you can disagree with me; you can even insult me; I will not fire back because that is your freedom of expression, however
In your world there's no place for me; you want to eliminate me and even my family from the world just because I disagree with your government or your ideology; this is puzzling isn't it?"
What's your point? That doesn't exclude US Americans from offering criticism. We are not all one entity, there's ~300M of us. Many of us had nothing to do with Vietnam and I can damn near guarantee wouldn't repeat that decision today.
While flawed in practice, I think the so-called "domino theory" had some valid roots in the so-called Paradox of Tolerance.
It's hard to dispute one historical aspect of communism in particular, namely that it cannot tolerate competing ideologies. The only way to implement communism is through the use of force; it's not something free people will adopt voluntarily. I may think of myself as a tolerant person, but if you have to stick a gun in my back to make me practice your ideology -- which you do -- why should I be required to tolerate that?
It can be argued that it's a moral responsibility to stop the spread of such a pathological system of thought by any means necessary, just as if we were fighting an infectious disease. I won't go that far personally, but others in America did, and the wars in Korea and Viet Nam were the result. Not so much an apology as an (admittedly oversimplified) explanation.
Of course you have just hoisted yourself on your own petard: it’s hard to dispute that American capitalism cannot tolerate competing ideologies, evidenced by (e.g.) The Vietnam War and Korean War. But now I am just repeating my original comment.
You also have another glaring problem to address: it is very easy and simple to tolerate the kind of socialism/communism where an independent nation state wants to use it’s own national resources instead of opening it up to foreign private interests. No one is harmed by that.[1] I guess the CIA just had a very eccentric interpretation of Popper.
[1] Unless you want to get real Red Scare and concoct some crazy theory about how those small nation states are really puppets of the Soviet Union who will use those resources to eventually nuke the Free World… and therefore War is Peace, Paradox of Tolerance and all that.
Comparisons to capitalism as an abstract ideology notwithstanding, you do have to use violence to keep people from voluntarily buying from and selling to each other.
There is a reason why the Communist Party of the USA is a thing and the Capitalist Party of the PRC is not. They are willing to use violence within their own borders to suppress competing ideologies in the absence of tangible criminal offenses, while we generally are not.
And then there's the simple question of whether more people die trying to sneak into your country or out of it. Moral relativists run into serious trouble with that one.
You have to use violence in order to stop people from nationalising their own resources instead of opening themselves up to foreign corporate penetration. The US federal state had to use violence to suppress the socialist Black Panthers.
I could go on like this all day. You have no legs to stand on when your claim is that capitalism is just voluntarism.
I don’t think that I am. My flagged reply was to a comment about the difference between the “liberal” and the “authoritarian” mindset. Some university has not invaded any country. In fact it hasn’t even done anything wrong—it has just condemned political persecution, which is just admirable if anything.
Could a reply to some statement like “the X mindset” be about ideologies in general and not directly about what we just read in the linked article? Several replies from the top of the thread? No. Surely not.
well, at least it seems like you understand why people flagged your comment in the first place. Maybe in the future don't bring up unnecessary generalizations that muddy the discussion?
It's pretty clear that in the context of the comment the usage of small-l liberal was referring to the classical ideal, not the homonym label misused in contemporary American politics.
It comes down to a simple formula: are people learning and appreciating freedom faster than it's being diluted by people who are ignorant or disdainful of freedom?
There's no fundamental reason one rate must remain above the other. Education, immigration trends, business, and culture all play a part.
But once the anti-freedom are greater in number than the pro-freedom, then freedom democratically self-destructs.
Non-free governments don't have this problem, because they aren't democracies.
In other words, losing freedom can be peaceful and even consistent with the principles of freedom (you're free to give up your freedom). But getting freedom requires some non-free (or at least non-democratic) things to happen.
Jefferson said "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty". Which is probably one reason why we now have efforts to read him out of the discussion.
The drive to power and control seems to be part of human nature, and it is always finding new ways to organize and express itself. And because freedom is a matter of human choices, yeah, there is always the danger that people will choose to become unfree.
I think freedom has the enormous advantages of being more effective and more motivating. The free are better able to innovate, and to correct their mistakes. They have a better moral basis, which motivates stronger action over longer periods of time. The free can rely on the power of the individual, which mounts en masse to an enormous force, while the unfree are ultimately always awaiting direction.
The greatest risks to a free society are internal, the forces which erode freedom of speech and thought. Liberal democracies have a very strong track record against totalitarian societies. For the US, I think the decline in free speech and the growth of ideological thinking is a serious problem, and we may hit a point of lock-in where people cannot criticize the regime. Many corners of the country are already at this point, and have been for a while, and those zones are spreading. It doesn't help that resistance to this has coalesced under a cult of a crazed personality.
I think freedom will win out, but it won't be easy, and we'll have to work at it. Probably always.
Yes, it is. We all like to believe in ideals like turn the other cheek, take the high road, welcome opposing views no matter how extreme etc. Looking back through human history though, the only way to combat intolerance has been to be intolerant yourself. Freedoms need to be defended, sometimes with blood. Look at WW2 for example. Appeasement didn't go very far, direct action did.
Freedom is never absolute. You can respect other people's freedom to disagree with you, but not their freedom to kill you. You can choose to only stop them from the latter, but not the former.
Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over. Limiting freedom (eg you can't kill others) can mean more freedom overall as more of the population are able to exercise their (limited) freedoms.
> Basically absolute freedom means less freedom overall because the strongest take over.
Am I the only one to see an interesting parallel to "copyleft" (e.g, [L]GPL) licenses (and a refutation of the "It's evil, viral, anti-free!" objections to them) here?
But should you respect someone's freedom to vote? What if they vote against freedom? And then what if that leads to the same result as them killing you?
You have no choice but to respect that freedom. The only alternative is to establish a tyranny of your own -- that's the only way you can tell people how to vote.
Democracies can suicide. The Weimar Republic did (though notice that Hitler never actually won a popular majority vote).
This problem was exactly what the American Founders had in mind as they shaped their Constitution. They wanted to identify the ways a government could be turned against its own people, and create barriers against those attacks. The US doesn't trust majoritarian government, which is why it isn't exactly a democracy. Items like the Bill of Rights, and features like the separation of powers, are intended both to secure liberties and hamstring oppression.
(The Federalist Papers are a fascinating discussion of all this.)
But at the end of the day, constitutional features can only slow down an oppressive majority. If a majority wants to dominate a minority, eventually they are going to find a way. The only real security for freedom, over long term, is to raise up a people that think and feel and act in those ways that are consistent with freedom.
I believe the answer is 'yes' and it's also true for most 'noble' causes.
Analogous to this quote from George Bernard Shaw:
"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man ."
This reminds me of a bit of trivia from Italian politics.
A few years after WWII, a senator from the main post-Fascist party greeted a fellow senator from the Socialist party (who had fought for the Resistance), saying: "We fought gallantly on opposite sides, now we can shake hands". The other replied: "Yeah, then we won so you could become a senator. If you had won, I'd still be a prisoner".
Feels the same to me, makes me wonder who'd ever disagree with it. Does the person this was written in response to really feel like it is false and that people should not be allowed to exist if they think certain things?
I'm confused by the last paragraph, out of my own naïveté, do HKers 'identify' as 'Chinese' then, just not 'from China'?
I suppose it's not surprising when someone's when someone adopts their parents' culture etc. despite being born abroad (e.g. self-describing as Indian without being a citizen/born there) - so makes sense, I just hadn't realised.
> do HKers 'identify' as 'Chinese' then, just not 'from China'?
If they were born in HK and raised there, they would call themselves a HKer (香港人) from Hong Kong. It's highly unlikely they would say they are from 'China' because in their eyes China is Mainland China (大陆/中国) and there is negativity associated with it.
Confusingly, my friends whose parents are from Hong Kong and were born in the UK identify themselves as 'British Born Chinese' rather than 'British Born HKer'.
I use Cantonese or English when in Hong Kong. Speaking Mandarin there, when you look East Asian, is just asking for trouble if you are in wrong part of town.
The English word "Chinese" describes three different things:
- a state (the PRC)
- an ethnic group (Han)
- a culture
The government of the PRC will gladly conflate those things serves their interests.
Most people in Hongkong would definitely identify as culturally and ethnically Chinese. That third item is ... a point of contention. I expect the situation in Taiwan is similar.
On the other side, it is possible to be nationally Chinese but neither culturally nor ethnically so -- see the Tibetans or Uighur for examples.
For those unfamiliar with the story here’s a short summary from his Change petition:
> Zhihao Kong, a student at Purdue University, posted a letter online in 2020 commemorating the victims of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. Shortly after he received a call from his parents, back home in China, saying they had been contacted by China's Ministry of State Security—the department responsible for national intelligence and managing domestic dissidents. Kong's parents told him the Ministry officers said he needed to cease his activism or he and his family would face trouble with the Chinese government. Other Chinese students at Purdue then began harassing Kong and threatening to report him to the Chinese government for his activism, which could potentially endanger both his life and the lives of his family.
Getting the actual opinion of anyone in China (or Hong Kong if you’re a worker and well integrated) is very difficult.
There is a lot of reading between the lines necessary because of the network of reporting from other Chinese that’s worldwide.
Note: those actual opinions are not necessarily “life is baaaad what a niiightmare”, they can be quite nuanced just like anywhere else. Something as simple as “I kind of liked that unsanctioned rendition of the Chinese national anthem” could have the same consequences for them and their family as a total denouncement of the Party.
Single party control, coupled with a constitution with articles that undermine all the other parts of the constitution, can really impact the experience to express anything.
Honestly the problem in my experience was the opposite: many American friends who visited me in Beijing expected it to be just as free as the west and were surprised when Google Facebook etc… didn’t work. This was well beyond the years where the GFW blocks were implemented. Come on, they expecting China to be openlike Japan or Thailand?
Everything I could possible write about that is covered on that page, especially the Misconceptions section.
The nearly non-existent line between public and private sector in China really derails all possible discussion and comparison to equivalences outside of China, but regardless I just don't find what goes on in China to be different enough when we tolerate the same things from the private sector that runs our daily life. It isn't different enough for me to draw the line at "but our government isn't doing it".
That's a pretty clear line... On the one side, even if the US government is not adequately regulating private companies today, it could begin doing so tomorrow, or if it's a question of legality, any individual or group could bring a case against those companies, and have it decided on by a judge who can actually make an impartial decision.
On the other side, you have a single entity which answers only to itself, and makes the law. There is no-one "above" that entity, even in principle. If you don't like the things it's doing... tough.
> Getting the actual opinion of anyone in China ... is very difficult.
Is it really that different in America (or the "west" in general)? Most of us have become very guarded in what opinions we share in the past few years.
That’s because people are aiming for single party control right now, in the US.
The difference is that expressing an opinion to another American abroad just means you cant sleep with them. It doesn't cause the federal or municipal police to track down your family for intimidation, or the private sector to galvanize excision of them either. For the individual that voiced there is just a small risk of being disassociated with the person you said something to, and if it was digital there is a small risk of getting fired or disassociated from institutions you were a part of. Very small risk. Maybe greater over the following decade, for something you said now.
Of course you have a point, but I just think that's a conveniently selective interpretation of the reality. I mean just take blackness for example, you don't even have to say anything for your life to be fundamentally undermined by the federal and municipal police. But what I think is more significant is Western foreign policy, freedom of self-determination exists in the weakest sense of freedom to adhere to Western hegemony. Just take Hong Kong for example, the only reason it exists is because the Chinese refused to continue the opium trade with the British. That's where the Opium Wars come from. And that continues to be the modus operandi; silencing of indigenous voices, funding of anti-communist sentiment in South America and South East Asia, arms sales to the Middle East, fabrication of evidence of WMDs to start wars, funding of anti-capitalist sentiment in Africa.
Of course us western, middle-class white people think we're free, we think what we have is normal. Nothing's prodding us to question the status quo.
I chose examples also available to black Americans. Of the example I chose, the biggest risk is just not being able to sleep with the American that person met abroad. The federal and municipal police are not going to track down their family stateside for harassment.
I think you extrapolated waaaaay more than either of us were talking about beforehand. We're talking about the comparisons to what happened in the article.
Its a tricky discussion since many of us want to make these comparisons between the countries, its very tempting to, but without narrowly tailoring the conversation it just derails everything.
In that point I agree, I can simultaneously acknowledge that having any somewhat coherent process of law is a relatively new phenomenon in China. It's like they're playing a game of paperwork and Rule of Law to appease trading partners and investors.
Single party control is effectively party-less control, and the due process is not necessary, but there is a future convenience to making decisions seem less arbitrary while getting the behaviors they want from all persons.
It's a very weak response from Purdue. Zhihao Kong was bullied and followed around on campus for commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen masacre. He was called a CIA agent by fellow Purdue students and was reported to the Chinese state, who attempted to silence him by forcefully leaning on his family in Hong Kong.
The identities of the bullies is well known and the extent of abuse is borderline criminal. There should be only one remedy: imediate expulsion of any agent of repression of the Chinese state.
The statement clearly fall short of what is required, it simply wants to appease those outraged by threatening with vague punishments, without risking the large revenue from Chinese students.
While it doesn't have the immediate satisifaction of a twitter pitchfork mob, I appreciate a measured approach IF there is serious (albeit slow moving) action taken. The last thing we need is an equally impactful response in the opposite direction. He's the head of the school and needs to balance a wide range of perspectives and demands. The context has been set so now I'm watching to see if the actions back it up. If not, you're right in your immediate assessment, but this has big geo-political implications and needs to take time. It's similar to the Meng Wanzhou extradition fiasco; she was under house arrest in a mansion while 2 Canadians languished in a Chinese prison. IT was completely unfair and imbalanced but we had to go through our process, not stoop to theirs.
>>The last thing we need is an equally impactful response in the opposite direction.
We need a MORE impactful response form this side, but it does not have to be instant.
And you are correct that it has to be carefully investigated, soundly based, and measured for maximum effect.
Ultimately, if you are a "student" here and are participating in state power projection, spying, or abuse of anyone merely participating in protected activities, we need to expel you not only from the school but from the country.
Would China tolerate US "students" on their land spying, attempting to project US power, or abusing others on their land? Not for a second, and we shouldn't either.
Moreover, stronger actions need to be taken to provide consequences to the CCP for attempting this kind of nonsense.
The CCP also needs to stop it from home, because the repeated spy cases of Chinese ppl in academia have already tainted the reputation of ALL Chinese students. I'm sure it is already shutting them out of interesting internships that might also use even CUI (Controlled Unclassified Data) in unrelated parts of the business.
China is banking on the hunch that it's impossible to rhetorically separate "China" and "Chinese", and that western powers or their citizens will fuck up and engage in hate crimes or war crimes that...
1. Unify the country around the People's Republic of China generally, and Xi Jinping specifically
2. Damage or destroy any alliances with western powers that China's neighbors might have
The absolute worst thing we can do right now is knee-jerk our way into blowback, and a lot of the reaction here seems to be that we should. In fact, I even read a report[0] stating that a lot of the recent government attempts to fish out Chinese spies have devolved into fishing expeditions against Chinese grad students in America. I'm tempted to say we're doing it wrong, but it could also be the case that we're just making the least-worst mistakes right now.
Just imagine the headlines if they did do something more impactful like taking a stance and expelling the relevant students. Many headlines would be conflating this expulsion with racism and who knows what other rhetoric. Not only that, but the university would be sued for years if they did this. Also, this guy would get fired in at-most a year. Not necessarily for his stance, but for rocking the boat and bringing so much attention to the university.
People don't realize just how much the rules are stacked in favor of bullies.
yup, abusive, and stalking. Including on HN - every single HN post that opposed CCP actions gets resistance from the handful of guaranteed downvotes to verbose advocacy. Russia has been the undisputed world champion of dezinformatsyia for over a century, but it looks like CCP is coming for their title , especially with their push into the US academic-military realm (and they are shameless about copying US tech, surprising for a culture that values face-saving).
Perhaps. Indeed, I haven't done a controlled study.
It has just jumped out at me how consistently and reliably items on that topic generate those responses. It's also consistent with available open-source info on ops of the CCP and Russian govt. which include social media trolling to promote their POV, undermine rival POVs, and/or sow discord (and considering the ROI on such ops, they'd be negligent to not do them considering there's no resistance).
In any case, I'll take a closer look before commenting.
I don't mean to pile on, but this is exactly the point: what jumps out at each of us is precisely the stuff that we find most disagreeable. If you had the opposite preference, opposite stuff would jump out. The effect that this has is very strong, and the conclusions it produces are completely unreliable. (I'm talking about all of us here, not you personally!)
I'm not expressing an opinion or any information on US-originated psyops as it applies to foreign social media.
As you, I'd expect that it exists, but I have little information on the extent. I'd assume it is competent, but it isn't relevant here, since the overall topic is about CCP operations on the grounds of a US university and operations here in a US-based online forum.
If you have information of interest on US ops in foreign (to the US) social media, please post it!
Perdue President Mitch Daniels said “Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere,” but there is no indication that the students have been expelled. The statement is bizarre and nonsensical if the students are not expelled.
"If those students can be identified..." It sounds from the statement that they don't know who they are at this point. This sounds to me like an initial statement before a full investigation has completed. I would also say that for the rights of other students, there should be some kind of fair process to ensure that the accused are fairly treated.
Also it’s what they would say if they wanted to look like they were taking a hard stance while having an out to avoid actually doing anything concrete or with consequences.
Anyone who;s attended a western university has seen how ... emotional? the politcals can get. I think this is probably a good thing, so it's tough to determine when the line is crossed. It sounds like it was definitely crossed here but it's still a tough minefield to navigate.
There seems to be a large or loud group who stoke their emotions, but not their rationality .. its like the blood drains from their head when their heart gets fired up
Emotions are good, but excessive emotions without deep understanding is something very different.
If something is harassment or merely exercising their right to express their opinion is also a matter for subjective judgement and he said/she said type finger pointing, and highly dependent on context and frequency (which can be hard to find solid concrete evidence for without a lot of work).
It sounds like some of the students not only threatened to report him to the Chinese authorities, but told him that they had done so, and he has proof who made these threats and claims. They didn’t try to hide it.
If they have a right to do that, is that harassment?
I doubt Purdue (up to now) has any policy saying it’s illegal to report someone to authorities for something they did. Even if those authorities are not popular right now and the thing they did is ok at Perdue but not at home.
Is it a ‘dick move’ and offend our sensibilities? Sure.
But that doesn’t mean it’s any different than if a bunch of folks from the US were at a French university during the 50’s and someone called the FBI telling them that Bob was saying a lot of scary things about communism and just got a Russian Girlfriend and maybe they should look into it.
If it’s true, then of course the FBI is going to look into it. If true, it’s also unlikely to count as harassment. It’s also pretty terrible from 5 different angles.
People have been expelled from universities for videos where they used the N-word. I agree with imposing that consequence (unless it was in the distant past and the student has since shown genuine rehabilitation). Reporting someone to a regime which tortures, kills, and harvests the organs of dissenters is orders of magnitudes worse than using a racist slur.
Purdue certainly has policy against harassment. Other students followed and directly harassed, Purdue is not the government so it doesn’t even need to weigh free speech or legality.
> But that doesn’t mean it’s any different than if a bunch of folks from the US were at a French university during the 50’s and someone called the FBI telling them that Bob was saying a lot of scary things about communism and just got a Russian Girlfriend and maybe they should look into it.
I’m sorry, but is this supposed to be a counter point? This kind of behavior would have been ridiculous and unacceptable as well, unless said US citizen had access to state secrets or something of that nature.
^Fully agreed. That period in time is literally referred to as "Red Scare" and is considered to be a massive failure of an initiative based solely on fearmongering.
And yes, it is taught this way even in semi-rural high schools in southern US states as well (I attended a high school like that myself in GA about 10 years ago). It's like saying "well, US did the whole Trail of Tears thing centuries ago, so we can do a soft-genocide in 2021 as well with Uyghurs".
That type of an argument doesn't sound convincing in the eyes of anyone who doesn't already support what China is doing or some very vocal radical left minority (aka tankies and adjacent groups) in the west. For an example of the latter, just check r/sino, it feels like reading into some parallel universe.
I agree with you, though I will caveat that by noting that, as an american, we tend to amplify the faults of our enemies and downplay those of our Allie’s and ourselves. I am by no means a China apologist but the rhetoric between the US and China over the last several years in concerning to me. It feels like people are looking to make everything in this relationship in a good vs evil narrative, no matter which camp you’re in.
What is happening to the Uighurs is easy for me to point out as crossing the line. But something like Hong Kong? As a westerner I was to support democracy and self determination, but by the same token, Hong Kong is indisputably part of china’s sovereign territory and it seems like a lot of people in the US think it’s ok to promote separatism in another country just because it shares our values. Why don’t I ever hear anyone apply that to our allies? ( cough cough Saudi cough)
I find myself sympathetic to the talkie rhetoric not because I believe in communism, but because I grew up in a generation that was lied into the Iraq war, and see similarities with the mind of nationalism that swept the country in the early 2000s. America never really atoned for abu ghraib, gitmo, cia black sites, signature strikes etc. and to me that is way more relevant to anything that we did in the 19th century.
reflexively I am just repulsed by the nationalistic rhetoric on these issues.
> If they have a right to do that, is that harassment?
You can harass someone with legal activity, making it illegal. If I show up outside your house everyday and stand on the sidewalk with a concealed weapon that is obviously illegal harassment. Standing on the sidewalk might be legal, carrying a concealed weapon may be legal, harassing someone with either is not.
> But that doesn’t mean it’s any different than if a bunch of folks from the US were at a French university during the 50’s and someone called the FBI telling them that Bob was saying a lot of scary things about communism and just got a Russian Girlfriend and maybe they should look into it.
You're right. This is something we will all need to worry about in the event that we time Travel to the 50's. When that happens, I'll criticize the US government, and encourage the French university to expel the American students. I guess we will need to settle for dealing with today's problems until time travel is possible :(
> If it’s true, then of course the FBI is going to look into it. If true, it’s also unlikely to count as harassment. It’s also pretty terrible from 5 different angles.
Why? I think your false assumption here is that everything the university should care about, the FBI should care about to, which is simply not true. You can outright break the law and the FBI not care depending on the law. I don't know that this falls into the category of things the FBI would deal with.
Interestingly enough, in most of your examples you are wrong - legally.
And you seem to be rather completely misreading my comment.
I’m not saying anything that the CCP, the students, or the university is doing is RIGHT.
I’m saying it happens, and it happens a lot, and it’s happened here in the US recently, and it’s not as illegal or clearly stoppable as people here seem to think.
So watch your ass, anyone that thinks that some moral right to speak truth is going to save you without some serious planning or thinking ahead (like the student who spoke out) - because you may very well be a martyr for a cause you did not plan to.
Because I’m one of those who likes to speak out, and I’ve almost been steamrolled by something before. So watch your ass.
> Interestingly enough, in most of your examples you are wrong - legally.
Care to point out which?
> I’m saying it happens, and it happens a lot, and it’s happened here in the US recently, and it’s not as illegal or clearly stoppable as people here seem to think.
Harassment is clearly illegal. It has a legal definition and everything. That being said, it is hard to prove, which is where the complications actually lay. In this case, it seems like there is plenty of evidence though.
> So watch your ass, anyone that thinks that some moral right to speak truth is going to save you without some serious planning or thinking ahead (like the student who spoke out) - because you may very well be a martyr for a cause you did not plan to.
I don't see where this fits into the conversation. Are you saying people shouldn't speak out? Are you saying reporting harassment to the police is bad?
> Because I’m one of those who likes to speak out, and I’ve almost been steamrolled by something before. So watch your ass.
> If they have a right to do that, is that harassment?
Yes. Having the right to say or do something doesn't mean it isn't harassment. But more importantly, the 'students' making these reports/threats are acting as agents of the CCP, projecting the CCP's power into an American university, and should be ejected from the country for that. What they were doing was espionage.
Read my comment above - I’m warning people that they’re being naive if they think it’s as clear cut as they think or this student isn’t pretty screwed for many reasons, regardless of how the rest of this turns out.
Even a public university can decide what they want to do when it comes to punishment for students they admit. You aren't owed an explanation no matter how much you pretend on the internet to care.
A public university has to respect the constitutional rights of it's students though. So there would be very strong legal protection for pro China students.
Edit: actually not sure if they are foreign nationals. Maybe someone knows if same applies?
The issue is of harassment and continued education at Purdue; not constitutional rights. It sounds like the pro China students were harassing Zhihao Kong. Purdue can decide what constitute harassment. 100% it's part of of every contract the student signs and agrees to as a part of their acceptance.
People have no problem bending the rules to punish people swiftly if it benefits them. It is only when it would be painful to do the right thing that people insist on their legal limitations.
This is a false statement. The only regulation here is title VI and title IX. The administration of a public university is not legally part of the government.
At the end of the day, it's a stretch to assume the students did anything other than wield their rights to free speech on an American (or other western) campus. Anti CCP activities, on campus or elsewhere in west makes it way through PRC media bubbles with of millions of eyeballs willing to do the dirty work, frequently within PRC soil. All it takes is for a post to trend. Freedom of speech in west =/= freedom from consequences, which applies even less in PRC.
What's nonsensical are the allegations that politically engaged pro-PRC/CCP Chinese national students must be state agents. And the disproportionate media attention it gets in the west whenever there's diaspora drama between PRC students and HK/Tibet etc. CCP doesn't need to instruct nationalists to behave like nationalists. Rich Chinese kids with social media are playing the same cancel culture game against the out-group and that just happens to be aligned/exploitable for PRC censorship.
There’s no assuming going on. These students explicitly threatened reporting him to the Chinese government, and did so using their registered accounts in online chat so we know exactly who it was.
That's called an allegation, an assumption. And alleging students said some dumb shit is different than proving collusion with PRC gov unless Purdue can dig up files from PRC MSS. In the meantime, the parsimonious answer is kids playing with PRC cancel culture, because to my knowledge there hasn't been a single proven allegation of PRC kids directly reporting other PRC nationals on western campus. Plenty of yellow journalism alleging collusion from the last few years, but zero expulsions despite China Initiative cracking down on campus harder than ever. That should tell you something. If anything I hope Kong / Purdue hits up the proper authorities and finally get some clarity on the extends of the issue other than non-stop news cycle weasel allegations. IMO the likely outcome is dumb kids trigger cancel culture drama over social media, and again free speech =/= freedom from consequences in other jurisdictions.
Two giant paragraphs that are largely irrelevant as well as inaccurate. Purdue has a framework to work with to adjudicate situations regarding the student experience. We will see how it plays out. Your emotional response to some trigger doesn't have anything to do with what is being discussed.
The students followed and threatened, that’s harassment. Even if it was legal, the campus can still expel them if it violates their standards. The campus is not bound by the first amendment, as it is not the government.
>Rich Chinese kids with social media are playing the same cancel culture game against the out-group and that just happens to be aligned/exploitable for PRC censorship.
So? It's a crappy game and we should stop letting them play it. Making up accusations of being a CIA agent is not better than making up accusations of being a PLA agent.
> it's a stretch to assume the students did anything other
No, because at least one (edit: two!) incidents like this has already repeatedly happened elsewhere. Chinese students sabotaged a panel at Brandeis University about Uyghurs ("Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem." - which is pretty clearly harassment), and an Emerson College student was subjected to doxxing and death threats[2]. Given these incidents, and that the university president released a letter about this (so it's not just an unverified social media post), the reasonable assumption is that the students did engage in harassment.
Moreover, yes, students in a foreign country reporting an incident legal in that country to their repressive home government is definitely "collusion".
> Freedom of speech in west =/= freedom from consequences
Um, no, that's incorrect. "Freedom of speech" means that you have the ability to express the opinions that you want to without consequences, by definition (the two components of freedom of speech are the ability to express opinions and the protection from "consequences" (which is a misleading way to say "active retribution") of that expression).
In the United States incarnation, the First Amendment is a specific instance of a law protecting freedom of speech that prevents the federal government from punishing you from saying what you want, modulo a few edge cases (most of which aren't restrictions on freedom of speech/expression so much as restrictions on particular utterances (e.g. yelling "fire" in a crowded theater) or knowledge (disseminating classified information)).
But, beyond the government (which is the only entity that the First Amendment applies to), other organizations or individuals can take pro-free-speech or anti-free-speech positions, which (again) means freedom from consequences due to that speech.
The CCP here is clearly taking an anti-free-speech position by threatening the student through his parents due to an opinion that he has expressed about Tianamen Square.
> Rich Chinese kids with social media are playing the same cancel culture game
Also completely false. "Cancel culture" means that you're attacked by the culture specifically, which includes just about everything except the government.
The legal argument behind that concept isn't that "yelling fire in a crowded theater" is about the particular utterance but that it was a metaphor for the government's legal ability to restrict free-speech when it presents a "clear and present danger".
The legal case where the metaphor was introduced was a unanimous decision allow charging some under the espionage act for pamphleteering against the draft in WWI. It considered among the worst Supreme Court decisions, has been partially overturned and is an odd example to reference when arguing that these "edge-cases" don't amount to real restrictions on speech. This particular "edge-case" decision upheld the criminal prosecution of anti-war activists for their speech.
Harassment on US soil, sure. That's under US perview and should be addressed by relevant US instruments. But freedom from consequences in a foreign jurisdiction? Besides being legally wrong, that's peak American exceptionalism. CCP is allowed to take anti-freespeech position on PRC soil, even triggered by incidents on foreign soil, that's PRC law (and HK NSL). They're not bound by US free speech, by design. PRC cancel culture involves flesh search and generating enough attention to warrant government action. Fixating on US definitions doesn't magically absolve the fact that there are consequences occurring on PRC soil according to PRC rules outside of US/host country purview.
Maybe, but again a university is not bound by due process requirements. I do agree that it might be good practice to not violate them. Let’s see if Purdue does eventually act.
Oh, I somehow misread the above comment entirely and took it to mean that these rules had to be in place before we can prosecute anyone for breaking them. Not sure how that happened
> If those students who issued the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary action.
It sounds like they don't know who the students are yet, so they can't punish anybody. Anyway, I'd rather they say "appropriate disciplinary action", because it implies they'll actually try to find out the full story, which is how I want an administration to behave.
It sounds like they are trying to have it both ways. On one hand, they need to do something. On the other hand, they can say, well we couldn’t identify the perpetrators, so oops, we tried.
A coerced agent is still an agent. But my point is that those who don't participate in such activities, despite the demands of the CCP, are not agents of the CCP.
I think part of the problem is that the "quarrel" is with the CCP itself. Students get into a political argument. Maybe it went over a line, into harassment.
The point at which it becomes beyond the pale, as Kong himself stated" was when the pro-ccp students "weaponized" the CCP/state. IE, called chinese secret police and arranged for an intimidation visit to his parents.
China has quite a few programs in place to use their students and expats for power projection. China United Front Work Department [1] tries to place PRC citizens into foreign companies in order to gather intelligence and influence them. Confucius Institutes [2] are widespread throughout American universities and use PRC international students to promote state interests.
The reality that Americans are unwilling to accept is that PRC nationals are agents of the state by default. Even if a PRC national doesn't fall into one of the above programs, they are still incentivized by China's social credit system to act in the state's interests, even while abroad.
I seems like a lot hinges on "The identities of the bullies is well known."
The President's letter says "If those students who issues the threats can be identified, they will be subject to appropriate disciplinary sanction." Have the threateners been reliably identified in, for example, press accounts? It seems very possible that in some communities on campus "everyone knows who it is" without the administration actually knowing, or being able to reliably prove, who it was.
I think this is an opportunity to raise the prominence of the issue. I wish Purdue had explicitly mentioned the Tiananmen Massacre in this notice. We should talk about it. Our diplomats should be applying pressure around Peng Shuai's status. I'd love to see a debate in Congress about our participation in the Olympics and what that says about our support of this regime.
Students are not being (considered for) expelled for their views of the Tiananmen Massacre one way or another. Taking any stance on that, in this context, would muddy those waters and make Prudue look like it was doing a political purge.
The problem that produced the statement was harassment. Not political views.
I would think that a government machining gunning down peacefully assembled civilians and then running over the bodies with tanks, then shooting any doctors who attempted to help the wounded, wouldn't be politicized. That we can all agree it is deeply and unquestionably evil.
Something being a political view doesn't mean its not verifiable fact.
A debate has different facets - political or not political - fact or not fact - harassment or not harassment.
In this case the problem that needed to be addressed by Purdue was the harassment.
Students debating different understandings of Tiananmen Square (regardless of either sides merits) was not the issue that required intervention by university leadership.
200 Chinese students have no material financial impact in a body of 35,000 students. I'm inclined to take the statement at face value, and won't be surprised if more actions come as they work out the facts.
Universities compete for the out-of-state and foreign students that pay their bills, they are not trivially replaceable. And if you exclude Chinese students from the replacement pool, it's even smaller.
200 were enrolled this fall. The article says elsewhere that "Of the over 45,000 students enrolled at campus, 5,196 are of Asian ethnicity", though it's not clear how many of them are from China.
Keep in mind that 7.2% of the total population of the United States identifies as Asian ethnicity. There's no reason to expect that most of Purdue's Asian students are from China.
I found a Purdue pdf that states international students comprised of 20% of Purdue's student body in 2019. "China ranks first (3250) in total enrollment while India (2156) is second." Source: https://www.purdue.edu/IPPU/ISS/_Documents/EnrollmentReport/...
Public universities make their tuition money on the out-of-state and foreign students, so your denominator here is an order of magnitude too big. Every marginal out-of-state or foreign student lost, is one or more in-state students whose tuition cannot be subsidized.
Please respond to my points. Prices are discovered on the margin, so losing a significant chunk of the students that pay full tuition, could certainly destabilize the market and cause challenges for university administrators.
Ok, say Purdue eats the acquisition cost to replace the 200 students. Those new students now need to be replaced by whatever school they would have otherwise attended, they have to come from somewhere. There exists some tipping point at which the system could unravel, maybe not 200 students but some number of students.
Acquisition cost is zero at this point - there are wait lists and no shortage of talented people from other countries that would love to go to Purdue or any other comparable school. They can also easily pull from the out of state basket. Also, you have to account for financial repercussions if they do nothing.
> There exists some tipping point at which the system could unravel, maybe not 200 students but some number of students.
Perhaps, but again 200 students is inconsequential to Purdue as I stated. They have the ability to replace instantly and they have a > $2.5 billion endowment.
The system would unravel due to overextension of loans and people deciding it's not worth it to take the debt on that they have been doing. That's the unravel risk. And it would hit the low tier schools anyway.
What Purdue or others with similar challenges cannot do, is nothing. Not everyone gives a shit about appeasing China. Maybe LeBron, the NBA and some other organizations care because it has been all about the $ for them. But things are changing. Women's Tennis is standing up. Biden making a statement regarding Olympics. Not many examples out there but they're becoming more frequent.
What is the end game in allowing PROC nationals into American universities?
Even without a kinetic confrontation, current trends indicate PROC will dominate the world economy, ocean navigation, the African and part of South American continents, near Earth orbit and the Moon because of technology they've already stolen, downloaded, misappropriated and bought from the West --and they're known to be creating bioweapons that kill only non-Chinese people while operating concentration camps that harvest organs, rape and murder millions of racial minorities!
Let's see Purdue prove they are not feckless by leveraging this to terminate Chinese investments and expel all members and family members of the CCP that refuse to surrender their Chinese citizenship, become naturalized Americans and (civilly) agree to lifelong warrantless monitoring of their loyalty to America.
Different ethnic groups carry different genes. You know how you sometimes see headlines like "DNA of 2,000-year-old corpse in the Himalayas analysed; he turns out to be Greek"? So apparently some ethnicities have some genes that others don't; otherwise they couldn't know that.
Make a bioweapon that targets people with genes that your ethnic group doesn't have, and you've made a bioweapon that targets only people of other ethnic groups.
How would that even work? There isn’t a gene for Chinese citizenship that would impact any disease or illness.
…I’m unfortunately assuming the poster is making a bad-faith reference to COVID-19. Some conspiracy theorists have been labeling it a bio weapon and ignoring the deaths from the initial outbreak.
The thing that the Purdue University President forgot to mention: Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, gender, pregnancy, or *national origin*.
Honestly, students need to understand that if they are perpetrating this violence (yes, harassment and intimidation, whether or not it is physical, is a form of violence) they will face severe disciplinary action. Also, they need to understand that they are breaking federal law.
Unfortunately, Purdue University likely will not be taking this as seriously as possible. There are so many other public universities that have better formal administrative policies towards this kind of behavior.
Depending on how they handle it, they could end up blacklisted by all Chinese students - which is likely a whole lot more than 200 students.
That it could also (in an extreme case) cause many employers with Chinese ties to avoid alumni with Perdue ties to avoid backlash from China is an outcome they can’t ignore either.
CCP is not known for rational, reasoned responses in situations like this.
Oh no, Americans would have more spots at an America university. Or students from another nation could take the opportunity. I don't see why we have to specifically import Chinese nationals for those 200 seats when there are plenty of qualified candidates both domestically and abroad.
Unfortunately, most of those responses are very rational and reasoned. The regime has decided that intimidation is a useful tool for defending its narratives, and uses it in many contexts.
That global campaigne makes an even handed response for Purdue important, both for this context, and helping set an example for wider contexts.
We need to maintain/develop a strong and even handed culture - standing up for everyone's right of expression without harassment.
You have a good point. As hard as it is to admit, ‘overbearing insane seeming overreaction’ is a useful and rational reputation to have in certain circumstances.
It definitely cuts down on the number of sane people being willing to be seen doing whatever it is that typically causes that response.
> should be only one remedy: imediate expulsion of any agent of repression of the Chinese state
There should be the same remedy that is provided to any other bully. These are still kids. There is a learning opportunity. If they refuse to learn, yes, expulsion should be in the cards.
This isn't some kids bullying another kid. These are adults representing a national government. This is a nation bullying someone inside the United States for exercising free speech. The message needs to be received in Beijing, not merely Indiana.
Legally adults, perhaps, but I think we have a social consensus that most college students are kids. Their brains haven't fully developed. If they're coming out of a brainwashed environment, they may never have been explicitly told that this is wrong; they deserve a second chance.
> message needs to be received in Beijing, not merely Indiana
I agree. My vote would be for a new foreign-student visa ban on the children of CCP members until Beijing commits to quit being petulant. But hit Beijing, the people commanding spooks to harass the parents of a student in a different country telling historical stories that scare them.
>Legally adults, perhaps, but I think we have a social consensus that most college students are kids.
US universities are famously litigious and take a hard line stance when it suits them. See Aaron Swartz. So, I don't buy the 'they are still kids' line. That is, I don't condone it, but I don't agree that universities are motivated by this sort of reasoning.
You don't have to believe them. You can look at the court records yourself, or any number of public case summaries[1].
To quote:
> Opting not to pursue a civil lawsuit against him, JSTOR reached a settlement with him in the summer of 2011 in which Swartz turned over the downloaded data to them. It was never released to the public. Neither did MIT take any civil action against him.
> social consensus that most college students are kids. Their brains haven't fully developed
If they are mature enough for the Chinese government to shoot them in the head for peaceful protesting, then they are mature enough to understand that some democratic cultures have strong objections against the CCP and those who do their bidding.
It's one of those things where the real world is too dangerous to allow kids to be kids: you must tell 5 year olds that magic capes can't help them fly, and that they should run away from strange men who wish to touch their peepee, even if, for an ideally happy childhood, you shouldn't have to.
There is no such social consensus. People act according to expectations. If we expect college students to act like adults then they will. I certainly didn't feel like a kid when I was in college.
It's bizarre how some societies have lowered their expectations of young people over the past couple centuries. When Horatio Nelson was that age he was captain of a warship, leading hundreds of men in combat and doing a pretty fine job of it.
> Legally adults, perhaps, but I think we have a social consensus that most college students are kids. Their brains haven't fully developed. If they're coming out of a brainwashed environment, they may never have been explicitly told that this is wrong; they deserve a second chance.
I really don't think we do have such a consensus. The post-high school (for those who graduated) 18-year-olds from my old neighborhood who committed offenses didn't get this consideration. They went to jail. Knowing their home lives growing up, it was no surprise to anyone that they committed the offenses they committed. It's difficult to see how they could have done otherwise. They weren't explicitly brainwashed, but they grew up in an environment that warped their world view as thoroughly as any Chinese propaganda could have done.
In the United States, we've also tried children as young as 11 years old as adults.
I think there is a social consensus to give college students a pass.
Showing them a kindness that they wouldn't receive back home might break through to them, or it might not. The situation should definitely carry gravity and have consequences for repeat offenses.
I think a bigger problem is two-fold:
1) Universities are addicted to Chinese student tuition funds, and they don't want to rock the boat. I doubt they care as much about the students themselves. My university totally half assed their program (eg. some Chinese students would have questions that went unanswered, professors tended to pay them less attention, etc.), and I felt so sorry for the students.
2) Chinese students tend to stick in groups together rather than be integrated and mixed amongst the other student populations. They're assigned the same dormitory blocks, do shopping/dining together, and they don't really get to experience America in the same way that other international students do. Not sure if this is due to design or negligence.
It is kind of interesting. At my college, we had large batches of students from (Mexican) migrant workers in our dorms. With very few exceptions the majority of two person dorms were 1:1 matching one of them with a second generation (and onwards) citizen. I thought it was a great way to expose all of us to both integration and diversity. It wasn't smooth for everyone of course, yet I thought it was a good balance of culturally jarring experiences, while still providing close proximity to people from the same background (e.g. several migrant worker kids in same hall still). I haven't really thought much about that since College but kind of assumed most places did something similar. (We also had specific classes that highlighted migrant worker issues / history).
University students are emphatically not kids. The students who are US citizens are legal adults expected to vote an participate in democracy. At what age do you expect them to suddenly "grow up" and be responsible for their actions?
Being a functional adult takes practice. Nobody "grows up" until they've been responsible for their own actions for several years. Highschools (and to a lesser degree, parents) have largely passed the buck on this one.
If it were up to me people would get voting rights a few years after they get treated like an adult in all other capacities, I don't care if you move one up or move the other back.
Universities should treat students like adults but these people have no practice being adults so it's gonna be messy.
True. But very often mommy & daddy - who write the checks for college tuition - expect the college to change his (metaphorical) diapers. And never dish out serious consequences for their failure to potty train him.
These are not highschool kids; they are legal adults choosing to enforce an oppressive policy from a foreign government. There's every reason to expel them.
> In a rush of adrenaline last year, the graduate student posted an open letter on a dissident website praising the heroism of the students killed in the Tiananmen Square massacre in 1989.
> The blowback, he said, was fast and frightening. His parents called from China, crying. Officers of the Ministry of State Security, the feared civilian spy agency, had warned them about his activism in the United States.
There is increasing evidence over the last 2 years that low-consequence "intervention" doesn't really deter future bad behavior. Perhaps there are some specific actions that would have a greater success rate, but a slap on the wrist and a "don't do that again" isn't going to cut it.
I completely agree that slaps on the wrist do no suffice. Expel all 200 and ban Chinese students for five years. Anything less will accomplish nothing.
> for commemorating the victims of the Tiananmen Masacre
You realize the 89' protestors were trying to overthrow the government (thats how you establish the Democracy). No surprise that celebrating failed-revolutionaries is contentious.
They were run over by tanks, and the PRC has made it illegal to even mention the event. Most nation states allow citizens to talk about their own history good and bad.
Run over by tanks doesn't quite cover the brutality of that night. The tanks repeatedly drove over and then reversed over the same bodies until they were pulp on the streets. What happened that night was ni unspeakable, yet we must speak of it or we risk it being forgotten in history.
The work "likely" is doing a LOT of work there. Contemporaneous examples in the GDU, Czechoslovakia, and other form Soviet satellites transitioned to democracies in a more or less bloodless fashion.
You seek freedom? You want democracy?! You murderers! Don't you know we'll fight back for our authoritarian dictatorship and millions will die? How dare you challenge the status quo?
Instead, it failed and now you get millions dying through oppression and genocide.
Freedom has a price that must be paid in blood. Do you think China will magically become free someday? No, it will take the blood of millions to overthrown that regime.
The ones that block freedom of the press, block and censore the internet, deploy military force against civilians, anex peaceful territories by force, push other democracies to overwrite their history, and commit genocide... So the Chinese government.
Nobody is going to show up at your home for saying so. Many US citizens will agree with you.
A country which improves its behavior through self-criticism from its citizens is not a tyranny. It is just a government that makes serious mistakes.
No form of government has managed to avoid that yet.
Democracy and freedom don't guarantee the majority will behave well all the time. But they systematically leave the door open for improvement - even if it takes a lot of effort.
Do starving its own people and persecuting anyone who talks, thinks out loud, researches, or investigates it, work for you? The Great Leap Forward and the "Three-year Natural Disaster!" There was nothing natural about it and we still don't know how many perished.
Ahh, the classic whataboutism prevalent in threads about China. No excuse, especially because almost all the bad stuff that those governments did are decades in the past, whereas China is doing those things now, accelerating them, and being defended by its citizens (and people like you).
Moreover, you can't just lump together governments like that? The UK is a completely different world than the US - for instance, their freedom-of-speech laws aren't comparable to ours.
And, if we're talking just about the US (which is the topic of discussion, not the UK) - the US does not "block freedom of the press, block and censor the internet, [...] push other democracies to overwrite their history, and commit genocide..." and the other things that we have (shamefully) committed are an order of magnitude not as bad as what China is doing now. The last time the US did something remotely similar to the million+ Uyghurs in concentration camps was the Trail of Tears in 1850 (which, as terrible as it was, involved less than a 10th of the number of victims as Xinjiang now).
You're sure making a lot of fallacies and bad arguments to try to excuse the behavior of a murderous, tyrannical government...
Money is the root of the problem. Canadian universities depend heavily on tuition paid by foreign students. A huge proportion of those students are from China.
If Canadian universities take too tough a stance against this kind of behaviour they could find themselves, either individually or collectively, on the Chinese government's naughty list. Perhaps the degrees they confer might lose their recognition in China, or perhaps students will be discouraged from attending "naughty" universities.
If you look at Daniels' response, note that it deliberately skirts around the fact that this kind of targeted harassment is directly encouraged by the Chinese government. Even just mentioning China by name in his statement is flirting with trouble.
It's chilling to observe that academic freedom of North American universities can be so negatively impacted by a foreign power.
Daniels is a classic GOP leader, as are many of the people beneath him. Use vaguely patriotic rhetoric to take over an American institution, sell out all possible assets to foreign powers for personal profit, retire to country estate. It's been the Republican playbook since the end of WWII.
The pattern of leadership is the same everywhere; the "academic freedom being negatively impacted by a foreign power" you mention is a rot that pervades nearly all American instutions, be they academic or commercial. Have you ever read the biography of Phil Knight, founder of Nike? His incredible business insight was to take shoes made cheaply elsewhere and undercut American labor with it. We're led by Phil Knights in every sector.
Interesting side note: before becoming president of Purdue, Daniels was governor of Indiana. His successor in that job was Mike Pence. Daniels was also a rising star in the GOP, so he's a competent politician who got closer than most to actually dealing with international relations.
He's also run Purdue differently than most administrators. He famously froze tuition, and he's using the name for an online school Purdue bought.
He froze (in state) tuition because the school is completely bankrolled by wealthy Chinese sending their kids to school. Every luxury car driving around town has a foreign student at the wheel.
It’s more complicated than that. They held the line on costs, which let them maintain the freeze, which increased enrollment and alum donations and made investments beyond low-hanging fruit possible. They claim not to have changed their mix of in-state. Daniels is a legitimate tightwad so it’s in character for him to take cost control seriously.
He was governor during the financial crisis wasn't it? Sounds like it was necessary measures since Indiana can't finance debt per its own constitution.
Why are communist Chinese even admitted at all? Many Americans have tried and failed at admission and now have to settle for some lesser education or none at all. What are they teaching people who are forbidden to learn? Why should they tolerate people returning with systemic resentment? I see no return on this investment -- none at all.
> before becoming president of Purdue, Daniels was governor of Indiana. His successor in that job was Mike Pence. Daniels was also a rising star in the GOP, so he's a competent politician who got closer than most to actually dealing with international relations.
How is the governor of Indiana closer to dealing with international relations? I suspect the president of Purdue does it more, given the international nature of academia. How does Mike Pence affect Daniels' experience?
> he's using the name for an online school Purdue bought
It wasn't good. During his tenure, he had the university create a deal with Kaplan to brand Kaplan University as Purdue Global and get the Indiana legisture to pass a sweetheart law for it. The result is that Purdue's name as a very good engineering school is mud.
They bought an online school (Kaplan University), then renamed it to Purdue University Global. It's one of the worst schools in the country. The only reason to do that is to cash in on the Purdue brand, and it will likely dilute it over time.
For those geo blocked. The president of Purdue sent out and email in response to learning that Chinese students had been harassing a Chinese student who spoke out about the heroism of the students who died in Tiananmen Square, insisting all students respect free speech.
“Those seeking to deny those rights to others, let alone to collude with foreign governments in repressing them, will need to pursue their education elsewhere.”
This is great, but I wonder how long these things will last? Big companies with a strong dependency on China tend take China's side, and since big companies controls the narrative I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a social faux pas to criticize CCP in the future.
China doesn't have enough power and influence for that to happen today, but what if/when their GDP per capita reaches the same level as US? At that point every big company has to adapt or get outcompeted by the companies allowed to operate in the Chinese market.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it becomes a social faux pas to criticize CCP in the future
It has been for years. You can find many stories of it, including companies firing employees who are critical of the CCP and CEOs apologizing. Look up stories of Disney, most of Hollywood, the NBA (a firestorm, though I don't know about apologies), etc.
I worked with people from China at a previous job. They came to visit us (South America) and while having dinner I lightly suggested things in China are difficult when it comes to freedom, right? Their facial expression changed immediately. They said it was better not to talk about that. They were who knows how many kilometers from home, not a single Chinese national around to report them, and they still feared talking about this subject. It was a short but eye opening experience for me.
My family hosted a Taiwanese exchange student when I was in high school. One day, he and I were out seeing the town. He discovered a Chinese Tea house in an out-of-the-way corner, and we stopped in.
The owner, a Chinese expat, greeted us enthusiastically and personally sat down to serve us tea. The conversation was lovely; she was explaining the source of the tea, the preparation and serving method, etc. and I was just enjoying the experience when she offhandedly asked where he was from.
When he responded, "Taiwan," she immediately frowned and made some terse comment in Mandarin, to which he retorted, also in Mandarin. There was a tense exchange, and then she abruptly turned to me and started asking me questions again in English, changing the subject.
I had not yet learned of the One-China stance, so when we left I asked him what happened. He told me that she admonished him for not saying he was from "Chinese Taipei", and apparently some other nasty remarks he decided not to translate.
It was such a shock to see that level of nationalism exhibit itself in real-time. She was genuinely offended and angry, not annoyed. I suspect if I hadn't been there, she'd have told him to leave immediately.
This story sounds doubtful to me. It's perfectly OK for a Chinese to say that they are from Taiwan, and Chinese, be it from the mainland or Taiwan, always say that: They're from Taiwan, Beijing, Guangdong, you name it. It's like saying which state you're from in the US.
No-one ever says "Chinese Taipei", certainly not among Chinese, which is just some political compromise, mostly in the Olympic Committee.
The only issue I can think of is if the question was specifically about the country of origin, in which case some people may indeed object to "Taiwan" and argue that it should be "China" instead (but not "Chinese Taipei"...)
Sorry if there is confusion; it was several years ago and I don't remember it word-for-word -- you're probably right about Chinese Taipei. The student was very, very gracious and anglicized a lot of things when translating. He even used an English name in addition to his normal name.
I imagine, for example, the hostess caught some nuance I missed, or followed up in Chinese to confirm his opinion on sovereignty. I was really just following tone and facial expression.
I could call and ask him if he remembers, but from my understanding, he unfortunately has to have difficult conversations like that quite a lot, and I don't know if this one would even stand out.
I think you're over-literally interpreting what above poster said. Above poster probably doesn't speak Mandarin so their retelling might be missing some nuance.
Please stop taking HN threads further into nationalistic flamewar.
Believe me, I understand the frustrations of representing a minority/contrarian point of view, but if you vent that frustration by tossing flamebait around, you're not only damaging the container we all depend on here, you're discrediting what you're trying to advocate for. That helps nothing and is not in your interests.
I don't think jumping down someone's throat for innocent ignorance is too productive.
And speaking as someone who has lived in China, their misconceptions of the West are comically bad as well. That's what you get with state controlled media and people learning about the West by watching Friends or Transformers.
> And speaking as someone who has lived in China, their misconceptions of the West are comically bad as well.
Not sure who you met, but a typical young person in China (aged under 40) would know more about the West than a young person in the West would know about China. Young people in China also know how to use VPNs to bypass the 'Great Firewall' to find whatever information they require.
> Not sure who you met, but a typical young person in China (aged under 40) would know more about the West than a young person in the West would know about China.
Only 60% of Chinese even attend high school (which isn’t compulsory), you are making a huge claim about the typical young person in China a when China is a huge country. Your claim might be true for comparing young Chinese in the big cities to all young Americans (including in small towns), but that isn’t a very fair comparison.
> Young people in China also know how to use VPNs to bypass the 'Great Firewall' to find whatever information they require.
VPNs to jump the GFW are incredibly unreliable (they tend to disappear after you pay your yearly fee), most don’t bother.
> Western understanding of the rest of the world is severely lacking
I would wager that Western countries, on average, have a better view of the world than non-Western countries, if for no other reason than the privileges their wealth and liberalism entail. Do you think the average Russian, African, South American, Chinese, (Yes, I'm aware some of that list is continents, and some is countries) etc. has access to a greater wealth of information and experience with regard to the Rest of the world?
Keep in mind I'm not saying this as a point of superiority or anything, just pointing out your lack of a well-grounded point.
I find it frustrating that so much discussion about other countries is based on hearsay and offhand translation, especially in the case of China where it seems few Western commenters even understand the language, much less the culture.
Sure, if you are comparing populations as a whole, but if you are comparing the subsets of educated people from each country that are participating in the global discourse I strongly disagree. There's no point in comparing the average Russian or African or Chinese person. Are we ever interacting with them? Do they drive any policy?
> find it frustrating that so much discussion about other countries is based on hearsay and offhand translation
It's frustrating when talking about any subject. The problem is, this is how people digest information. They take in pieces and regurgitate it. Hopefully they are open minded enough to take criticism so that over time the regurgitations get more accurate. The discussion is important for everyone, but not everyone is going to know everything at once.
As far as grouping together entire populations: Totally agree. There is no point in making sweeping generalizations, which is why I pointed out the parents bad argument. Not only was it a pointless point to make, but it was also wrong. 'Westerns' are no more ignorant about the world than 'non-Westerners'.
Educated Westerners generally know far less about China than educated Chinese people know about the West.
This really shows in conversations about China. Anti-Chinese propaganda has dramatically ratcheted up in the West (it really began during the Trump administration), and since most people know nothing about China to begin with, they basically believe what they're exposed to in the media. People are operating with such a wildly distorted, wacky view of China that it's nearly impossible to have an intelligent discussion about the country.
> Educated Westerners generally know far less about China than educated Chinese people know about the West.
Source?
>Anti-Chinese propaganda has dramatically ratcheted up in the West (it really began during the Trump administration), and since most people know nothing about China to begin with, they basically believe what they're exposed to in the media.
If that's your argument, I'd like to point out how much more distorted the news is within China than within liberal democratic nations. You don't honestly believe the Chinese media feeds a more accurate view of the world to it's constituents do you? They literally outlaw information, and have what essentially constitutes a CCP controlled national intranet. If we were to rank China against ALL western nations for information and journalism freedom they'd be dead last: https://freedomhouse.org/countries/freedom-world/scores
Edit: I'd also like to point out that I, as an educated American, have worked with people from 12 different countries, for a number of years each, across 3 companies that have employed me. All within the U.S. borders. How many non-Western countries have such a wonderful amount of diversity?
I've interacted extensively with educated people in the West and China. The asymmetry is obvious.
Most educated people in the West have almost no clue about China. Most educated Chinese people at least speak English to some degree, they're heavily exposed to Western popular culture, and many use VPNs to get around the Great Firewall.
> I'd like to point out how much more distorted the news is within China than within liberal democratic nations.
The news in China is, of course, heavily biased.
However, when it comes to coverage of China, the news media in Western countries does a terrible job. Coverage is extremely distorted, and focuses almost exclusively on whatever issues the current US government is pushing (Xinjiang, Taiwan, etc.). Almost anything will be presented in a negative light. China builds a railway in Laos: is China trying to debt-trap Laos? China exports over a billion doses of vaccine: can we trust Chinese vaccines?
I don't think watching CNN or reading the NY Times regularly will confer even a basic understanding of China. The picture you'll get will be warped beyond recognition.
> Most educated Chinese people at least speak English to some degree, they're heavily exposed to Western popular culture
So, anecdotally that's your experience, ok. I don't think a greater exposure to pop-culture necessarily makes on better equipped to talk about the ethics of censorship, forced labor, and the dangers of centralized systems. I'd wager as far as substantive information goes, the asymmetry you're describing doesn't exist.
> I don't think watching CNN or reading the NY Times regularly will confer even a basic understanding
Most people, educated or not, know this. Thankfully we have access to the entire internet and the entire body of human literature, even among those not tech savvy enough to use a VPN.
My argument is not 'cable news does a great job', my argument is 'the wests liberal access to information and wealth affords it's affluent and educated a more complete and clear picture of the world', which you are failing to rebut.
Yes, anecdotally, almost every single educated person I know in the West is remarkably ignorant about China. They don't know even the most basic things, like the names of the major provinces or the names of cities with 15 million people. They couldn't tell you the first thing about Chinese history. When did the empire fall? They couldn't name one major Chinese literary figure in the last 500 years.
I'm talking about people who are fairly international, who might speak a few different European languages. The sheer lack of knowledge is really striking.
I don't think it's the case that the people I know are almost all anomalous in this way. Knowledge of China is simply near zilch in the West.
Young, educated Chinese people practically all speak English to at least a basic level. That already gives them more knowledge about the West than the average educated Westerner has of China.
> forced labor
I'm assuming you're talking about Xinjiang. This is an issue that I am certain your average person in China understands far better than your average New York Times reader. The programs that are being labeled "forced labor" by the US government are fairly well known in China. With a lot of these types of China stories that hit the news from time to time in the West, you'll find that the average taxi driver in China knows more detail than what you'll read in Western newspapers. The idea that Westerners know what's going on in China better than people in China do is just hubris.
Not necessary. There's a chance that they support their government, and they didn't want to hear the usual western stuff about freedom and how bad their country is. I had many similar experiences as a student. Western students would start this discussion to Chinese students in anticipation of hearing how oppressed they feel. What they would often get is an irritated Chinese student who will tell them that it's hard to control 1.3 billion people and that their government has done a lot of them etc. And the western student's brains would hardwire unable to accept that answer and conclude "Clearly they're brainwashed" :D
PS: I'm not taking sides here
I’ve worked primarily with Chinese for years, both inside and outside of China. They consistently poke fun at and speak thoughtfully about the government and policy. It’s possible they just had learned to avoid being baited by westerners looking to confirm a certain narrative.
Reminds me of when I was back in high school in the very early 2000's. We had a Chinese girl in our class and during a History lesson about Mao she started crying and yelling that everything the teacher was saying was wrong, that Mao was the greatest leader, etc.
She was not visiting from China, she literally had been in Europe for more than a decade, and still.
Maybe it was that specific group of people? All my associates from China had no problems discussing these issues (and three Ts) with me. Some were supporting the party, some weren't, but they still shared.
No one, naturally, would blog about it or openly shout on the street but families and friends (from what I've heard) do talk about these political issues.
That's been my experience too. When traveling to China, we were given a class and they advised us to not discuss any politics, even American ones, overseas. Other items that were "off topic" including voting, rights for non-traditional lifestyles, abortion, death penalties, taxes, and discussions about world conflicts.
Sort of, you can talk freely in America about abortion without fear of death; we're literally doing it right now.
I think what you're referring to what is socially appropriate. Most of these topics would be poor taste to discuss in public, but the mere act of doing so wouldn't land you in the back of a windowless van, which is the difference.
I don't know about those people in particular, but the way totalitarian states have worked in the past is to have them report secretly on each other. This keeps everyone in a constant state of fear and oppression.
Read Koba the Dread by Martin Amis for a powerful, extremely well-written account of it.
May they simply did not want to be put on the spot by getting into a political argument. Arguably you brought up a topic not suitable for a social dinner with colleagues.
Discussing politics is always getting into argument territory and always best avoided on social occasions, especially if you do not know the opinions of the people around you.
For instance, I (in Europe) don't "lightly suggest" things in the US are difficult when it comes to guns/Trump/abortion/etc to American colleagues because these are sensitive political topics and nothing good can come out of that. You mentioned it was in South America so maybe another example would be to mention drug cartels and Pablo Escobar to Colombian colleagues.
I can imagine your Chinese colleagues thinking "here we go again..." and politely stirring the conversation to another topic.
I did not say that you were arguing. I just pointed out that you were starting a conversation that could lead nowhere pleasant for anyone so your guests probably wisely stirred away from it.
Or, you’re making a ton of conjecture without knowing the situation, the people involved, their relationship, what was actually said, the emotional context, and are forming all of these opinions stated as fact from a few lines of text on an HN comment.
I wish people were more charitable on HN, on the internet, and in life.
What a strange comment, the most uncharitable one I've read in a while on HN. I didn't pick up anything uncharitable at all in the comment you are complaining about, while yours reeks of it - and in the same breath publicly wishing everyone else were more charitable!
What was not charitable in simply suggesting an alternative explanation that did not involve fear of retribution? This is a friendly discussion (or so I thought).
You told the GP how they should not act during dinner conversations, and double downed despite the GP telling you that you didn’t know how close they were. That comes off to me not respecting what they were telling you about their relationship, which is uncharitable in my book. Given my upvotes, I’m not the only one that feels that way.
Separately, plenty of good relationships can discuss politics without issue, and to not do so would leave the world only to their information bubbles.
It is better for someone that does support the Chinese government not to voice their support in the West. It will avoid many conflicts. This goes for pretty much anyone who agrees with an unpopular regime and is a popular practice.
> not a single Chinese national around to report them
You said "people", "they", and "them" -- all plural. Did you talk to them separately, one-on-one, or were they afraid of being denounced by each other?
Purdue President Mitch Daniels sent an email to the university criticizing the harassment against Purdue student Zhihao Kong, whose experience was documented in an article on ProPublica, an investigative journalism outlet based in New York City.
I’ve had the pleasure of working with and getting to know several Chinese nationals and nearly all of them were hesitant to take about China when discussions at bars would turn to world politics.
I wonder if this is how your average American would have felt at the height of McCarthyism? I hope one day Chinese people feel more free to speak their minds about their government.
This is how 40-50% of America feels now, btw. Many of us are silent because we know that any view right of the orthodoxy can lead to negative social and career repercussions.
I’ve got no clue, I don’t live there. For all intents and purposes I live online, where investors and employers and colleagues are all hyper aware of what I say. That’s why I had to make an alt to even post what I actually think on this website.
(Note that people with beliefs on the other side of the spectrum do not feel the need to make pseudonymous accounts to post their opinions. Frankly this should tell you all you need to know. I call this liberal privilege.)
This is a great statement, I disagree with people saying it's not strong enough. The school administration can't identify people without evidence. But he made a strong, definitive statement of support of harasee, called the Tianamen Square protesters martyrs, and said both people that directly harassed the student as well as those that reported it to authorities in China would be subject to discipline. The question is follow-through, but we will have to wait to see how that bears out.
If they had followed a student around campus harassing them and causing their family to be threatened:
- because they were LGBTQ
- because of their ethnicity or race
- because they were female
- because they spoke out on issues regarding any of the above
In all of these cases not only would those students already have been suspended from the university and on their way to expulsion (and rightfully so), the university would have acted within days of it being reported.
In some kind of ridiculous reverse-mccarthyism we currently have known agents of a foreign government harassing US residents and institutions are afraid to do anything about it for fear of reprisals from a foreign government!
Eh, talk is cheap. Glad they’re speaking out against China, but as far as I know it costs them nothing to do so and they stand to gain some positive PR.
I assume university leaders’ pay is correlated to a university’s budget, which is correlated to international students paying full price, which is correlated to students from China due to their large numbers.
> At Brandeis University near Boston, Chinese students mobilized last year to sabotage an online panel about atrocities against Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. Viewers interrupted a Harvard-educated lawyer as she tried to describe her brother’s plight in a concentration camp, scrawling “bullshit” and “fake news” over his face on the screen and blaring China’s national anthem. To the dismay of participants, the university’s leaders failed to condemn the incident.
> U.S. universities have received more than $1 billion in donations from mainland China — from individuals, companies, government organizations — since 2013, according to the Department of Education. That doesn’t include tuition paid by Chinese students, whose numbers in the U.S. reached 370,000 in 2019.
The number of Chinese students is already already in decline for various reasons [1]. It means less money for the American universities. It also means less tensions between students in the future. I don't think it's good news for the US though.
He needed to make this about harassment, not China. If the first paragraph was corrected to leave these parts out, I think it would be a much clearer case:
From:
> Purdue learned from a national news account last week that one of our students, after speaking out on behalf of freedom and others martyred for advocating it, was harassed and threatened by other students from his own home country. Worse still, his family back home, in this case China, was visited and threatened by agents of that nation’s secret police.
To:
> Purdue learned from a national news account last week that one of our students, after speaking out on behalf of freedom and others martyred for advocating it, was harassed and threatened by other students. Worse still, his family back home was visited and threatened by agents of that nation’s secret police.
It's a pertinent fact of the case and answers an obvious question most would have. After reading your proposed edit, since "that nation's secret police" is mentioned, the obvious question most would instinctively have is "what country are they talking about?"
Reading the letter as a whole, it seems harassment and free speech was the main focus. "China" is mentioned once, and "Chinese" is mentioned once.
I disagree. The CCP has made itself a very big problem internationally. WE need a LOT more conversation about that government in particular, urgently. Hypotheticals can wait.
I also think that it's a big problem and was thinking that not mentioning it would be an easier way to deal with it (i.e. expel the perpetrators). Expelling students who harass other students, or giving death threats (for the case of Emerson) should be a relatively straightforward decision without getting politics involved.
Pro-CCP students from China harassing an Anti-CCP student (or at least one critical of) from China while guests at a college in the US, about that students expression on his views of Tienanmen Square while in the US. Also, it seems, based on those statements made in the US, his family is being persecuted back in China. How does one separate politics when it's entirely political?
If we can agree that a student harassing another student while being enrolled in a US university is not acceptable under any situation, this should be able to be dealt with without mentioning 'China' at all. When I said separating political, I meant not bringing 'China' into the issue. As an example, if there was a clear case of assault by a perpetrator (in a different situation), even if there was a hate crime involved, the fact that an assault took place should be enough to press charge.
There's no "our" here. America is not a hivemind - it's a collection of individual citizens with very different perspectives. Personally, I would be alright with the price of my electronics doubling in exchange for us cutting off all trade with China, but I suspect that many of my representatives might not feel the same way...
We may not be a hive-mind, but we have a collective effect. I also would suggest (non-scientifically) that many of the people buying incredibly inexpensive clothes originally sourced from the Guangzhou fashion market are also deeply concerned about forced labor or films with screenplays altered to align with a totalitarian government’s wishes.
This has been happening for a while now all across the globe. One of the most recent egregious cases happened to a student in Australia who was attacked by thugs associated with the Chinese consulate at a HK protest. His university took China's side and made his life a living hell.
For Chinese students studying in the US in the time after Tiananmen Square massacre this is nothing new. I was in grad school before and after the event and there were a large number of Chinese students in my department, geoscience. At my university it was probably true at the time that around half of the grad students in geosciences were Chinese.
I came to know several of them, though not to the point of knowing any of them well. Tiananmen was such a serious event for these students. I know there was pressure on them to avoid any discussions related to the event and especially to to avoid any statements supporting the students who protested and died.
I had a conversation with one of these men that I knew best and whom I studied with and after all the geoscientific things had been beaten down until we felt we had achieved a deeper understanding of the topic, talk turned to world events. I didn't steer it in that direction, he brought it up after looking around to make sure that we were alone and especially that there were no other Chinese students in the room that might overhear. We discussed Tiananmen Square for a few minutes and at the conclusion he mentioned the fear that he had of discussing that subject with anyone. He had to be careful who he studied with and talked with as some of his fellow students were known to be strong supporters of the Chinese Communist Party and they would report anyone they determined to be supportive of the dead students. He told me that their families back home might suffer as a result. His absence of trust in those with whom he had the most in common - language, culture, etc really drove home the depth of the fear that he felt. Discussing that event with any of them was just not going to happen since he feared for his family back home.
You had to be there. There was so much positive change in the air back then with dictatorships under threat, communism being exposed and challenged, young people full of the knowledge that they could effect meaningful change in their lives if they were willing to take a stand or to fight for it.
Thirty years is a long time. It has certainly been plenty of time for the Chinese Communists to rise to their current status by adopting the things most useful in other systems while imposing an iron hand of control over the parts of the system that maintain their own power.
A number of these students stayed in the US or moved to the EU for employment in the industry after grad school. Others returned to China to help develop their domestic oil and gas industry.
Normally, I would think that this is a fake threat. However, it's written by Mitch Daniels who is also the same guy who froze Purdue's tuition for at least 7 years.
So, I figure there's a chance he means it. Time will have to tell for sure though.
"Those seeking to deny those rights" are not, in the sense that matters, individual students. This is a state pursuit, a state seeking to...
Chinese points of priority are going to continue increasing in relevance. "Is the CCP good?" is not an acceptable conversation topic, in chinese, even in Purdue. Superpower superpowers, so to speak. The US has some of these too.
By “those,” they mean the other Chinese students that harassed him after his speech and more than likely reported him to the Chinese government. Did you read the article?
Still, this is a state effort. The state/ccp made of people. The other students, the chinese officers.. the parents who got a visit in China. This is not all that different from how college "censorship" works in china itself..
to me it is kinda embarrassing that Purdue administration only learned it from a news source. ofc I'm not saying they shouldve monitored students' online chatter etc, but if a group of your students actively harrass a student and you learn it by reading the news there's something wrong there.
It's pretty clear that China is winning the war. American society fabric is disintegrating to ashes while the Chinese are laughing. China's economy is also set to overtake the US this decade. China already has a bigger navy and army.
Only a matter of time before the Chinese invasion comes on the disarmed West coast - Fallout style. Freedom of speech - which is mostly a joke in the US now will then be given its final burial. You will now be thoroughly re-educated and get the Freedom of Glorious Mao. Only the armed gangsters will do some basic resistance before being promptly eliminated.
No nation lasts forever and I guess its USA's time to fade out into the twilight. Time to kneel down to your Chinese overlords soon Americans! All Hail God-Emperor Xi!
It reminds me of a fellow student at Wharton. Whatever the question was in classes (ethics, economics) his answer was ALWAYS "I really feel strongly both ways".
My friends and I even gave him a price for his answers/behavior at the end.
Years later he was a CEO of major corporations. That served him well to never take the stand.
Life is full of people who "really feel strongly both ways". It seems that Purdue is taking that route. We have seen that with other Universities: cheating on exams? Don't do that again (=we need to keep the money flowing).
This is awful. President Daniels should resign. Or the Board should advise him to step down "in the interest of the University".
China poses a significant threat on basic human freedoms of all people. We need to aggressively fight back against any and all influences that are Chinese in origin.
Don't do business with Chinese companies, or companies that are even affiliated with Chinese companies. Don't accept funding with ties to China. Etc etc.
And more importantly, we need programs for Chinese citizens that allow them to immigrate and live in Western countries provided they renounce their Chinese citizenship. The people aren't at fault here, naturally, it's the system that is corrupt and is using the population to further its own corrupt ideology.
So, the other students that trailed the speaker with accusations and harassment on the university’s property will face consequences for their actions to discourage this from recurring, right? Didn’t see that part in the article.
Excellent. Supporting free thought and expression is exactly what universities are supposed to do. I don't feel they've always done so sufficiently in recent years, but it's great to see them taking a stand here.
> I don't feel they've always done so sufficiently in recent years
I TA'd for an anthro program a bit and the 'free thought' people were usually finding out that they'd been abusing terms of art or needed to switch contexts and were struggling to reframe their perceptions.
The difference between "you can't do that" and "that's not what we're doing here" evaded some people for a while.
That's an easy stand to take. It would be more interesting to see what stand would they take on more controversial subjects that also support free thought and expression.
I wonder what motivated Chinese students to offend the poor guy from Hong Kong. I can think of several plausible reasons:
- pure fanaticism of CCP China
- such bullying is just the norm in daily lives where they grew up
- someone from Chinese special services approached them and their families and pressured them to make such comments (to peer pressure)
Knowing that they made to the USA makes me believe that the first one is improbable and the last reason is so convincing.
"Throughout history and regardless of color, culture and creed, the ruling classes have applied more or less the same techniques to control the people. Besides the application of brute force or the mere threat of it, we are manipulated by a plethora of psychological methods that have been refined throughout the ages. Sophisticated technological tools and toys work wonders in manipulating our thoughts, beliefs, and behavior."
This does kind of raise an interesting question. Where do you draw the line between disagreeing and harassing?
If a group follows around a student it seems like harassment, but if they follow around a politician it would likely be called a protest. What if the group was following a professor? Or the president of the university? It seems like it's a matter of how much power the person holds if it is a protest or not, but the line is still somewhat murky.
And narcing on someone in the hope that whoever you narc'd to then goes on to threaten that person's family or friends elsewhere is another several levels beyond that.
How specifically would a Chinese person report taboo speech of another Chinese national from abroad? Is there a hotline or a website or something? Or do you just call any government agency and tell them you want to report bad speech by someone abroad? This seems like something that the US and other countries should be legislating against, instead of leaving it up to schools to deal with.
I find it highly entertaining that they talk about denying rights and then deny the whole of the EU access because they insist on violating their readers' privacy rights and that would be illegal in the EU.
Perhaps a fair point, but I don't think it's remotely comparable to the topic at hand. We're talking about Chinese-born students in America being ratted out to the Chinese government for exercising their free expression rights like model American citizens, even though they are foreigners.
If I had the relevant Presidential powers, I'd offer citizenship to every one of the threatened students, and the rats would be sent packing home to China the second they were identified.
The 50 cent lackeys of Pooh-Bear[1] are not welcome here in America. Go home, scumbags!!
It would be kinda interesting if somebody actually implemented a law like this: all citizens without free speech get automatic asylum. You'd have half of the world turning up on your doorstep within a month.
More seriously, it's also interesting when you think back to how asylum worked during the cold war. Migrants, even explicit economic migrants, were encouraged to emigrate from communist countries (cuba, east germany, etc), while asylum seekers in imminent threat of torture and death (say, 70's era Iranians, 80's tamils, etc) were blocked.
This is a very shallow statement. Probably 99.99% of people fleeing the above-mentioned communist countries were detained at border and sent to camps with tens (maybe hundreds) of thousands being literally murdered while attempting to do so. Obviously the big difference in this case is the numbers of potential asylum seekers, not the origin.
"Probably 99.99% of people fleeing the above-mentioned communist countries"
As far as Czechoslovakia goes, the success rate was WAY beyond 1:10000, that is why people still tried.
About 400 people were killed on our militarized border with West Germany and Austria. The # of people who succeeded was actually over 10 thousand, especially in the earliest phase (1948-51), when the security of the border was far from perfect.
You could also escape in less dramatic fashion, for example by going to Yugoslavia (a non-aligned country) for a vacation and defecting.
Of course, whoever was caught and their families would face serious repercussions. In the Stalinist era, Gulag, after it, less pronounced bullying (loss of jobs, forbidden from higher education, forcibly moved to rural regions).
Your assumption that I'm assuming that is even more bizarre. But regardless, plenty of them do want to become citizens -- especially the kind that speaks their mind in public. There's nothing wrong with making the offer.
Trust me most students in US nowadays are family financial support. They are already rich. And the US do not often give enough working position for them (outside of tech, which h1b is not particularly friendly)
> better quality of life
This definitely is wrong. Those kids enjoyed a far better life in China than US.
> more personal freedoms.
Well, for what they want to do, they'll have more freedom...
If China is such a paradise for the children of the Chinese elite, why do they overwhelmingly go to US universities? Why bother ever leaving China at all?
> because they insist on violating their readers' privacy rights and that would be illegal in the EU.
Bad assumption. Maybe an unpopular fact, but many sites simply block EU access to avoid potential legal pitfalls of navigating foreign laws. Getting the site compliant would require review from legal teams and work from (likely contracted) web developers, which is almost certainly not in the budget for a side site like this.
Not every website is backed by a corporation with on-staff web developers and corporate counsel to double-check everything. Their audience is primarily a local one, so allocating the budget to do this and maintain it isn’t worth it.
It’s a form of purity spiral where the consensus on acceptable behaviour becomes narrower and narrower as peope try to out-compete each other on who is the most virtuous, or in this case who is the most careful about nonexistent GDPR risks.
> or in this case who is the most careful about nonexistent GDPR risks.
Parent comment is convinced the site is doing something that would be illegal.
You are convinced that the site’s GDPR risk is non-existence.
It’s amazing how many people sitting on the sidelines can be so confident about GDPR while having entirely opposite opinions.
But my point stands: This stuff is complicated and requires sign-off from the lawyers in any large institution. If you don’t have a reason or budget to go through that process, you don’t do it. It’s not virtue signaling or anything silly like that. It’s basic corporate legal protections.
Within the EU itself, GDPR is rarely enforced. A paper tiger of sorts. Its main meaning is to scare some people straight, but the resources for actual enforcement of its provisions are rather limited.
For example, I still receive a lot of commercial spam that advertises in-EU businesses.
Maybe but no lawyer is going to say it’s probably fine to break the law since enforcement is lax, and the engineering team isn’t going to say we can stand by all the random code this we pulled from npm. The obvious thing to do here is blocking readers from 7 time zones away which up until today went unnoticed.
This is a completely backwards way of looking at it. If you don't have the budget, create a static website and throw it behind github pages or s3 or whatever. An entire university with a school of computer science cannot figure out some standard way of doing this ?
This is an independent website, not part of the official University budget.
You can’t just round up some CS students and have them produce a website compliant with international law for free.
This involves legal teams, contracted developers, and constrained budgets that are already stretched thin on operating in their core business. It’s not reasonable to demand they invest tens of thousands of dollars (or demand equivalent free labor from CS students and lawyers) to serve a population that almost never visits the site.
> You can’t just round up some CS students and have them produce a website compliant with international law for free.
But the issue isn't "international law" in the general case (which, indeed, would be very hard), it's the specific case of the GDPR, the solution to which (for this particular site, which only serves static content) is mind-numbingly trivial: don't collect personal data, don't set cookies. That's it. That's all you have to do.
You're only talking about the technial part. But there are non technical requirements as well: In many cases you need to name a person responsible for data protection, a privacy policy, a list of services you're sharing data with,...
Though I'm not sure if a local US newspaper even needs to be compliant, since it doesn't target EU residents and thus might be out of scope.
How are they producing a website compliant with local laws then ? What if they inadvertently end up violating DMCA ? What happens then ? The answer to that is one can be reasonably sure that they aren't doing anything stupid or malicious. It's the same with GDPR. Don't use trackers, cookies, adware etc., none of which are necessary for a college newspaper. This is a simple technical problem.
Right, but surely they have resources at the school if they need technical assistance. It's a university. Just find any CS major and they'll tell you how to set up a website.
• with all images / external resources hosted on the same domain;
• where the logs are default configuration, don't leave the server (except as GoAccess reports), and are deleted / anonymised eventually;
is GDPR-compliant. Sure, there are other ways to be compliant, but this works, and is basically the default way of setting up a website. It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
> is basically the default way of setting up a website
It's not the default way of setting up an online content management system to which student journalists can post articles without going through some convoluted command-line build process ("...then you do a git commit and push, run the Hugo script, and rsync the files to the server"... yeah, no.)
> It's not hard to check whether this is how your website works.
Since they're using a third-party content management system, they most likely neither know nor even care how the website works. Why should they? They're journalists, not system administrators.
As others have noted, this is an independent student newspaper. Their normal readership outside the Purdue community is probably in the low single digits on a percentage basis, and their EU readership is likely close to non-existent. They (or, more likely, the people who run the CMS for them) have concluded that a full audit of their system to ensure GPDR compliance is simply not worth it for the minuscule number of additional readers they'd gain. And they're almost certainly right.
When you put together that simple bulletpoint approach you still leveraged baselevel knowledge about the GDPR that would be ridiculous to assume of a CS major.
I don't know how this newspaper works, but typically the team itself will comprise students from different majors, seniority, etc. So it's not a question of begging for help or money.
Like a sibling said, you misunderstand these laws (there have been more than one, but the main one now is GDPR). I never heard of a law where you needed a privacy wall to inform people about some technical features of how the website works. It's only when you store tracking tokens in the cookie jar, localStorage, etags, etc., that you need to tell them what data you are collecting.
If you do not need opt-in consent just to view the page, then no coercive wall is ever required.
Literally every single one of the sites with so-called cookie walls can be divided into two categories: site owners that have no idea what the law actually says but they think it's trendy or something, and sites that have no legitimate interest or other legal reason for processing some data and therefore need to seek your "freely given" opt-in consent. If they already had a legal grounds, they wouldn't need to ask for it.
The fact that they don't want to spend the time and money to conform to the EU's bureaucratic "privacy theatre" is not evidence that they're actually violating anyone's privacy rights.
What makes you day they are violating readers' privacy rights? It's a not-for-profit student newspaper, they probably just don't want to risk GDPR fines. Or they don't expect readers from Europe.
Of course, lawyers exist to make themselves money. Doesn't change that if you don't violate GDPR you won't be fined. A simple blog does not violate it, so they must be doing something creepy.
Very simple sites can violate it. For one example: if you, or anything in your stack, logs IP addresses you need a legitimate business interest to do so. It is needed for security and usage statistics and stuff but you will need a lawyer to explain that when you get hit with some fines.
> but you will need a lawyer to explain that when you get hit with some fines.
This is really just scaremongering. Usually there are exceptions to a rule but here I feel fairly comfortable saying: show me a single case where someone got "hit with some fines" and then they needed a lawyer to "explain" things in a lawyery manner and then suddenly everything was fine whereas it wasn't when the site owners responded to an inquiry in normal human language.
If you don't do tracking for no reason and aren't blatantly invading privacy, you'll get a warning if anything -- and for a USA-only site, no country's DPA feels responsible anyway so I'd be highly surprised if they even got to the warning phase even if you were doing something wrong.
I know there are technically some requirements in every privacy policy, e.g. mentioning which rights the user has (I'm not in favor of having those, citing the law in every policy makes them much longer than necessary to read and dilutes the real content, and also it makes it so that you can't have a legal website without complying with the EU's specific laws -- that won't scale if all ~190 countries in the world try to pull that crap), but that's not the same as needing to lawyer up to wave away fines that you got hit with out of the blue as a website that had nothing to do with the EU in the first place.
First you would get a request from a private citizen to explain. And -if you can indeed explain- it would seldom go further than that.
Possibly it'd be nice to have some boilerplate and possibly config tweaks for some of the most common default server configurations though. (Eg. for a standard Wordpress site).
> Doesn't change that if you don't violate GDPR you won't be fined.
For most companies figuring out if they violate a foreign privacy law like GDPR and remaining compliant with it isn't a technical question, it's a legal one.
Attempting to hand-wave this away is likely what led to the decision to geo-block in the first place (tech person says "there's no risk", board says "prove it", lawyer says "pay me", tech person blocks the EU).
I have no clue about Purdue, but many large universities with significant numbers of international students have things like recruiting offices abroad, etc.
I have not a deep knowledge of GDPR but wouldn't their study abroad / student exchanges programs with universities from Europe be considered like doing business in Europe?
I feel like you've got that backwards: making the site available if it violates GDPR would be violating your rights. Making the site unavailable to you is respecting them.
That's not to mention that what's much more likely here is that a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN likely just considers the EU out of scope of their audience vs the cost of figuring out if they're GDPR compliant.
You should take the outside perspective into account: For me as an EU employer, this implies students from West Lafayette, Indiana, are unable to fulfils even the most basic of rules regarding privacy and are thus a liability. Doing this - even if the site itself is not directly associated with the student body - diminishes the perceived worth of the degree.
I'm not sure that computes for me. Can you explain in more detail how refusing service outright is better than providing ethical service?
To trigger GDPR, you need to be collecting PII (of EU citizens).
What interest would a student focused and student run campus newspaper in West Lafayette, IN have in people's PII (let alone the PII of European Citizens) in the first place, and why would they be collecting it?
It’s also negligible if you block EU access. The people that own the content get to decide which approach to take.
I for one am a little tired of EU citizens telling me something doesn’t have compliance costs when I’ve been in the room when outside counsel couldn’t agree if a brochure ware site was compliant because the logs contained IP addresses.
You may wish that the regulations didn’t make the choice of blocking EU citizens the more palatable but that doesn’t make it true.
At quick glance their page does have a login button, which you can't implement on a static site. It also has social network buttons. These are probably all useful features for them and their audience
Indeed, though that's extra work. One can also just send people to the social media site when they click on the site's button, afaik they all have dedicated pages for sharing content (they want you to share stuff on their platform). Don't need to import their javascript and run it on every visitor's system just to have links to their sites.
My low-information view is that the Chinese government is an extraordinarily effective communications agency who very clearly understands the role that university students play in transmitting culture, especially when studying abroad, and has very openly worked to help spread their message throughout their diaspora.
Many US universities have a Chinese Student & Scholar Association and it's not like they try to hide that they are arms of the CCP. (Just for a random example https://myinvolvement.org/organization/cssaatualbany - "The Chinese Student and Scholar Association at the University of Albany is joined and organized by the Chinese students and scholars at the University of Albany of their own record. It is a nonprofit organization that is supported and guided by CCP through the Consulate-General of the PRC in New York.")
Mass organization can do incredible things -- a group of people is much more effective than the individuals.
I wonder how much of it is similar to East Germany with their informants, it's possible that even overseas the students don't dare speak out because someone in their friend group could report them. And as the press release said, even the student's parents back home got harassed by the cops.
It'd be an effective way of control, "Hey why didn't you come to our student org meeting last week?".
The CSSA is part of the CCP’s overseas surveillance and intimidation arm.
I speculated last year that the CSSA was also involved in the arrest of Chinese student Luo Daiqing from the University of Minnesota. He was arrested when he set foot in China for Xinnie the Pooh meme tweets he made while in the states.[0]
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”
Whenever you think that you’re on the outside looking in, seeing the world for what it is while others seem blind, you should reconsider your perspective.
The Chinese people is not some herd of sheep without mental faculties. I wince when I see quotes like these spoken about a people of literal billions.
Whenever you think that you’re on the outside looking in, seeing the world for what it is while others seem blind, you should reconsider your perspective.
My wife's an immigrant, having grown up in Shanghai during the cultural revolution. She's got countless stories of how she was systematically lied to the entire time. For example, when she was little she was taught that children in America were largely starving too death, which the children of China were lucky that the leadership of Chairman Mao had brought them such bounty.
My wife's family was systematically persecuted, in part because of their cosmopolitan exposure (her uncle was already in America, and her father was a sea captain traveling the world). Every member of her extended family, other than her grandmother, spent time in prison or work camps. I've read the forced "confession" documents from some of her family.
All through this time, we know that China has been consistently suppressing information about the Tienanmen Square massacre, for example.
While under Deng's regime the pendulum started to swing back toward freedom a bit, it's completely reversed again over the past several years under Xi. On a number of occasions my wife's own communications to her family in China have been filtered (e.g., postings on WeChat being removed after the fact, or email attachments being stripped out of messages).
Your point that we need to be cautious about assuming that others are blinded while we have a unique ability to see the truth is well taken. But I think in this case it's really warranted.
I wonder how much business Western cyber companies have with China? If I recall, the Great Firewall was actually started by a US company built out of either an IARPA or DARPA project. It wasn’t until many years later that DoD started using similar products, only then after they jailed (Shawn Carpenter).
>The Chinese people [are] not some herd of sheep without mental faculties.
Meta: sure doesn't take much bad faith to sour a good debate! "One bad apple spoils the bunch," they say.
One of the two core ideas in 1984 is a) the extreme plasticity of the human mind, and b) that power finds its ultimate expression using that plasticity to cause suffering. The ruling society of 1984, the "inner circle", as represented by O'Brien, is highly self-aware (also, insane). The people, like Smith, are not sheep although he, like everyone else around him, must act like one on command, by threat of force.
To characterize the victims of 1984 as sheep is miss the stunning evil of the antagonists, which is that they first found ways to make people act that way on a gross level, and who are now methodically finding ways to make them act that way on a subtle, universal level.
Perhaps you, and rugged individualists like you, believe you wouldn't have anything to worry about under such a regime, and by extension if you accuse a population of actually suffering under such a regime, then it is an attack on them. I encourage you to consider the possibility that your hypothesis is wrong. Namely that you would not, by hypothesis, have survived the events of 1984. And that doesn't make you, or anyone, sheep.
The point in 1984 is that *everyone* can fall victim to mental manipulation, and an observer can discover the manipulation easily. Like American sees the hypocrisy of Chinese democracy, and, equally, Chinese seeing the hypocrisy of American one. They are virtually identical in the observation, and both sides can easily convince themselves of their own conviction.
God, I only wish this time the leaders from the both sides are responsible ones, people like Trump on both sides can easily make wars in a wink of eyes with both sides seeing each other this way.
The sideline point is that one is the worst judge of themselves...
I'm beginning to think this is an intentional tactic made in bad faith. Criticisms of the CCP are not criticisms of Chinese people. This was used two years ago regarding the cover up by the CCP of the Wuhan Lab.
Direct parallels can be seen in US discourse regarding the actions of the Israeli government being equated to antisemitism.
maybe not the book itself, but if you read the article you'll see that even weirder stuff are banned:
The government disallows the publication of any work by Liu Xiaobo, the determined critic of the Communist Party who in 2017 became the first Nobel Peace Prize winner since Nazi times to die in prison. Again, for a time last year Chinese citizens could not type 19, 80, and four in sequence—but they could, and still can, buy a copy of 1984, the most famous novel on authoritarianism ever written. Prefer Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? They can buy that text, too, just as easily, although its title also joined the taboo list last winter.
Do you know of any examples of descent against the government that ended well for those that spoke up? I highly doubt the people are sheep and I'm pretty positive I would act in the same exact way and keep my mouth shut in order to live my life if I was living in a country with an oppressive government.
The collapse of the Eastern European socialist countries 30 years ago is an excellent example. But it only works when the general public had suffered enough and isn't willing to support the regime anymore. And the economic situation needs to get worse for one or two generations, it won't happen overnight and in a working economy. A few dissidents "speaking up" to incite change is a romantic idea, but it's not enough.
It's a kind of miracle it happened in most these countries without bloodshed. You need to mobilize large parts of society and have a favorable political situation to perform a coup like this without a civil war.
Yea, I meant in China but those examples you provided definitely illustrate how unlikely it will be to happen in China. It's pretty sad and I can't imagine having such a bleak future, especially for those that are more oppressed than others over there.
So, should the outside observers who noticed the mass hysteria, death and destruction in Russia, Germany, Cambodia, Myanmar, Romania, Turkey and myriad other examples during the 20th century just have realized that they needed to "reconsider their perspective"? It's entirely possible, and in fact, highly probable, that entire mass groups of people can be manipulated into collective insanity quite easily. That doesn't make them sheep, it makes them Human, and it's up to us to be aware of this aspect of our collective psychology and point it out where visible.
I think that so far there, billion is singular since the population of China is only about 1.5 billion. The population growth rate is also in decline and has been for a while.
One and a half billion is still a big number though.
One of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives. This displays the virtues of our imperfect system better than anything else, imo.
Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.
I am less worried about our democratic governments then I am about private entities, especially in sports and entertainment bending over to various totalitarian governments for a handful of bucks. Because that is making it easier for our governments to do the same, simply because people are used to it.
China as a strong lobby in DC [0]. And, while admitting you're wrong should show strength and courage, for some reason, probably due to media pressure among other things, the political discourse in the US doesn't allow people to admit they were wrong and course correct or just come to a new position when new information is found. Remember the huge campaign calling John Kerry a "flip-flopper" [1]? I suspect the lobbyist money is more of the driving factor here though. If you can somehow eliminate that, our elected leaders wouldn't have the motivation for lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry in the first place.
> Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'.
But Americans do. Things are so polarized that people believe complete horseshit from their political leaders because they don't want to budge an inch to the "other" side.
>one of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives
I'm far more concerned about tolerating this behavior among ourselves. Politicians always lie and people have been complaining about it as far back as we have written record.
This case involving these students is the same basic fact pattern (but without and abstractions between the victims and the thread of government violence) of the narcing on your neighbors for various minor stuff behavior that is applauded as "being savvy and working the system" behavior in certain demographic circles in the US.
If you don't wanna live in a world where the secret police show up at the door or someone who's kid said some WrongThink don't make us take steps in that direction by making us live in a world where people have to worry about not putting the wrong politician's sign in their yard lest the building inspector showing up and measuring the square footage of their garden shed that can't be seen from the street.
It's not like you wake up one day and have a secret police in an otherwise free society. It's a long slow slide with a lot of intermediate steps where similar behavior under different pretexts and with slight abstractions is normalized until it is so pervasive it doesn't need to be obfuscated and you get an official "secret police" agency
> One of the best ways for those of us in the democratic West to combat this is to not tolerate when our own governments promote false narratives
Virtually every narrative peddled by politicians in the West is either false or misleading. That's a high bar that I don't think we'll ever meet. We can maybe asymptotically approach it, say by getting money out of politics, but I don't think it will ever go away.
The best way for us to combat this is to strengthen our diplomatic relations and develop our economy, which is exactly want China is doing itself.
I think that people in the West really overestimate the importance of combating narratives to the point where China is taking advantage of it. China doesn't actually give a damn about narratives outside of China, except when they want to virtue signal or when it's convenient. For example, look at China's reaction towards Nike and H&M after they spoke out about Xinjiang. They've encouraged their citizens to boycott these companies, which helps their Chinese-owned competitors. Meanwhile, they'll happily continue to supply H&M and Nike because they would otherwise harm their economy. The result is that we have a larger trade deficit.
This is just wishful thinking. Doesn’t help other countries. We just think way too much of ourselves in the US and our influence in the world, specifically how our way of life influences other countries. It probably stems from the collapse of the USSR, which was mostly because of internal system rot but we attributed it to American freedom and democracy. Every foreign policy decision since then is taken with those lens and we ended up failing miserably in all of them.
I mean I think that is a very simplistic, limited and isolated point of view to address a population, but also very optimistic about the democratic West population capability to logically read situations.
I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out, I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp, and if I was worried as Americans right now about China (not even Taiwanese are giving as much of a fuck), I am sure I would be aware of more examples.
What I mean is that there are servants in the world, patriotic people that are willing to put 1 kilo of ham slice on their eyes at every press conference, we have people who believe in the second coming of god and people who believe in Q theories, we have accepted the incarceration of people who reported about war crimes in the middle east, we have accepted attacks on women right to abort, we have accepted the killing on our streets of black people and minorities. All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia, is nothing more than a way to keep the people of the west distracted from their own misery, if people of the West were able to solve anything, there are already enough problems that internally need to be taken care of
I suspect the two of you are agreeing more that in initially seems - IMHO the proper response of the west to the current time of troubles is to double down on the values of freedom over safety that made us the dominant cultural force. Stupidity exists in dictatorships also, it's when we're not willing to be distracted by propaganda against our rivals and look at our own mistakes that a democratic system lets much of that stupidity cancel itself out.
> I see tennis players in China being incarcerated for speaking out
Who is this?
> I saw recently a video of a guy trying to report about Uyghurs concentration camp
https://youtu.be/zZCq7wLgpEc
This? This guy is using this to seek political asylum in US. I watched his previous videos on Chinese website, this guy had been planning this for a while. The validity of the video is up to you to assess.
>All this spotlight on NK, China, Russia
If you look closely at all the spotlights, then you actually can find that most of them are minor issues. Even human rights violation are less diabolical: uygurs are put into rededication camp, while Afghanistan/Iraqian/Syrians were blow to pieces...
Bot of course, one might believe putting into rededication camp is worse than being blown into pieces.
"Don't tolerate lies, hypocrisy, or sophistry from our leaders even if they are nominally on 'our side'. ", This bugs me so much. The biden administration literally complained to MSM about the bad news they were getting. In a few days CNN came out with "Gas prices are coming down ", being still not as low as the Trump era.
Reminds me of 1984 when Winston makes up an article about chocolate rations
From your source, gas was an average of ~2.40 on jan 20th. Rite after biden gets in gas spikes, peaking around 3.40 end of october. Now it's around 3.20. Still up by 80c nationally. But CNN is saying "gas is going down" trying to give biden a favorable image, instead of saying "Gas is still way up because of the ESG policies of the biden administration"
The headline from CNN I found is: "Finally some relief: Gasoline and natural gas prices are falling". Does that sound particularly positive? Not really, it actually emphasizes how bad it had been and how it's something that even needs relief. You'd rather they inject politics into their statement of fact headlines like your example? Is that even true? It's also been high recently in Europe so I'm skeptical.
This example is grasping at straws to find an example of bias in the media. Please reconsider that this bias may be much smaller than you think if this is what it manifests as. The comparison to 1984 is absurd. They're saying "2+2=4" and you're saying that shows bias since that's what Biden says.
Edit: I thought to check what Fox says about gas prices and of course the top hit for that was "CNN gushes over falling gas prices". Yikes, talk about bias in news and I'm guessing that's where this crazy idea comes from! I'll take CNN over that any day, and you should too.
We have the same problem in the US. Certain "Freedom loving" sects applaud military intervention, increased police presence, spying on citizens, and the death of any protester, peaceful or otherwise.
US embarrassments, however, have movies made about them, as opposed to burying them as deeply as possible whilst simultaneously threatening every single citizen with, essentially, removal from society, if they speak against the chosen narrative.
No country is innocent, some are, however, free (moreso, at least, enough to matter, enough to choose if the need arises).
> US embarrassments, however, have movies made about them, as opposed to burying them as deeply as possible
In some ways, I think this can actually serve to make people believe that real events were fictional - after all, movies are generally fictional or at least with a good dose of artistic license.
I also must point out that some western governments will go to extreme lengths to bury bad actions as deeply as possible - if it wasn't for leakers, there are a whole host of Western war crimes and atrocities that would never have surfaced to the public. Even when they do, government and media propaganda machines are very efficient at convincing the general populace there is nothing to see here.
We like to berate China and others for bad actions (rightly so), but in many respects Western governments are appalling hypocrites.
One "feature" of democracy is that it doesn't matter whether people speak out against something. You just need 51% of people to agree with you, which can come from manufactured consent, and you can accomplish all the evil deeds you want all the same. If you try to do anything thar actually threatens the government's operations, you're treasonous and can be punished accordingly.
I have yet to see a feature-length film depicting Trump the way, e.g. Oliver Stone's "W" or Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" depicted Bush. Trump's crimes are buried in a mountain of...other crimes, and the atmosphere is so thick with bullshit that investigating facts is to tempt a firehouse of political hate of epic proportions. I think certain topics are virtually suicide these days.
Those movies are more often than not glorifying such embarrassments, which make them propaganda.
As an analogy for China & the US, you can say one of them is Orwellian while the other is Huxleyan. They're both oppressive, but it's about time to stop pretending only coercion is bad; propaganda is everywhere in american media and it's the same tactic used by autocracies in the 40s: spin everything you do as "us vs them they evil" and dehumanize anything your foes do as "they evil not free genocide". People who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths are the same to dismiss the Iraq war with millions dead; calling it what it was, a genocide, will never even pass by their brains. Double standards.
Two that come to mind are The Big Short and The Trial of the Chicago Seven.
Two movies in a rich fabric that give me no confidence in the reality of consequences of bad behaviour that my parents drilled into me since I was born.
Both movies give me the impression that no lessons have been learned by either experience.
Subjective comparisons are really useless on a debate eg. "I think USA/EU are bad but China is worse" while someone else will say exactly the opposite. You'll then say "he's blinded by propaganda" and the other side will say the same. If the debate is in a western website, you win, if it's in China, they win. That's a flamewar shitshow, not a debate.
The Orwell/Huxley comparison wrt the way China/America respectively enforce their narrative. China is through crackdown of dissent, coercion, while the US is through propaganda that paints everything America does as righteous, inherently good, altruist, selfless... You only have to look at the output of Hollywood or modern videogames to see such an obvious fact.
Of course, if you're the target of state propaganda, it'll be hard to decouple what you've been fed your whole life as truth from geopolitical interests. Being an outsider I can see the bullshit in both governments, but the one I'm worried about is the one which has been belligerent since I was born and much before that.
Yeah, I mean you're basically saying if someone is so inclined they can approach any question from a perspective of bad faith, and never recognize any merit to a theoretically valid argument. I don't think that problem in general can be solved, even if we eliminated propaganda or otherwise. No one can make anyone agree with someone, even if they're right.
That being said, I can still ask questions and say what I think and see what happens. I'm legitimately open to being wrong, in fact I'd love to be.
Also, I'll just add this briefly, I didn't say anything about China. I just said it could be much worse. That could come from my own people (I'm from the USA).
I believe discourse/debate on the internet are broken. I'll go as far as saying internet forums have failed because they're still text-only, moderation is still upvote/downvote-only and people are not obligated to add citations for what they claim. We're left with finding forums where people are more rational and less biased, which is why I frequent HN.
Still, the problem can be alleviated imo if we level up the way internet forums work.
You and me are doing it right now! Respect and setting a good example at the end of the day I think succeed. I can't prove it, but I take it as a matter of faith I suppose.
O and yeah, you're right, these kinds of issues aren't so much of a problem face to face. Our emotions are like little ASICs that just kind of grease the wheels of social friction. Evolutions... crazy.
I'm still waiting for the incontestable proof China is trying to get rid of Uygurs. No, a known anti-China source such as Adrian Zenz being propped up by adversaries of China does not count. If you have the slightest understanding of discourse, you already know this: you don't get a biased source to report on the subject they're biased about.
It seems unreasonable to require that all bad information about China come from previously neutral sources. Is Zenz an anti-China source because he's "biased", or because he's reached a reasonable evidence-based conclusion that the Chinese government is very bad?
AFAIK there was (still is) huge public backlash after it became apparent that there were no WMDs in Iraq. Ofc you can argue that this reaction was too late and maybe even insincere (since public support was very high in the beginning of the war).
> people who say there's a genocide in China with 0 Uygur deaths
Whoa, some paid CCP propaganda there. How about this: Allow international human rights groups and Western media access to the Uygurh areas? Allow the topic to be discussed openly on the Chinese internet?
Until the CCP does that, it's better advised to just suppress the story. Like it's doing now.
Sadly not - remember, the US with the UK's complicity is going to let Julian Assange rot in prison probably for the rest of his life. For engaging in an act of journalism which in all likelihood ended the Iraq war, or at least made a substantial contribution to doing so.
It's the same type of problem, but much more limited in extent.
Every country has it to some degree, authoritarian regimes typically go crazy with nationalism since it's the most powerful tool they have to force their victims on the side of the aggressors against the evil foreigners.
We have the same problem in the US. Certain "Equity loving" sects applaud disregarding national boarders, easy release of multiple time offenders, shouting down those who disagree, and the death of any vaccine protester.
Eh, I don't think that this pattern is even remotely a uniquely Chinese thing; this is just how most people react defensively of the country and narrative they identify with when it is seen as threatened by a hostile country. Look into any Reddit thread on the topic of Russia and Ukraine, and you will see the same patterns play out with Americans giving each other backrubs for the most implausible theories imputing cartoonish evil to their geopolitical opponents (these days I quite often see celebrated posts suggesting that the US should withdraw its military protection from the ungrateful Germans which surely will result in Russia invading them), while accusing every disagreeing poster of being personally on the payroll of the Russian propaganda apparatus.
Of course, the situation in Russian popular forums is not better in the slightest, and the relevant patterns of conspiratorial thinking are reproduced at even the smallest of scales all the time. It has become a bit of a trope on 4chan that some contingent of posters will, if more than one post disagrees with their viewpoint, immediately claim that the two posts were actually made by the same person sockpuppeting; and last time I checked the recurring threads for some video games I play (still among the best sources for real-time information and gossip about updates and what-not...), they were all getting torn apart by mutual accusations of off-site conspiracies (usually on Discord) to push some viewpoint or meme or another.
I used to think but the last few years in the US taught me that people everywhere have the same capacity for zealotry, they may have to be reached/triggered differently that’s all.
My commentary is (intended to be) more about how effectively it's been triggered than any particular group of people's susceptibility to it. The effectiveness of the execution of it.
Plenty of groups of Western folks get super amped up over any threat to the continuity of their chosen self destructive, unhealthy, unsustainable lifestyles to which they've become accustomed. Because freedom!
Plato talked a lot about this. It's very easy for politicians to feed people things that they like but aren't good for them, and this is the normal course of affairs in history. It doesn't really mean anything bad about the USA in the great picture, because we're no different than the rest of the world. That being said, good things happen when "divine providence" (or whatever) produces leaders who feed the people things that improve their health. History in this way is sort of chaotic and kind of a waiting game. The best way to minimize the time in between downward spirals is by strengthening the fabric of society when you have the opportunity, by teaching them - for lack of a better word - how to recognize knowledge.
America was like this during the run-up to the Iraq war. The last iteration of "cancel culture" was when anyone questioning the war was shouted down as un-patriotic. Search for the Dixie Chicks, a country group who spoke out against the war, and read about what happened to them.
One of the things I've learned in my years on this planet is that propaganda works. It works very very well. That's why governments, corporations, and special interests spend so much money on it.
> Search for the Dixie Chicks, a country group who spoke out against the war, and read about what happened to them.
In case anyone is curious, the group fka the Dixie Chicks spoke out against the Iraq war in 2003. In 2005, they won a Grammy award. In 2007, they won five Grammies, including all three overall major categories (excluding "best new artist" from the four general field categories, because they weren't new). They are also the first female band in chart history to have three albums debut at No. 1.
In 2020, the group dropped the word "Dixie" from their name ... because of cancel culture? In any case, the Chicks then performed "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the 2020 Democratic National Convention.
There is also a large contingent of young english speaking CCP loyalists who go around liberal American social media and absolutely shred the US about everything (to much applause). It just looks like typical, albeit extreme, young liberal anti-establishment (and race centric) rhetoric. Dig through their profile though and you'll see they are oddly sympathetic to China.
These are people who are simultaneously calling for America to be dissolved on the grounds of repaying for slavery while also arguing that the youth of Hong Kong are confused and mislead.
I personally haven't met anyone from China who has liked their government. I would assume there is some selection bias there and those that love their country are more likely to stay home, but would be really interested to talk to a true believer. I wouldn't be surprised if pressure was applied to those individuals to harass the one that spoke out against the party. The regime is brutal and most will toe the line when their family is threatened back home.
Have you met them at a $30k+/yr university? I think that's an important piece of context here. The current Chinese system affords these students the ability to go to prestigious universities abroad. Things are going good for these students, so why wouldn't they like the government that grants them such privilege?
Folks who've immigrated for other reasons might have a different experience...
I don't think I met any in college who spoke about their thoughts about the CCP. But yea, it definitely seems plausible and very likely that there are a proportion that are grateful to the CCP for the opportunities they are given. I would be extremely curious about the ratio that is thankful to the party versus thankful that they've escaped.
> I would be extremely curious about the ratio that is thankful to the party versus thankful that they've escaped.
Escaped? Lolololol.
If China is as bad as the western mainstream media or some of those anti-China YouTube channels make it out to be, then all of those Chinese students (middle class or above) that studied in western countries would do whatever they could to stay but the majority go back to China to live and work.
Of all the Chinese friends I made in China, some are not satisfied with the CCP, mainly to do with the issue of free speech/censorship and that you cannot criticise the CCP openly. I would say the majority love their country, including the ones that studied in western countries.
For some of them, yes [0], but even beside that, if you're well off enough, in country that treats dissenters so poorly, to send your child abroad to study at an expensive university, you're likely in favor of the status quo.
Your link shows: The CSC funds approximately 65,000 Chinese students studying abroad in a given year, and the same number of international students in China.[1]
If you want to talk to a true believer, go to reddit, on /r/sino. /r/china has the people critical to China, /r/sino has the pro-CCP crowd. As for similar subs I'd expect the threshold for getting banned to be fairly low, though.
I'd be pretty curious to know if there are many people working for the CCP in propaganda in the /r/china forum. The possibility of astroturfing makes it kind of impossible to know the truth. But, I will definitely give it a read.
/r/china is very critical of the CCP, so I doubt there are many there - even relatively innocuous-looking stuff positive on China tends to get piled on there. /r/sino is opposite.
You only have to look at this very website to see the same happening with US citizens' support for their government's chosen narrative. It bodes poorly for Puerto Rico, Cuba, Nicaragua and every other nation who had military juntas propped up by the USG and still suffer from american influence. Some will go to great lengths to foment hatred against whistleblowers, such as Assange or Snowden.
Oh yes, I totally agree, but I just think this is on a different scale, and I might be way wrong on this, but...
Imagine a US college student studying overseas commenting about the US failures in the Vietnam War or the Iraq War over nonexistent WMDs. Would other US students harass that individual, and if so, would they report the individual to US "authorities" to make sure a message was passed on to the individuals parents?
I get riled up about bad opinions, but I'm not going out of my way to make their lives miserable or report them to authorities. Fuck man, I've got shit to do of my own.
> I'm not going out of my way to make their lives miserable
But things like that often happen in the US, like, for example, in the case of people who spoke against the invasion of Iraq. This can even escalate further, I will never forget the “freedom fries” or “Today Baghdad, tomorrow Paris!”
These are other students though, if that makes a difference. Kids, in a foreign country, who should be either studying, drinking, or fucking. Doing shit because their parents are a thousand miles away. Anything but home country goddamn politics.
Again, maybe I'm wrong, but usually that level of zealotry requires a few years of career and relationship failure that's out of reach to the average student.
The US governemnt is inept and oppressive in its ways, but you are acting exactly as a hostile foreign agent would, stirring up strife and making exaggerated equivocations to create division.
From my point of view, being a foreigner to US citizens, it's the USG stirring strife, exaggerated equivocations like the Uygur genocide fiasco... All in an attempt to create division and weaken their adversaries. It goes both ways, the US doesn't get to be morally in a higher ground when you do the same things (or worse) as the people you're accusing. If you cut down on the jingoism, it's 2 global superpowers in a geopolitical battle, and that's the only objective view.
The same can be said about the citizens of the empire. Unfortunately, it is the global problem. Especially, countries with the oil are affected (e.g., remember Iraq and fake 911, WMD connections). Though, countries with social leaning should be concerned too I'm looking at you Europe: universal health care is a cardinal sin that will be corrected by the empire sooner or later.
The university has disciplinary procedures, and referring the matter to that process is exactly the rule-of-law response that rule of law is intended for. The goal here is to respond in a way that defangs the CCP’s provocation.
Applause for Purdue eh. I am excited to see how this plays out for them but I support this position.
Universities are a place of learning. If someone is misunderstood in their worldview or something else. That's the place to learn where you're wrong. Therefore all viewpoints must be allowed.
"We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111."
The brainwashing must be strong for students thousands of miles away from China in the middle of nowhere Indiana for them to feel the need to snitch on dissenters. Or, more likely, they were threatened before they left China that they would be watched while abroad.
You don't need to be brainwashed, you just need to be afraid.
Afraid of being reported yourself, if you don't report others. You never know, if the "other" was just a false flag to test your reporting. You never know if your best friend, who also witnessed the same thing, reported. He doesn't know if you reported. Reverse prisoner's dilemma.
> You never know, if the "other" was just a false flag to test your reporting. You never know if your best friend, who also witnessed the same thing, reported. He doesn't know if you reported.
I am worried about the authoritarian turn my country (not China) is taking. But reading and contemplating these words sent a shiver down my spine.
Students, privileged ones at least, are still living in a fairly black and white life and have not seen that the world is many colours of truth. So defending one broad ideology is pretty easy for them, until they live a little longer and experience that we are more greys than hard edges.
I don't know, I remember a naturalized college classmate of mine who came to the US permanently in elementary school (from China) going on off the cuff rants about the Dalai Lama poisoning people.
I think they do a really good job at creating a narrative of victimhood and inculcating a sort of unhinged teenage belligerence. Not that threats don't have their role, or that they aren't keeping folks under observation, but they get a lot of mileage without those tools.
I get leery of claiming "brainwashing" because I know some people in the US who would probably do the same thing... no threats or direct government intervention necessary. For some people it seems our natural predilection for tribalism only needs a little push to get there.
The network effect is even worse when consider a lot of the alternative are banned in china. This makes it difficult basically impossible for Chinese abroad to communicate with their friends and family back in mainland using some alternative service.
I get it. But atleast I'm not living in fear of my family being put in jail due to some offhand remark on a WhatsApp group (not saying that is not a possibility in future due to how things are turning around the world).
The narrative of Chinese international students being brainwashed CCP militants or terrified informants is miles away from every interaction I've actually had with Chinese international students. Even when 'sensitive topics' are brought up.
I think there are some bad trends and some very vocal and nationalistic exceptions that make for some sensational news stories. Like most college students, everyone is mostly just concerned with homework and getting along with their roommates.
I've heard it from another Chinese student that a lot of Chinese students come from families that are blessed by CCP. So naturally they are very loyal to CCP. Very few students/people in general can make it outside of China without being blessed by CCP. Hence very high loyalty to CCP among international Chinese students.
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country
belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be
granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call
765-743-1111.
I am surprised it's blocked in the EU. My first guess is that this student newspaper doesn't have a lot of technical folks on staff and didn't see much point in investing in being Europe-friendly. Their hosting site, https://townnews.com/, doesn't look super legit at a glance but perhaps someone else knows more.
As an American living in London, I find GDPR blocks extremely annoying…but I blame GDPR. It is a well intentioned law but horribly scoped. If I were the technical staff at a regional university in the US, I wouldn’t invest in compliance with a law that in theory can issue severe penalties. I would simply block that traffic, as they and many others have done.
Are the logs permanent? If not then GDPR doesn't cover it. Can you use the logs to identify users and their behaviour? If not GDPR doesn't cover it.
If you keep permanent logs with information about users, then yeah that is a problem. But it should be a problem, that is a big potential security/privacy issue.
This is a student run newspaper. They probably don’t employ a dedicated IT professional nor a legal professional to help them understand what GDPR requires of them. It’s easy to say “compliance with GDPR is so easy” when you’ve taken the time to understand what it requires—why should an American student newspaper have to take the time to learn other countries’ laws? Blocking access is easier especially considering the probability of the web site appealing to an international audience.
I’m not sure how I’m supposed to parse this. Maybe the “continents” is meant to be a correction from “countries’ laws”, but that would be a mistake because the EU isn’t a continent but rather a union of sovereign nations, and “countries’” is plural possessive so the original wording is correct.
Since GDPR, I've had to implement a lot of data retention policy and "nuke" button type feature in various systems.
But as a general web consumer myself, all I've noticed is that nearly every website I visit has a banner at the bottom saying "We use cookies, click Accept". Very rarely is there some kind of "Please Don't" button. It's just tacit acceptance, or else close the browser tab to opt-out.
“Not much harder” for the technical person maybe, but for the nontechnical person who doesn’t even know what information their software stores or for how long much less the requirements to appease GDPR, it’s much easier to block and get on with life especially considering what little legitimate EU-originating traffic their site probably received when the decision to geoblock was made.
How does a nontechnical user with little knowledge of GDPR know if he needs to display a cookie popup (he may not even know what a cookie is or whether or not his software uses them or in what capacity). What about email addresses in user accounts? Is he now collecting private information and making himself culpable for expunging that information on request? He may not even know how to expunge in the case of log files or other artifacts. “Not much harder” my arse.
This is a student newspaper, not actually a property of the university itself. Moreover, we’re you seriously considering ponying up tuition for a US university (most of which goes to fund a bloated administration apparatus)?
More likely they're blocking it because they're a local campus newspaper and they spent money on 1hrs worth of time with a lawyer who, well informed or not, told them if they just block the EU/UK they won't have to spend any more money to figure out if they're GDPR compliant or not.
If it costs more than zero and you don’t care about euros not visiting your site, it makes sense.
For example if you have ads or external analytics (practically 100% of websites) you need a cookie banner. Best to restrict access than to annoy your innocent users.
Well, you have to know something about the law to know when it does/doesn’t apply, and this student newspaper apparently decided it didn’t care to invest that kind of time. I think this is understandable for those of us who don’t prefer to study other countries’ laws. Perhaps EU subjects should seek to improve their laws.
Nah. Speaking as an American ex-pat, it's about Americans being offended that foreign laws have heft and import. It pierces the sovereignty bubble. The Internet is home-grown. How dare other nations dictate to us Americans how we run our sites, amirite? We're gonna take our toys and home.
This is a silly, shamefully obvious straw man. No one is saying “Americans uniquely shouldn’t have to parse other countries’ laws”, the argument is “it’s ruggedly impractical for ordinary citizens of any country to parse the laws of other countries”.
Those aren’t cases of “ordinary individuals” and thus don’t apply, but yes the general principle also implies the special case that ordinary non-Americans shouldn’t have to parse American law just to go about their lives.
Foreign nationals contending with extraditions to the US for alleged actions performed while in foreign, sovereign lands is a far more serious problem by any measure than having to protect user data or risk not being able to do business in Europe. But go on with your "No True Scotsman" arguments
The "compliance" is quite simple. Don't do this thing. Don't collect personal information without permission. Very, very simple.
If you do collect personal data,
with permission, it's only slightly more complicated. Let the individuals control their data, including deletion. Don't do anything with it without permission. Again, not hard to understand.
The "morass" is for people who are gonna try anyway. "Well, what about if we bury the permission under exhausting legalese?" No, that's unlawful. "What if we collect it but obfuscate it?" Not without permission. Etc.
So, "compliance morass" is not an argument. It's an extremely simple law.
>For example if you have ads or external analytics
It is not about ads or analytics and about collecting private data without consent. Just to remind americans GDPR does not specifically target the Internet, it apples for real world places with physical paper (like you got to a lab and want to do some tests they are forced to tell you what they will do with your private data and you have to agree or not).
You can have no tracking ads or analytics that do not record private data just fine, you can also have non tracking cookies without a popup. But honestly it makes sense that there is a big rich group that spread a lot of FUD about this stuff so many places will just decide not to server EU. If you never seen such GDPR popup maybe you should try to have a look at some of them, see how many "partners" this people share your tracking data with and how scummy the UX patherns they use are.
Btw I am 100% fine with some US resources blocking me, I can go read soemthing else and for sure not try workaround for accessing this people page.
Imagine they locked out afrika there'd be a huge amount of screaming about injustice and isms...
You can identify users by geoip and ASN surprisingly well, don't pretend supporting that has to annoy ameri-land, it's the same as arguing lock off California, it's a bad argument.
GDPR is a hundred articles of legalese, and to understand what it means to be compliant you probably need an understanding of EU legal context as well. Services of people who can do that do cost a lot.
I don't quite understand how EEA GDPR regulations can extend to entities with no European footprint at all, such as this student newspaper. Can't they just issue cookies and give the EU the finger?
Someone was presented with an issue that was both technical and legal in scope and just punted. The contact info was added by minions who knew it was a stupid decision.
They probably just don’t have the legal and technical resources to navigate GDPR in a manner more sophisticated than “geoblocking” and frankly I don’t blame them—how often do they get legitimate traffic from Europe, especially without the benefit of hindsight from this incident. I like the spirit of GDPR, but blaming the entire world for not understanding your own country’s laws is the pinnacle of navel gazing.
> 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
>
> We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to > the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data > Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. > For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
> 451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
>
> We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time.
1. I didn't know about 451.
2. What is so important that they cannot allow to read behind a GDPR?
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
This is just an example of the different ethics between China and America. America is very deontological in terms of FREEDOM. We love freedom above everything else. China is very consequentialist, they care about prosperity and success over everything else. I'm a pretty red blooded American (I drive a black smoke diesel truck and have enough firearms and ammo to make it pretty far in the apocalypse). I wonder what ethical system will be more successful in the future. We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics. The Chinese know that Tiananmen Square was a bad thing, but they want to forget about it and move on (consequentialism). In America our Tiananmen Square is probably slavery and we apparently don't want to forget about it even if it rips our county apart (deontological). What system will succeed in the next 100 years? The pandemic really showed me some of the issues of Western deontological ethics.
Whitewashing history to save the economy is certainly an interesting take.
Let's be clear: the reason the Chinese government wants to forget and move on from Tiananmen Square is because it threatens their power. The scariest thing for an autocrat is the people realizing that people hold the real power, and that all systems of government only exist because of the consent of the governed (implied in China's case, explicit in a democracies).
Yet the freedom of speech in the US hasn't prevented a gerontocracy of multimillionaires (both in government and outside of it) to preside over a servant class. We have mass incarceration in for-profit prisons whose inhabitants protect California mansions from wildfires, "gig economy workers" without health insurance, and laborers who are effectively indentured servants who cannot leave their jobs without losing health care. In every city on the west coast, the tent cities grow larger by the day.
"At least we can talk about it..." Yes, talk, and talk, and talk. This has come about over decades. How many decades of "freedom" will it take to actually bring change? Could it be that endless debate on Twitter is our modern bread and circuses that will amount to nothing?
Completely disagree with your portrayal of consequentialism. Freedom absolutely provides utility, and allowing the government to disappear people who disagree with it is in no way a path to maximizing utility.
I don't think you're down in the weeds enough. China does have freedom to a degree. Obviously there's lots of ways where they have zero freedom also. But it certainly looks like the CCP is attempting to maximize freedom where it provides utility and minimize it where it hurts their goals or prosperity.
I vehemently disagree with that stance, but I do want acknowledge the CCP's actual stance.
The American criminal justice system has problems. Those problems are systemic and publicly discussed, but the rule of law exists, and the process is public, and you have the right to defend yourself against charges the state levies.
When is Jack Ma's public trial? Peng Shuai's?
Putting things into quotes doesn't make it "work".
A vanishingly small percentage of these defendants are innocent. Prison reform cannot proceed rationally unless everybody involved admits that nearly all the people who go to prison did indeed commit a serious crime.
Now that this is moving the goal posts. Lots of people go missing and die for unknown reasons, including non-violent ones.
The issue with "disappearing" is that it is done by coordinated groups (including the prison-industrial complex). It is not that we don't know precisely how the victims got hurt.
This comparison is risible. First of all, you actually do have to commit a crime to go to prison, in the vast majority of cases. Second, the details of your trial (and appeal) are public. The "mass incarceration" meme has been too successful for it's own good, so successful that people seem earnestly to believe that most prisoners are innocent or there for spurious reasons, but it's simply not the case. The median state prisoner in the U.S. is a violent offender with a long rap sheet.
This chart reveals a lot of problems with our system. Are too many people in jail for drugs? Sure, probably. (But it's nowhere near the largest category.) Do we have a big problem with getting people in local jails to speedy trials? Yes, absolutely. Are our sentences too long? Yes, in some cases.
But most people in prison committed a serious crime.
I don't have the data on the "long rap sheet" portion of my claim, though I would encourage you to look out for it every time there's a news story about a high-profile arrest. The list of previous crimes in most cases would be comical if it weren't so tragic.
Additionally, studies of released inmates show very high recidivism rates. One study showed that, "401,288 state prisoners released in 2005 had 1,994,000 arrests during the 9-year period, an average of 5 arrests per released prisoner".
I liked your take on this situation and the tradeoffs, but please note I'm a red blooded American that just ordered a tesla, doesn't own guns, and couldn't tell you who won the Super Bowl last year.
Yeah, I'd push back a bit on the "red blooded American" = "rural truck driver/gun owner" idea, at least if "red blooded American" is supposed to mean "typical American" or "indisputably American" or "American who wishes their country to flourish".
My backstory is that I used to live in SF for 10 years before this pandemic. We moved to a rural western area because of the pandemic. I need the diesel truck to tow trailers.
I think this is overly reductive, even if it’s largely pointed in the right direction.
For example, I think the best way to interpret the pandemic isn’t through ethical systems, it’s through state capacity and competence. America didn’t fumble the pandemic because of deontological ethics, it fumbled because the federal government was just straight up incompetent. Without the federal government coordinating the crisis, every state was left to try its own strategy, which really does not work during a pandemic.
Furthermore china might have eventually taken a “utilitarian” approach, but only after their first strategy of denial and repression failed. Like many authoritarian regimes China’s first interest is in their own stability, not prosperity per se. In cases where the prosperity of the citizens and the pride of the party are in conflict, China will clearly favor the latter over the former.
A very similar thing happens with “democracy.” In America it’s basically just anything that calls itself democracy and vaguely follows some notion of Western democracy is just accepted as the obvious best way to organize society.
You’ll get a lot of head scratching if you ask questions like “What if it turns out that the correlation between government policies and the policy preferences of the population is stronger in some supposedly ‘undemocratic’ countries than in major Western democracies?” After the head-scratching you’ll usually get some kind of argument that strips the former population of agency, like “oh well they’re just brainwashed.” Kinda ironic for supposed proponents of democracy to strip people of their agency.
> If by 'undemocratic' you mean autocratic, it isn't proponents of democracy that are stripping them of agency. It is their form of government.
But you would need to show that they are actually being stripped of their agency. You can't just say "I declare that their government doesn't represent their preferences, and when they say that the government actually does represent their preferences, that's because they can't think for themselves." Having different preferences than you is not sufficient evidence of brainwashing. That's pretty circular, and you could just as easily say "Western democracy is bad, and anyone who lives in a Western democracy who says they like it is just brainwashed."
If a government severely punishes debate about its behavior or views it wants accepted and unchallenged, or has a system in place to eliminate information in the public sphere that it does not want you to encounter, through technology and overwhelming pressure on organizations and individuals, ...
... that's all you need to know. That is a situation designed precisely to stay in power despite not responding to a freely informed public's preferences.
If an autocratic leader actually asked its citizens for their preferences on whether the autocrat should stay in power, and abided by the result - it would not be an autocracy.
We’re talking about the form of government though, not specific acts of censorship about specific government actions. Those are definitely bad! But I don’t think there are secrets about the form of government of, say, China, and how it is similar and different than, say, the United States.
Not everything is measured by economic success. Liberal democracy is a value in of itself not just for financial gain.
Could be that the Chinese system is better economically, who knows. But to me it sounds very alien to live there - I wouldn't want to.
They don't align with most of my values.
Now, present America which is fast becoming eaten by radicals may also become not aligned with my values at some point (at that point Europe will be the last standing), but for now it's better for people who appreciate liberal democracy.
It's hard to know if the information we get out of China is reasonably accurate, for a given value of 'reasonably accurate'.
It seems that the Chinese has problem with rampant cheating by both authorities and corporations, leading to many projects that seems impressive at first but are of questionable quality.
For sure. The lack of transparency is a given in an authoritarian regime and I'm sure there are consequences. Isn't Covid a good example? Chinese scientists who tried to ring the alarm where harassed or worse when the whole outbreak was beginning. Kinda reminds me of what happened in Chernobyl.
You also have to be aware of the language barrier/lack of voices from within China who can give you context of what is happening. News that you hear about China are mostly written by western media who has little to no clue about what actually happened (remember the Bloomberg report on the spy chip?). I would exercise caution when reading anything online, especially at this very low SNR climate.
Key to peace and tolerance is understanding, unfortunately China is like a blackbox to most, and people tend to get angry at things they don’t understand.
Whose fault is that? China only has one voice as a policy. I'll take Western media's reporting over what the Chinese party is saying more often than not. The media has its own problems but still.
Historically categorizing America like this might have made sense but ever since 9/11 it’s been less and less true. How else do you explain the economic response around the 2008 recession, the patriot act and everything in the Snowden leaks, our insane wars that are ostensibly not about oil futures, or the insane amount of money printing and spending in the wake of covid? I’m not even sure I’d be willing to buy the argument that China is more consequentialist than we are.
I don’t think that Tiananmen Square is their slavery. When I was in high school we had a guy visit from China and I dragged him to the school library and showed him the Wikipedia page for Tiananmen Square. He’d never heard of it. Same experience when I discussed it with Chinese friends in college. It’s not because Chinese society wants to get over it — China does not have such a thing as public opinion. Don’t look at China with rose colored glasses in the context of their 2021 economy, you have to remember how backwards and broke they were just 20 years ago. It was a totalitarian regime and it’s still a totalitarian regime, just a more wealthy one.
In summary, I agree that it seems like “consequentialism” has won, but it’s not the case that the two are battling it out to see which is better. Both countries independently chose consequentialism, and maybe it didn’t have to be that way.
Chinas pandemic outcome remains to be seen. Their zero Covid approach may prove increasingly challenging as new variants become more contagious and the rest of the world takes a maintenance approach.
I think a centrally controlled society’s IQ is the sum if it’s leaders. A free society’s IQ is the sum of its people. That makes me optimistic about the prospects for the US.
What is the bandwidth of political leaders in US occupied by? If you can have an abortion or not, who can vote and in what conditions, if vaccines are a good thing or a bad thing. Basically issues which were settled 100 years ago in other places.
Meanwhile China built thousands of miles of high-speed train in the last 10 years (while US built basically none), is about to have more navy ships than the US and so on.
The US leaves far more to people outside the government. We get stuff like Space X.
China has profited greatly by allowing its people more economic autonomy, but even the most successful are subject to State control of whatever the State wants to control, whenever the State wants to control it. See Jack Ma.
I think you're building a fake dichotomy: as a politician in France once said, borders are the only hope we have to escape if we dont like what we have. It's fine to have many models and important we can move in between them. I agree China cares about the result now but it's probably temporary: once the middle class is proportionally more important, priorities will shift, they already have somewhat. Xi Jinping announcing in glorious pomp a new stock exchange in Beijing is, for all the flaws of the communists, sort of different from what Mao would have done.
Tiananmen is not something the Chinese want to forget, but that the communists want to hide, it's a bit different. But, since there's always balance in everything, rather than throw themselves wave after wave on their bullets, they make the most of what they can get now and bide their time. If that can give you some sense of relief, I never met a pro communist Chinese, never one, who would defend the party: they only ever say stuff like "bah, we had an emperor before, it's the same with another name", hardly a support of the ideology you'll agree lol.
In America your Tiananmen are the civilian deaths and war crimes in Afghanistan, and see, you forgot about them and prefered to talk about someth you reformed already, like a Chinese would say of nobility and servitude under the empire. Face your demons, if you dare :)
Assuming this is right (and even if it's not), do not confuse the values and actions of a government with the values of its people. The CCP has gone out of its way to remove Tiananmen from history. Many bureaucrats in the US government wish they had the power to erase points in history as what the CCP wields.
To be crystal clear, the PRC does not view Tiananmen Square as a purely domestic affair. The extent to which students were radicalized, or signal-boosted by foreign influence is unclear.
In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China. However, you absolutely cannot publicly glorify 9/11 and side with al-Qaeda. That will put you on watch lists and be socially shunned to the point of never getting hired by any company that can view your online comments.
They machine gunned and steam rolled their own people by the thousands. Used road equipment to make them into a giant “meat pie” (British ambassador’s description) soaked the sea of mangled corpses in gas and lit it on fire. Then they drove over it repeatedly and washes the body parts and ashes down the drain.
This is not a two sides issue. It doesn’t matter if the students were radicalized etc. the Chinese Govt murdered thousands of people who questioned it. Completely barbaric system of govt but in line with their current use of slave labor and concentration camps.
Yes, eye witness accounts. Thousands of families whose children never came home. Widely available photos online. The smoking gun that you aren’t allowed to talk about it.
I have talked to people who saw it. Similar to how we can still talk to holocaust survivors. Maybe they are all lying. But the motive seems unclear and the testimonies are corroborated by others.
That's also against the site guidelines, and actually worse than the GP provocation I replied to, because two piling on is already the seed of a mob. We don't want that dynamic on HN at all. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
Any criticism of Xi at all will suffice. And there is mountains of evidence about the thousands of innocent protesters that died that day, despite the attempts of an authoritarian government to prevent the truth from being known.
I'm not sure what to make of this comparison. You're not sure the extent to which foreign influence played a role in radicalizing people leading up to an event where Chinese citizens were massacred by the Chinese state, so it's fair to compare it to a situation where foreign nationals murdered US civilians? This is apples and oranges. Apples and Teslas. Dogs and supercomputers. They're not the same thing.
> just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Square in China
Citation needed. Even researching Tiananmen Square in China gets you on watchlists.
There is substantial evidence that Washington was involved in amplifying misinformation and possibly directing student leaders to escalate the violence. Take student leader Chai Ling, for example [1]. She is on record advocating for bloodshed, yet apparently did not take part in the deadly rioting. Instead, she landed at Princeton and Harvard.
The sad truth is that most Americans have no interest in understanding what really happened that week, beyond reinforcing our ideological biases. We accept propagandistic claims of "organized massacre" when "chaotic, deadly riot" is far more accurate. There are pictures of charred government soldier corpses, burned alive in their vehicles. That simply does not happen in a one-sided massacre. Meanwhile, there is a suspicious lack of any photographic evidence of organized executions and other characteristics of a massacre.
I believe they are referring to "rolling coal". Its the practice of modifying a diesel truck to run dirty for the purposes of directing the black cloud at someone.
They are contrasting their viewpoint by identifying some of their other traits in terms of "hard right" characterizations in a somewhat poetic manner, e.g. those that would stereotypically come from someone who would blanket condemn Chinese policy based purely on it not being America + Freedom. i.e. "If even _I_, as someone typically far away from X, think Y, then...". It would be like saying "I own five Tesla's but am a bit skeptical of this whole electric car thing because...""
Americans obviously don't love freedom above all, at least not uniformly across the country. Many seem to be surprisingly willing to give it up in return for a sense of safety.
I would qualify your comment about "prosperity and success" to say that the CCP (which is not the same as "China") cares about average prosperity and the further entrenchment of the ruling elite. Chinese people are too numerous, varied, and under-studied (since no honest political surveys are done there) for me to comment on their overall culture.
There's a lot Id like to discuss about the logic in this comment, but one thing really struck me 'the Chinese know tienamen square was a bad thing'...
I have a number of Chinese friends from college and they universally view this event as a CIA fraud with no actual basis in historical reality. I really would like to know what your basing your logic here on.
I think that deontological vs consequentialist ethics is a spectrum. If Covid were as painful and dangerous as Ebola, people would be much more likely to accept stricter quarantines and mandates.
I think the problem with Western deontology is that it is no longer rooted in consequences and has become a parody of itself. Take US foreign affairs, for example. We used to care about limiting the Soviet Union's sphere of influence. The most efficient way to do so was to support anti-communist dictators that could be bought out. However, this was sold to the people as "spreading democracy". A generation later, those in power genuinely believed that America is supposed to spread democracy, which is why we spent trillions of dollars trying to do so in the Middle East to little effect.
Wow. not "forgetting about slavery" is tearing the country apart? You are so far down the racist q-anon rabbit hole, I doubt you can see your way out. The US is today, and always has been deeply racist. That didn't end when slavery ended. The main forces tearing this country apart today are white nationalists who were so freaked out that cops started being held accountable for modern day lynchings that they are trying to overthrow the government.
A lot of Chinas current decision making doesn’t seem too consequentialist. Cracking down on tech companies? Is that supposed to make China a stronger country?
China wants to be a “great power,” but that’s more deontological than consequentialist.
For example, is China’s current naval expansion creating good consequences? An increased GDP? Higher life expectancy? Higher literacy rates?
Not really.
How about the Belt and Road project? Is it increasing GDP?
We have to also consider the ethical framing of “success.” Perhaps success is ripping the country apart rather than forgetting the moral blight of slavery.
Truthfully, I don’t have a good answer here myself beyond, “uh, something in between willful forgetting and never ending cross-group animus.”
As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as I am, and no more.
>>> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics.
The free world developed the vaccine, and virtually the entire R&D and manufacturing infrastructure that made vaccine development possible.
Also, response to the pandemic has been highly regional, suggesting that we don't have a single unifying "ethical system." There are also two polarized camps related to the presentation of information to the public, such as the effects of carbon dioxide, the results of elections, and so forth.
I wonder if there's a better example than the pandemic for supporting your hypothesis.
I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it?
The time I spend in the US I had the feeling that you have more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom. Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.
> Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested. You go to a town festival and the people who want to drink are enclosed in a small area like cattle.
Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
But for what it’s worth, laws regarding public alcohol consumption are a local thing. There are plenty of places in the United States where public alcohol consumption isn’t a crime. And of course, you’re free to drink privately.
But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.
> Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
I would say it's a much more relevant metric than the ability to own a shitload of guns, or to drive a black smoke diesel truck, the latter of which is honestly bafflingly antisocial behavior. The definition of "freedom" should begin with the freedom from others pushing their negative externalities onto you.
I think the attitude might be that we should prohibit and punish the behaviors, not the source. If someone is being belligerent or otherwise disruptive in a public space, whether or not they're drinking alcohol should not be a factor. And if someone is drinking alcohol without being disruptive, is there cause to punish or prohibit their behavior?
Except it should be, because alcoholism is in fact a lethal disease all on its own and frequently overlies serious mental health issues, including things like domestic abuse, drunk driving, etc. Where there’s smoke, look for fire.
But this was about public vs private drinking. Many, if not most, problem drinkers drink in private. Cherry-picking some visible issue X, that may be related to a more complex underlying problem Y, just because it's visible, is called window-dressing and is in general a very ineffective way to try to solve Y (and honestly, solving Y is often not even the goal, marketing speeches notwithstanding).
I think we have a disagreement about the number of problems. I agree with you at to the 0th iteration but in the particular example of alcohol, the externalities are so large, the perturbation is important and we should make sure the model is “as simple as possible, but no simpler”.
So your statement “If someone is being belligerent or otherwise disruptive in a public space, whether or not they're drinking alcohol should not be a factor”
Please find a different example, or, if you believe in the goal of improving human society, please revise that statement. Belligerence and other disruptiveness involving alcohol should be tracked, because it can reveal the deeper problem that is present in some (honestly, many) cases of public belligerence and disruptiveness once a trend is established. Saving lives is important all on it’s own.
> Public space alcohol consumption is one of the weirdest metrics I’ve seen to gauge freedom.
How so? It seems to me that the people's ability to use and enjoy public spaces as they fit (of course unless they intrude on other people's freedom) is at the very heart of what I consider freedom.
> And of course, you’re free to drink privately.
And of course you're free to express your opinion privately, at home, when no one's listening. See the problem with that kind of 'freedom'?
The reason many municipalities ban public drunkenness is because it intrudes upon other people's freedom. Very many people tend to behave badly while drunk!
Many other places deal with that by making behaving badly the thing you're not allowed to do, rather than the activities that sometimes lead people (who partake in them irresponsibly) to behave badly.
> But freedom doesn’t mean anarchy. If you want to nit pick individual restrictions on non-speech activities in public spaces then you can find something to complain about every country.
Anarchism is based on freely agreed rules and organization. It denies rulers, not rules. I find this to be a necessary condition for freedom. So yes, one can find something to complain about pretty much every country if arguing from freedom. The status quo is not a good excuse for lack of freedom, that's just circular reasoning.
I urge everyone not to fall into the trap of the "Us vs Them" rhetoric that almost always leads to more oppression and violence. Trying to quantify freedom is moot. The enemy of freedom is corruption, fear and hate.
The Tulsa race massacre which has been featured in pop culture and all over the press in the last few years because a lot of Americans didn’t know about it.
Vs
The Tiananmen Square massacre which is censored to even mention digitally in China, and state agents intimidate citizens outside China just for mentioning it.
Also note that Tulsa was 100 years ago. Around the time of the birth of the CCP, which has killed tens of millions of its own citizens since that time. Tiananmen was in 1989.
Any attempt to equivocate these two is utterly intellectually dishonest.
It’s a delusional if you think that in the 50s, there were American agents intimidating their citizens abroad for talking about the Tulsa race massacre.
The idea that it is OK for it to take another 50 years before the Chinese can talk about Tiananmen without fear of state reprisal, seems to be an apology for totalitarian oppression.
In the 50s there was US agent repression and intimidation of beliefs around communism (see McCarthyism). The KKK was also still rampant and had members that were police or other "state officials". So ... maybe US isn't so different after all?
And yes, there was state sponsored anti-communism in the 50s, but it is not even close to comparable. Nobody was being intimidated for mentioning communism, or even advocating for it.
People were targeted for group membership. This is still wrong, but please stop trying to make it seem equivalent to what is happening today in China. The fact that you have to go back 50 years to find an example shows how different the two countries are today.
The KKK was a defacto paramilitary arm of several states and municipalities during that time. Many sheriffs, and more than a few high level state government officials were members. Folks got killed and programs of terror were instituted against ‘uppity’ populations using the KKK as the instrument.
There was widespread state supported suppression (as in literal FBI members harassing and destroying peoples lives) for anyone who even SEEMED to POTENTIALLY support communism, even if they literally had no idea what the FBI was talking about.
If you dared publicly support communism, many folks got deported, disappeared, or worse.
Or do you think the gov’t of Alamance and Caswell counties just somehow lost the paperwork?
Why do you think the Federal government sent in federal Marshalls (and more) so James Meredith could attend Ole’ Miss? Could it have something to do with the Governor himself taking over as registrar to block it, and numerous threats of violence, including from the KKK? [https://aas.olemiss.edu/documenting-the-african-american-exp...]
If you want to talk First, Second, or Third Klan, then sure. But if you want to spin the Klan in the south as a bunch of radicals running around in the woods? That’s just false.
It was who would come for you if you didn’t do what you were ‘supposed to’ - and were aided, abetted, and in many cases actively led by members of various state and local governments. When Lincoln was assassinated, reconciliation or follow through post civil war mostly stopped, and for a long time the hardliners and ‘secret Baathists’ (or not so secret) used it as their enforcement arm. And it was very effective. Ask any black man or woman living in the Deep South.
Now they’re mostly a bunch of loser types (Third Klan or post Third Klan depending on where you draw the line), but they’re still somewhat dangerous. And to not remember the history is even more dangerous.
Which means it wasn’t ever a paramilitary arm of the state. You just want to pretend it was because that way you can act as if the KKK and the state were part of the same thing, which they never were.
> It was who would come for you if you didn’t do what you were ‘supposed to’
Yes, because there were a bunch of racists who were operating a secret paramilitary organization…
> and for a long time the hardliners and ‘secret Baathists’ (or not so secret) used it as their enforcement arm
As you admit here.
Nobody is denying how bad the KKK was. It simply not true to say that it was ever part of the state.
Try this quote from Wikipedia:
“Organized in the Southern United States, it was suppressed through federal intervention in the early 1870s. It sought to overthrow the Republican state governments in the South, especially by using voter intimidation and targeted violence against African-American leaders. Each chapter was autonomous and highly secret as to membership and plans. Its numerous chapters across the South were suppressed around 1871, through federal law enforcement.”
It was a terrorist organization which attempted to overthrow state governments and which the state suppressed.
That is about as far away from being an arm of the state as you can get, ‘defacto’ or not.
Well, they were busier intimidating and harassing American citizens abroad for daring to say anything in support of Communism. I doubt Tulsa made the radar.
> I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre. How many Americans don't know about it?
This is a legitimate comparison between the CCP and the government of Oklahoma. It is a bad comparison in terms of responses. China fears and represses discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre. In America, we discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experience.
> In America, we discuss and debate and try to incrementally learn from our experience.
Well, some do. The anti-CRT brouhaha is a reaction against that. Do you suppose they'll be teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre in Oklahoma high schools in the near future?
ETA I think people were taking me the wrong way. I added "anti-" above. The brouhaha is all the people trying to prevent their kids from hearing anything in history class that makes them feel bad. To the extent that they're putting the force of law behind suppressing the discussion of ugly events in US history, I would say this is pretty analogous to the policy of the CCP.
Omitting something from a curriculum is one thing.
Attempting to scrub it from the internet and all of human consciousness is a whole new level of tyranny.
If I google "Tulsa Race Massacre" I immediately get results and information. Try searching for "Tiananmen square massacre" in China and see what kind of results you get.
One is subjectively more egregious than the other. There isn't even a real comparison here.
I'm not claiming that some people in America would like to live under a totalitarian regime. I'm saying that's not what we have, and that most Americans don't want that.
We can look at China, get scared, and note the similar systems in our own. But we shouldn't be lazy and conclude that, because bees and birds both have eyes they are fundamentally the same thing.
It's clear that some Americans would prefer to hide and forget inconvenient parts of US history in the same way China would prefer to forget Tiananmen Square.
Personally I'm strongly on the side of remembering history so we can learn from it and not be doomed to repeat it.
In the same way China would prefer to forget Tiananmen Square?
You are free in America to talk about the Tulsa race massacre as much as you like. You can look it up on the web, you can buy books about it. The government won't threaten you for doing so. It is taught in some schools and universities. In Oklahoma, it is required by law to be taught in schools. Every year at the end of May there are articles published about how no one knows about the Tulsa race massacre.
That is not equivalent to the way China would prefer to forget Tiananmen Square. Those two things are not the same at all. America is not China. Freedom is not slavery.
That is all true. That doesn't change the fact that there are people in the US who would prefer that these events are not taught in school. It's good and important that they are, but there are people who would prefer to see only nationalistic feel-good history be taught. There are also schools that ban certain books, important, literary books.
These are things to be wary of, and not be complacent about.
I don't know about Oklahoma, but I did learn about the Tulsa Massacre in high school. I was also taught that it's my responsibility as a citizen to question my government and hold them to account, to never blindly trust them, and to reject nationalism. This is a pretty clear difference...
On a higher level the issue is not one sided and focusing solely on one side is what the CRT brouhaha is all about. It’s an ideology not an attempt at portraying reality.
There is no human group in history that holds the moral high ground. Trying to convey anything else is tribalism.
> Well, some do. The CRT brouhaha is a reaction against that.
Yes, because "learning from our experience" is yet another form of oppression according to CRT pushers. And "discuss and debate" are routinely dismissed as "White" values.
> Yes, because "learning from our experience" is yet another form of oppression according to CRT pushers.
I don't understand. Are you saying people who discuss critical race theory are opposed to learning from our experience? Could you characterize what these people are doing? I'm genuinely curious. I don't mean to be aggressive, I just don't understand your point.
The parent commenter was referring to "the CRT brouhaha" (how the broader issue is playing out in the real world, not just what the academic term "critical race theory" does or doesn't refer to). The brouhaha is affecting how history is taught in at least some places.
Also, CRT has probably never been taught in an American K-12 public school. It's an academic subject you would only encounter at a university in a very specific field of study.
No, the claim is just that most Americans have never heard of it, even now after it was featured in some critically-acclaimed (although probably not massively watched) TV shows, and certainly not for the century before those TV shows.
Now the problem is I'm not a lawyer or expert in reading laws or understanding how they would be interpreted. The bill aims to prevent the following kind of theories being taught, ones that say:
(A) any race is inherently superior or inferior to any other race;
(B) the United States is a fundamentally racist country;
(C) the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution of the United States is a fundamentally racist document;
(D) an individual's moral worth is determined by the race of the individual;
(E) an individual, by virtue of the race of the individual, is inherently racist or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously; or
(F) an individual, because of the race of the individual, bears responsibility for the actions committed by members of the race of the individual.
This sounds pretty good to me. B and C could be controversial in that those things were true in the past, but they seem to refer to the present tense. So the letter of the law is okay and the rest of the points are banning racist theories which is good, so the spirit of the law seems reasonable too. I don't see how this would be interpreted as banning the teaching of past racism like slavery or segregation or that massacre. But as I said I'm not an expert so I would be interested to know whether that's a real concern.
You realize that B and C would ban any discussion of the Dred Scott decision if read literally? Think about Stephen Douglas’ arguments in his debates —- we couldn’t discuss those either?
As I explicitly wrote, I don't realize that because from a lay person's reading, they are written in the present tense so it would not seem to ban any discussion or theory that the US was racist. Pretty hard to claim that it wasn't, surely.
So do you have a legal opinion or more informed reasoning that says the law would actually be interpreted differently, and would also ban discussion of past issues?
How is disallowing in public schools the use of a particular instructional approach (not discussion of the topic as such) equivalent to "discussion of the Tulsa race massacre"?
It does, for example, the provision regarding
>(B) the United States is a fundamentally racist country;
Could be interpreted as preventing proper discussion about what caused the Tulsa massacre
Ok, so you just proved the point. These bills do not prevent teaching about Tulsa. That claim has always been a lie.
As for what you call “proper” discussion about what caused the Tulsa massacre. Nothing in the bill prevents people talking about how the massacre was caused by racism. Nothing in the bill even prevents discussion of the idea that the US is fundamentally racist, or why people might believe that to be true.
The only thing the bill prevents is teaching that the US is fundamentally racist as if it were an absolute truth or fact, rather than an idea that some people hold.
So no. You are simply wrong about what the bill means.
My claim (upthread) was "honest and uncensored discussion." You can talk in censored ways about it, yes.
If you think it's okay to censor particular views because they're obviously wrong or misguided... you're totally free to hols that view, but that's still censorship.
Your claim I was responding to is this: “Could be interpreted as preventing proper discussion about what caused the Tulsa massacre”
> If you think it's okay to censor particular views because they're obviously wrong or misguided... you're totally free to hols that view, but that's still censorship.
It’s a false claim to say that these bills ‘censor’ particular views. That is the lie.
They seek to prevent certain views being taught as fact that can’t be debated.
I.e. the bills do the opposite of what you assert.
Controlling how classroom time is managed is not suppression of speech. The teacher can't spend the whole day preaching the gospel, either, and that doesn't amount to suppression of religion.
It may not be the best example of the U.S. remembering its failures, but it's nowhere close to what China does to force people to forget.
"The time I spend in the US I had the feeling that you have more of a pseudo freedom than actual freedom. "
Having grown up in Germany and now living in the US I think in the US you can have more freedom if you are willing to live outside the boundaries of the life the average citizen has. If you are willing to live off the grid you can be pretty free. Some people think freedom also means the right to not have health insurance.
But if you live the life of the average citizen with a regular job I feel the US citizen is less free. You constantly have to worry about the cost of health care and education. I also feel people are less willing to voice their opinion in order to not offend others. You have way less rights as an employee. Police is less predictable and may do weird stuff. I also feel less free when I get into a confrontation with somebody and have to worry about getting shot.
Interesting perspective, though I'd like some detail around the 'worry about getting shot' comment.
I'm in my 50s and have lived in the US all but 2 of my years, and have never been concerned about getting shot (in the US or abroad.) In what kind of situations have you found yourself that you've actively had this worry?
I had a situation where almost every morning a guy with big work truck would pass us extremely closely at full speed while we were walking our dog. The road didn’t have sidewalks so usually cars would slow down or change sides but this guy didn’t. We tried to wave to him to slow down which only resulted in him swerving towards us so we had to jump off the road. One day I stood in the middle of the road and made him stop. I explained the situation to him and he was extremely aggressive and threatened to beat me up. I told him he can try but should think about the consequences first. After a while he backed off. I called his employer and never saw him again.
When i told this story to some people they told me that I would have had a real problem if he had had a gun. That’s probably true.
In Germany you usually can assume that even bad guys don’t have a gun but in the US you have to assume that every idiot has a gun. This brings confrontations quickly to a dangerous level.
You can talk about the Tulsa race massacre. You can make TV shows depicting it. Forces may have conspired to keep it from the forefront of the American consciousness, but nobody was going around burning the books or throwing people in jail for bringing it up.
>I would compare Tiananmen Square with the Tulsa race massacre.
The issue with that comparison is Americans can easily search about Tulsa and find a bunch of information about it. People in China are restricted from getting information about Tienanmen Square.
While a lot of people in China know bad stuff happened in Tienanmen Square, they can't so easily confirm their suspicions. They can't hear people's take on it and fully understand what happened.
>How many Americans don't know about it?
Just because Americans don't know about a topic doesn't really matter. Americans don't know about a lot of historical events, especially ones that happened 100 years ago.
I would guess a lot of Americans don't know Harding was President during Tulsa. Does that mean Harding is like Tienanmen Square?
I would go as far as saying people don't even know about Tulsa shows people aren't really moving on, but just forgot about it. On the other hand, everybody knows slavery occurred.
The Tiananmen Square massacre killed off the Chinese democracy movement which challenged the CCP for national power. It set a new course for Chinese government, that it is still more or less on.
The Tulsa massacre was a local race riot, with little impact outside Oklahoma.
The area involved was also fairly affluent. There’s a possibility that Black Americans could seen that become a larger enclave, not unlike Atlanta’s Black community. It’s impossible to know which butterfly’s wings might have changed the course of history.
This struck me as I was visiting Munich, momentarily agog at the guy in front of me walking down the street drinking beer like it was no thing. Meanwhile Americans were protesting that mask mandates were an infringement on their freedom (Germans too).
Many, many things are an infringement on our individual freedom, but it's revealing what people actually choose to rally around, and when. It points to how certain issues have become politicized and have organized, well-funded opposition.
To all the people up in arms about masks -- why now? Why this easy thing? Why weren't you protesting restrictions on voting age, driving age, drinking age, restrictions on gay marriage rights? Those are all very consequential restrictions, as opposed to wearing a bit of fabric on your face. Something that snow-sports enthusiasts routinely do without complaint or consequence.
I got comments from neighbors for going into the street with a cup of coffee in the Netherlands. My Dutch wasn't that great but I picked up they were busting my balls in a friendly way - guess it looked funny to some.
I also sometimes would get uncomfortable stares whenever I came down to throw something in the garbage room - the old guy looking was making sure I'm not gonna put garbage A in a B dumpster.
Now every society has some kind of norms police citizens, but I feel it's quite worse in places like Germany/NL/Switzerland etc.
Not really much substance to my argument, just sharing. Also I'm not criticizing these countries, their culture is just different than what I was brought up with. Where I live if you start correcting everyone around you you will be the one corrected eventually. That's why where I live looks much worse than Germany I guess.
> Everyone keeps saying how free they are and how great their country is yet you can't even drink an alcoholic beverage on the street without getting arrested.
This shows a common misunderstanding of the US legal system - the federal gov't couldn't make public consumption legal or illegal even if it wanted to. I go to local festivals in my town multiple time s a year with thousands of people milling about drinking freely - because my city and county don't prohibit it.
You come to the US with the assumption that the federal government has authority over these things, but they don't - constitutionally they are largely forbidden from creating laws like that - it's up to the state, county, and city to do so.
not comparable. I know of it (and have for 20 years; hey, I went to a public school run by hippies so we talked about this kind of stuff) AND ALSO I can post about it right here, right now, without worrying about the state coming after me (as, obviously I have, just now, and has everyone else in this thread) AND ALSO I can go to a FOREIGN COUNTRY and post about it without worrying that the us will go after my mom living in the US.
In the US (and most western countries), I can put up a website detailing what happened in the Tulsa race massacre with no fear of government censorship or retaliation. In China, I could not do the same with details of Tiananmen Square.
Note that the USA is rather special in how it encodes freedom. There is, after all, literally a big list of guaranteed freedoms. In practice, if something's not on there, then every government and quasi-governmental entity assumes you are not free to do it, or at least, they believe they can decide to stop you.
This is the inverse of almost every construction of freedom that went before it, and your experience arises from that difference. The notoriously vast & byzantine scale of the US Code is another emergent property, it being essentially a salami attack on its own fundamentals.
If you compare how China treats discussion and remembrance of Tiananmen to the how the US treats the Tulsa Race Massacre you will find there is no comparison.
It's true that many in the US don't know about it but many in the US cannot find China on a map so ignorance of the thing might be explainable by something rather more benign than the oppressive and punitive way China handles things.
In recent years information and documentaries on the Tulsa race massacre have been popping up with regularity. The information is easy to find, there are multiple documentaries you have easy access to, the government (in the form of the Tulsa Historical Society) has a very through website exploring what happened, etc. More importantly no one is punished for exploring and discussing this topic. Quite the opposite lately, it is of growing interest to many in the US. Now compare that to China and the Tiananmen Square massacre. As I said at the top, no comparison at all.
I'm not a rah rah "Murican", either. I am very critical of my own country (as I think we all should be.. you can't improve if you don't learn from the bad) and the US has many problems that should be addressed but to compare China and the US on these points is not even a little reasonable, in my opinion. It shows a lack of knowledge of both China (someplace I have lived for years) and the US (where I grew up and currently live). Also, your example of drinking in public is just a generalization and of all the things you could have picked that would be valid arguments, is not a good one. In my community in Ohio you can drink anywhere in the downtown public area, for example and it is several square miles in area.
Not talking about the Tulsa race massacre, is an example of society at large choosing, through inattention or other social forces, to not care about something they should probably choose to care more about.
Not being allowed to talk about Tiananmen Square massacre is society being told what to find worthy of attention.
While the ends may on occasion align, I think it’s an important distinction.
But it is also worth considering “practical” freedoms.
I don't think you made the comparison between these two events with any ulterior motives, but the subthreads below your comment are interesting and telling in part because a significant number of the comments are parroting each other from users with little history on HN. It feels like this thread may have attracted the attention of the Fifty Cent Army[1].
There are a remarkable number of comments that fall into the same vein, and at least one is a username I recognize from previous threads about China shilling very hard in a pro-CCP way. I wonder if @dang or HN have any processes by which to identify bot / shill accounts and limit them, because it's obvious there's a far larger contingent of these accounts on the site than I originally expected. I guess HN is no longer an unnoticed corner of the Internet where folks can just have normal conversations like it used to be.
It varies a lot by where you live and how much premium you personally care about following the letter of the law.
I think HN tends to assume nobody has any freedom because most of HN lives in "nice" suburbs or "nice" parts of cities where law enforcement is being used in a backhand manner to enforce conformity and also comes from a life where obeying basically all the laws basically all the time is considered default behavior. The lower classes are far, far free-er on a day to day basis than HN is. Nobody cares if you smoke weed on your porch in any neighborhood where a Ford E350 is a more common driveway adornment than a Mercedes E350. I walk my dog beer in hand two days a week. Kids ride dirt bikes on the street. The section 8 people play loud music in languages I don't speak. Nobody gets hassled by the powers that be, as far as I can tell. And this isn't some rural area in a small government red state, it's working class neighborhood in a blue state.
I think what I mean by “freedom” is that “citizens” are a branch of government. Freedom is that we’ve decided the citizens are the ruling class.
To oversimplify quite a bite: As a citizen of the United States, and Arizona, I’m allowed to get together with a group of citizens, draft law, and bring it to vote during the next election.
As long as it’s constitutionally valid, and we get a majority vote, it becomes law.
Several cities have changed their ballot box from First Past The Post to Ranked Choice Voting through citizen lead initiatives. Ending the full prohibition on Marijuana in my state was a citizen initiative.
I’m sure they exist - but I don’t know of other countries that have this kind of freedom.
We’ve gotten it wrong in places (gerrymandering is a big one) - but we’ve been one piece of citizen lead legislation away from improving it for a long time. And that gives me hope.
I want to help the parent poster out here: I think he was refering to how easy it is to get thrown in jail in America. Jail as a concept does not really exist in many European countries. You can swap drinking in public with speeding or some other minor offense.
This is what-about-ism. I am surprised you didn't mention that we are less free to smoke in public places!
Here's the thing: Laws about where you can smoke and drink vary from place to place in the US but in every part of them you are free to complain about them. The laws were passed by elected officials. You can start a petition to change them. You can run for mayor on the platform of changing the rules about where you can smoke or drink.
I agree that it is a sad commentary that many Americans don't know about the Tulsa race riot. Yet here we are discussing it. A popular TV show in the US (The Watchmen) depicted it quite graphically. Could those things happen with Tiananmen Square in China?
I personally feel that the term "what-about-ism" is excessively used to down play the wrongs of a other party. Especially when that other party is pretending to be at a higher moral ground than the one they are critical about. One should not make things OK because someone else does it but one should point out the wrongs another party is engaged in especially if it is hypocritical.
In this case however I didn't say what about, I did suggest an alternative to Ops comment which in itself may have been what about ism.
There are number of places in the US where it is legal to walk around outside with a drink. New Orleans is the place I'm most familiar with but there are others. Some people forget that the US is not a monoculture.
I'll take not being able to drink on the street in some parts of the US if it means I can criticize the government without being harassed (or worse) by government officials.
Prime whataboutism. But anyways, just as one example, the Tulsa race massacre was the subject of a major recent TV series (The Watchmen). Mere mentions of Tiananmen square massacre, observing quiet vigils, etc. could get you jailed in China. On freedom of speech, there is no possible comparison. Even the existence of this very conversation would be immediately censored on the Chinese domestic internet.
In the U.S. there's a hierarchy of freedoms. Fundamental rights, like speech and the right to a fair trial, are necessary to secure other "lower" freedoms if you want.
You can drink outside in some places, like Las Vegas. The fact that you can't drink outside most places just illustrates that the overwhelming majority don't even want to do that.
Drugs and booze are cheap freedoms that don't do anything to avoid repression.
As you've described yourself, you're more of a shallow cliche of Americans and one that doesn't necessarily reflect well on the rest of us. You're as real an American as the rest of us, and no more.
> We can already see having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics
We’ll see. Due to it’s Zero COVID strategy and ineffectual vaccines China has a highly immunonaive population just as the virus gets so infectious that other Zero COVID countries have abandoned that strategy. However, New Zealand, Singapore etc have the much better mRNA vaccines. I hope the terrible cost of losing their basic human rights was worth it for them, but I suspect the worst days of COVID are ahead for China.
Different ethics? You are very open minded. Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it. Totalitarian governments busy themselves with editing history and skewing the narrative. I've been there, growing in a communist country liberated because the USSR went bankrupt. So, thank you USA. Now we can hold views critical of the government without being arrested, tortured and sent to forced labour camps.
This is some asinine cultural analysis, as if entire cultures can be reduced to the embrace of moral philosophies. You could just have easily described China as harboring a deontological commitment to social harmony and deference to authority, or America as being consequentialist in its embrace of freedom as the approach most conducive to happiness and opposed to tyranny. Both are caricatures, of course.
A problem I’ve noticed with philosophy nerds is that they have a tendency to overemphasize the importance of their niche interest by hallucinating the influence of philosophical reasoning in human affairs and historical events. Most people in most times don’t think about this stuff at all. It’s completely irrelevant.
This logic works on the average. There are plenty of nuances between the two countries. This is my reduced experience from spending lots of time in China from the early 2000's.
Indeed, all of philosophy has devolved from praxis to theory unmooring itself from the seed by which it began: that of living informed by wisdom. It is damning that one of its elevated patrons is a man who wrote in spirals.
The philosophers of thousands of years ago instructed by which they lived: drinking to excess in bathtubs if you were a hedonist or meditating in the woods surviving only on the food which others gave you if you were a Buddhist.
The Chinese also don't talk about a lot of the bad things that happened in the great leap forward, which could have a case made that it was worse than slavery.
Is like to see what that case is? Because nothing about the Great Leap I’ve read compares to chattel slavery or the 40% losses of life in the transatlantic slave trade.
Go read stories about neighbors eating each others children to survive. It is pointless to compare tragedies as to which is worse, but it is worthwhile to recognize the magnitude of the (unimaginable) suffering caused by bad policy. The point is you wouldn't want to experience either -- neither is a better choice, they were both disasters worthy of keeping in memory.
In absolute number of dead, it's certainly worse, if only because of the scale of China. According to Henry Louis Gates 12.7 million Africans were abducted by the slave trade. Estimates for the Great Leap Forward are 15 to 55M dead from famine and several million more from violence.
The Great Leap famine that killed between 11.6 - 55 million over fours years, compared to the Atlantic slave trade with estimated deaths from 2 - 60 million (over 200 hundred years).[1]
Ostensibly consequentialist, but that is just a symptom of maintaining authority and order. Arguably many choices from the Chinese State reported in the last decade have been at the expense of prosperity and success, such as Xi consolidating power and cracking down on business leaders. Hyper centralization of power rarely works out well, and when it has, those personalities as in SK and Singapore favored Capitalism.
Look at you, getting all fancy with your "deontological" and "consequentialist." Does it feel erudite to use 5 dollar words when a 10 cent word like "freedom" would do?
No, actually we cannot see that "having consequentialist ethics that don't care about your freedom do a lot better at fighting pandemics." But then, we don't have police welding people's doors shut, either.
I think you need to look up what "deontological" means. It's putting a means before an end. America does this with spreading freedom. Colonial Spain did this with spreading christianity. Russia did this with spreading communism.
This isn't an inside joke that someone just made up, other than someone (Timothy Bray?) choosing this particular constant out of the remaining unused 4xx series.
For me, the spirit of 451 was as a form protest, not some sort of blanket arse-covering.
In other news, a friend of a friend's mom's tennis partner's cat sitter knew someone whose website was taken down by socialist European lawyers, so what harm is there from banning them from the village? It's not like we want them here anyway!
Yeah, this is the wrong response code, but I guess there isn't one for "we want to harm you, but since this is illegal, we prefer to deny you service". Looks like a severe overlook from the IETF.
We recognize you are attempting to access this website from a country belonging to the European Economic Area (EEA) including the EU which enforces the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and therefore access cannot be granted at this time. For any issues, contact help@purdueexponent.org or call 765-743-1111.
Maybe it is just me, but the "therefore" is not consequential.
AFAIK, if you don't gather data, you don't have to protect them, GDPR or not.
Can't help seeing the irony that the censored document is a declaration by the publisher about how strongly they are committed to freedom of expression in international context..
CORRECTION: As other have pointed out, the publisher is actually the student newspaper, which is independent from Purdue University itself.
>Can't help seeing the irony that the censored document is a declaration by the publisher about how strongly they are committed to freedom of expression in international context..
Yep, and - also ironically - the root of publisher is the same as public, so you want to make something public but you restrict the access to a whole subset of the public.
Besides that, if they had written (without recurring to http 451[0]) a simple message like:
"We are sorry but we cannot serve this content due to the possible non-compliance of this site with EU Laws (GDPR)"
it would have been (IMHO) much more correct/polite.
I read the message "as is" more like:
Hallo, stupid visitor from Europe, you are denied access to the contents because you voted stupid people that wrote stupid laws that we won't respect.
The page served should be reachable even from non EU countries:
The letter is from the president of Purdue, while the web site is a news site that is independent of the university.
Also, it’s not really censorship — they have to deal with the GDPR headache, one way or the other, just like everyone else. Simply blocking the EU is a blunt but simple and effective way of doing so, and makes decent sense for a site where the interest is 99% local.
> What headache? A sensible solution: when EU visitor is detected, don't set cookies.
The headache is convincing someone to pay a lawyer to agree that this is the solution when serving content to the EU is outside your publication's mission.
Also: The Exponent isn't Purdue, it's independent. Purdue chose email as their publication medium.
The GDPR is about personal data. It can get complex when you actually start to deal with personal data. You need to notify users, enable them to modify their data and so on. For many platforms this is already very easy or built in, for some like ERP systems it was quite complicated.
Fortunately there exist a very simple solution: don't gather personal data. Note that it does not necessarily applies to cookies: they are considered personal data only if they can be used to identify the individual.[0] There is exactly zero chance anybody would go after you if you don't set cookies or set them for reasons other than making personal identification possible.
How do you know that somewhere in the stack of things the server is running isn't something that would set a cookie for some valid reason, and thus trigger the EU's stupid laws?
A positive stop, the redirect to a text page, is far better than a hope and a prayer.
Not setting cookies is a radical solution. Actually there is no problem with cookies at all unless they are being used to identify the individual. [0] So by definition any valid reason causes absolutely no problem. It is only if you decide that you want to deal with personally identifiable information, transfer it to third parties etc., it becomes problematic. People in the EU quickly learned not to do that and we're very happy about it.
Not sure if that is enough. They seem to have facebook and twitter links and as far as I remember these usually come in a JavaScript spyware bundle and those are only the obvious ones.
My guess is that there is not enough staff resources to ensure that all sites are compliant to the GDPR regulations so a blanket block of the EU was the most (only) cost effective solution to mitigate risk.
You're kidding, right? I was hoping after so many years it's clear. GDPR is about personal information. First, if you have no way of linking the IP to personal information, it does not apply. Second, even if it's linked (as in a web store etc.), storing it is perfectly fine! You just need to clearly state what information you store and for how long.
Everybody, also in the EU, are storing IP addresses. Everybody. Even the company who bragged they don't store logs for privacy reasons was caught storing them. It is important, it is necessary, and in many cases required by law.
Why risk getting entangled in weird foreign laws that might still have consequences here? The simplest solution is the best, just say no thanks in a simple redirect.
I understand why some people might be afraid of the risk. My point is that since you already implemented the code to detect EU customers, you could as well decide to not to set cookies rather than block them. In terms of complexity it's basically the same, but you get the benefit of increased exposure.
This website is an independent publication about Purdue, not Purdue itself.
If you're small and running ads, I'm pretty sure you don't want to risk dealing with the significant legal pitfalls of GDPR. They EU isn't your audience, and lawyers that confirm you're in compliance (or not) are expensive.
That's a bit of an exaggeration. Those that try to collect as much data as possible data from visitors will of course find it difficult to be compliant, but many do not do this and are therefore in compliance with GDPR.
I do find the propaganda against GDPR annoying though. As an EU citizen (and someone who had to make sure we were compliant on multiple projects) I am happy about it. Is it perfect? No. But it's still waaaay better than nothing.
If you're an explicitly US website with no operations abroad, you shouldn't even give the GDPR a second thought. And if that's the case and you also have no operations in California, you should give the CCPA the same treatment.
I am not sure about Purdue and their affiliation with their student newspaper, but many US universities have operations abroad to some extent, like a recruiting office or something.
Based on their privacy policy, it's data extraction. Also for some reason they link out to privacy policies of the Walt Disney company and the Washington Post? They also seem to use some obscure, third party CMS provider, and perhaps the ads are handled by that organization? In either case, I'm not sure why a student run, university newspaper needs to have such predatory data practices.
As an European citizen, yes I am profoundly glad these effects exist. Error 418 means, to me, that the website is disappointed it cannot exploit my personal data without my consent. Good riddance.
Note Gdpr is not only about cookies. It's about data collection.
Being able to get and erase your personal data from any website is quite a nice feature.
I'd rather seriously reconsider dealing with publishers of sites who consider it so important to trample all over our privacy rights that they'd rather block access than address the issues.
I occasionally run into websites that deny access rather than complying with the GDPR, but that's fairly rare and happens perhaps a few times a year. Most sites I've seen have gone through the trouble of complying and implementing cookie consent controls instead.
The added legal complexity from the GDPR for small-time operations has made me skeptical at times, but geoblocking due to the GDPR seems surprisingly rare and not a reason for that skepticism at all. I'd frankly have expected it to be much more common than it's turned out to be.
Quite the opposite! I'd much rather that the website denied me access than treated my private info like their own property purely because they are too lazy to be GDPR compliant.
I find the use of the 451 status code almost offensive in this case. They're invoking one of the most famous literary treatments of censorship, when really what's happening is that the citizens of the EU are being protected from an assault on our human rights.
I would strongly prefer if my browser handled my privacy preferences and ensured my personal data isn't shared with websites I don't want to share it with.
Because even if a website promises to obey GDPR rules, I have no way to verify if they actually do.
I participated in planning of potential evacuations of US citizens from Japan after Fukushima, 10x smaller problem than Taiwan. Air evacuation is infinitely better. The per capita economics in time and money are 1000x better by plane. Also, evacuation by boat to where? Having been part of the New Orleans Katrina diaspora, the problems of diaspora still reel my mind.
> We have to evacuate Taiwan, a population the size of LA, by boat.
While the Taiwan situation isn't great, this seems a bit of a leap. It also completely disregards the reality of a situation like that. You can't just relocate cutting-edge industry and a population of more than 23 million.
Do we? We need to keep Taiwan out of the PRC’s control. To do otherwise means that China effectively controls the most important Asian trading routes. Japan and Korea would be in a totally different power structure than the one they’re in today.
this is exactly the white savior crap that much of the world hates from the US. the sheer arrogance to think that even a significant fraction of Taiwanese would be interested in moving to America, let alone the entire populace.
And then the gall to suggest _Ohio, the Mojave, and Alaska_. Bit on the nose, don't you think?
I don't understand how you think this rhetoric helps anyone. I guess it lets Americans puff out their chest?
Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. Doing that is worse than the original offense, because if people didn't fan flames, the original provocation would simply fizzle, as it deserved. Instead, you amplified it, as well as egregiously breaking HN's rules with your own comment.
No, no, this is about exactly right. When the CCP comes for Taiwan, the exodus will be on a scale unseen in our generation.
It seems your family history has been blessed to not know this sort of existential crisis. For generations now, The US of America is, actually and literally, viewed as the land of salvation and opportunity for millions of people around the world. Do not pretend that it is not.
Of those, the US is the most frequent top preferred destination, at 21% or 158 million.
Gallup also publishes a Potential Net Migration Index for each country, which finds that net 17% of Taiwan would like to leave, including 25% of the youth. This data is from 2015-2017.
Times have changed. I've lived through that era where much of my childhood years were living under the impending threat of a takeover but over the years, I've come to realize that the path laid by the late Lee Teng-hui had been a noble and justified one. If it weren't for him and history, I would have continued to believe in the KMT (I no longer do).
your appeal to emotion rings hollow. Did I deny that? My family viewed the US as such in the past. No longer, I can assure you. It is precisely because we have experienced life in the US and Asia that I feel that I can actually comment on this topic.
If you seriously think millions of Taiwanese think this of America I would love to see your reaction when you travel there. Ohio, the Mojave, Alaska. Insulting on a whole new level, really.
> If you seriously think millions of Taiwanese think this of America I would love to see your reaction when you travel there.
Whether intentionally or not, I think you are misreading the parent comment.
They never claimed that this is how the Taiwanese population views the US now. They are claiming that this is how they are very likely to start viewing the US when/if CCP starts marching towards Taiwan. Those two statements are very different.
Thanks. That's a more reasonable statement but I still stand by my main points that 1. a much, much larger contingent would stay than Americans seem to think, 2. the US is far less desirable a location now than ever, and 3. those that do come to the US will not be going to our backwaters, hell the standard of life in Taipei is arguably higher than in top American cities.
I also think violent takeover is a remote hypothetical but that's another discussion.
Absolutely. Those points you are making [regarding why you don't believe that Taiwanese people will have a heavy majority that is for escaping to the US], they are valid, regardless of whether I agree with them or not. And I don't necessarily have a strong reasoning for disagreeing with them, hence why I am perfectly ok with agreeing to disagree on those. Especially since I agree with you in premise, I just disagree on the magnitude.
I fully agree with the violent takeover being a remote hypothetical though.
Surely you understand that your preferences are not widely shared - that's probably part of why you like living there in the first place, no?
If you wanted to persuade a group of people to immigrate to the US, you'd mention Ohio and the Mojave desert first? Those are not "premier" locations regardless of how you or I feel about them personally.
> Surely you understand that your preferences are not widely shared
"Not a widely shared preference" and "insult" are two different things, entirely.
"Anchorage has the most ethnically diverse schools in the United States, including the three most diverse high schools, the three most diverse middle schools, and the 19 most diverse elementary schools. Even the least diverse schools in Anchorage rank in the top 1% nationally."
As for Ohio, over 11 million people like it well enough to live there. Again, it's not an "insult" to suggest that someone else might like it. Especially if their alternative is PRC.
“[Taiwan refugees] can help [USA] rebuild the infrastructure [of] Shanghai and Guangdong in Ohio Valley, Mojave/Sonora or Alaska regions”
There is no suggestion that any Taiwanese citizens be forced to relocate, be confined to or even visit those spectacular areas of North America! Seriously comrade, me thinks you protest too much.
I'm inclined to agree. Half of the Taiwanese in the US live in California and the rest mostly in Texas/NY. They are a highly-educated, modern populace, they aren't going to go "building railroads in flyover country," let alone come here at all. There will be some sort of exodus that will likely be supported by the US gov't but I can't imagine it being anywhere nearing the millions mark.
> this is exactly the white savior crap that much of the world hates from the US
I'm the kind of person that hates this kind of crap from the US, like, interfering with foreign governments to increase their freedom is the kind of doublespeak I'm not too thrilled about.
But this does seem a bit different. Here people from Taiwan are proposed to be given an evacuation route. Nobody said anything about invading and taking the whole population by force. An alternative proposal I saw mentioned is to keep Taiwan out of China's hands which seems way more invasive (and risky, like, world war type risky) by comparison.
I do agree that the specific "dump them in one of our deserts" idea would not be what first comes to my mind, but ignoring the specifics for now, I'm not sure that this is how GP meant it. (And leaving completely in the middle whether this is feasible or a good idea for all the other reasons. I'm just commenting on the "provide option to get away" -> "don't do savior crap" part.)
this is exactly the white savior crap that much of the world hates from the US
How do you have information that he's white, or even American? I couldn't see anything like that in his profile. I read it as the voice of someone in Taiwan asking for help.
And then the gall to suggest _Ohio, the Mojave, and Alaska_. Bit on the nose, don't you think?
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Can you elaborate for the rest of us?
Most of your comment comes off as just anti-American sentiment, but zero actual information or discussion of the topic at hand.
Agreed…i didn’t see any sort of racism in the comment. I read his location choices as having more to do more with supporting a semiconductor / advanced manufacturing base - sort of an expansion of the TSMC fab being built in AZ.
Really, it's a lot worse; White savior crap usually has at least a couple levels of indirection between it and the outright ethnically-stereotyped economic exploitation of the “beneficiaries”. (To be fair, the latter does usually end up accompanying it, but usually not as an overt part of the initial sales pitch.)
We are all rightfully outraged that a foreign regime is able to impact free expression on college campuses in the US.
It strikes me as relevant that we are building a lot of the same infrastructure of our own accord, with strikingly similar justifications.
At this same university, anybody can anonymously complain about professors or other students based on what they say in a classroom or lecture hall, and that complaint will be investigated.
Maybe so, but rightful outrage is not a sufficient condition for a good HN thread. If anything, it makes people forget all about the mandate of this site in a rush to express their rightful outrage.
No, because the submission is interesting, contains new information, and is possible to discuss substantively—as many commenters in the thread are demonstrating. That makes it on topic for HN.
The onus is on commenters to stick to the site guidelines, regardless of how provocative the information in a submission may be.
I was a Republican. I was always pro choice. I was always skeptical of cops. I thought the Soviet Union and then the rump empire under Putin was dangerous. I never felt "oppressed" by standards of decency. Maybe it's not about being a Republican.
Your post supports with facts - ie. your own experience - the idea that moderate members of a group don't get oppressed, which is missing the point, in my opinion.
I think the point of the parent of your post and the article is that regardless of what you believe, you should have the right to your opinion and should not be persecuted for it.
Your "persecution" is a cheap shadow of actual persecution, which was meted out to whole sexes and races under the flag of inherent superiority. That's not what the modern right is feeling. They are feeling the consequences of expressing overt racism and sexism. It is their right to do so. Nobody has taken away that right. It is everyone's right to reject racism and sexism and the people espousing it.
I think it more depends on how you fall on the authoritarian/libertarian spectrum. As a libertarian myself, I certainly feel that my views are not welcome. I have often been accused of being a horrible person for holding a belief in what is essentially tolerance of intolerance, and voluntary cooperation.
I am estranged from libertarianism. Too many people self-assigning that label are against women's rights, voting rights, and are comfortable with the dictator in Russia. And this is before one gets to issues like Pareto optimal policies entrenching existing disadvantages.
Have you become attracted to authoritarianism then? I'd be very curious as to why. I'm very much pro women's and voting rights, and am under no illusion that Russia is somehow a liberal place.
If you're referring to abortion, I think the main disagreement between sensible people is the point at which a group of cells becomes a child, deserving of protection? And whose responsibility is that child? My answers are at conception, and whoever is currently in custody (the mother, before birth); simply because I don't see an alternative that isn't highly arbitrary or subjective.
In regard to voting rights, democracy is clearly better than the other things we've tried. I just don't think the people we elect should have quite so much power. Their remit should be limited to the administration of peace and order, not binding us all into one cooperative working towards a common goal. Society is about peaceful coexistence, not collectivizing the realities of misfortune or inadequacy.
Most basically, I think anyone who is drawn to the idea of forcing people to cooperate is taking a moral stance that I simply cannot follow. In the absence of an oracle to divine good from evil, I can't come up with a justification, save one, for using force to compel cooperation. Doing so is indistinguishable from a degree of slavery.
This "the idea of forcing people to cooperate is taking a moral stance that I simply cannot follow" is why libertarianism, especially recently, is naive and counterproductive.
Would you care to elaborate as to why? Is productivity or Pareto optimization universally more important than agency? How did you arrive at this conclusion?
That might be hard.If i recall correctly a few years ago there were some numbers indicating somewhere between 1-3 million people who were either "proper spying", doing espionage(industrial,research,etc) or having ties(actively involved, not merely having relatives/distant connections) with China living in the US.[I will edit with a source assuming it still is online, otherwise i have to dig in my local data]
This happens a lot at 'FAANG-tier' companies, but then again screening employees is virtually impossible at this scale, US companies still have an advantage and they remain ahead of the competition because copying/leaking information takes time, and the re-engineering also takes time.Academia is a sensitive area, because on one hand you have to be transparent and keep discourse public and open, but on the other hand state-sponsored entities actively engage in battles(especially cybernetic ones) to control narratives about certain subjects, especially in 'public spaces'.
If you have ever attended a college in the US, you must have had to submit a list of vaccinations, with their dates. I remember digging through files to to find my son's list.
And for a little context: Mitch Daniels is a Republican, twice governor of Indiana. The form of political correctness you have in mind (which I think is improperly taken to include vaccination requirements) does not flourish in Republican circles.
Here’s a thought: the CCP is trying to provoke a response. A measured response that puts the onus of discipline on the governance system reinforces the rule of law. A knee-jerk dismissal of students is, I believe, what you are looking for, but that would be the offensive response that the CCP wants.
I'm not looking for a particular response. I'm noticing that everybody here is up in arms about speech suppression on a campus in this case, so I pointed out other cases of speech suppression on campuses that don't elicit attention.
That includes making your substantive points without degenerating into nationalistic flamewar, ideological flamewar, partisan flamewar, or any flamewar. Edit name-calling and swipes out of your comments. Don't attack other users. Comment in the spirit of curious exchange, not smiting enemies. The latter is tedious and uninteresting, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.