6 ms·

Say what you will about China and its pollution, it's an interesting attempt at a solution.[1] Could you imagine something like that implemented easily in the U

Say what you will about China and its pollution, it's an interesting attempt at a solution.[1] Could you imagine something like that implemented easily in the US before caught within lawyer-string nets of liability? China has many problems, but many HN readers bashing China have probably never set foot there and are formulating their understanding based off of western media and the socioeconomic + cultural dynamics of Chinese diaspora communities in the west (working in low-paying jobs, less seen as literary/communicative thanks to language barriers). I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism - the shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation (in China's own way; see 'Shanzai'). All this is to say that - pollution sucks. China needs to get its shit together and pass clean air laws. But these devices are emblematic of a very Chinese mode of progress and innovation that I'm not quite describing properly. [1] Yes, I know the technology is not completely new, and controlling particulates by deploying other media is common - when polishing/concrete, for example.

jcyw 11y ago
lol. been to some Chinese village cor a holiday and became a China expert.
- ymse 11y ago
  The GP never asserted being an expert and made a well-reasoned argument (unlike yours). I spent three weeks in China last year and generally got the same impression. We westerners perceive Chinese people as oppressed and poor, but the people I talked to were extremely friendly and optimistic.
Htsthbjig 11y ago
"I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism" It is normal to fall in love when you meet a different culture. It takes 6 months or so living on a country to start seeing caveats and "not so good things" in any country. "the shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation" It is called a "bubble", I traveled frequently to Spain(my native country) and Ireland while the shared assumption that everything was getting better was at full power and all media was talking about those "economic miracles". When those miracles reversed it was not(and it is not) pretty. My father lived the Japanese "economic miracle" of Japan, the country that was going to rule the world. I lived 5 years in China at the beginning of the bubble. It is an entire world in itself, but they have BIG problems. I continue traveling and doing business in China, and it is getting worse day after day. When I was there I could use a normal VPN without problems, and Chinese authorities could not care less, as it was necessary for the business. But now you have to use like 6 layers of VPN, change patterns of navigation...because people in power is desperate to control their own people.
- eva1984 11y ago
  Literally 6 VPNs? OMG, I haven't come back to my motherchina for 2 years...Cant believe it get so bad...
  - erics32 11y ago
    As a counterpoint I visited in October this year and used ExpressVPN, which worked fine and was fast. No 6 layers of VPN required.
    - TeMPOraL 11y ago
      9 weeks (October and November); ExpressVPN and VyprVPN worked pretty well.
  - sdm 11y ago
    He is exaggerating. You just use Astrill or ExpressVPN or one of the other VPN providers that specialize in getting around the GFW. Other than the one week of the year, around a certain anniversary, when the GFW decides to shit on everything you don't really notice it.
- jewbacca 11y ago
  > But now you have to use like 6 layers of VPN, change patterns of navigation Please explain further.
  - analyst74 11y ago
    Since Xi Jinping took power, the government has stepped up their internet censorship efforts, banning many well known VPN. According to some accounts, they also utilize some sort of dynamic filter to determine if you are accessing censored content or using non-blocked VPN. How exactly they do that is unknown, but the fact is, it's much harder to visit censored websites now than before.
    - Laforet 11y ago
metaphorical 11y ago
Not sure how exposed you were to clever soft propaganda in those 3 weeks in China :) As a Chinese, I can tell you I don't feel any social optimism at all. 1) Much political infighting at the top 2) The richer people are moving family to Canada / US / Australia 3) Credit bubble, bad debt in banks 4) Migrant workers and women from villages are constantly getting exploited without any protection 5) Pollution 6) Food is not safe to eat. People buying baby formula from overseas 7) I can go on and on... Technological "innovations" don't solve problems in a society where there's no trust and no fairness. Please tell where those social optimism come from?
- namelezz 11y ago
  +1 for #4
tokenadult 11y ago
many HN readers bashing China have probably never set foot there Readers of Hacker News who have been reading the Chinese press in the original Chinese since the 1970s and who have been to the Chinese-speaking world since the 1980s and thereafter (as I have) get really sick and tired of credulous Westerners believing propaganda from China, that's all. I can remember a time from the 1980s when China (by contrast with Taiwan) was praised by a French student I knew at the time for having no air pollution. I pointed out to him then that that was because China was only just beginning to develop economically at the time. (In that year, the per-capita G.D.P. of Taiwan was ten times that of China.) China has made some interesting progress on some issues, and I often appear here on Hacker News pointing out that even the United States can learn quite a bit from how China does primary school instruction in mathematics, for example.[1] But China is still a dictatorship, with none of the free and fair elections or free press that Taiwan now has. (Taiwan was a dictatorship when I first lived there, but a thriving democracy the second time I lived there.) China's air pollution is now about the worst in the world--it could have put in pollution controls as it industrialized, as the technology for pollution control was well known by then, but the dictators of China chose to industrialize without minimizing pollution. In general, when I see a gee-whiz popular press story about China here on Hacker News, I simply don't believe the first submission. I look for comments in the thread by some of the Hacker News participants who currently live in China and who know the language well[2] (the latter criterion is more stringent, but necessary) to check whether the story is plausible at all. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843 http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf [2] In this thread, the earlier comment by a Hacker News participant who lives in China deserves an upvote. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779183
- contingencies 11y ago
  Oh come on tokenadult, it's not like China's the same place it was in the 70s and 80s! Not only has government policy shifted immensely just since the 90s (start and end of one child policy, WTO joined, passports and international travel freely available for (almost) all citizens, internationalization push for the RMB just to name a few big policies) but honestly, most places are unrecognizable since Y2K! China's mode of governance, while responsible for some horrible problems and extremely frustrating to be on the wrong side of, is not without its positive points. Hand-waving it off as a "dictatorship" implies there is no internal political change, that political terms are re-granted to the same power-base, that secret police stalk and raid the population with great frequency... something much more aking to Lee Kwan-Yew's Singapore. That's simply not the case, and I know that even my government-critical Chinese friends here on the ground believe that the reigns of power are wielded to some extent differently by different leaders, and that within the communist party exist factions and new ideas. Almost the only thing Chinese people pretty much ever say when political issues are raised is "the population is too large ... there is no other option!" (人口太多了！没办法！) While hideously frustrating for westerners (consequently Chinese people rarely complain, disbelieving that fighting to leave feedback with bureaucracies has any effect) it is immensely pragmatic from another perspective. Remember, the population which incorporates entirely disparate language families (everything from Turkic to Tibeto-Burman to Sinitic to Tai) now effectively has total literacy and a mutually comprehensible spoken language... Mao and his legacy, for all his terrible failures, did achieve that, and nobody can argue otherwise. Shouting "dictatorship" when basically China would have been another India without the events of the 20th century, which nobody could have foretold, falls hollow and in fact riles these ears... those without experience in the country hear too much of this fallacious drivel through the media already. You don't need to fuel it. PS. Before I am accused of being some kind of victim of propaganda, I literally never watch TV or read Chinese government media and my 15 years in and out of the country has been tempered with roughly equal time on three other continents.
muddyrivers 11y ago
The majority of Western media are simply reluctant to give credit for any progress China has made. When they did, they never failed to emphasize that the air pollution, the products of low quality, the Communist government, the violation of human rights, etc. It is true that all of these problems exist. They can't be solved in a short time. Many Chinese think that it might take a generation to solve some, two or more generations to solve the others. They also complained a lot, but know it is not an easy job. If anybody cares to look at the history of industrialization and its affects on the society and their people's life, they know Chinese are paying the same price, maybe at less scales. It is unfortunate both for the world and for Chinese themselves. The question is, have we human beings find a feasible alternative approach to achieve the same goal while bypass all the negative stages? As for air pollution, it is a horror. It is undeniable. Just look at the air condition today in Beijing and New Dehli. http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://aqicn.org/city/india/new-delhi/us-embassy/ http://aqicn.org/city/india/new-delhi/us-embassy/ At least the government establishes many monitoring stations and suggests people stay inside. China and India are similar in many aspects. People in both countries, especially the young generations, are working hard to improve their motherlands. But, how often do we hear the media talk about air pollution in India?

jcyw 11y ago

lol. been to some Chinese village cor a holiday and became a China expert.

ymse 11y ago
The GP never asserted being an expert and made a well-reasoned argument (unlike yours). I spent three weeks in China last year and generally got the same impression. We westerners perceive Chinese people as oppressed and poor, but the people I talked to were extremely friendly and optimistic.

Htsthbjig 11y ago

"I'm not Chinese nor do I have a particular stake, but I was there for three weeks this summer and was overwhelmed by a kind of social optimism" It is normal to fall in love when you meet a different culture. It takes 6 months or so living on a country to start seeing caveats and "not so good things" in any country. "the shared assumption that services are getting better, progress will happen, and a relentless cycle of innovation" It is called a "bubble", I traveled frequently to Spain(my native country) and Ireland while the shared assumption that everything was getting better was at full power and all media was talking about those "economic miracles". When those miracles reversed it was not(and it is not) pretty. My father lived the Japanese "economic miracle" of Japan, the country that was going to rule the world. I lived 5 years in China at the beginning of the bubble. It is an entire world in itself, but they have BIG problems. I continue traveling and doing business in China, and it is getting worse day after day. When I was there I could use a normal VPN without problems, and Chinese authorities could not care less, as it was necessary for the business. But now you have to use like 6 layers of VPN, change patterns of navigation...because people in power is desperate to control their own people.

eva1984 11y ago
Literally 6 VPNs? OMG, I haven't come back to my motherchina for 2 years...Cant believe it get so bad...
- erics32 11y ago
  As a counterpoint I visited in October this year and used ExpressVPN, which worked fine and was fast. No 6 layers of VPN required.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    9 weeks (October and November); ExpressVPN and VyprVPN worked pretty well.
- sdm 11y ago
  He is exaggerating. You just use Astrill or ExpressVPN or one of the other VPN providers that specialize in getting around the GFW. Other than the one week of the year, around a certain anniversary, when the GFW decides to shit on everything you don't really notice it.
jewbacca 11y ago
> But now you have to use like 6 layers of VPN, change patterns of navigation Please explain further.
- analyst74 11y ago
  Since Xi Jinping took power, the government has stepped up their internet censorship efforts, banning many well known VPN. According to some accounts, they also utilize some sort of dynamic filter to determine if you are accessing censored content or using non-blocked VPN. How exactly they do that is unknown, but the fact is, it's much harder to visit censored websites now than before.
  - Laforet 11y ago

metaphorical 11y ago

Not sure how exposed you were to clever soft propaganda in those 3 weeks in China :) As a Chinese, I can tell you I don't feel any social optimism at all. 1) Much political infighting at the top 2) The richer people are moving family to Canada / US / Australia 3) Credit bubble, bad debt in banks 4) Migrant workers and women from villages are constantly getting exploited without any protection 5) Pollution 6) Food is not safe to eat. People buying baby formula from overseas 7) I can go on and on... Technological "innovations" don't solve problems in a society where there's no trust and no fairness. Please tell where those social optimism come from?

namelezz 11y ago
+1 for #4

tokenadult 11y ago

many HN readers bashing China have probably never set foot there Readers of Hacker News who have been reading the Chinese press in the original Chinese since the 1970s and who have been to the Chinese-speaking world since the 1980s and thereafter (as I have) get really sick and tired of credulous Westerners believing propaganda from China, that's all. I can remember a time from the 1980s when China (by contrast with Taiwan) was praised by a French student I knew at the time for having no air pollution. I pointed out to him then that that was because China was only just beginning to develop economically at the time. (In that year, the per-capita G.D.P. of Taiwan was ten times that of China.) China has made some interesting progress on some issues, and I often appear here on Hacker News pointing out that even the United States can learn quite a bit from how China does primary school instruction in mathematics, for example.[1] But China is still a dictatorship, with none of the free and fair elections or free press that Taiwan now has. (Taiwan was a dictatorship when I first lived there, but a thriving democracy the second time I lived there.) China's air pollution is now about the worst in the world--it could have put in pollution controls as it industrialized, as the technology for pollution control was well known by then, but the dictators of China chose to industrialize without minimizing pollution. In general, when I see a gee-whiz popular press story about China here on Hacker News, I simply don't believe the first submission. I look for comments in the thread by some of the Hacker News participants who currently live in China and who know the language well[2] (the latter criterion is more stringent, but necessary) to check whether the story is plausible at all. [1] http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematics-Understanding/dp/0415873843 http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic... http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://condor.depaul.edu/sepp/mat660/Askey.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf [2] In this thread, the earlier comment by a Hacker News participant who lives in China deserves an upvote. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779183 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10779183

contingencies 11y ago
Oh come on tokenadult, it's not like China's the same place it was in the 70s and 80s! Not only has government policy shifted immensely just since the 90s (start and end of one child policy, WTO joined, passports and international travel freely available for (almost) all citizens, internationalization push for the RMB just to name a few big policies) but honestly, most places are unrecognizable since Y2K! China's mode of governance, while responsible for some horrible problems and extremely frustrating to be on the wrong side of, is not without its positive points. Hand-waving it off as a "dictatorship" implies there is no internal political change, that political terms are re-granted to the same power-base, that secret police stalk and raid the population with great frequency... something much more aking to Lee Kwan-Yew's Singapore. That's simply not the case, and I know that even my government-critical Chinese friends here on the ground believe that the reigns of power are wielded to some extent differently by different leaders, and that within the communist party exist factions and new ideas. Almost the only thing Chinese people pretty much ever say when political issues are raised is "the population is too large ... there is no other option!" (人口太多了！没办法！) While hideously frustrating for westerners (consequently Chinese people rarely complain, disbelieving that fighting to leave feedback with bureaucracies has any effect) it is immensely pragmatic from another perspective. Remember, the population which incorporates entirely disparate language families (everything from Turkic to Tibeto-Burman to Sinitic to Tai) now effectively has total literacy and a mutually comprehensible spoken language... Mao and his legacy, for all his terrible failures, did achieve that, and nobody can argue otherwise. Shouting "dictatorship" when basically China would have been another India without the events of the 20th century, which nobody could have foretold, falls hollow and in fact riles these ears... those without experience in the country hear too much of this fallacious drivel through the media already. You don't need to fuel it. PS. Before I am accused of being some kind of victim of propaganda, I literally never watch TV or read Chinese government media and my 15 years in and out of the country has been tempered with roughly equal time on three other continents.

muddyrivers 11y ago

The majority of Western media are simply reluctant to give credit for any progress China has made. When they did, they never failed to emphasize that the air pollution, the products of low quality, the Communist government, the violation of human rights, etc. It is true that all of these problems exist. They can't be solved in a short time. Many Chinese think that it might take a generation to solve some, two or more generations to solve the others. They also complained a lot, but know it is not an easy job. If anybody cares to look at the history of industrialization and its affects on the society and their people's life, they know Chinese are paying the same price, maybe at less scales. It is unfortunate both for the world and for Chinese themselves. The question is, have we human beings find a feasible alternative approach to achieve the same goal while bypass all the negative stages? As for air pollution, it is a horror. It is undeniable. Just look at the air condition today in Beijing and New Dehli. http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://aqicn.org/city/beijing/ http://aqicn.org/city/india/new-delhi/us-embassy/ http://aqicn.org/city/india/new-delhi/us-embassy/ At least the government establishes many monitoring stations and suggests people stay inside. China and India are similar in many aspects. People in both countries, especially the young generations, are working hard to improve their motherlands. But, how often do we hear the media talk about air pollution in India?