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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 t

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.
dinkumthinkum 11y ago
I swear there are sooo many propaganda believers that I see whenever China-related articles posted. It's always like "The Bay Area has stupid safety regulations wahhh I want to be dominated by a brutal regime, it's not so bad anyway."

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.

dinkumthinkum 11y ago

I swear there are sooo many propaganda believers that I see whenever China-related articles posted. It's always like "The Bay Area has stupid safety regulations wahhh I want to be dominated by a brutal regime, it's not so bad anyway."