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I lived in China for 3 years and speak pretty decent Mandarin. I'm really grateful people are doing analyses like this, but, and I am very sad to say this, I th

by b6 10y ago

I lived in China for 3 years and speak pretty decent Mandarin. I'm really grateful people are doing analyses like this, but, and I am very sad to say this, I think it may not matter because very few people want to discuss anything subversive anyway. Recently I tried to engage with my oldest Chinese friend about the Sesame Credit system that I think will gradually be adapted to compel more and more obedience. It was like water off a duck's back. As far as she was concerned, the government's description was the end of the story. Anecdote, of course, but I can't do a real survey. My feeling is that I could try all day (speaking very frankly on WeChat) to get Chinese friends to at least understand my concerns and I'd just get blown off 20 different ways. I hope I'm wrong, that it's just my limited experience that makes the situation seem gloomier than it really is.

tluyben2 10y ago
Same experience with my friends mostly but seems them and their families are happy with how it goes and believe their gov is doing well for them. Which is more than I can say I believe my gov is doing.
tcrews 10y ago
Two years ago, two colleagues from China came to visit (South American country) on a business trip (mostly training and technical discussions). I took them to a nice restaurant after a day of meetings. I said something about the censorship being bad after they said they couldn't access some websites I mentioned. They answered a nervous "It's ok" and an awkward silence followed. I sensed they had a lot of things to say about that but even 6000km+ away from China, they still didn't feel comfortable voicing any concerns.
- uiuiuop 10y ago
  I was just in China and when I first met my colleagues they started to tell me what I would need to bypass the Great Firewall. Also, just about every taxi I took, the taxi driver would complain about the government. Maybe your colleagues just didn't want to talk about it in a professional setting?
  - vilhelm_s 10y ago
    There's a paper that uses a quite cool trick to try to measure how much people mask their true opinions and stick to the government line. One of their conclusion is that it happens more for people of high socioeconomic status (as opposed to taxi drivers). > We first draw reader’s attention to the upper left quadrant of the graph. In some sense, this quadrant can be called “liars” quadrant, as the divergence between expressed and actual support are greater for these groups than the sample average (in other words, more intense falsification). Four groups are located in this quadrant: (1) wealthy individuals (the top 20% of the local income percentile),16 (2) frequent internet users,17 (3) those with college-level education or above,18 and (4) state sector employees. Memberships in the first three categories are highly correlated.19 Together, they represent a segment of the Chinese society that is intelligent, informed and with relatively high socioeconomic status. Based on our conjectures of information access, it is not entirely surprising that these groups hold the greatest distrust in the official anticorruption narrative. Individuals with higher levels of education are typically more capable of critically processing information from the political authority. Frequent internet users could easily get access to overseas websites that discussed the power-struggle aspect of the purge. The economically better-off class probably had an extra bit of sympathy for Chen as many of them might have made their fortune under his administration (note the very negative coefficient on actual support for this group). Yet, the fact they are also among the groups that voiced the highest expressed support–a sharp contrast to their own vocal, active style as documented by many existing studies (King et al., 2013; Yang, 2013)—is somewhat counterintuitive. This pattern of behavior is nonetheless consistent with our second conjecture: These groups, by virtue of their better economic conditions, typically had much more to lose from state sanctions than those from lower social strata. At the same time, their intelligence and information probably also gave them a better understanding of the risks associated with expressing dissident views in a moment of high politically sensitivity. As a result, while members of these groups might be outspoken in times when revealing true preferences bears little political cost, they can be extremely cautious about the views they express when the political atmosphere is tightened. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2564413 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2564413
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    Taxi drivers, especially in Beijing, are a subversive bunch. People with money are more vested in the system, so for the fuerdai, it isn't just brainwashing, they are protecting their interests.
rahimnathwani 10y ago
"My feeling is that I could try all day (speaking very frankly on WeChat) to get Chinese friends to at least understand my concerns and I'd just get blown off 20 different ways." I'm not sure I'd get much further talking with my friends in the UK about the Investigatory Powers Bill.
- ue_ 10y ago
  My thoughts exactly. Also laws in the UK which ban certain pornographic drawings. The latter is more likely to have you blown off as a 'pedohile' rather than defender of civil liberties. Even disgusting speech is speech and few people I know seem to grasp this.
mahranch 10y ago
> As far as she was concerned, the government's description was the end of the story. This is what people don't get about China. "Ooohh yeah, China will take the U.S down a few pegs, go China!" this is a very popular sentiment on reddit's /r/Worldnews or with any cynical millennial on reddit. They eat up all the blatant propaganda that comes out of either Xinhua or the People's Daily (China's very own English language, government-owned & ran propagand... erm, I mean "news agency"). China literally, not figuratively, brainwashes its citizens. And they do so from a very early age: Japan is evil!. I get a kick when I hear people say how China hates Japan and Japan hates China. I'm sorry, but relatively speaking, it's a one-sided hatred -- just go search youtube for people asking random Japanese people down the street what they think of China. There are dozens and dozens of them, all by different youtubers and done at various times over the last 10 years. What they don't understand is that if China replaced or supplanted the U.S as the world's sole superpower, things would be a whole hell of a lot different than they are now. China would most definitely exert its influence in a way that the world has yet to see. The U.S is far from perfect but they are, by *orders of magnitude, the lesser evils. They're simply benign by comparison. Under Chinese rule, it would most certainly not be benign and many of our freedoms would erode the more powerful China got. Until one day we wake up to a global "great firewall". Sounds like an exaggeration but as someone who has lived in China, I assure you, it's not.
- 794CD01 10y ago
  Why is this baseless speculation so upvoted? We already know what China exerting its influence on other countries looks like. Just look at places where that's currently happening, such as Ethiopia or Zambia.
  - mahranch 10y ago
    It's not baseless speculation, it's fact. > Just look at places where that's currently happening, such as Ethiopia or Zambia. Are you using that as a positive example? You need to do your research kid, China's imperialism in Africa is not turning out to be a good thing for the African countries they're working in. Hell, Kenyan workers were protesting the Chinese http://qz.com/749177/kenyan-rail-workers-are-protesting-against-their-chinese-employer-for-a-raise-to-5-a-day/ http://qz.com/749177/kenyan-rail-workers-are-protesting-agai... Oh yeah, and Zambia? http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36341367/china-denies-selling-human-flesh-as-tinned-corned-beef-in-zambia-in-africa http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36341367/china-denies-... Sounds like everything is peachy.... /s
794CD01 10y ago
Sounds similar to my attempts to convince Americans about the negatives of gun ownership or free speech.
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  > about the negatives of gun ownership Many Americans agree on that. We even argue with each other. > or free speech. Ok, you got me there.
  - 794CD01 10y ago
    Many might, but not the ones I talk to about it, since people who think similarly congregate together. Perhaps you can see some parallels in the anecdata I was replying to.
    - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
      I can't imagine someone working in tech being surrounded by gun righters. Mississippi, sure, but Silicon Valley? I spent 9 years in China (I just moved back in August). Southerners (e.g. Fujianese) tend to be more subversive than northerners, but only one-on-one, given a largish group of Chinese, there is definitely a standard "party line" that diverges little. There is just no chance to have actual "public" factions like we have in the states (e.g. pro gun and anti gun), they can only exist under the radar (e.g. one-on-one conversations).
      - 794CD01 10y ago
        Not everyone here lives and works in Silicon Valley.
thatguyinchina 10y ago
I'm currently studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing (one of China's top universities), and all of my Chinese friends here seem to be very clear about what their government is doing. The one Communist party member I met so far told me they're only a party member because they were made to join in high school, when they didn't yet know what any of that was about, and now didn't want to pay the fee to leave. Of course, I'm living in a campus bubble of the country's English-speaking elite (unfortunately, I'm not yet fluent at Mandarin). I'm curious what this divide in perception between the well-educated elite and the non-English speaking majority means for China's future.
tzs 10y ago
In countries where discussing subversive things could get people in trouble with the government, I'd expect people to be cautious about who they discuss such things with. Perhaps foreigners who have only lived there for three years don't make the cut?
jza00425 10y ago
Because talking does not solve the problem. Chinese are aware of the problem, and complain about it a lot. But talking to Westerners about it is not a good idea most of the time, because high percentage of Westerners in China just try so hard to prove their own bias that Chinese are brainwashed. Chinese can tell the condescending attitude. No Chinese like to hear a foreiger bash their government, no matter it is good or bad.
- vtange 10y ago
  Sounds like the Trump effect only this time it's Chinese v. Foreigners. I'm Chinese and I know that my people have a strong sense of national and racial unity. We easily get triggered when we see Chinese people neglected/criticized unfairly.
- uiuiuop 10y ago
  I would also add that talking about it in English might be difficult for them to express the nuance of the situation. If the Westerner was willing to talk in Mandarin, perhaps they would be more willing to discuss the issue.

by b6 10y ago

tluyben2 10y ago

Same experience with my friends mostly but seems them and their families are happy with how it goes and believe their gov is doing well for them. Which is more than I can say I believe my gov is doing.

tcrews 10y ago

Two years ago, two colleagues from China came to visit (South American country) on a business trip (mostly training and technical discussions). I took them to a nice restaurant after a day of meetings. I said something about the censorship being bad after they said they couldn't access some websites I mentioned. They answered a nervous "It's ok" and an awkward silence followed. I sensed they had a lot of things to say about that but even 6000km+ away from China, they still didn't feel comfortable voicing any concerns.

uiuiuop 10y ago
I was just in China and when I first met my colleagues they started to tell me what I would need to bypass the Great Firewall. Also, just about every taxi I took, the taxi driver would complain about the government. Maybe your colleagues just didn't want to talk about it in a professional setting?
- vilhelm_s 10y ago
  There's a paper that uses a quite cool trick to try to measure how much people mask their true opinions and stick to the government line. One of their conclusion is that it happens more for people of high socioeconomic status (as opposed to taxi drivers). > We first draw reader’s attention to the upper left quadrant of the graph. In some sense, this quadrant can be called “liars” quadrant, as the divergence between expressed and actual support are greater for these groups than the sample average (in other words, more intense falsification). Four groups are located in this quadrant: (1) wealthy individuals (the top 20% of the local income percentile),16 (2) frequent internet users,17 (3) those with college-level education or above,18 and (4) state sector employees. Memberships in the first three categories are highly correlated.19 Together, they represent a segment of the Chinese society that is intelligent, informed and with relatively high socioeconomic status. Based on our conjectures of information access, it is not entirely surprising that these groups hold the greatest distrust in the official anticorruption narrative. Individuals with higher levels of education are typically more capable of critically processing information from the political authority. Frequent internet users could easily get access to overseas websites that discussed the power-struggle aspect of the purge. The economically better-off class probably had an extra bit of sympathy for Chen as many of them might have made their fortune under his administration (note the very negative coefficient on actual support for this group). Yet, the fact they are also among the groups that voiced the highest expressed support–a sharp contrast to their own vocal, active style as documented by many existing studies (King et al., 2013; Yang, 2013)—is somewhat counterintuitive. This pattern of behavior is nonetheless consistent with our second conjecture: These groups, by virtue of their better economic conditions, typically had much more to lose from state sanctions than those from lower social strata. At the same time, their intelligence and information probably also gave them a better understanding of the risks associated with expressing dissident views in a moment of high politically sensitivity. As a result, while members of these groups might be outspoken in times when revealing true preferences bears little political cost, they can be extremely cautious about the views they express when the political atmosphere is tightened. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2564413 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2564413
- seanmcdirmid 10y ago
  Taxi drivers, especially in Beijing, are a subversive bunch. People with money are more vested in the system, so for the fuerdai, it isn't just brainwashing, they are protecting their interests.

rahimnathwani 10y ago

"My feeling is that I could try all day (speaking very frankly on WeChat) to get Chinese friends to at least understand my concerns and I'd just get blown off 20 different ways." I'm not sure I'd get much further talking with my friends in the UK about the Investigatory Powers Bill.

ue_ 10y ago
My thoughts exactly. Also laws in the UK which ban certain pornographic drawings. The latter is more likely to have you blown off as a 'pedohile' rather than defender of civil liberties. Even disgusting speech is speech and few people I know seem to grasp this.

mahranch 10y ago

> As far as she was concerned, the government's description was the end of the story. This is what people don't get about China. "Ooohh yeah, China will take the U.S down a few pegs, go China!" this is a very popular sentiment on reddit's /r/Worldnews or with any cynical millennial on reddit. They eat up all the blatant propaganda that comes out of either Xinhua or the People's Daily (China's very own English language, government-owned & ran propagand... erm, I mean "news agency"). China literally, not figuratively, brainwashes its citizens. And they do so from a very early age: Japan is evil!. I get a kick when I hear people say how China hates Japan and Japan hates China. I'm sorry, but relatively speaking, it's a one-sided hatred -- just go search youtube for people asking random Japanese people down the street what they think of China. There are dozens and dozens of them, all by different youtubers and done at various times over the last 10 years. What they don't understand is that if China replaced or supplanted the U.S as the world's sole superpower, things would be a whole hell of a lot different than they are now. China would most definitely exert its influence in a way that the world has yet to see. The U.S is far from perfect but they are, by *orders of magnitude, the lesser evils. They're simply benign by comparison. Under Chinese rule, it would most certainly not be benign and many of our freedoms would erode the more powerful China got. Until one day we wake up to a global "great firewall". Sounds like an exaggeration but as someone who has lived in China, I assure you, it's not.

794CD01 10y ago
Why is this baseless speculation so upvoted? We already know what China exerting its influence on other countries looks like. Just look at places where that's currently happening, such as Ethiopia or Zambia.
- mahranch 10y ago
  It's not baseless speculation, it's fact. > Just look at places where that's currently happening, such as Ethiopia or Zambia. Are you using that as a positive example? You need to do your research kid, China's imperialism in Africa is not turning out to be a good thing for the African countries they're working in. Hell, Kenyan workers were protesting the Chinese http://qz.com/749177/kenyan-rail-workers-are-protesting-against-their-chinese-employer-for-a-raise-to-5-a-day/ http://qz.com/749177/kenyan-rail-workers-are-protesting-agai... Oh yeah, and Zambia? http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36341367/china-denies-selling-human-flesh-as-tinned-corned-beef-in-zambia-in-africa http://www.bbc.co.uk/newsbeat/article/36341367/china-denies-... Sounds like everything is peachy.... /s

794CD01 10y ago

Sounds similar to my attempts to convince Americans about the negatives of gun ownership or free speech.

seanmcdirmid 10y ago
> about the negatives of gun ownership Many Americans agree on that. We even argue with each other. > or free speech. Ok, you got me there.
- 794CD01 10y ago
  Many might, but not the ones I talk to about it, since people who think similarly congregate together. Perhaps you can see some parallels in the anecdata I was replying to.
  - seanmcdirmid 10y ago
    I can't imagine someone working in tech being surrounded by gun righters. Mississippi, sure, but Silicon Valley? I spent 9 years in China (I just moved back in August). Southerners (e.g. Fujianese) tend to be more subversive than northerners, but only one-on-one, given a largish group of Chinese, there is definitely a standard "party line" that diverges little. There is just no chance to have actual "public" factions like we have in the states (e.g. pro gun and anti gun), they can only exist under the radar (e.g. one-on-one conversations).
    - 794CD01 10y ago
      Not everyone here lives and works in Silicon Valley.

thatguyinchina 10y ago

I'm currently studying at Tsinghua University in Beijing (one of China's top universities), and all of my Chinese friends here seem to be very clear about what their government is doing. The one Communist party member I met so far told me they're only a party member because they were made to join in high school, when they didn't yet know what any of that was about, and now didn't want to pay the fee to leave. Of course, I'm living in a campus bubble of the country's English-speaking elite (unfortunately, I'm not yet fluent at Mandarin). I'm curious what this divide in perception between the well-educated elite and the non-English speaking majority means for China's future.

tzs 10y ago

In countries where discussing subversive things could get people in trouble with the government, I'd expect people to be cautious about who they discuss such things with. Perhaps foreigners who have only lived there for three years don't make the cut?

jza00425 10y ago

Because talking does not solve the problem. Chinese are aware of the problem, and complain about it a lot. But talking to Westerners about it is not a good idea most of the time, because high percentage of Westerners in China just try so hard to prove their own bias that Chinese are brainwashed. Chinese can tell the condescending attitude. No Chinese like to hear a foreiger bash their government, no matter it is good or bad.

vtange 10y ago
Sounds like the Trump effect only this time it's Chinese v. Foreigners. I'm Chinese and I know that my people have a strong sense of national and racial unity. We easily get triggered when we see Chinese people neglected/criticized unfairly.
uiuiuop 10y ago
I would also add that talking about it in English might be difficult for them to express the nuance of the situation. If the Westerner was willing to talk in Mandarin, perhaps they would be more willing to discuss the issue.