9 ms·

China is the living embodiment of what 1984 can look like in 2018. I do wonder if an ever increasing crackdown and everything ultimately becomes so unwieldy tha

China is the living embodiment of what 1984 can look like in 2018. I do wonder if an ever increasing crackdown and everything ultimately becomes so unwieldy that the whole country falls apart.

adventured 9y ago
It'll hold so long as the economic output keeps rising, incomes keep rising, etc. The people of China will put up with a lot so long as that vague social pact remains. The CCP & Xi know that of course.
- JumpCrisscross 9y ago
  > The people of China will put up with a lot so long as that vague social pact remains Counterfactual: Venezuela.
  - seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Venezuela is far from stable ATM. The country could just implode anytime.
    - Yizahi 9y ago
      He meant that people are fine with their state even after everything collapsed. At least no major protests happened (really major).
      - adventured 9y ago
        People aren't fine with their state at all in Venezuela. Major protests have happened, along with countless large riots. "Days after the [Maduro] recall movement was cancelled, 1.2 million Venezuelans protested throughout the country against the move" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Venezuelan_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Venezuelan_protests "Huge marches as Venezuela marks 50 days of protest" https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/05/venezuelan-opposition-marks-50-days-protests-170520174956348.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/05/venezuelan-opposition... June 2017 "Beginning on April 1, anti-government demonstrators have staged daily protests across Venezuela that continue to devolve into violent clashes with riot police, leaving thousands arrested, hundreds injured, and 66 dead." https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/months-of-anti-government-protests-continue-in-venezuela/530031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/months-of-anti-gov...
        JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        > Major protests have happened The centralized economy enabled Maduro's government to co-opt food distribution and election security apparatuses to make the protests fruitless. TL; DR An organized dictator can survive economic collapse longer than one might expect. "Voters who used their Fatherland Cards were given food at a quarter of the polling stations surveyed in December by Torino. At some other sites, voters were instead told where they could pick up the food. After voting, Katerina Noriega, a street vendor in Santa Rita, was directed by Socialist activists to a warehouse to receive a couple of pounds of rice and beans, worth about 10 days of work. 'They bought our votes,” said Ms. Noriega, who acknowledged supporting the government candidate to get the free food. “I did it because of our difficult situation.' ... The so-called Fatherland Card, using technology from Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp., allows the government to keep track of who has voted. That permits officials to put pressure on food recipients if they are reluctant to cast a ballot, according to election experts, government critics and ruling party activists. By law, the vote is supposed to be secret. But at voting centers in the capital, Caracas, and the westernmost state of Zulia during the December municipal elections, it was easy to see how the ruling party worked the levers of government to ensure that likely supporters made it to the polls. In a giant red tent, Socialist activists scanned voters’ Fatherland Cards. Using a computerized database, they could determine who hasn’t voted and what benefits those people receive. Government supporters called “patrollers” were then dispatched on motorbikes to the homes of food recipients to remind them of the benefits and convince them to turn out, according to a local ruling-party official." https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-maduro-clinging-to-power-uses-hunger-as-an-electoral-weapon-1521734622 https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-maduro-clinging-to-p...
        adventured 9y ago
        My guess on Maduro, is that he has less than 12 to 24 months left to live if he doesn't leave the country. The average Venezuelan reported losing 24 pounds [1] of body weight just in 2017 from lack of food. The system won't survive much longer. They're at a stage of collapse where cannibalism will probably start to show up. People are flooding to Colombia and Brazil. The army will very likely remove him sooner rather than later. There's no cult loyalty system built up around Maduro as with someone like Kim Jong-Un for example. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelans-report-big-weight-losses-in-2017-as-hunger-hits-idUSKCN1G52HA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelan...
    - duxup 9y ago
      Venezuela is so sad, and scary at the same time considering it didn't need to go that way and was "ok" before it took such a nosedive.
      - adventured 9y ago
        It was the wealthiest nation in Latin America in the early 1980s, with a GDP per capita considerably higher than Argentina and several times that of Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Oil output peaked the few years prior to Chavez taking over and then began a persistent decline. Oil exports boomed from 1987 to 2000, going from 1.5m to 3m barrels per day. Under Chavez that collapsed by nearly 50%. Maduro of course has just continued the trend line.
  - adventured 9y ago
    Venezuela?!? Venezuela has essentially collapsed. Their people are starving to death and have been rioting in the streets for years. 2016: "food riots show Venezuela crisis has gone beyond politics" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/20/venezuela-breaking-point-food-shortages-protests-maduro https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/20/venezuela-brea... May 2017 "Venezuela protests: 200,000 march against President Maduro as riots and looting spread across country" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/21/venezuela-protests-200000-march-against-president-maduro-riots/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/21/venezuela-protes... January 2018 "Venezuelans Are Rioting Over Food Shortages" http://fortune.com/2018/01/11/venezuela-food-riots/ http://fortune.com/2018/01/11/venezuela-food-riots/
- pizza234 9y ago
  I'm not really sure of that - authoritarian regimes/dictatorships can also feed on fear and uncertainty (in this context, "uncertainty" would also refer to economical/political troubles), and many actually do (random example: North Korea).
- thisisit 9y ago
  I can't be sure but time and again doubts are cast over China's data: economic output, rising incomes etc. Local governments were recently encouraged to report if they fudged their numbers: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Chinese-local-governments-rush-to-admit-fake-data https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Chinese-loc...
  - adventured 9y ago
    I largely agree with that premise. China's economic data is very clearly partially fake. They infamously have faked unemployment numbers for decades. They hide trillions in shadow debt. I just don't think it's that fake. We may be talking about 10% or 15%. Their astounding economic climb is well correlated in far too many data points to be, eg 50% fake or something similarly outlandish. The amount of oil they're importing, the military spending, the rapid advances in various industries, the general commodity consumption, the exports, electricity consumption & generation, etc.
- mattnewton 9y ago
  Not only will China stick together, I’m afraid that people will start looking at them as a model to be followed as our own society scales to a billion people.
  - remir 9y ago
    If by "our society" you mean the US, I seriously doubt it will reach 1 billion people any time soon.
ataturk 9y ago
Not only is it that, but it is also a harsh lesson in how technology is value neutral--it can be used to enslave just as easily as it can free. And companies like Google are all too happy to make China the baseline for the world because Google works at the behest of unelected intelligence community bureaucrats who are doing their best to overthrow the US right now. The world needs an enema.
jaimex2 9y ago
As long as the government keeps the army happy they can ban whatever they like.
- letsgetphysITal 9y ago
  The Rules for Rulers - CGP Grey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
  - jaimex2 9y ago
    exactly :)
- forapurpose 9y ago
  That's built into the political structure: The Paramount Leader is not just head of government, but of three separate organizations: The Communist Party, the military, and the government. (At least, that was my understanding around 10 years ago; I don't know if anything has changed.)
Yizahi 9y ago
See Russia. If the country has "some" money to spend it can do whatever and just keep brainwashing its citizens for decades.
- mandelbulb 9y ago
  The circumstances in Russia are more complicated and by far not as good of an example of a 1984 situation as China is.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - larrydag 9y ago
    Agreed but could be a precursor to what could become of China if a revolution like the Berlin Wall episode were to happen.
    - astebbin 9y ago
      Wouldn't the "Berlin Wall episode" pertain more to the former East Germany, whose GDP per capita today is several times that of Russia's? All in all, reunification and the fall of Communism has been very good for East Germans: http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-second-economic-miracle/a-17970685 http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-second-economic-miracle/a-1797...
- vkou 9y ago
  Please. Russia does not have a great firewall, and it's not interested in one. Pravda.ru, or the other rags it publishes isn't that much worse then CNN or Fox news. They all push hypocritical, logically unsound, nationalistic content. Nobody's being brainwashed there - instead, unsurprisingly, people prefer to read news that paints their country in a good light, and it's antagonists in a poor one. It's the exact same thing in the US. As long as you don't cause problems for the thieves and oligarchs in charge, nobody really cares what books you read, what news you watch.
  - 9y ago
maxxxxx 9y ago
As long as the economy is doing well things will be OK. From the outside China looks pretty well run so I'd expect them to last for a long time. It's not like the Soviets where it was blatantly obvious that things are mismanaged.
- emiliobumachar 9y ago
  > It's not like the Soviets where it was blatantly obvious that things are mismanaged. Do you mean blatantly obvious at the time and from outside? Could you please elaborate? I thought the USSR put up a good front, and fooled much of the West with regard to economic development (not freedom).
  - adventured 9y ago
    There were always people that left the USSR and came over to the West and told the truth about what conditions were really like there. People mostly chose to believe those stories or not, based on their own ideological bias. Hollywood put out several productions that proclaimed the USSR was a paradise. [1][2] US and European industrialists had gone over to the USSR pre-WW2 and helped them build out their industrial base. The Soviets had entirely failed at industrializing on their own. From those experiences, and people writing about them, it was fairly well known what general condition the USSR was actually in economically. Firm, reliable metrics however were largely unavailable throughout the Soviet era. The fooling of the West, regarding the Soviet's mighty materialism output, mostly fell apart by the 1960s (the facade lasted for ~30 years or so, and mostly only for people that were sympathetic to that ideology). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Star_(1943_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Star_(1943_film) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Russia
  - maxxxxx 9y ago
    People I have met who had lived in the USSR and East Germany knew exactly that things were far different from the official reality.
- forapurpose 9y ago
loceng 9y ago
What I wonder is if their system system is so efficient at censorship/control, if there are very dark things going on which don't have the opportunity to make it to see the light o day - or if 99.999999999% of the population is being treated fairly and benefitting fairly from the systems they've implemented.
- Canada 9y ago
  What if it's both?
- adventured 9y ago
  I'd like to know what the condition of these people is: "At least 120,000 members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority have been confined to political “re-education camps” redolent of the Mao era that are springing up across the country’s western borderlands, a report has claimed." With Xi assuming total power, there has to be a legitimate concern regarding what might be about to happen. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-120000-muslim-uighurs-held-in-chinese-re-education-camps-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...
- nhurj 9y ago
  The goal of censorship isn't, usually, to control information as such. It is to enforce certain behaviors. People on Hacker News has the wrong idea about how authoritarian states work, largely based on cold war propaganda. But it's not really a discussion worth having on HN since any attempt at framing it in a way that people could understand would be accused of shilling. You will have to find some other way to get that information.
- dTal 9y ago
  Well, they do harvest organs from "political prisoners". I'd say that's pretty dark. I don't know if the official denial that this is occuring counts as "censorship" though.
zombieprocesses 9y ago
> China is the living embodiment of what 1984 can look like in 2018. Or britain - you know the place that 1984 was about. Or germany, spain, canada, russia, saudi arabia, etc. > I do wonder if an ever increasing crackdown and everything ultimately becomes so unwieldy that the whole country falls apart. People like gordon chang have been wondering for decades now. Wouldn't hold my breath on it though. China has a few decades more of development and urbanization ahead of it. They'll continue to grow for a few more years.
- weavejester 9y ago
  Some countries are a lot closer to 1984 than others. The EU and US are considerably further away from an authoritarian dictatorship than countries like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.
  - zombieprocesses 9y ago
    > Some countries are a lot closer to 1984 than others. Yes. Britain is far ahead of everyone at this moment. I'm sure china and the rest are desperate to catch up. > The EU and US As an american, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't lump us in with the EU. EU is a lot closer to china than you think in terms of political system, censorship and mentality. After all, the EU heavily censors parodies and "hate" speech and is at the forefront of internet censorship. I'm afraid america stands alone in many respects but we have our own challenges. We are most definitely not perfect.
    - slothtrop 9y ago
      >Yes. Britain is far ahead of everyone at this moment. I'm sure china and the rest are desperate to catch up. I don't think you even believe that horseshit.
      - zombieprocesses 9y ago
        Considering Britain is banning journalists like Lauren Southern and convicting people for making jokes on youtube ( count dankula ), I most certainly believe it. Not only that, Britain is the most surveilled society on earth. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/6108496.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/6108496.stm That's from 2006. Britain has at least a decade head start. But china is working very hard to catch up on their surveillance. But I guess it's evil when they do it, but it's "civilized" when britain does it?
greggarious 9y ago
>China is the living embodiment of what 1984 can look like in 2018. The headline brought to mind that scene from V for Vendetta right before Stephen Fry gets disappeared.
z2 9y ago
My personal benchmark for this is to monitor Taobao for the day that the book is banned from Chinese markets. So far it's still available for sale: https://s.taobao.com/search?q=%E4%B8%80%E4%B9%9D%E5%85%AB%E5%9B%9B&type=p&tmhkh5=&spm=a21wu.241046-us.a2227oh.d100&from=sea_1_searchbutton&catId=100 https://s.taobao.com/search?q=%E4%B8%80%E4%B9%9D%E5%85%AB%E5...
- ballenf 9y ago
  Here's a youtuber I came across in prep for a trip to China last year: https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza He's a South African living in China for 10 years and married to a Chinese woman. Very interesting to see his videos from the last few months about how things are changing in a more dramatic way than in his entire time there.
- GuiA 9y ago
  I'm overall not that familiar with Chinese culture, so asking with genuine curiosity - why would the availability of 1984, a piece of Western work depicting the Western world with very little mention of China, be an interesting benchmark? If the average Chinese person has no prior interest in wanting to read that book or even knowing of its existence, why would the Chinese government care about banning it?

China is the living embodiment of what 1984 can look like in 2018. I do wonder if an ever increasing crackdown and everything ultimately becomes so unwieldy that the whole country falls apart.

adventured 9y ago

It'll hold so long as the economic output keeps rising, incomes keep rising, etc. The people of China will put up with a lot so long as that vague social pact remains. The CCP & Xi know that of course.

JumpCrisscross 9y ago
> The people of China will put up with a lot so long as that vague social pact remains Counterfactual: Venezuela.
- seanmcdirmid 9y ago
  Venezuela is far from stable ATM. The country could just implode anytime.
  - Yizahi 9y ago
    He meant that people are fine with their state even after everything collapsed. At least no major protests happened (really major).
    - adventured 9y ago
      People aren't fine with their state at all in Venezuela. Major protests have happened, along with countless large riots. "Days after the [Maduro] recall movement was cancelled, 1.2 million Venezuelans protested throughout the country against the move" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Venezuelan_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Venezuelan_protests "Huge marches as Venezuela marks 50 days of protest" https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/05/venezuelan-opposition-marks-50-days-protests-170520174956348.html https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/05/venezuelan-opposition... June 2017 "Beginning on April 1, anti-government demonstrators have staged daily protests across Venezuela that continue to devolve into violent clashes with riot police, leaving thousands arrested, hundreds injured, and 66 dead." https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/months-of-anti-government-protests-continue-in-venezuela/530031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2017/06/months-of-anti-gov...
      - JumpCrisscross 9y ago
        > Major protests have happened The centralized economy enabled Maduro's government to co-opt food distribution and election security apparatuses to make the protests fruitless. TL; DR An organized dictator can survive economic collapse longer than one might expect. "Voters who used their Fatherland Cards were given food at a quarter of the polling stations surveyed in December by Torino. At some other sites, voters were instead told where they could pick up the food. After voting, Katerina Noriega, a street vendor in Santa Rita, was directed by Socialist activists to a warehouse to receive a couple of pounds of rice and beans, worth about 10 days of work. 'They bought our votes,” said Ms. Noriega, who acknowledged supporting the government candidate to get the free food. “I did it because of our difficult situation.' ... The so-called Fatherland Card, using technology from Chinese telecom giant ZTE Corp., allows the government to keep track of who has voted. That permits officials to put pressure on food recipients if they are reluctant to cast a ballot, according to election experts, government critics and ruling party activists. By law, the vote is supposed to be secret. But at voting centers in the capital, Caracas, and the westernmost state of Zulia during the December municipal elections, it was easy to see how the ruling party worked the levers of government to ensure that likely supporters made it to the polls. In a giant red tent, Socialist activists scanned voters’ Fatherland Cards. Using a computerized database, they could determine who hasn’t voted and what benefits those people receive. Government supporters called “patrollers” were then dispatched on motorbikes to the homes of food recipients to remind them of the benefits and convince them to turn out, according to a local ruling-party official." https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-maduro-clinging-to-power-uses-hunger-as-an-electoral-weapon-1521734622 https://www.wsj.com/articles/venezuelas-maduro-clinging-to-p...
        adventured 9y ago
        My guess on Maduro, is that he has less than 12 to 24 months left to live if he doesn't leave the country. The average Venezuelan reported losing 24 pounds [1] of body weight just in 2017 from lack of food. The system won't survive much longer. They're at a stage of collapse where cannibalism will probably start to show up. People are flooding to Colombia and Brazil. The army will very likely remove him sooner rather than later. There's no cult loyalty system built up around Maduro as with someone like Kim Jong-Un for example. [1] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelans-report-big-weight-losses-in-2017-as-hunger-hits-idUSKCN1G52HA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-food/venezuelan...
  - duxup 9y ago
    Venezuela is so sad, and scary at the same time considering it didn't need to go that way and was "ok" before it took such a nosedive.
    - adventured 9y ago
      It was the wealthiest nation in Latin America in the early 1980s, with a GDP per capita considerably higher than Argentina and several times that of Mexico, Brazil, Chile and Colombia. Oil output peaked the few years prior to Chavez taking over and then began a persistent decline. Oil exports boomed from 1987 to 2000, going from 1.5m to 3m barrels per day. Under Chavez that collapsed by nearly 50%. Maduro of course has just continued the trend line.
- adventured 9y ago
  Venezuela?!? Venezuela has essentially collapsed. Their people are starving to death and have been rioting in the streets for years. 2016: "food riots show Venezuela crisis has gone beyond politics" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/20/venezuela-breaking-point-food-shortages-protests-maduro https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/20/venezuela-brea... May 2017 "Venezuela protests: 200,000 march against President Maduro as riots and looting spread across country" https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/21/venezuela-protests-200000-march-against-president-maduro-riots/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/05/21/venezuela-protes... January 2018 "Venezuelans Are Rioting Over Food Shortages" http://fortune.com/2018/01/11/venezuela-food-riots/ http://fortune.com/2018/01/11/venezuela-food-riots/
pizza234 9y ago
I'm not really sure of that - authoritarian regimes/dictatorships can also feed on fear and uncertainty (in this context, "uncertainty" would also refer to economical/political troubles), and many actually do (random example: North Korea).
thisisit 9y ago
I can't be sure but time and again doubts are cast over China's data: economic output, rising incomes etc. Local governments were recently encouraged to report if they fudged their numbers: https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Chinese-local-governments-rush-to-admit-fake-data https://asia.nikkei.com/Politics-Economy/Economy/Chinese-loc...
- adventured 9y ago
  I largely agree with that premise. China's economic data is very clearly partially fake. They infamously have faked unemployment numbers for decades. They hide trillions in shadow debt. I just don't think it's that fake. We may be talking about 10% or 15%. Their astounding economic climb is well correlated in far too many data points to be, eg 50% fake or something similarly outlandish. The amount of oil they're importing, the military spending, the rapid advances in various industries, the general commodity consumption, the exports, electricity consumption & generation, etc.
mattnewton 9y ago
Not only will China stick together, I’m afraid that people will start looking at them as a model to be followed as our own society scales to a billion people.
- remir 9y ago
  If by "our society" you mean the US, I seriously doubt it will reach 1 billion people any time soon.

ataturk 9y ago

Not only is it that, but it is also a harsh lesson in how technology is value neutral--it can be used to enslave just as easily as it can free. And companies like Google are all too happy to make China the baseline for the world because Google works at the behest of unelected intelligence community bureaucrats who are doing their best to overthrow the US right now. The world needs an enema.

jaimex2 9y ago

As long as the government keeps the army happy they can ban whatever they like.

letsgetphysITal 9y ago
The Rules for Rulers - CGP Grey https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
- jaimex2 9y ago
  exactly :)
forapurpose 9y ago
That's built into the political structure: The Paramount Leader is not just head of government, but of three separate organizations: The Communist Party, the military, and the government. (At least, that was my understanding around 10 years ago; I don't know if anything has changed.)

Yizahi 9y ago

See Russia. If the country has "some" money to spend it can do whatever and just keep brainwashing its citizens for decades.

mandelbulb 9y ago
The circumstances in Russia are more complicated and by far not as good of an example of a 1984 situation as China is.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- larrydag 9y ago
  Agreed but could be a precursor to what could become of China if a revolution like the Berlin Wall episode were to happen.
  - astebbin 9y ago
    Wouldn't the "Berlin Wall episode" pertain more to the former East Germany, whose GDP per capita today is several times that of Russia's? All in all, reunification and the fall of Communism has been very good for East Germans: http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-second-economic-miracle/a-17970685 http://www.dw.com/en/germanys-second-economic-miracle/a-1797...
vkou 9y ago
Please. Russia does not have a great firewall, and it's not interested in one. Pravda.ru, or the other rags it publishes isn't that much worse then CNN or Fox news. They all push hypocritical, logically unsound, nationalistic content. Nobody's being brainwashed there - instead, unsurprisingly, people prefer to read news that paints their country in a good light, and it's antagonists in a poor one. It's the exact same thing in the US. As long as you don't cause problems for the thieves and oligarchs in charge, nobody really cares what books you read, what news you watch.
- 9y ago

maxxxxx 9y ago

As long as the economy is doing well things will be OK. From the outside China looks pretty well run so I'd expect them to last for a long time. It's not like the Soviets where it was blatantly obvious that things are mismanaged.

emiliobumachar 9y ago
> It's not like the Soviets where it was blatantly obvious that things are mismanaged. Do you mean blatantly obvious at the time and from outside? Could you please elaborate? I thought the USSR put up a good front, and fooled much of the West with regard to economic development (not freedom).
- adventured 9y ago
  There were always people that left the USSR and came over to the West and told the truth about what conditions were really like there. People mostly chose to believe those stories or not, based on their own ideological bias. Hollywood put out several productions that proclaimed the USSR was a paradise. [1][2] US and European industrialists had gone over to the USSR pre-WW2 and helped them build out their industrial base. The Soviets had entirely failed at industrializing on their own. From those experiences, and people writing about them, it was fairly well known what general condition the USSR was actually in economically. Firm, reliable metrics however were largely unavailable throughout the Soviet era. The fooling of the West, regarding the Soviet's mighty materialism output, mostly fell apart by the 1960s (the facade lasted for ~30 years or so, and mostly only for people that were sympathetic to that ideology). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Star_(1943_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_North_Star_(1943_film) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Russia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Song_of_Russia
- maxxxxx 9y ago
  People I have met who had lived in the USSR and East Germany knew exactly that things were far different from the official reality.
forapurpose 9y ago

loceng 9y ago

What I wonder is if their system system is so efficient at censorship/control, if there are very dark things going on which don't have the opportunity to make it to see the light o day - or if 99.999999999% of the population is being treated fairly and benefitting fairly from the systems they've implemented.

Canada 9y ago
What if it's both?
adventured 9y ago
I'd like to know what the condition of these people is: "At least 120,000 members of China’s Muslim Uighur minority have been confined to political “re-education camps” redolent of the Mao era that are springing up across the country’s western borderlands, a report has claimed." With Xi assuming total power, there has to be a legitimate concern regarding what might be about to happen. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-120000-muslim-uighurs-held-in-chinese-re-education-camps-report https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/jan/25/at-least-12000...
nhurj 9y ago
The goal of censorship isn't, usually, to control information as such. It is to enforce certain behaviors. People on Hacker News has the wrong idea about how authoritarian states work, largely based on cold war propaganda. But it's not really a discussion worth having on HN since any attempt at framing it in a way that people could understand would be accused of shilling. You will have to find some other way to get that information.
dTal 9y ago
Well, they do harvest organs from "political prisoners". I'd say that's pretty dark. I don't know if the official denial that this is occuring counts as "censorship" though.

zombieprocesses 9y ago

> China is the living embodiment of what 1984 can look like in 2018. Or britain - you know the place that 1984 was about. Or germany, spain, canada, russia, saudi arabia, etc. > I do wonder if an ever increasing crackdown and everything ultimately becomes so unwieldy that the whole country falls apart. People like gordon chang have been wondering for decades now. Wouldn't hold my breath on it though. China has a few decades more of development and urbanization ahead of it. They'll continue to grow for a few more years.

weavejester 9y ago
Some countries are a lot closer to 1984 than others. The EU and US are considerably further away from an authoritarian dictatorship than countries like Russia, China and Saudi Arabia.
- zombieprocesses 9y ago
  > Some countries are a lot closer to 1984 than others. Yes. Britain is far ahead of everyone at this moment. I'm sure china and the rest are desperate to catch up. > The EU and US As an american, I'd really appreciate it if you didn't lump us in with the EU. EU is a lot closer to china than you think in terms of political system, censorship and mentality. After all, the EU heavily censors parodies and "hate" speech and is at the forefront of internet censorship. I'm afraid america stands alone in many respects but we have our own challenges. We are most definitely not perfect.
  - slothtrop 9y ago
    >Yes. Britain is far ahead of everyone at this moment. I'm sure china and the rest are desperate to catch up. I don't think you even believe that horseshit.
    - zombieprocesses 9y ago
      Considering Britain is banning journalists like Lauren Southern and convicting people for making jokes on youtube ( count dankula ), I most certainly believe it. Not only that, Britain is the most surveilled society on earth. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/6108496.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/6108496.stm That's from 2006. Britain has at least a decade head start. But china is working very hard to catch up on their surveillance. But I guess it's evil when they do it, but it's "civilized" when britain does it?

greggarious 9y ago

>China is the living embodiment of what 1984 can look like in 2018. The headline brought to mind that scene from V for Vendetta right before Stephen Fry gets disappeared.

z2 9y ago

My personal benchmark for this is to monitor Taobao for the day that the book is banned from Chinese markets. So far it's still available for sale: https://s.taobao.com/search?q=%E4%B8%80%E4%B9%9D%E5%85%AB%E5%9B%9B&type=p&tmhkh5=&spm=a21wu.241046-us.a2227oh.d100&from=sea_1_searchbutton&catId=100 https://s.taobao.com/search?q=%E4%B8%80%E4%B9%9D%E5%85%AB%E5...

ballenf 9y ago
Here's a youtuber I came across in prep for a trip to China last year: https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza https://www.youtube.com/user/serpentza He's a South African living in China for 10 years and married to a Chinese woman. Very interesting to see his videos from the last few months about how things are changing in a more dramatic way than in his entire time there.
GuiA 9y ago
I'm overall not that familiar with Chinese culture, so asking with genuine curiosity - why would the availability of 1984, a piece of Western work depicting the Western world with very little mention of China, be an interesting benchmark? If the average Chinese person has no prior interest in wanting to read that book or even knowing of its existence, why would the Chinese government care about banning it?