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I'm really tired of people fawning over China. This is a country with a horrible human rights record, over a million people presently in camps based on racial p
by api 8y ago
I'm really tired of people fawning over China. This is a country with a horrible human rights record, over a million people presently in camps based on racial profiling, and an active program to build the most comprehensive surveillance state in the world.
It's doubly hypocritical when the people doing the fawning are American liberals that would go completely bonkers if anything like that were happening here. (The same logic applies to Saudi Arabia, our other even more brutal "ally.") Money talks I guess. China's GDP growth has been phenomenal and that's all that matters.
Getting tough on trade with China is one of the very few things I agree with Trump about. The Chinese don't play fair in the trade realm either. They vertically integrate their industries with the government, subsidize them to dump, manipulate their currency, ignore the environment and pollute to a degree unprecedented in human history, and deploy "soft" plausibly-deniable mechanisms for trade protectionism so they can pretend to open their markets without actually doing so. The most significant part of the latter is the "great firewall," which is as much about keeping foreign Internet companies out of China as it is about censorship or surveillance. Another mechanism is a maze of regulations around currency, banking, incorporation, and payment systems that makes actually taking payments from Chinese customers painful. It's very easy to send money into China but hard to take any money out.
- tepidandroid 8y ago> I'm really tired of people fawning over China. Where are you seeing this? Any thread even remotely involving China is 95% filled with anti-Chinese posts, such as your own. There were a few this week. Heck, look in this very same comment thread -where are the 'fawners' you speak of?
- dnomad 8y agoIt's strange, isn't it? It's a ritual at this point: an anti-China post is submitted by adventured, rapidly voted up, and then filled with comments that are a competition to see who can denounce China the most. What do you suppose the point is? Is it a Trump thing? It certainly wasn't always the case. There was a time when I happily shared HN with Chinese colleagues. Was that point, I wonder.
- uRreading2slow 8y agoRapidly voted up, and rapidly penalized. > position 11. How intermittent breaks in interaction improve collective intelligence, 34 points, 5 hours ago, 7 comments vs. > position 16. From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly, 82 points, 3 hours ago, 27 comments But that's not enough, I guess. > comments that are a competition to see who can denounce China the most. [..] Is it a Trump thing? I "love" how guidelines can be blatantly violated if it's in the right direction on the right subject. No, it's a totalitarianism thing, which you project via Trump. > There was a time when I happily shared HN with Chinese colleagues. Was that point, I wonder. So, you yourself never brought any of this up to them? I guess they were just colleagues, not friends. And at any rate not hackers by any remotely old school cultural definition.
- tepidandroid 8y agoThe only demographic I can think of that would dedicate so much time denigrating a country with such force and vitriol are the ex-pats. SV types, though very left leaning, are far too busy. A common pattern to look for is large blocks of hand-wavy, conjecture-fuelled text with little in the way of facts and substance.
- yorwba 8y agoDo you mean ex-pats from China living in other countries, or ex-pats from other countries now living in China?
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoI think they means the latter. We (well, I used to be one) have a reputation for being salty, though we are just very critical having lived the life and seen things for real.
- woodandsteel 8y agoSo you're saying things in China are actually pretty good? How about some specifics.
- WillPostForFood 8y agoNot sure about fawning, but every time there is a negative post about China, there is always a big thread of “we are just as bad”.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoThose are just normal what aboutisms. Either side will feel like they are the underdog anyways, critical-China will complain about too many pro-China posts, pro-China will complain a bit too many anti-china posts. There is still enough of the latter because HN has plenty of Chinese readers and hasn’t been blocked in China (yet).
- WillPostForFood 8y agoMy sense is that it isn't Chinese HN readers defending China, it is self hating westerners.
- seanmcdirmid 8y agoWho knows. I’m sure there is a bit of both.
- LeftTurnSignal 8y agoIt seems like any thread about China or Microsoft or xxxxx devolves into a pissing match between A is better than B types. The good thing? about these posts being so common is it's a HUGE sign that I'm done with the thread and time to go somewhere new. The bad thing is that sometimes those comment threads do have good information. Such is life I think.