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Modern China Is So Crazy It Needs a New Literary Genre (2016)
- osipovas 8y agoThis should have a 2016 tag :)
- trumped 8y agoit doesn't apply in 2018? ;) anyways, the rules here are "randomly" applied... it's a bit like a "communist" country... it has a bunch of rules but they are being applied selectively.
- dang 8y agoThat's mostly because we don't see everything. If you or anyone notices a case that needs taking care of, please let us know at hn@ycombinator.com.
- shawn 8y agoNo, in this case they're right: the rules are randomly applied depending on your mood. It's nice that people are starting to notice. I don't think they were talking about editing titles. If it were something as mundane as that, no one would complain.
- trumped 8y agohave you thought about implementing software solutions to optimize your omnipotency? seems like a lot of it could be automated...
- forkLding 8y agoThe article this was translated from was written in 2015
- Animats 8y agoThat's important, because China hadn't rolled out the "social credit" system back then. China has a new approach to control. It's not Orwellian. It's not the USSR's. It's not a police state. It's a new thing. It's the gamification of authoritarianism. The previous system of control was run through the "work unit", when almost everybody worked for the state. The party mostly acted through work supervisors, rather than cops. That started to come apart once there were more private employers. The social credit system is an attempt to get back that level of control. It's going to be interesting to see how this works out.
- ilamont 8y ago> It's the gamification of authoritarianism. ... It's going to be interesting to see how this works out. And like all gamification systems, it's already being gamed. The citizens and enforcers who figure out the tricks win, everyone else suffers, and resentment builds.
- biesnecker 8y agoDoes anyone have a link to the original Chinese?
- yorwba 8y agoPossibly http://www.bjwl.org.cn/wwwroot/bjzjw/publish/article/657/53058.shtml http://www.bjwl.org.cn/wwwroot/bjzjw/publish/article/657/530... Edit: actually, the English version appears to have been adapted significantly, providing details that would either require no explanation for a Chinese audience, or that could get the author into trouble with the authorities. But the version that the translation was actually based on might not be public.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- ForHackernews 8y agoShades of https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true-and-everything-is-possible https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/21413849-nothing-is-true...
- mastazi 8y ago> 3) It is has the quality of a fable or an allegory. Reality itself has the quality of a fable. In recent years I have been seeing this over and over, not just in China but also in the West. Two examples are the rise of Trump and Brexit.
- narrator 8y agoWell we forget history. Can you imagine how bizarre the Russian revolution or World War I would have felt to someone living through it?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- 8bitsrule 8y agoThis article on China's recent crazyiness doesn't mention its long-standing oppression of minorities. It looks as though getting at the obvious root of the obvious problem is not on the table. That said, there's plenty of madness at loose in the world. When we in the US get our own house cleaned up, finger-pointing will see less absurd.
- yourbandsucks 8y ago.. could we have just one humanist piece about life in China without people breaking out the battle axes? We don't shoehorn the Iraq war into everything about America. We could do with a lot more understanding and a lot less context-free outrage if we're gonna get through this century with the peace intact.
- CptFribble 8y agoActions that cost lives should always be front and center. Maybe we should be talking more about the Iraq war in the USA, considering our actions led to the death of hundreds of thousands of people. I contend the opposite: The only way to survive the next century is if we identify sources of death and misery, and (try) to hold leaders accountable to stamp them out.
- yourbandsucks 8y agoThe Chinese government has overwhelmingly reduced death and misery within their borders. Half a billion people moved from third world to first world. Half. A. Billion. And their big foreign policy power play consists of building infrastructure for other third world countries. Turns out you can do that for 10 countries cheaper than invading one. Yet the popular opinion ever since dragonfly was proposed is that they're the worst country ever. How about some perspective?
- taneq 8y agoThe needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, eh?
- zipwitch 8y agoIs "cyberpunk dystopia" truly insufficient?
- riskneutral 8y agoMaybe if you dial the “punk” down to zero, dial the “dystopia” up to 9, and maybe “cyber” is around 3 or 4 depending on how futuristic modern day China is.
- almost_usual 8y agoOrwellian dystopia with a hint of cyber
- forkLding 8y agoThe issue is that you likely wouldn't have said that about China either 10 years ago or even 5 years ago. I don't think you would have used cyberpunk at all. Thats where the unreal comes in.
- baybal2 8y agoThe best comparison I heard of was "China is something in between Desneyland and Buchenwald"
- qlk1123 8y agoSadly, they do have a camp now: https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/14/asia/uyghur-china-xinjiang-interview-intl/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/14/asia/uyghur-china-xinjian...
- stevenwoo 8y agoThere's a short mention about food safety and how ordinary citizens worry about this - I'm in the USA and I and the people I know always inspect the food we eat for country of origin and never purchase anything from mainland China. On the one hand factory farming in the USA means we have to worry about stuff like e coli and safe food handling but that pales in comparison to the risk of feeding your children lead or melamine because the producer was purposely trying to pinch pennies.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- jen729w 8y agoAustralian here, and same. We won’t buy food made in China.
- ramraj07 8y agoWhat kinds of food have you found to have been made in China?
- joeblubaugh 8y agoMany products in Asian supermarkets are made in China - we try to buy from brands that manufacture in other Asian countries if possible, or the USA. Some examples: - spices and condiments for chinese cooking, - seeds, nuts, and canned vegetables that are not common here - asian meat preparations like fish ball, vietnamese beef ball
- misterbwong 8y agoThis seems to be pretty prevalent in the Asian-American population. I wonder if this is filtering out to the general population. I've been told many times by members of the older generation to never buy food made in China. Stories (rumors?) of plastic mushrooms and polluted ingredients abound.
- throwaway5032 8y ago
- cmuguythrow 8y agoIs it just me or do all of these things seem very reasonable, even tame by novel standards? All of the examples are exciting stories, but nothing that doesn't show up in your standard action movie.
- doombolt 8y agoThe difference is that you don't just know that it has actually happened, but also you are footing the bill for it. As a Russian I find chinese ultra-unrealism pretty wimpy. We've got cooler, more fierce stuff.
- kough 8y agoAre there forums / collections of Russian ultra-unrealism? Ideally with English transaltions -- would love to read some but I don't understand Russian.
- doombolt 8y agoYou could probably start from The Moscow Times, though they are rather softcore. https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/krasnodar-judge-throws-2-million-dollar-party-58405 https://themoscowtimes.com/articles/krasnodar-judge-throws-2... Then nobody was sure that this judge had ever study law. She said she went to some college in Georgia (the country) which said she's not on their records.
- erikb 8y agoIs Roadside Picnic from Russia?
- doombolt 8y agoIt's from the Soviet Union, but basically yes.
- mrhappyunhappy 8y agoRead the mentioned occurrences and thought: these would make a lame movie.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- qlk1123 8y ago> First, the history is different. Chinese civilization has an unbroken history of five thousand years. Despite that this is a inspired article, this sentence still interrupt my immersive reading. Such claim has always been ridiculous to me, but it is still too often spoken to be ignore. Chinese has unique own point of view to their history, which includes legends and myths. Check this ( http://camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/ http://camphorpress.com/5000-years-of-history/ ) if you have interests.
- runeblaze 8y agoEven in Chinese schools we are told in history classes that we really don't have five thousands years of real history. It is just an often used, maybe canonized, phrase to emphasize our long history. I really would not get distracted over it.
- bordercases 8y agoIt's rhetoric, then.
- starbeast 8y agoOn the other hand, the Kurds who run the phone shop up the road from where I used to live, can lay claim to about 7000 years of continuous recorded history, as they are Erbil locals.
- adrianratnapala 8y agoYes it's astonishing how Alexander and people had dealings with Kurds who seemed to interact politically with the rest of Mesopotamia much as they do today.
- qlk1123 8y agoI totally understand that situation because I have been through similar education in Taiwan about twenty years ago as well. Thankfully the history education here is saner now. Back to the 5K-year claim. It seems just rhetoric, but it actually enlarges unnecessary national pride, and then rhetoric becomes an unchallengeable truth. The "truth" then sounds so true that foreigners starts to believe it without hesitation. Once I had a chat with an American friend, about Chinese character system and its ability to maintain information through the past five thousand years. I was astonished that nowadays some foreigners might still view East Asia as the mysterious Far East.
- epynonymous 8y agofor the record, that’s a picture of hong kong, though it is a part of china, it’s not representative of where most of these “stories” happen
- vnorilo 8y agoThis was a great article. Usually I get a distinct "translated from Chinese" vibe, but not here! I thought that the translation must be very good. Can Anyone who has read the original comment?
- Apfel 8y agoAgreed. The only thing that really jumped out at me as "translated from chinese" was the "As you all know" (I assumed translated directly from 众所周知)
- erikb 8y agoInterestingly, while reading the text and with zero knowledge of the novel he's talking about, I always assume the text's author to be a woman. Does anybody know the guy? Are his novels also like this?
- twic 8y agoThis sounds a lot like Pelevin's turbo-realism to me. It's probably not a coincidence that that movement arose in early post-communist Russia, when the present were similarly unmoored from the past.
- xte 8y agoAny rapid growing/evolving country is a crazy and super-dangerous/disastrous evolution. You can't evolve fast and well, you can't avoid mistake when changes happen and the more concentrated changes the more mistake you'll get... Often after some time evolution start to became for reaction an involution and if people in that country are lucky evolution+involution result after some time in a new stability "golden period", but that's rare...
- nshm 8y agoChina does need a modern religion for expansion of the influence sphere, not just literature, that's why the officials are in touch with Vatican.