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As an US citizen, I feel like China's lack of free press and due process is fundamentally at odds with my countries core values. So maybe we should ratchet down

As an US citizen, I feel like China's lack of free press and due process is fundamentally at odds with my countries core values. So maybe we should ratchet down trade with them. Now if I'm China, and I'm looking at what Russia just did in the last presidential election, I'm thinking, let's just buy ourselves a pro-China candidate here in 2020. And I think our system is still vulnerable. I don't even know how China got in the WTO in the first place. There were rumors that they had some significant influence in the Clinton administration, but I guess the promise of opening up the biggest market in the world to US companies was too shiny. Bush was too busy going to war to piss anybody else off. Who know's why Obama didn't do anything...

hungryhobo 7y ago
That's a rather naive point of view. Yes free press as an ideal is great, but that rests on the premise that press' goal is for the betterment of the country. But in reality, press is effectively weaponized as a propaganda tool that's trying tirelessly to push their own agenda. I think of limited press freedom in China as a measure of protectionism, it knows it does not have the level of sophistication when it comes to pushing out their own narrative, so it blocks it off. And I have no doubt that there will be free press when the parity in sophistication is reached.
- chillwaves 7y ago
  What point are you trying to make? That state propaganda is superior to free press? I do not agree. The press has its faults but the idea of openly accepting state propaganda seems like a low value proposition.
  - hungryhobo 7y ago
    I'm saying free press can also be free propaganda, it's not a matter of which is superior because fundamentally they all have an agenda to serve. Also I'm not sure what you are referring to when you are talking about state propaganda. Do you mean BBC or abc or what?
    - danShumway 7y ago
      Free press can be free propaganda. State press is free propaganda. Free press also has a check-and-balance in that other journalists can call out its abuses. State press has no check-and-balance, because everyone who contradicts it gets thrown in prison. Even if someone distrusts literally everything that modern press is putting out, they'd still prefer to live in a world where they're legally allowed to publish blog posts talking about how bad the press is. More to the point, if someone assumes the BBC is propaganda because it's publicly funded, why would they want to live in a world where only the BBC is allowed to broadcast? Saying that one system has faults doesn't imply that it's a good idea for us to switch to a system that is strictly worse on nearly every axis.
      - hungryhobo 7y ago
        You are still not getting it, how likely would a British journalist have the best interest of China at heart? So if BBC were to publish propaganda against China, how likely would they act as the check and balance that you talk about?
        danShumway 7y ago
        No, I get what you're saying. It's just that I think the solution you've proposed is unhelpful. > how likely would a British journalist have the best interest of China at heart? More likely than the British government. Additionally, under a free press, anyone in Britain can publish anything criticizing the BBC, and anyone can claim that it doesn't have China's best interests at heart. Heck, even China can publish information in Britain that criticizes the BBC. Under a state-propaganda system, only state approved actors get to publish information, which means that however slight you think it is that someone would call out the BBC, a free press is still the more-likely system for that to happen. China is better off because Britain has a free press. In regards to China itself, the idea I gather you're putting forward is that China can't counter the BBC's propaganda on its own and therefore has to protect its citizens by shielding their ears. There are a lot of problems with this idea that boil down to, 'every time a nation has tried it, it's been awful for the citizens involved.' But a more general argument against this idea is that it doesn't scale -- it is always easier to win an argument when you control what the other person is and isn't allowed to say. If China doesn't trust its citizens to hear news from other countries, there's not going to be a point in the future where it suddenly starts trusting them. It will always be easier to make the argument that we have to protect stupid people from hearing stupid things. An indefinite state-propaganda system is in the long run almost universally worse for the world as a whole, and almost universally worse for the citizens of individual countries. We also have a lot of examples in the past of it being worse for citizens in the short term. But the fact that there is no off-ramp for state propaganda, and no check-and-balance system to prevent it from going bad -- that would be enough to make it dangerous even if that short-term data didn't exist.
  - entropea 7y ago
    Most mainstream pess is propaganda in the USA. You cannot have free press when the majority of media is for-profit and colsolidated into the hands of fewer companies than ever. The filters keep the truth from being told and you don't even need a conspiracy for it, it's just the outcome of capital control. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
    - chillwaves 7y ago
      Then propose a better system. State censorship is not it.
      - entropea 7y ago
        Private censorship is OK though? I wasn't proposing anything, just pointing out that USA isn't a land of press freedom. Americans love to criticize others, but never self reflect. Only on Hacker News can you say something true with evidence and get downvoted. Edit: Downvoted immediately at 7:20AM on an old topic that didn't garner much interest in the first place, but pushed more propaganda about China. Really fishy, almost as if keywords and sentiment are scanned.
      - fragmede 7y ago
        Transition media conglomerates over a certain size/revenue to run as some new category of non-profit (imo 503 doesn't have enough categories) Limit the number of boards any one person is allowed to sit on. Those five media conglomerates that control the US media aren't even really all that distinct. Hell, break up the media conglomerates. Update the sherman anti-trust in order to do so. Give the FCC more power. The lack of power is partially to blame for our sad state of affairs. Fewer regulations haven't resulted in a good system, and I'll be bold - I think more regulations will. I'm with you that state censorship of political views is right out, but there are some standards of decency that I do think we should keep such as gore, and hardcore pornography on TV even on cable. Especially right after school. Fund the hell out of PBS. More Mister Rogers, fewer 20-minute toy commercials.
JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> I don't even know how China got in the WTO in the first place The hypothesis was a wealthier China would become a freer, safer and more democratic and stable one. Ceteris paribus I still subscribe to that view. But the effect of modern technology on the scaling capacity of dictatorships was unexpected, among other things.
- devoply 7y ago
  What if the hypothesis is just propaganda to make moving all the manufacturing capacity to China so corporations and their shareholders can make greater amounts of profit. No one actually sipped on this koolaid, they just claimed to for sake of profit.
  - jimclegg 7y ago
    The main problem with this hypothesis is western assumptions of the route China would take to arrive wherever its people/govt want to arrive. The Chinese government has a tremendous obligation to protect its citizens from external manipulative forces (history books list the primary belligerents) while navigating to a more economically prosperous and freer society (possibly). Not a walk in the park, more like a tight rope... and regardless of whether we want to admit or not, our tax dollars help put sharks in the water under that tight rope.
    - nutcracker46 7y ago
      Wumao, you misspelled "hostile foreign forces" in your CCP propaganda reply. You will never accept the fact of domestic resistance to your government's infringement on basic rights all people are born with - even Chinese people. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and ethnic Chinese around the world live well with democratic governance, free speech, free press, and no communist big brother police state.
      - jimclegg 7y ago
        No need for propaganda when one can reference history books and current affairs. No doubt there will be a day when China could become more democratic but initiating this too early in development opens many attack vectors. Anybody who truly cares about China doesn't want to introduce the risk of Chinese leaders being picked from outside its borders.
philwelch 7y ago
> Now if I'm China, and I'm looking at what Russia just did in the last presidential election, I'm thinking, let's just buy ourselves a pro-China candidate here in 2020. And I think our system is still vulnerable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_...
entropea 7y ago
>Now if I'm China, and I'm looking at what Russia just did in the last presidential election Can you explain to me what Russia did that every other country didn't do? Please respond with evidence before you downvote.
- entropea 7y ago
  Nobody responded with any evidence to suggest Russia did anything other countries like UK with Cambridge Analytica didn't do, but there sure were a lot of downvotes! Time to open your mind to reality, Hacker News.
  - chillacy 7y ago
    I don’t disagree with your stances but I see this often enough for other topics so I’ll mention my take on it: responding to an ask for evidence is sort of a trap to enter an argument with someone who already has responses for your evidence. Basically the ask for evidence is not a legitimate query for info, it’s usually disingenuous. That’s why I don’t respond to people who say things like “what evidence do you have that global warming is real” or “what evidence is there that the earth is round”
xster 7y ago
Why do you think the US has a free press? The number of US media conglomerates just went from 6 to 5 this week and they all have the same advertisers. I don't see anyone having an iota of care about that.
- codedokode 7y ago
  You could also note that today people are turning to Internet instead of traditional media and what do we see there? A monopoly: Google controls almost all search, advertising, mobile phone and user-generated video market (except for adult video), Facebook owns all major Western social networks. So if the government makes a deal with these two companies, they will be able to control what majority of Internet users see on their screens. Wouldn't it be nice if they would see only positive things about one candidate and negative news about others? Both Facebook and Google are private companies and they are free to moderate and censor content as they wish. In exchange for a good service, for example, the government could make legislation more favourable for them. But no matter how bad is this situation, it cannot be even remotely compared to authoritarian countries.
  - xster 7y ago
    Ya, excellent points. I'd probably still make minor pedantic arguments about whether brave new world or 1984 is easier to defeat but I generally agree otherwise. i.e. if the people's lives are going down the tube, you know there's specifically one person to revolt against. If lawmaking has a zero percent correlation with popular opinions [1] and your elected officials spend 2/3 of the time fundraising [2], what do you revolt against? [1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... [2] https://fortune.com/2016/04/04/john-oliver-congress-fundraising-money/ https://fortune.com/2016/04/04/john-oliver-congress-fundrais...
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
  - 7y ago
nobody0 7y ago
I encourage you to read <Manufacturing Consent>, to see how Uncle Sam was able to do the propoganda and how most of their citizens was fine with them. It was communism, then terroism. The U.S. always needs an enemy. As an aside, 60% of americans supported to invade Iraq. When it comes to WTO, the big money voted with their money.
turk73 7y ago
Are you implying that Russia bought Trump the presidency? You still believe all that Russia bs? The people who made that up were projecting. The true villains are also the ones who sold the uranium to the Russians. Where do we have a free press in the US, exactly? Where? Oh, and "due process" is dying fast.
trilila 7y ago
There was a pro china candidate, obama, and he did it for free. He didn't even flinch an eye when china prevented or restricted us companies from doing business in china, neither did he strongly call them out for intellectual property theft.

hungryhobo 7y ago

That's a rather naive point of view. Yes free press as an ideal is great, but that rests on the premise that press' goal is for the betterment of the country. But in reality, press is effectively weaponized as a propaganda tool that's trying tirelessly to push their own agenda. I think of limited press freedom in China as a measure of protectionism, it knows it does not have the level of sophistication when it comes to pushing out their own narrative, so it blocks it off. And I have no doubt that there will be free press when the parity in sophistication is reached.

chillwaves 7y ago
What point are you trying to make? That state propaganda is superior to free press? I do not agree. The press has its faults but the idea of openly accepting state propaganda seems like a low value proposition.
- hungryhobo 7y ago
  I'm saying free press can also be free propaganda, it's not a matter of which is superior because fundamentally they all have an agenda to serve. Also I'm not sure what you are referring to when you are talking about state propaganda. Do you mean BBC or abc or what?
  - danShumway 7y ago
    Free press can be free propaganda. State press is free propaganda. Free press also has a check-and-balance in that other journalists can call out its abuses. State press has no check-and-balance, because everyone who contradicts it gets thrown in prison. Even if someone distrusts literally everything that modern press is putting out, they'd still prefer to live in a world where they're legally allowed to publish blog posts talking about how bad the press is. More to the point, if someone assumes the BBC is propaganda because it's publicly funded, why would they want to live in a world where only the BBC is allowed to broadcast? Saying that one system has faults doesn't imply that it's a good idea for us to switch to a system that is strictly worse on nearly every axis.
    - hungryhobo 7y ago
      You are still not getting it, how likely would a British journalist have the best interest of China at heart? So if BBC were to publish propaganda against China, how likely would they act as the check and balance that you talk about?
      - danShumway 7y ago
        No, I get what you're saying. It's just that I think the solution you've proposed is unhelpful. > how likely would a British journalist have the best interest of China at heart? More likely than the British government. Additionally, under a free press, anyone in Britain can publish anything criticizing the BBC, and anyone can claim that it doesn't have China's best interests at heart. Heck, even China can publish information in Britain that criticizes the BBC. Under a state-propaganda system, only state approved actors get to publish information, which means that however slight you think it is that someone would call out the BBC, a free press is still the more-likely system for that to happen. China is better off because Britain has a free press. In regards to China itself, the idea I gather you're putting forward is that China can't counter the BBC's propaganda on its own and therefore has to protect its citizens by shielding their ears. There are a lot of problems with this idea that boil down to, 'every time a nation has tried it, it's been awful for the citizens involved.' But a more general argument against this idea is that it doesn't scale -- it is always easier to win an argument when you control what the other person is and isn't allowed to say. If China doesn't trust its citizens to hear news from other countries, there's not going to be a point in the future where it suddenly starts trusting them. It will always be easier to make the argument that we have to protect stupid people from hearing stupid things. An indefinite state-propaganda system is in the long run almost universally worse for the world as a whole, and almost universally worse for the citizens of individual countries. We also have a lot of examples in the past of it being worse for citizens in the short term. But the fact that there is no off-ramp for state propaganda, and no check-and-balance system to prevent it from going bad -- that would be enough to make it dangerous even if that short-term data didn't exist.
- entropea 7y ago
  Most mainstream pess is propaganda in the USA. You cannot have free press when the majority of media is for-profit and colsolidated into the hands of fewer companies than ever. The filters keep the truth from being told and you don't even need a conspiracy for it, it's just the outcome of capital control. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent
  - chillwaves 7y ago
    Then propose a better system. State censorship is not it.
    - entropea 7y ago
      Private censorship is OK though? I wasn't proposing anything, just pointing out that USA isn't a land of press freedom. Americans love to criticize others, but never self reflect. Only on Hacker News can you say something true with evidence and get downvoted. Edit: Downvoted immediately at 7:20AM on an old topic that didn't garner much interest in the first place, but pushed more propaganda about China. Really fishy, almost as if keywords and sentiment are scanned.
    - fragmede 7y ago
      Transition media conglomerates over a certain size/revenue to run as some new category of non-profit (imo 503 doesn't have enough categories) Limit the number of boards any one person is allowed to sit on. Those five media conglomerates that control the US media aren't even really all that distinct. Hell, break up the media conglomerates. Update the sherman anti-trust in order to do so. Give the FCC more power. The lack of power is partially to blame for our sad state of affairs. Fewer regulations haven't resulted in a good system, and I'll be bold - I think more regulations will. I'm with you that state censorship of political views is right out, but there are some standards of decency that I do think we should keep such as gore, and hardcore pornography on TV even on cable. Especially right after school. Fund the hell out of PBS. More Mister Rogers, fewer 20-minute toy commercials.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> I don't even know how China got in the WTO in the first place The hypothesis was a wealthier China would become a freer, safer and more democratic and stable one. Ceteris paribus I still subscribe to that view. But the effect of modern technology on the scaling capacity of dictatorships was unexpected, among other things.

devoply 7y ago
What if the hypothesis is just propaganda to make moving all the manufacturing capacity to China so corporations and their shareholders can make greater amounts of profit. No one actually sipped on this koolaid, they just claimed to for sake of profit.
- jimclegg 7y ago
  The main problem with this hypothesis is western assumptions of the route China would take to arrive wherever its people/govt want to arrive. The Chinese government has a tremendous obligation to protect its citizens from external manipulative forces (history books list the primary belligerents) while navigating to a more economically prosperous and freer society (possibly). Not a walk in the park, more like a tight rope... and regardless of whether we want to admit or not, our tax dollars help put sharks in the water under that tight rope.
  - nutcracker46 7y ago
    Wumao, you misspelled "hostile foreign forces" in your CCP propaganda reply. You will never accept the fact of domestic resistance to your government's infringement on basic rights all people are born with - even Chinese people. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and ethnic Chinese around the world live well with democratic governance, free speech, free press, and no communist big brother police state.
    - jimclegg 7y ago
      No need for propaganda when one can reference history books and current affairs. No doubt there will be a day when China could become more democratic but initiating this too early in development opens many attack vectors. Anybody who truly cares about China doesn't want to introduce the risk of Chinese leaders being picked from outside its borders.

philwelch 7y ago

> Now if I'm China, and I'm looking at what Russia just did in the last presidential election, I'm thinking, let's just buy ourselves a pro-China candidate here in 2020. And I think our system is still vulnerable. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_finance_controversy https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_...

entropea 7y ago

>Now if I'm China, and I'm looking at what Russia just did in the last presidential election Can you explain to me what Russia did that every other country didn't do? Please respond with evidence before you downvote.

entropea 7y ago
Nobody responded with any evidence to suggest Russia did anything other countries like UK with Cambridge Analytica didn't do, but there sure were a lot of downvotes! Time to open your mind to reality, Hacker News.
- chillacy 7y ago
  I don’t disagree with your stances but I see this often enough for other topics so I’ll mention my take on it: responding to an ask for evidence is sort of a trap to enter an argument with someone who already has responses for your evidence. Basically the ask for evidence is not a legitimate query for info, it’s usually disingenuous. That’s why I don’t respond to people who say things like “what evidence do you have that global warming is real” or “what evidence is there that the earth is round”

xster 7y ago

Why do you think the US has a free press? The number of US media conglomerates just went from 6 to 5 this week and they all have the same advertisers. I don't see anyone having an iota of care about that.

codedokode 7y ago
You could also note that today people are turning to Internet instead of traditional media and what do we see there? A monopoly: Google controls almost all search, advertising, mobile phone and user-generated video market (except for adult video), Facebook owns all major Western social networks. So if the government makes a deal with these two companies, they will be able to control what majority of Internet users see on their screens. Wouldn't it be nice if they would see only positive things about one candidate and negative news about others? Both Facebook and Google are private companies and they are free to moderate and censor content as they wish. In exchange for a good service, for example, the government could make legislation more favourable for them. But no matter how bad is this situation, it cannot be even remotely compared to authoritarian countries.
- xster 7y ago
  Ya, excellent points. I'd probably still make minor pedantic arguments about whether brave new world or 1984 is easier to defeat but I generally agree otherwise. i.e. if the people's lives are going down the tube, you know there's specifically one person to revolt against. If lawmaking has a zero percent correlation with popular opinions [1] and your elected officials spend 2/3 of the time fundraising [2], what do you revolt against? [1] https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/files/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_theories_of_american_politics.doc.pdf https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi... [2] https://fortune.com/2016/04/04/john-oliver-congress-fundraising-money/ https://fortune.com/2016/04/04/john-oliver-congress-fundrais...
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
- 7y ago

nobody0 7y ago

I encourage you to read <Manufacturing Consent>, to see how Uncle Sam was able to do the propoganda and how most of their citizens was fine with them. It was communism, then terroism. The U.S. always needs an enemy. As an aside, 60% of americans supported to invade Iraq. When it comes to WTO, the big money voted with their money.

turk73 7y ago

Are you implying that Russia bought Trump the presidency? You still believe all that Russia bs? The people who made that up were projecting. The true villains are also the ones who sold the uranium to the Russians. Where do we have a free press in the US, exactly? Where? Oh, and "due process" is dying fast.

trilila 7y ago

There was a pro china candidate, obama, and he did it for free. He didn't even flinch an eye when china prevented or restricted us companies from doing business in china, neither did he strongly call them out for intellectual property theft.