7 ms·

You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are th

You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions. These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people, they are not even government-sponsored Wumao, they genuinely love China and defend it, their reason being it may have some flaws but any other country has too and is worse than China, and them being either students or comfortable middle-class help.

zachguo 7y ago
Whoever has been living in China knows this is true, too bad you are downvoted. I always laugh at report like this, because in reality probably such 'coordinated effort' is simply done by people from a random forum online.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
walshemj 7y ago
That's pretty common in dictatorships, if you read Alex Kershaw's two volume Bio of Hitler he gives some examples. The response to corruption by local Nazi party members, was along the line of "if only the Fuhrer knew"
- UnFleshedOne 7y ago
  This goes much further back, Russian peasants often expressed similar sentiments towards their tsars. Even Robin Hood stories feature benevolent king who would come in and fix everything, if only he knew.
jknz 7y ago
The examples given in the article are hardly "genuine, spontaneous citizens". Of course, the important question is to quantify bots vs. genuine--though the following examples are pretty clear-cut. Quotes from the article: > The accounts posted in Indonesian, Arabic, Portuguese and other languages. They promoted hookup services, posted about Korean boy bands and retweeted messages about pop-punk music. > “As a Hong Kong person who loves Hong Kong, I really miss the Hong Kong of before, which was developed and ruled by law,” @derrickmcnabbx wrote in Chinese on June 15. The account’s location was described as “Georgia, USA.” Before this year, nearly all of its tweets were links to pornography.
wisty 7y ago
I wouldn't say most Chinese love the system. They don't despise it though. I think a lot see the HK thing as an attack on their country. There's a fair bit of history (the insult of losing territory to foreign powers) and also current tensions ('locusts' is a HK slur against mainland Chinese). A lot of HK people kinda dislike mainlanders coming to HK, but the city kinda relies on mainland money. So there's already a bit of contention, then a large number of HK people are protesting against mainland China having any influence. It's then easy to conflate attacks on mainland China (the government) with attacks on mainland China (the people).
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- gleenn 7y ago
  I feel like all the people who are involuntary organ-donors might disagree if they weren't dead. China has a way of disappearing people who don't like it. I wonder how many people would come out more vocally if you weren't disappeared for disagreeing or even being outspoken. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the-reality-of-human-organ-harvesting-in-china/news-story/14d3aa5751c39d6639a1cc5b39f223b7 https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the...
  - jjcc 7y ago
    Give you some hint: According to Godel theorem, a system in higher order is necessary to judge the truth in current system. So self claim the story is true implied the story teller (i.e. the author of the news) is not quite intellegent and maybe very naive to mix fact and belief. I totally respect your strong belief about the story. But don't enforce others accept your personal opion by imply your personal belief is truth. It's quite insulting.
    - gleenn 7y ago
      Godel has nothing to do with this. Chinese organ donation is well documented across many news organizations. There are some crazy facts regarding how quickly you can get a new liver, for instance. It can take people months or years in most cases to find an appropriate liver, but in China you can get one in weeks. They execute prisoners and extract their organs. Chinese doctors have even admitted this. [0] 'In 2006, allegations emerged that a large number of Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry. An initial investigation stated "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained" and concluded that "there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners".' [1][2] 'In December 2005, China's Deputy Health Minister acknowledged that the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners for transplants was widespread.' [3] 'China Daily reported in August 2009 that approximately 65% of transplanted organs still came from death row prisoners. The condemned prisoners have been described as "not a proper source for organ transplants" by Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu...' [4] [0] Matas, David (2011). Steven J. Jensen (ed.). The Ethics of Organ Transplantation. Catholic University of America Press. p. 234. ISBN 978-0-8132-1874-8. [1] http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ [2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/824qbcjr.asp http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00... [3] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article2612313.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article2612313... [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8222732.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8222732.stm
freeflight 7y ago
> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions. This has been a common theme with this "Fake News and Social Bots" stuff since the very beginning not reserved to China. On the 34C3 there was a really interesting talk [0] about the troublesome nature of classifying users as "social bots" and how it regularly turns out to be completely wrong, with plenty of absurd examples. Tho the English translation is a bit spotty, especially in the beginning. [0] https://youtu.be/k6GUpbRq5Vs https://youtu.be/k6GUpbRq5Vs
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions. Is that what they actually feel, or is that exactly the upper limit of what the State accepts as legitimate dissatisfaction with the status quo, which the vast majority of people are aware of an unwilling to buck out of fear of the consequences? More to the point, in an authoritarian regime that is known to punish dissidents who go outside of the tolerated limits, how could one ever hope to get honest enough answers from a diverse enough base to confidently state this?
  - alexron782 7y ago
    Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right? Perhaps the next generation of Chinese people will start to demand more freedom, etc..
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right? That's a reason one might suspect that people would support the regime, but not an answer to the question asked in GP.
NicoJuicy 7y ago
I don't really think that it's true though. If everything goes well, it can stay that way. Bit when things go to shit and people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly. Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives. Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts, from my point of view. Eg. See Russia now and how the Soviet Union crumbled.
- fiblye 7y ago
  China’s still going through massive economic growth, and it has for many young people’s entire lives. The USSR is remembered by food shortages and other various struggles. So long as people are fed and comfortable, China won’t suddenly collapse. Any various small problems will be brushed off or silenced until they pass.
- dirtyid 7y ago
  >people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly. Pretty much why CPC is reluctant to endorse patriotism, patriotic positions can be much more extreme than the party line - it's very hard to walk back. >Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts These are not really considerations for the general population. Sentiment for social credit where it's tested is positive. People like seeing financial criminals punished. They also like "civilizing" behavior modifications of mass surveillance, i.e. country bumpkins in tier3 cities stop spitting, speeding and jaywalking because they're under observation. GFW is an annoyance but easily circumvented with lax VPN rules. >Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives. If China is going to collapse, it's going to be due to the demographic time bomb when only-childs watch their aging parents languish because there isn't sufficient social safety net. CPC living standards goals is to "become a moderately prosperous society" where poverty is largely eliminated by 2021 and "fully developed nation" by 2049, presumably one with sufficient social services. I think they're a little behind, and time is not on their side.
nitwit005 7y ago
Russia and China have, in effect, trained people to assume posts defending them are paid or bots. Many of us have seen the sudden swarm of patterned posts, sometimes with bad English, show up in comments. And we've seen news articles like this one. Maybe it works, on average, but it tends to undermine real people's posts. Why listen to someone who is likely to be a bot?
tomp 7y ago
How do these "spontaneous people" even access Twitter? Smells fishy...
fossuser 7y ago
I suspect when living under a system experiencing nearly miraculous economic growth people are less political and more willing to look the other way with potential abuses. Growth leads to a lot of things being a lot better for a lot of people. If that ever slows down though I think there will be trouble. It's good to think long term, but removing term limits seems to increase risk around transitions of power. Though at the moment I suppose they could point to the US's current political situation as a reason you can't trust the public to have unfiltered access to the internet with elections.
lettergram 7y ago
I’ve pointed this out before, but China has a huge population. They also have hundreds of millions of “migrant workers” who aren’t allowed to live in cities without having an active job. These works have to collect money so they can send it back to their farms and pay for their brothers or kids education(s) (because in China you have to pay for education). We are likely only seeing the voices of people who love the CCP. I do agree many love China, of course they do, everyone has to or they aren’t allowed to work, or have internet...
mrtweetyhack 7y ago
As if people even have a choice to love the CCP. Those who don't end up disappearing. Yeah, great place to live.
ljw1001 7y ago
> These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people You know this how?
jjcc 7y ago
I would say "love" might not be accurate word. A lot of things CPP did are quite controversial and it's well known to most educated people. However alternatives are much worse which is not very well known outside of Chinese speaking community. In addtion, western media constantly brain wash their wesern audiance by distorting news coverage so that quite some Westerners believe CPP defenders are the brain washed groups added fuel to nationalist sentiment by insulting those CPP defenders. So to consider lot of mainland Chinese defending CPP as "they love CPP" is a simplified interpretation. Does'nt reflect reality
- bigbluedots 7y ago
  To take a single example: The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s which caused the deaths of many millions of people through famine. Which alternatives do you think were 'much worse' than that?

zachguo 7y ago

Whoever has been living in China knows this is true, too bad you are downvoted. I always laugh at report like this, because in reality probably such 'coordinated effort' is simply done by people from a random forum online.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]

walshemj 7y ago

That's pretty common in dictatorships, if you read Alex Kershaw's two volume Bio of Hitler he gives some examples. The response to corruption by local Nazi party members, was along the line of "if only the Fuhrer knew"

UnFleshedOne 7y ago
This goes much further back, Russian peasants often expressed similar sentiments towards their tsars. Even Robin Hood stories feature benevolent king who would come in and fix everything, if only he knew.

jknz 7y ago

The examples given in the article are hardly "genuine, spontaneous citizens". Of course, the important question is to quantify bots vs. genuine--though the following examples are pretty clear-cut. Quotes from the article: > The accounts posted in Indonesian, Arabic, Portuguese and other languages. They promoted hookup services, posted about Korean boy bands and retweeted messages about pop-punk music. > “As a Hong Kong person who loves Hong Kong, I really miss the Hong Kong of before, which was developed and ruled by law,” @derrickmcnabbx wrote in Chinese on June 15. The account’s location was described as “Georgia, USA.” Before this year, nearly all of its tweets were links to pornography.

wisty 7y ago

I wouldn't say most Chinese love the system. They don't despise it though. I think a lot see the HK thing as an attack on their country. There's a fair bit of history (the insult of losing territory to foreign powers) and also current tensions ('locusts' is a HK slur against mainland Chinese). A lot of HK people kinda dislike mainlanders coming to HK, but the city kinda relies on mainland money. So there's already a bit of contention, then a large number of HK people are protesting against mainland China having any influence. It's then easy to conflate attacks on mainland China (the government) with attacks on mainland China (the people).

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
gleenn 7y ago
I feel like all the people who are involuntary organ-donors might disagree if they weren't dead. China has a way of disappearing people who don't like it. I wonder how many people would come out more vocally if you weren't disappeared for disagreeing or even being outspoken. https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the-reality-of-human-organ-harvesting-in-china/news-story/14d3aa5751c39d6639a1cc5b39f223b7 https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/real-life/true-stories/the...
- jjcc 7y ago
  Give you some hint: According to Godel theorem, a system in higher order is necessary to judge the truth in current system. So self claim the story is true implied the story teller (i.e. the author of the news) is not quite intellegent and maybe very naive to mix fact and belief. I totally respect your strong belief about the story. But don't enforce others accept your personal opion by imply your personal belief is truth. It's quite insulting.
  - gleenn 7y ago
    Godel has nothing to do with this. Chinese organ donation is well documented across many news organizations. There are some crazy facts regarding how quickly you can get a new liver, for instance. It can take people months or years in most cases to find an appropriate liver, but in China you can get one in weeks. They execute prisoners and extract their organs. Chinese doctors have even admitted this. [0] 'In 2006, allegations emerged that a large number of Falun Gong practitioners had been killed to supply China's organ transplant industry. An initial investigation stated "the source of 41,500 transplants for the six year period 2000 to 2005 is unexplained" and concluded that "there has been and continues today to be large scale organ seizures from unwilling Falun Gong practitioners".' [1][2] 'In December 2005, China's Deputy Health Minister acknowledged that the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners for transplants was widespread.' [3] 'China Daily reported in August 2009 that approximately 65% of transplanted organs still came from death row prisoners. The condemned prisoners have been described as "not a proper source for organ transplants" by Vice-Health Minister Huang Jiefu...' [4] [0] Matas, David (2011). Steven J. Jensen (ed.). The Ethics of Organ Transplantation. Catholic University of America Press. p. 234. ISBN 978-0-8132-1874-8. [1] http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ http://organharvestinvestigation.net/ [2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/015/824qbcjr.asp http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/00... [3] http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article2612313.ece http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/news/world/asia/article2612313... [4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8222732.stm http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8222732.stm

freeflight 7y ago

> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions. This has been a common theme with this "Fake News and Social Bots" stuff since the very beginning not reserved to China. On the 34C3 there was a really interesting talk [0] about the troublesome nature of classifying users as "social bots" and how it regularly turns out to be completely wrong, with plenty of absurd examples. Tho the English translation is a bit spotty, especially in the beginning. [0] https://youtu.be/k6GUpbRq5Vs https://youtu.be/k6GUpbRq5Vs

dragonwriter 7y ago
> You may not believe it, the vast majority of Chinese actually love the CCP and the system, they only just hate that a few corrupt low-level officials who are the bad apples fucking up leaders' glorious visions. Is that what they actually feel, or is that exactly the upper limit of what the State accepts as legitimate dissatisfaction with the status quo, which the vast majority of people are aware of an unwilling to buck out of fear of the consequences? More to the point, in an authoritarian regime that is known to punish dissidents who go outside of the tolerated limits, how could one ever hope to get honest enough answers from a diverse enough base to confidently state this?
- alexron782 7y ago
  Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right? Perhaps the next generation of Chinese people will start to demand more freedom, etc..
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > Well, because the quality of life is indeed getting better and better in China. CCP successfully satisfied the fundamental need of people who were living under extreme poverty before right? That's a reason one might suspect that people would support the regime, but not an answer to the question asked in GP.

NicoJuicy 7y ago

I don't really think that it's true though. If everything goes well, it can stay that way. Bit when things go to shit and people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly. Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives. Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts, from my point of view. Eg. See Russia now and how the Soviet Union crumbled.

fiblye 7y ago
China’s still going through massive economic growth, and it has for many young people’s entire lives. The USSR is remembered by food shortages and other various struggles. So long as people are fed and comfortable, China won’t suddenly collapse. Any various small problems will be brushed off or silenced until they pass.
dirtyid 7y ago
>people found out the government lied, that patriotisme can reverse quickly. Pretty much why CPC is reluctant to endorse patriotism, patriotic positions can be much more extreme than the party line - it's very hard to walk back. >Living in partial fear for the social credit ain't helping and realizing you live behind a firewall online is enough to grow doubts These are not really considerations for the general population. Sentiment for social credit where it's tested is positive. People like seeing financial criminals punished. They also like "civilizing" behavior modifications of mass surveillance, i.e. country bumpkins in tier3 cities stop spitting, speeding and jaywalking because they're under observation. GFW is an annoyance but easily circumvented with lax VPN rules. >Depends on the roots of doubt on your close relatives. If China is going to collapse, it's going to be due to the demographic time bomb when only-childs watch their aging parents languish because there isn't sufficient social safety net. CPC living standards goals is to "become a moderately prosperous society" where poverty is largely eliminated by 2021 and "fully developed nation" by 2049, presumably one with sufficient social services. I think they're a little behind, and time is not on their side.

nitwit005 7y ago

Russia and China have, in effect, trained people to assume posts defending them are paid or bots. Many of us have seen the sudden swarm of patterned posts, sometimes with bad English, show up in comments. And we've seen news articles like this one. Maybe it works, on average, but it tends to undermine real people's posts. Why listen to someone who is likely to be a bot?

tomp 7y ago

How do these "spontaneous people" even access Twitter? Smells fishy...

fossuser 7y ago

I suspect when living under a system experiencing nearly miraculous economic growth people are less political and more willing to look the other way with potential abuses. Growth leads to a lot of things being a lot better for a lot of people. If that ever slows down though I think there will be trouble. It's good to think long term, but removing term limits seems to increase risk around transitions of power. Though at the moment I suppose they could point to the US's current political situation as a reason you can't trust the public to have unfiltered access to the internet with elections.

lettergram 7y ago

I’ve pointed this out before, but China has a huge population. They also have hundreds of millions of “migrant workers” who aren’t allowed to live in cities without having an active job. These works have to collect money so they can send it back to their farms and pay for their brothers or kids education(s) (because in China you have to pay for education). We are likely only seeing the voices of people who love the CCP. I do agree many love China, of course they do, everyone has to or they aren’t allowed to work, or have internet...

mrtweetyhack 7y ago

As if people even have a choice to love the CCP. Those who don't end up disappearing. Yeah, great place to live.

ljw1001 7y ago

> These "bots" are mostly spontaneous people You know this how?

jjcc 7y ago

I would say "love" might not be accurate word. A lot of things CPP did are quite controversial and it's well known to most educated people. However alternatives are much worse which is not very well known outside of Chinese speaking community. In addtion, western media constantly brain wash their wesern audiance by distorting news coverage so that quite some Westerners believe CPP defenders are the brain washed groups added fuel to nationalist sentiment by insulting those CPP defenders. So to consider lot of mainland Chinese defending CPP as "they love CPP" is a simplified interpretation. Does'nt reflect reality

bigbluedots 7y ago
To take a single example: The Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s which caused the deaths of many millions of people through famine. Which alternatives do you think were 'much worse' than that?