18 ms·
Hong Kong: books by pro-democracy activists disappear from library shelves
- lr4444lr 6y agoQuestion to the people who disapprove of this but who endorse the top down language policing as endorsed by Twitter Eng.: Why does this bother you and not that?
- EliRivers 6y agoWhile I'm not them and can't answer for them, I wonder if they see a qualitative difference between a government who will come round to your house and vanish you from the face of the earth for saying things in private to your friends, and a private corporation not letting you use their tools.
- papeda 6y agoI'm not one of "the people who disapprove of this but who endorse the top down language policing as endorsed by Twitter ", but as far as I can tell, few of those people advocate banning books. I think "banning books" is a specific thing that is pretty well drilled into Western minds as something that evil totalitarian dystopian forces do, maybe because of Fahrenheit 451, 1984, and so on. Twitter, on the other hand, doesn't have any obvious cultural precedents for most people, so different policies for it don't set off the same cultural alarm bells.
- lisardo 6y ago"Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen." - Wherever they burn books, in the end will also burn human beings. Heinrich Heine
- jansan 6y agoWhat do you say about classic literature being banned from classrooms because people were unable to see the content in the context of the time it was written?
- praptak 6y agoI see it as an order of magnitude less dangerous than censorship at the library level.
- jpgreens 6y agoYou mean that wasn't real <insert your ideology>? Censoring 'at the library level' is not more or less dangerous than burning books. Its intent is exactly the same: silence opposing views, control the narrative and people's thoughts. Your statement is a testament to the slippery slope that Western society is on right now.
- jansan 6y agoHere is an extensive list of frequently challenged and banned books http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks/classics http://www.ala.org/advocacy/bbooks/frequentlychallengedbooks... Some school libraries appear to be being very active on banning certain books.
- praptak 6y agoBigoted parents challenging a book in a school library is not comparable to a state using law to intimidate public libraries into removing books.
- jariel 6y agoThis is upside down. Banning books from school is 10x worse than censorship at the library. All this library talk is a little moot because nobody goes to the library. How many copies of said 'banned books' do HK libraries even have? 10? 20? The Internet is the Library. But the information taught in class will define an entire generation.
- numpad0 6y agoBut do they burn books first or do they burn human and also go after their books? I think it’s usually human first and that that takes until it reaches to the books to be recognized.
- Aqua 6y agoIsn't it surprising that Microsoft, Apple, Google, Netflix, Blizzard and others don't express their deep regret and support the people of Hong Kong? If they really stood by their values they would act in the same way as they did by supporting the BLM movement. It's just another proof that they only did that to get press coverage for being "benevolent" and not because they genuinely supported the people. Disgraceful.
- doliveira 6y agoThe companies' PR statements are innocuous for society at large and are at best just thermometers for the current political climate. I don't know why people expect huge corporations to have good hearts and enact political change by themselves; that is on us.
- caymanjim 6y agoI don't expect or even want corporations to wade into the social and political arena, beyond doing the right thing with as little fanfare as possible. When they choose to publicly pat themselves on the back, they're begging to be called out for their inevitable hypocrisy when they fail to do so at inconvenient times, as the parent is doing. They should shut up and build things.
- kwistzhaderach 6y agoI don’t really think they reflect the current climate. Many of those who are silent don’t believe in these ‘campaigns’
- spamizbad 6y agoYou’re asking them to support “cafeteria capitalism” Supporting BLM or LGBTQ+ Equality costs them nothing, even if you go beyond a PR gesture. You can put Black and LGBTQ people on your board and in corporate leadership positions and it will not have it negatively impact your bottom line in any measurable way. Maybe equalizing salaries would impact the bottom line but not by a significant amount. However, by (rightly) calling out Chinas numerous human rights abuses you risk being shut out from China. That directly impacts your bottom line the way putting a Black Ivy League grad rather than a White Ivy League grad on your board does not. Same logic applies regarding ICE contracts. Talking about how great immigrants are costs you nothing. But refusing to do business with alphabet agencies that terrorize and inhumanely interns them impacts your bottom line. People love to harp about how corporations are amoral and are only obligated to follow the law and create value for their shareholders. If you adopt this worldview then don’t be surprised if companies start doing business with tyrants.
- mensetmanusman 6y agoThe world has already spoken: Money is more important than human rights.
- praptak 6y agoThe Moloch from the Slate Star Codex has spoken. As a corporation you can support human rights but you'll get outcompeted by the less scrupulous actors. In theory the government could step in to solve this coordination problem, but it is also subject to the coordination problem. Other governments willing to throw human rights under the bus will reap the economic benefits of cooperation with China.
- hkt 6y agoThere's a big, untapped market for "ethical" that doesn't receive enough capital. I for one would pay for a fairtrade certified laptop. No such laptop exists at present, although there are phones (FairPhone) that fit the bill.
- kohtatsu 6y agoThis post is incredibly downmodded on the front page.
- baylearn 6y agoInteresting. I took a screen snapshot of the front page: https://imgur.com/gallery/thY5Tl6 https://imgur.com/gallery/thY5Tl6 Compared to #1 and #2 ranked posts, which have half the upvotes, but uploaded within the same hour or two, this post is ranked #19. Maybe many people are "flag"-ing the post so the HN ranking algorithm pushes it lower. (Edit: For the record, I don't believe the HN mods are doing any downmodding here, and it's probably just due to the ranking algorithm and behavior of the HN audience)
- jbay808 6y agoI've been surprised by the absence of discourse about HK on HN over the past week, given the magnitude of what's going on there and its relevance to this forum's interests. Meanwhile, relatively trivial articles are holding the front page for days.
- input_sh 6y agoMods often suppress anything remotely political in order to keep the forum "civil". It's one of the aspects of this forum that I personally dislike.
- cumcastsucks 6y agothey are all liberals, that's how they survive with their precious egos intact in the current climate.
- yborg 6y agoIt's a tech forum, not a general discussion board. It's a courtesy they leave these topics with zero tech content at all. There are a million places to engage in current events discussion, not every place needs to be filled with the same echo chamber cacophony all the time.
- eloff 6y agoIt was very clever of China to tighten their grip on Hong Kong while the world is distracted with the pandemic, and the US is further distracted with its own issues. Well played. I hope it backfires on them.
- baybal2 6y agoVery much it, But even before that, your usual club of rogue nations worked ceaselessly to keep moving Western red lines, and eroding West's resolve while 18 Western Alliance armies were merrily bombing men with flintlock rifles in the middle of nowhere. This issue absolutely did not appear overnight.
- hkai 6y agoIt seems so, although it's not like the world paid much attention to the mass imprisonment and "reeducation" of Kazakhs and Uyghurs for the crime of speaking a wrong language, praying to the wrong god or wearing the wrong style of beards. Fuck those beard-wearing Xinjiang hipsters anyway, am I right guys?
- ttul 6y agoThis is one part of a several act drama that is playing out for the home audience. Reign in the disobedient teenager (Hong Kong) by taking his skateboard away. Act two is a military provocation, which is why the US has moved more hardware into the area.
- systemvoltage 6y agoUS should equip Taiwan with nuclear weapons for deterrance. Should there be invasion en-masse, deep in the mountains of Taiwan there would be nuclear weapons ready to strike. Nuclear weapons are great to keep peace in the region.
- microcolonel 6y agoHow do we get people from their gut reaction to this, to realizing that it is the most likely path toward lasting peace?
- chadcmulligan 6y agoHow is it that many Chinese students are schooled in the west, and have access to all these books and thoughts, but then they don't exist when they go back home. There must be some significant cognitive dissonance between the two situations. I don't see how they can keep a lid on this long term.
- arkades 6y agoAs a Russian, seeing how Russians perceive things, which I imagine is something of an analogue: They don't believe our internal propaganda. That's why Russia and the like spend so much time hyping up where we don't live up to our ideals - it lets them sell the line that we're just as bad, just as corrupt, just as etc. but we either mouth the propaganda trying to get by, or we're dumb/gullible enough to fall for the propaganda. My understanding of Chinese culture suggests there's also a strand of "they'd love us to be hamstrung by falling for their bullshit, so we don't seize our place in the world."
- chadcmulligan 6y agointeresting, but Russians afaik don't get schooled overseas too much, like so many Chinese students spend years at overseas uni's, you'd think some of it would seep in. If not I'm very disappointed with the universities. Edit: a world without dissent seems so ... pointless
- NikolaeVarius 6y agoDon't forget Kim Jong Un was educated in Switzerland
- sand_castles 6y agoI am not Chinese, but studied at a top College in the West under Stanford / Berkeley profs. My view on the West was much more "enlightened" and envious before traveling and living in the West. I used to be a Capitalist and then turned full Maoist Communist, after my experience. I became convinced the only way for the global poor to get a say in world affairs was to take up arms against G7. Not that I advocate for it or want it to happen, because my life is quite comfortable.
- hkai 6y agoTwo things are true at the same time: - Hong Kong's rule of law has disappeared; - The books in question are written by pretty radical young revolutionaries. Personally I am more concerned that libraries in Hong Kong seem to keep less and less books in the local version of Chinese and more books written in Simplified Chinese used in Mainland China. It's like if you are in California and suddenly half of the books in your library are in Russian instead of English or Spanish.
- caymanjim 6y agoIt's odd that you include Spanish since until recently the same argument was made about half the books in the library being in Spanish instead of English.
- derefr 6y agoMaybe in other states, but the US purchased much of California from Mexico, so that population isn’t immigrant to that region, but native to it. That historical basis—of there being (acquired) natural US citizens whose primary spoken language is Spanish—is one of the main reasons that Spanish is a national language. Spanish-language books aren’t at-all strange to see in (Southern) California libraries. They’re part of the region’s heritage, rather than a novelty.
- bpodgursky 6y agoThat's.... only sort of true. California was actually almost depopulated at the time of US conquest. The Spanish (mostly via disease) had essentially wiped out the native population, and there was very little hispanic re-settlement of CA by 1846. A lot of the remaining population was Native, which (shocker!) did not actually speak Spanish as a native language -- they spoke their own native languages. There was a Spanish mission system TRYING to "civilize" the remaining natives, but it was floundering by that time. The actual real native languages (not Spanish) are gone, for all practical purposes. Arguing whether Spanish or English is the "native" language is sorta nonsensical, given that the Americans only showed up a hundred years after the (mostly failed) Mission system started teaching Spanish. I don't want to get into a fight as to Spanish or English is a native language or whatever, but it's pretty deceptive to argue that most of the hispanic population in CA is leftover from the US conquest -- actually very little of it is, the vast majority is from immigration after 1846.
- runawaybottle 6y agoThis is what Steam looks like in China, if you’re wondering how crazy they’ve really gotten: https://cdn--images-win-gg.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w820/s/cdn-images.win.gg/news/e7023ba77a45f7e84c5ee8a28dd63585/1bf3ebf3aefb9744a3f52cc82326fd7b/original.jpg https://cdn--images-win-gg.cdn.ampproject.org/ii/w820/s/cdn-...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- foobar_ 6y agoIntra-party democracy is alright. Unabobmers manifesto or the school shooters manifesto or IRA manifestos are not exactly available in the libraries.
- rsync 6y agoThey absolutely should be.
- jumelles 6y agohttps://www.worldcat.org/title/technological-slavery-the-collected-writings-of-theodore-j-kaczynski-aka-the-unabomber/oclc/932177324 https://www.worldcat.org/title/technological-slavery-the-col... https://www.worldcat.org/title/handbook-for-volunteers-of-the-irish-republican-army-notes-on-guerrilla-warfare/oclc/1043126119 https://www.worldcat.org/title/handbook-for-volunteers-of-th... https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4596&context=dissertations https://scholarworks.waldenu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
- mrobot 6y agoImportant to note that the US Agency for Global Media was funding and supporting the Hong Kong protests [1]. China could never get away with doing the same thing in the US. The fact is that media bubbles are a powerful tool. There is a reason the US / CIA spend so much time/money on projects like Radio Free Asia. If you are on the same side as the CIA and US imperialism, you might want to think about why that is and what kind of harm you are causing with your jingoistic posts. The US media is carefully controlled and an opinion-making bubble of its own. Yes, many Chinese people support their government and it's not because they are duped, actually. [1] https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3091438/us-has-been-exposed-funding-last-years-hong-kong-protests https://www.scmp.com/comment/opinion/article/3091438/us-has-...
- xster 6y agoThis is HN though. It's a brave response but I don't know what else you expected besides coastal elite intelligentsia signaling in support of humanitarian overthrows around the world.
- njrc9 6y agoThank you for linking the article. I had never heard of the US Agency for Global Media before. I have not read that much about it yet but it sounds in line with some of the criticisms Chomsky levels at U.S. propaganda. I would be very interested in any other sources of information you might recommend on this topic or hearing more of your own thoughts (my email is in my profile).
- cvlasdkv 6y agoI'd recommend reading: https://liberationschool.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-wasnt/ https://liberationschool.org/tiananmen-the-massacre-that-was... as well as the WikiLeaks documents and draw your own conclusions. CBS, NYT, and many other American sources all also do not report this "massacre" yet I recall it being in my textbooks and it being "common knowledge". It's become impossible for me to trust the US on anything domestic much less China. I'd hoped for much better from HN but it seems the critical lens is not being applied as much as a xenophobic one. :(
- terenceng2010 6y agoIt's worth to mention that some of these books have been published quite some years already (>5 years) , and their viewpoint for democracy is rather mild too. That's why they can be on the bookshelf in the first place.
- 737min 6y agoHong Kong is the freedom and civil rights issue of this generation. There should be protests and boycotts in every US city about this, instead it barely receives coverage...
- systemvoltage 6y agoWhy only US? EU/Switzerland/UK/Australia/India/Japan/Korea should as well.
- GuB-42 6y agoWhat is so special about Hong-Kong? It is a territorial dispute, it happens often in the world, and there are not protests and boycotts every time it happens. Just look at the Wikipedia page here, it is quite long: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes And for Honk-Kong, we already know how it will end. Hong-Kong will become part of mainland China in 2047, that's the deal. That's unless China changes its mind, which is unlikely. The way the US treats the Hong-Kong case is not "a freedom and civil rights issue". It is for Hongkongers, but for the US, it reeks of a proxy war. The US doesn't like China, but they can't fight directly, so instead, they support Hongkongers who oppose China.
- 737min 6y agoIt is special in the same way as other cases of smaller, more free places being taken over by stronger, less free regimes. US and “the West” supporting freedom and civil rights in such circumstances is both the right thing to do and the usual policy. The fact that oppression of Hong Kong (in violation of agreements, btw) not more of an issue for the US public is the only special thing here - it should be.
- dikaio 6y agoThe only way to force US companies make a choice is to boycott them here locally.
- charliebrownau 6y agoIt should say a lot about EU and Western goverments all onboard the Global LEFT bandwagon and none of them actuallly support right wing / pro freedom / civic or ethnic Nationalism Back in the 80-90s people would rather goto war protecting people of X nation from commies in 2000's we now entire goverment and systems run by commies instead of shooting, abortion & Suiside is used for mass murder instead of burning books its digital removal + deplatforming Yet to find a single nation on the planet run by "goverment" thats actually free from authoritarian control - Tip Instead of calling me ISM/FOBIAS/made up names debate me with facts/reason/counter points
- tamaharbor 6y agoIn some countries, people would be willing to die for democracy, yet the US is on he verge of pissing it away.
- malloryerik 6y agoDoes anyone have an informed idea of what effect the new law may have on the South China Morning Post? https://www.scmp.com/ https://www.scmp.com/
- RavlaAlvar 6y agoNo, since the paper is now owned by the Chinese tech billionaire Jack Ma.
- loughnane 6y agoIs there a list of some of these books?
- cZGuJ7g7 6y agohttps://news.mingpao.com/pns/%E8%A6%81%E8%81%9E/article/20200705/s00001/1593885502126/%E5%9C%96%E6%9B%B8%E9%A4%A8%E5%B0%B1%E6%96%B0%E4%BE%8B%E8%A6%86%E6%AA%A29%E6%94%BF%E6%B2%BB%E6%9B%B8-%E6%B6%89%E9%99%B3%E9%9B%B2-%E9%BB%83%E4%B9%8B%E9%8B%92-%E9%99%B3%E6%B7%91%E8%8E%8A%E8%88%8A%E4%BD%9C-%E6%9D%8E%E7%AB%8B%E5%B3%AF%E8%B3%AA%E7%96%91%E3%80%8C%E6%86%91%E4%BD%95%E6%BA%96%E5%89%87%E5%88%A4%E6%96%B7%E3%80%8D https://news.mingpao.com/pns/%E8%A6%81%E8%81%9E/article/2020... The newspaper searched the catalogue of the Hong Kong Public Library yesterday. At least 9 books were listed as "under review". The former assistant professor of the Chinese Department of Lingnan University, Chen Yun, had six books, Huang Zhifeng had two books, and Chen Shuzhuang had one. This (see picture). There are a total of 379 books in the collection of 9 books, of which the most is "Hong Kong City-State Theory II Restoration of the Native Land: Restoration of the Native Land, Fan Huaxia, is the only way out for Hong Kong. There are 76 books in 58 pavilions; in addition, "Hong Kong City-State Theory: One Country, Two Systems, City-State Autonomy" is a matter of life and death in Hong Kong. 》It also occupies 73 books, spread over 55 pavilions. https://www.thenewslens.com/article/137304 https://www.thenewslens.com/article/137304 According to the report of "Hong Kong 01", at least 9 books are temporarily unavailable, including "Hong Kong City-State Theory", "Hong Kong City-State Theory 2", "Body of the Earth" written by Chen Yun, a former assistant professor of the Chinese Department of Lingnan University, "Hong Kong Defence War", "City State Sovereignty" and "Hong Kong Adherents' Theory"; "I am not a hero" and "I am not a fine road: around 18" by Huang Zhifeng, former secretary general of "Hong Kong People's Comrades" Legislative Councillor Chen Shuzhuang's "Walk While Eating and Fight" The report said that the total number of nine books involved in the "review" in various libraries in Hong Kong is more than 400.