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While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist cultu

While most of the post is what I would expect, the minority language censorship was unexpected. It’s another sign of China’s ethnocentrism/Han Supremacist culture play out. It’s a real shame to see this sort of enforced death of linguistic diversity.

exhaze 6y ago
How come you found it unexpected?
jbob2000 6y ago
We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned". So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.
- CharlesW 6y ago
  > We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted. If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.
  - jbob2000 6y ago
    And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?
    - duxup 6y ago
      Promotion? They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.
      - jbob2000 6y ago
        Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off. Same shit, different process.
        duxup 6y ago
        I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but I don't know of any state level limitation on the demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only folks in it...
    - slowmovintarget 6y ago
      It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales. It is interested in preserving the party by controlling the populace, with special emphasis on ideology. The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.
    - dillondoyle 6y ago
      Absolute not. Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what about the other side? CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part facilitated propaganda ('ads') US corporations are not forced by the government to include for instance only one community or exclude another in their communications. Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the top's) grip over its own citizens. In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the government out of their business!
- gumby 6y ago
  > We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. What? It’s all about the money. Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible. In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed. Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before. I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.
  - thisiszilff 6y ago
    It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in power want society to look like because the people in power are those with money and people who figure out how to make more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep up with the distribution of money in society.
  - rchaud 6y ago
    > I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means. OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses enclosing it.
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that is also accurate would be that the people in power are people with money and influence.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  I think it's strange that you equate "using racially ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern television marketing.
nomay 6y ago
Live streaming platforms literally detect and warn against "unauthorized foreigners" from appearing on the screen. TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in dictionaries get painted black. Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's among the few things communists are actually good at.
- jaflo 6y ago
  Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?
  - nomay 6y ago
    I counldn't find that tweet from a female streaming on Doyu that got a warning for featuring her white boyfriend, but found another news. https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595 https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595
  - hkmaxpro 6y ago
    The stream was cutoff after a white guy appeared for a minute. If it’s not race detection, I don’t know what it is. https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271
noobface1337 6y ago
Where is this idea of Han supremacy coming from? I've known many Han who, when they had the option, they chose to be classified as a minority on their ID cards, since you know, minorities in China get far better treatment. And if we were to talk about death of languages, maybe you need to realise that it's actually a much worse problem in Anglo-Saxon countries than anywhere else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...
yorwba 6y ago
Most speakers of minority languages in China are Han Chinese. The censors who interrupted live streams when a non-Mandarin language was spoken were most likely speakers of a minority language, just a different one, which is why they didn't understand anything. So I don't think describing it as "Han Supremacism" is accurate. Presumably they didn't interrupt the streams because they felt ethnically superior to the speaker, but because they're liable if something illegal gets said and they don't censor it. And note their reason for not automatically blocking Uyghur content: "We eventually decided not to do it: We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored." Which I guess means they have a dedicated group of Uyghur speakers on staff to censor those streams.
hkmaxpro 6y ago
Douyin even banned speakers of Cantonese [0][1], a language spoken by 80M+ speakers and a top-20 language in the world [2]. Cantonese was widely spoken in Guangdong until the CCP actively wiped it out [3]. Among the 204 members of the CCP Central Committee, only 2 are from Guangdong [4]. Guangdong generated the highest GDP among all 31 administrative divisions [5], and doesn’t get its fair share of high ranking officials. It’s not Han supremacy. It’s Mandarin-Han supremacy. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tiktok-users-china-temporarily-banned-speaking-their-own-cantonese-language-instead-using-official-mandarin.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tikto... [1] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-version-tiktok-suspends-users-speaking-cantonese https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-v... (paywalled) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest-cantonese-speaking-region-to-speak-mandarin-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest... [4] https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 (in Chinese) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...

exhaze 6y ago

How come you found it unexpected?

jbob2000 6y ago

We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. My company recently moved away from animated characters back to using humans in their ads. Most of the people in our ads are mixed race, you can't really tell if they're asian, white, arab, or "tanned". So it's the same promotion of a genetic look, just with a different group of people.

CharlesW 6y ago
> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. The actual explanation is simpler and more crass: It's about what sells to the target audience. At least for large campaigns, these things are thoroughly vetted. If you're uncomfortable with some aspect of an ad, you aren't the target audience.
- jbob2000 6y ago
  And you don't think the CCP's promotion of Han is the same thing?
  - duxup 6y ago
    Promotion? They described simply cutting off a stream because of the language spoken.
    - jbob2000 6y ago
      Ok, and if my company's marketing team proposed an ad with a bunch of white people in it, they would also be cut off. Same shit, different process.
      - duxup 6y ago
        I can't comment on what your marketing team is up to but I don't know of any state level limitation on the demographics of ads. I see plenty of ads with white only folks in it...
  - slowmovintarget 6y ago
    It is definitively not. CCP has zero interest in sales. It is interested in preserving the party by controlling the populace, with special emphasis on ideology. The activist Left in the West is grass-roots censorship, which is a completely different problem from a top-down, military-backed authoritarian regime. Granted, the former seems hard at work trying to produce the latter.
  - dillondoyle 6y ago
    Absolute not. Even disregarding your false promotion comparison, what about the other side? CCP 'promotes' (actually carries out) the brutal persecution of non-Han and specifically Uighurs in part facilitated propaganda ('ads') US corporations are not forced by the government to include for instance only one community or exclude another in their communications. Us corporations are not de facto owned by the government and do not have the same goal of consolidating power to maintain the CCP's (and increasingly just one man at the top's) grip over its own citizens. In the US many spend lots of money lobbying to keep the government out of their business!
gumby 6y ago
> We do the same thing in the west. Look at the people you see in ads and on TV, it's always an idealized look at what the people in power WANT society to look like. What? It’s all about the money. Ads, and tv (which is simply a honeypot to draw ad viewers) want to connect with as many viewers as possible in order to sell as much product (cars, cereal, or whatever) as possible. In the 1950s US the only people with appreciable spending power were white parents, thus those were the ads. Magazines, which could be more finely targeted, were more diverse overall, though demographically siloed. Society does not look like that (it never did, but the $$$ distribution did). Ads and TV are on the trailing edge, not the leading edge. And TV looks demographically more like the people I see, and more like my family, than it ever has before. I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means.
- thisiszilff 6y ago
  It's true, in a way, society looks like what the people in power want society to look like because the people in power are those with money and people who figure out how to make more money get power. It's like you say, that TV and ads are on the trailing edge as people figure out how to keep up with the distribution of money in society.
- rchaud 6y ago
  > I have no idea what the phrase “people in power WANT society to look like” really means. OP wasn't exactly ambiguous. Only thing that was missing from "people in power" was maybe three sets of parantheses enclosing it.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    This seems like a ridiculously uncharitable explanation to the point of bad faith. A better interpretation that is also accurate would be that the people in power are people with money and influence.
nemothekid 6y ago
I think it's strange that you equate "using racially ambiguous people" to promotion of said group. The fictional marketing company and the CCP have very different goals and I think you are projecting your own personal biases onto modern television marketing.

nomay 6y ago

Live streaming platforms literally detect and warn against "unauthorized foreigners" from appearing on the screen. TV channels like BBC (for high-end hotels) are being monitored real-time to black-out sensitive parts, books mailed or imported from overseas get pages ripped out, even entries in dictionaries get painted black. Don't underestimate the seriousness of the censorship, it's among the few things communists are actually good at.

jaflo 6y ago
Could you elaborate on the first point? Do they run live race detection on streams and cut off access?
- nomay 6y ago
  I counldn't find that tweet from a female streaming on Doyu that got a warning for featuring her white boyfriend, but found another news. https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595 https://en.pingwest.com/a/6595
- hkmaxpro 6y ago
  The stream was cutoff after a white guy appeared for a minute. If it’s not race detection, I don’t know what it is. https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://twitter.com/JoshuaDummer/status/1280877750245453828 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271 https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3963271

noobface1337 6y ago

Where is this idea of Han supremacy coming from? I've known many Han who, when they had the option, they chose to be classified as a minority on their ID cards, since you know, minorities in China get far better treatment. And if we were to talk about death of languages, maybe you need to realise that it's actually a much worse problem in Anglo-Saxon countries than anywhere else https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_extinction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_time_of_e...

yorwba 6y ago

Most speakers of minority languages in China are Han Chinese. The censors who interrupted live streams when a non-Mandarin language was spoken were most likely speakers of a minority language, just a different one, which is why they didn't understand anything. So I don't think describing it as "Han Supremacism" is accurate. Presumably they didn't interrupt the streams because they felt ethnically superior to the speaker, but because they're liable if something illegal gets said and they don't censor it. And note their reason for not automatically blocking Uyghur content: "We eventually decided not to do it: We didn't have enough Uyghur language data points in our system, and the most popular livestream rooms were already closely monitored." Which I guess means they have a dedicated group of Uyghur speakers on staff to censor those streams.

hkmaxpro 6y ago

Douyin even banned speakers of Cantonese [0][1], a language spoken by 80M+ speakers and a top-20 language in the world [2]. Cantonese was widely spoken in Guangdong until the CCP actively wiped it out [3]. Among the 204 members of the CCP Central Committee, only 2 are from Guangdong [4]. Guangdong generated the highest GDP among all 31 administrative divisions [5], and doesn’t get its fair share of high ranking officials. It’s not Han supremacy. It’s Mandarin-Han supremacy. [0] https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tiktok-users-china-temporarily-banned-speaking-their-own-cantonese-language-instead-using-official-mandarin.shtml https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200402/03110144220/tikto... [1] https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-version-tiktok-suspends-users-speaking-cantonese https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3078365/chinas-v... (paywalled) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_num... [3] https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest-cantonese-speaking-region-to-speak-mandarin-2014-8 https://www.businessinsider.com/china-is-forcing-its-biggest... [4] https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 https://www.sohu.com/a/429814378_469134 (in Chinese) [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative_divisions_by_GDP https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_administrative...