4 ms·

I see a lot of enthusiasm for these protests, but I think the caveat here is that we in the west get to see these protests, footage, and headlines, but truth is

I see a lot of enthusiasm for these protests, but I think the caveat here is that we in the west get to see these protests, footage, and headlines, but truth is the majority of Chinese people do not see this. I think the biggest problem for people in China is access to information like this.

themodelplumber 4y ago
According to people in China it's all over state approved social media, not just Western sources. Edit: Posted there, presumably seen by many, then taken down later. https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/1596682638131171328?t=vva981A0mU1Z-CDjbvmfbA&s=19 https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15966826381311713... (Note that this journo appears to be threatened downthread, in Chinese on Twitter) At least one journo, maybe it was this one, says they've seen nothing like it in their 10 years there. Edit: 51 universities have also seen protests. Seemingly includes students holding signs of a formula...? https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/1596756273730502657?t=-GaM3jAqRcCdVqxNCKgtnA&s=19 https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15967562737305026... Context: Total lockdown circumstances leading to e.g. deaths in lockdown fires. China simultaneously reporting record highs in COVID cases; Chinese vaccine apparently seen/known to be less effective than others.
- mlindner 4y ago
  This is curious as China has strict control over the internet. If they didn't want to allow these posts to be up in China then they wouldn't be up (any western archives will of course stick around). Either Xi is losing control of the government or he's letting this happen for some purpose.
  - sgu999 4y ago
    Or he's not really aware of it, or at least the scale of it, because he surrounded himself with people who wouldn't dare tell him something he may dislike.
- tianqi 4y ago
  That is Friedmann Equation. Homophone of "freedom".
  - techdragon 4y ago
    This is the sort of thing that is while easily understandable in principle, can be remarkably hard to keep up with. I’m aware of the general trend with how Chinese dissent is often done by pun like manipulation to avoid censorship, but it can be completely inscrutable at times when it’s something like a Chinese regional dialect specific homophone. They often frequently mutate as they spread, forcing the censorship efforts to play catch up on a massive scale… often the only good link for the censors will be proximity and volume, which is why you get some downright Orwellian sorts of things from time to time like the recent events leading to brief periods where the word “Bridge” was seeing people in certain locations getting flagged by the censors. So thank you so much for providing the necessary context!
- caligarn 4y ago
  The twitter account mentioned here appears to be based in New York and is from western media. Her bias seems to be obvious? How can she have a legit read on what Chinese locals are seeing on television, social media, and media?
  - sneakerblack 4y ago
    It's in her bio: > Media studio co-founder. has worked as Head of BBC Hong Kong Bureau & BBC Chinese News Editor. China Editor @initiumnews. Legal reporter @scmpnews and others SCMP is a Hong Hong-based news outlet. I'm assuming she has her sources, since all you need is someone in china with a VPN or someone in Hong Kong in mainland with WeChat/Weibo account that has access to community groups
dirtyid 4y ago
Big events gets posted on PRC social media faster than censors can censor. Much of Chinese with mobile will see this, the biggest problem is people in west thinking they know better, overindexing on a bunch of students stuck in shitty dorms protesting because lockdown in these facilities are genuinely terrible, while the protestors use some dead Uyghurs and libral values as pretense (yes many are genuine too) for international attention to pressure gov response. This is just one of the thousands of "small" scale protests that happen every year in PRC, except young students are better coordinated and tech savvy (i.e. Shanghai protest organized on Telegram with western reporters in group), same with Henan bank who got some money back. Or Urumqi finally relaxing lockdown because 1000s of commoners got on the streets - imagine that CCP even listens to Uyghur pressure. I expect there's going to be some concessions for campus lockdowns (and organizers getting fucked), but until their parents get on the street enmass, this is western media who got kicked out or left PRC during covid getting overzealous on breadcrumbs of access they occasionally get through oblique channels from mainland. E: over limit, @powerapple Yeah, it's coordinated. Cabin fever lockdown students learned from HK protestors / Henan. I was peeping at @actionshanghai on telegram leading up. I think campus concessions will get attention or some priority. And should - lock down in Chinese dorms would suck. I'm sure organizers are going to get crushed, especially for inviting / appealing to foreign jouralists and rags like RFA or epochetimes is going to ruin some lives accordign to how HK NSL prosecutions are going.
- powerapple 4y ago
  This may not result in anything, but these are synchronised acts, I watched the clip predicted it, and a few guys announced this before it happened on DouYin (Chinese TikTok).
- baybal2 4y ago
powerapple 4y ago
Chinese do see them. It is very interesting actually. I saw the pretext in DouYin, some people was saying something big was going to happen "tonight" on DouYin, so apparently there are organizations. Today, some friends in China shared with me some video clips. I am only connecting the dots now. It would be interesting to learn the full picture.
- caligarn 4y ago
  DouYin’s algo is heavily monitored and manipulated by the state.
Yeahsureok 4y ago
What do you think the average response was in the West to covid protests last year? Here in Australia the public and media overwhelmingly despised anyone protesting despite having some of the harshest covid restrictions on Earth.
- bsaul 4y ago
  This period is going to be studied as one of history’s bizarre moments, that people in the future will have trouble understanding. The fact that no major western country, or major political party, strongly condemned those lockdown measures at the time is astounding. But even crazier is the fact that now that everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response, not a single major country i know of has performed any serious commission work to established what things went wrong and why. It’s like nothing has happened.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
  - kmos17 4y ago
    Live with it is ok now because effective vaccines are available. A lot of lockdown measures went overboard but that was hard to tell at the time, when NYC had overflowing hospitals that required mobile morgues due to the overwhelming number of deaths it was more understandable.
    - bsaul 4y ago
      People completely stopped vaccinating in france, and ICUs aren’t overloaded at all anymore. What changed isn’t the vaccination rates but the nature of the virus itself. Omicron completely changed the nature of the epidemic (that plus the fact that after 2 years and with super-contagious variant like omicron, almost 100% of the population have been in contact with the virus, either symptomatic or not). EDIT : as for lockdowns, they were understandable in 202O when the virus was new. But locking down 20 yo students in 2021 made absolutely no sense, and all the evidence pointed to that. Note that in france at least, the most serious measures against non vaccinated people were taken in early 2022 (aka: not even allowed to take the train), despite omicron being the only variant remaining, and casualties becoming super super low.

themodelplumber 4y ago

According to people in China it's all over state approved social media, not just Western sources. Edit: Posted there, presumably seen by many, then taken down later. https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/1596682638131171328?t=vva981A0mU1Z-CDjbvmfbA&s=19 https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15966826381311713... (Note that this journo appears to be threatened downthread, in Chinese on Twitter) At least one journo, maybe it was this one, says they've seen nothing like it in their 10 years there. Edit: 51 universities have also seen protests. Seemingly includes students holding signs of a formula...? https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/1596756273730502657?t=-GaM3jAqRcCdVqxNCKgtnA&s=19 https://twitter.com/vivianwubeijing/status/15967562737305026... Context: Total lockdown circumstances leading to e.g. deaths in lockdown fires. China simultaneously reporting record highs in COVID cases; Chinese vaccine apparently seen/known to be less effective than others.

mlindner 4y ago
This is curious as China has strict control over the internet. If they didn't want to allow these posts to be up in China then they wouldn't be up (any western archives will of course stick around). Either Xi is losing control of the government or he's letting this happen for some purpose.
- sgu999 4y ago
  Or he's not really aware of it, or at least the scale of it, because he surrounded himself with people who wouldn't dare tell him something he may dislike.
tianqi 4y ago
That is Friedmann Equation. Homophone of "freedom".
- techdragon 4y ago
  This is the sort of thing that is while easily understandable in principle, can be remarkably hard to keep up with. I’m aware of the general trend with how Chinese dissent is often done by pun like manipulation to avoid censorship, but it can be completely inscrutable at times when it’s something like a Chinese regional dialect specific homophone. They often frequently mutate as they spread, forcing the censorship efforts to play catch up on a massive scale… often the only good link for the censors will be proximity and volume, which is why you get some downright Orwellian sorts of things from time to time like the recent events leading to brief periods where the word “Bridge” was seeing people in certain locations getting flagged by the censors. So thank you so much for providing the necessary context!
caligarn 4y ago
The twitter account mentioned here appears to be based in New York and is from western media. Her bias seems to be obvious? How can she have a legit read on what Chinese locals are seeing on television, social media, and media?
- sneakerblack 4y ago
  It's in her bio: > Media studio co-founder. has worked as Head of BBC Hong Kong Bureau & BBC Chinese News Editor. China Editor @initiumnews. Legal reporter @scmpnews and others SCMP is a Hong Hong-based news outlet. I'm assuming she has her sources, since all you need is someone in china with a VPN or someone in Hong Kong in mainland with WeChat/Weibo account that has access to community groups

dirtyid 4y ago

Big events gets posted on PRC social media faster than censors can censor. Much of Chinese with mobile will see this, the biggest problem is people in west thinking they know better, overindexing on a bunch of students stuck in shitty dorms protesting because lockdown in these facilities are genuinely terrible, while the protestors use some dead Uyghurs and libral values as pretense (yes many are genuine too) for international attention to pressure gov response. This is just one of the thousands of "small" scale protests that happen every year in PRC, except young students are better coordinated and tech savvy (i.e. Shanghai protest organized on Telegram with western reporters in group), same with Henan bank who got some money back. Or Urumqi finally relaxing lockdown because 1000s of commoners got on the streets - imagine that CCP even listens to Uyghur pressure. I expect there's going to be some concessions for campus lockdowns (and organizers getting fucked), but until their parents get on the street enmass, this is western media who got kicked out or left PRC during covid getting overzealous on breadcrumbs of access they occasionally get through oblique channels from mainland. E: over limit, @powerapple Yeah, it's coordinated. Cabin fever lockdown students learned from HK protestors / Henan. I was peeping at @actionshanghai on telegram leading up. I think campus concessions will get attention or some priority. And should - lock down in Chinese dorms would suck. I'm sure organizers are going to get crushed, especially for inviting / appealing to foreign jouralists and rags like RFA or epochetimes is going to ruin some lives accordign to how HK NSL prosecutions are going.

powerapple 4y ago
This may not result in anything, but these are synchronised acts, I watched the clip predicted it, and a few guys announced this before it happened on DouYin (Chinese TikTok).
baybal2 4y ago

powerapple 4y ago

Chinese do see them. It is very interesting actually. I saw the pretext in DouYin, some people was saying something big was going to happen "tonight" on DouYin, so apparently there are organizations. Today, some friends in China shared with me some video clips. I am only connecting the dots now. It would be interesting to learn the full picture.

caligarn 4y ago
DouYin’s algo is heavily monitored and manipulated by the state.

Yeahsureok 4y ago

What do you think the average response was in the West to covid protests last year? Here in Australia the public and media overwhelmingly despised anyone protesting despite having some of the harshest covid restrictions on Earth.

bsaul 4y ago
This period is going to be studied as one of history’s bizarre moments, that people in the future will have trouble understanding. The fact that no major western country, or major political party, strongly condemned those lockdown measures at the time is astounding. But even crazier is the fact that now that everybody seems to have finally agreed that « live with it » was the most sensible response, not a single major country i know of has performed any serious commission work to established what things went wrong and why. It’s like nothing has happened.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- kmos17 4y ago
  Live with it is ok now because effective vaccines are available. A lot of lockdown measures went overboard but that was hard to tell at the time, when NYC had overflowing hospitals that required mobile morgues due to the overwhelming number of deaths it was more understandable.
  - bsaul 4y ago
    People completely stopped vaccinating in france, and ICUs aren’t overloaded at all anymore. What changed isn’t the vaccination rates but the nature of the virus itself. Omicron completely changed the nature of the epidemic (that plus the fact that after 2 years and with super-contagious variant like omicron, almost 100% of the population have been in contact with the virus, either symptomatic or not). EDIT : as for lockdowns, they were understandable in 202O when the virus was new. But locking down 20 yo students in 2021 made absolutely no sense, and all the evidence pointed to that. Note that in france at least, the most serious measures against non vaccinated people were taken in early 2022 (aka: not even allowed to take the train), despite omicron being the only variant remaining, and casualties becoming super super low.