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Faced with tens of thousands of protesters contending that a Beijing-backed plan for “moral and national education” amounted to brainwashing and political

by mhartl 14y ago

Faced with tens of thousands of protesters contending that a Beijing-backed plan for “moral and national education” amounted to brainwashing and political indoctrination... Do you find yourself reflexively siding with the protesters? Perhaps you have been exposed to some "brainwashing and political indoctrination" of your own, by none other than official American (or other Western) public education.

crazygringo 14y ago
Not really. For large amounts of people to get worked up enough about a proposed government policy to bother protesting in public, it usually means the proposed policy is really bad. People don't get off their butts otherwise. Good government policy involves enough stakeholders, and propose reasonable enough solutions, that there's no reason for protests. So while certainly not every large protest is 100% right, they usually do indicate a breakdown of effective processes for representative government, as applied to the policy area in question.
- mhartl 14y ago
  Your response is a case in point. Your views on "stakeholders", your belief in "representative democracy", and your faith in the wisdom of the People are fully in line with the progressive orthodoxy that is the bedrock of Western public education. That doesn't necessarily make your views wrong, but it's unlikely that you were reasoned into them from a blank slate. It's more likely you came to them after a lifetime of exposure to a press and public educational system that almost uniformly espouses such views. As a thought experiment, consider what a hoplite educated in a Spartan agoge would think of your views. What about an aristocrat educated in Antonine Rome, or in France under Louis XIV? Would they share your sanguine views on the wisdom of the People? If not, why not? How confident are you that you are right and they are wrong, and what is the basis of that confidence? None of this is a defense of current Chinese government policy. My point is that using official education for brainwashing and political indoctrination is par for the course in a country founded on the principle of popular sovereignty. One consequence of this is that virtually every educated Westerner, including most readers of Hacker News and the New York Times, has been exposed to the same sort of brainwashing and political indoctrination decried by the protesters in the OP. One effect of this is a reflexive support of popular movements of all sorts without an appreciation of the potential costs of that support. Louis XIV might even have been sanguine, but his descendant Louis XVI would know what I mean.
  - trevelyan 14y ago
    Marcus Aurelius once remarked that "the object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
  - ChuckMcM 14y ago
    You are fighting a losing battle here I think but it is a reasonable question. In political studies folks often use economic success as a proxy for evaluating the quality of governance, by that analysis the US system would score highly. and African feudalism would score poorly. However such discussions are fraught with conditions, such as what are the natural resources available? What are the hindrances? China makes an interesting case because its economic growth under strict communism (Mao's model) was quite poor, whereas its economic growth under a more capitalist system (Den Xioping's model) has done much better. But its also perfectly valid to wonder if economics is a good proxy. What about life expectancy? happiness ? hunger? Ultimately though you are going to run into debating philosophy and that makes for wonderful rhetoric but few conclusions.
    - andrewflnr 14y ago
      Aren't all those other factors pretty strongly correlated with economic success? "Happiness" is obviously slippery and hard to measure, but to the extent it's not dependent on the individual's choices, it depends a lot on physical/emotional/economic comfort. And money works pretty well for getting medicine and food.
      - ChuckMcM 14y ago
        Yes, they correlate, although the causal linkages are subject to debate. It is is also one of tenets of American politics sort of "If you're so good how come the economy has tanked while you were driving?" this encompasses both the evaluation criteria and the assumption of causality.
- batista 14y ago
  >Not really. For large amounts of people to get worked up enough about a proposed government policy to bother protesting in public, it usually means the proposed policy is really bad. People don't get off their butts otherwise. The "large amounts" can be a figure media put out of their asses. Take Putin, as a case in point. He has the majority vote by a large margin, the common people love him, but in western media he is portrayed as a dictator. E.g they take some pro-westernization demonstrations of 10,000 people and blow them out of all proportions. The equivalent would be to use the "Occupy Wall Street" footage as proof that the majority of Americans are against their leadership and the country is a dictatorship. It doesn't hurt that the minority of Russians that americans find closer to them and their views are anti-Putin. For them, those people (bloggers, tech-geeks, young westernised people etc) represent what most Russians want, when in reality they represent a small minority.
tokenadult 14y ago
Perhaps you have been exposed to some "brainwashing and political indoctrination" of your own Speak for yourself. Have you ever been to Hong Kong? Do you speak Chinese? I have been following the news on political and educational developments in Hong Kong since the 1970s, when I began my study of (standard) Chinese and Cantonese, and have especially followed news from Hong Kong from multiple sources since the first time I traveled to Hong Kong in 1982. People in Hong Kong have a legitimate, grave concern that the central government of the P.R.C. will restrict the freedom of people living in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. One of the reasons that few people in Taiwan support "reunification" on P.R.C. terms is that many people in Taiwan are well traveled in the P.R.C. proper and in Hong Kong, and know that they enjoy more freedom under their independent government. As Confucius said, in one of his most famous take-downs, "始吾於人也、聽其言而信其行、今吾於人也、聽其言而觀其行。At first in dealing with people, I would hear their words and trust their deeds, but now my way of dealing with people is to hear their words and observe their deeds." Maybe the P.R.C. regime mostly has benign intentions toward Hong Kong, which is part of its national territory since retrocession from Britain in 1997. But retrocession has not been all upside for the people of Hong Kong, and they ought to be the people who decide what policy trade-offs they desire to live under. Action speaks louder than words, and people close to the action speak more persuasively to me than armchair observers in the United States. AFTER EDIT: Responding to the kind reply, I have to strenuously disagree that what goes on in the United States, where most but not all primary schools are operated by (local units of) the government, and where government officials from time to time issue press releases to a free press with no prior restraint on publication, is in any way comparable to the situation in China, where all primary schools are tightly regulated by the national central government, there is no free press and much prior restraint of all publications, and where the ruling party has never subjected itself to the discipline of free and fair elections. The term "brainwashing" originated in Chinese ("洗脑") and was used without irony by Communist Party of China political cadres in the leadership echelons of the Chinese armed forces fighting in Korea to describe practices of torture to influence the ideology of captured Korean and United Nations P.O.W.s. The current news about the situation in Hong Kong includes the background that people in Hong Kong objected to new textbooks slanted to support the Party as "brainwashing," http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/09/07/hong-kong-education-china.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/09/07/hong-kong-educ... and then a pro-Beijing leader of an NGO said "A brain needs washing if there is a problem, just as clothes need washing if they're dirty and a kidney needs washing if it's sick." That statement by Jiang Yudui, chairman of the China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong (essentially a CPC front organization) further alarmed residents of Hong Kong. So, no, I respectfully submit that you are comparing apples to stones, and have made an inapt suggestion in the comment to which I first replied here. Again, I base my point of view on this issue on actual overseas residence in the Chinese-speaking world, including time in Hong Kong speaking to people who were born and who grew up there.

by mhartl 14y ago

crazygringo 14y ago

Not really. For large amounts of people to get worked up enough about a proposed government policy to bother protesting in public, it usually means the proposed policy is really bad. People don't get off their butts otherwise. Good government policy involves enough stakeholders, and propose reasonable enough solutions, that there's no reason for protests. So while certainly not every large protest is 100% right, they usually do indicate a breakdown of effective processes for representative government, as applied to the policy area in question.

mhartl 14y ago
Your response is a case in point. Your views on "stakeholders", your belief in "representative democracy", and your faith in the wisdom of the People are fully in line with the progressive orthodoxy that is the bedrock of Western public education. That doesn't necessarily make your views wrong, but it's unlikely that you were reasoned into them from a blank slate. It's more likely you came to them after a lifetime of exposure to a press and public educational system that almost uniformly espouses such views. As a thought experiment, consider what a hoplite educated in a Spartan agoge would think of your views. What about an aristocrat educated in Antonine Rome, or in France under Louis XIV? Would they share your sanguine views on the wisdom of the People? If not, why not? How confident are you that you are right and they are wrong, and what is the basis of that confidence? None of this is a defense of current Chinese government policy. My point is that using official education for brainwashing and political indoctrination is par for the course in a country founded on the principle of popular sovereignty. One consequence of this is that virtually every educated Westerner, including most readers of Hacker News and the New York Times, has been exposed to the same sort of brainwashing and political indoctrination decried by the protesters in the OP. One effect of this is a reflexive support of popular movements of all sorts without an appreciation of the potential costs of that support. Louis XIV might even have been sanguine, but his descendant Louis XVI would know what I mean.
- trevelyan 14y ago
  Marcus Aurelius once remarked that "the object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane."
- ChuckMcM 14y ago
  You are fighting a losing battle here I think but it is a reasonable question. In political studies folks often use economic success as a proxy for evaluating the quality of governance, by that analysis the US system would score highly. and African feudalism would score poorly. However such discussions are fraught with conditions, such as what are the natural resources available? What are the hindrances? China makes an interesting case because its economic growth under strict communism (Mao's model) was quite poor, whereas its economic growth under a more capitalist system (Den Xioping's model) has done much better. But its also perfectly valid to wonder if economics is a good proxy. What about life expectancy? happiness ? hunger? Ultimately though you are going to run into debating philosophy and that makes for wonderful rhetoric but few conclusions.
  - andrewflnr 14y ago
    Aren't all those other factors pretty strongly correlated with economic success? "Happiness" is obviously slippery and hard to measure, but to the extent it's not dependent on the individual's choices, it depends a lot on physical/emotional/economic comfort. And money works pretty well for getting medicine and food.
    - ChuckMcM 14y ago
      Yes, they correlate, although the causal linkages are subject to debate. It is is also one of tenets of American politics sort of "If you're so good how come the economy has tanked while you were driving?" this encompasses both the evaluation criteria and the assumption of causality.
batista 14y ago
>Not really. For large amounts of people to get worked up enough about a proposed government policy to bother protesting in public, it usually means the proposed policy is really bad. People don't get off their butts otherwise. The "large amounts" can be a figure media put out of their asses. Take Putin, as a case in point. He has the majority vote by a large margin, the common people love him, but in western media he is portrayed as a dictator. E.g they take some pro-westernization demonstrations of 10,000 people and blow them out of all proportions. The equivalent would be to use the "Occupy Wall Street" footage as proof that the majority of Americans are against their leadership and the country is a dictatorship. It doesn't hurt that the minority of Russians that americans find closer to them and their views are anti-Putin. For them, those people (bloggers, tech-geeks, young westernised people etc) represent what most Russians want, when in reality they represent a small minority.

tokenadult 14y ago

Perhaps you have been exposed to some "brainwashing and political indoctrination" of your own Speak for yourself. Have you ever been to Hong Kong? Do you speak Chinese? I have been following the news on political and educational developments in Hong Kong since the 1970s, when I began my study of (standard) Chinese and Cantonese, and have especially followed news from Hong Kong from multiple sources since the first time I traveled to Hong Kong in 1982. People in Hong Kong have a legitimate, grave concern that the central government of the P.R.C. will restrict the freedom of people living in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. One of the reasons that few people in Taiwan support "reunification" on P.R.C. terms is that many people in Taiwan are well traveled in the P.R.C. proper and in Hong Kong, and know that they enjoy more freedom under their independent government. As Confucius said, in one of his most famous take-downs, "始吾於人也、聽其言而信其行、今吾於人也、聽其言而觀其行。At first in dealing with people, I would hear their words and trust their deeds, but now my way of dealing with people is to hear their words and observe their deeds." Maybe the P.R.C. regime mostly has benign intentions toward Hong Kong, which is part of its national territory since retrocession from Britain in 1997. But retrocession has not been all upside for the people of Hong Kong, and they ought to be the people who decide what policy trade-offs they desire to live under. Action speaks louder than words, and people close to the action speak more persuasively to me than armchair observers in the United States. AFTER EDIT: Responding to the kind reply, I have to strenuously disagree that what goes on in the United States, where most but not all primary schools are operated by (local units of) the government, and where government officials from time to time issue press releases to a free press with no prior restraint on publication, is in any way comparable to the situation in China, where all primary schools are tightly regulated by the national central government, there is no free press and much prior restraint of all publications, and where the ruling party has never subjected itself to the discipline of free and fair elections. The term "brainwashing" originated in Chinese ("洗脑") and was used without irony by Communist Party of China political cadres in the leadership echelons of the Chinese armed forces fighting in Korea to describe practices of torture to influence the ideology of captured Korean and United Nations P.O.W.s. The current news about the situation in Hong Kong includes the background that people in Hong Kong objected to new textbooks slanted to support the Party as "brainwashing," http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/09/07/hong-kong-education-china.html http://www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2012/09/07/hong-kong-educ... and then a pro-Beijing leader of an NGO said "A brain needs washing if there is a problem, just as clothes need washing if they're dirty and a kidney needs washing if it's sick." That statement by Jiang Yudui, chairman of the China Civic Education Promotion Association of Hong Kong (essentially a CPC front organization) further alarmed residents of Hong Kong. So, no, I respectfully submit that you are comparing apples to stones, and have made an inapt suggestion in the comment to which I first replied here. Again, I base my point of view on this issue on actual overseas residence in the Chinese-speaking world, including time in Hong Kong speaking to people who were born and who grew up there.