Hacker News Reader

Comment by vpalan2 | Hacker News Reader

If I wanted to do massive, irreparable harm to China, this is the law I would pass. And yet, they have done this willingly to themselves, without hesitation or incident.

View on HN

Can you explain to me why (like I'm 5 :D)

EDIT: Context for my question is that of rule of law and how much can get away without actually having an effect at the top.

Here's how I would explain it to a 5-year-old - when you make laws like this, you make everyone else not want to do business with you. This means that you only get to business with people in your own country. 7 billion people with ideas is going to be much better than just one billion people with ideas. The 7 billion people have more money, more ideas, and more people to make cool things, and you're stuck with your one billion people. You will be left behind.

well, with this law, you got stability and can focus on things important. With 1 billion well educated ppl, I am not too worried about shortage of talent.

But with stability, you also get stagnation. The State being able to crush upstarts to protect their own interests means a lot of those 1 billion people won't challenge the powers that be.

1 billion is a massively variable population in it self.

You might get stability. But if the population is already disillusioned with you, you might get less stability. The way I understand it, many people already don't believe what the government says; what happens if you have a large population of people who assume the government is not tell the truth whenever it opens its mouth? Whatever it is, I don't think it is stability.

I have heard it said that people don't need to get their way, but they do need to feel heard. The more you can't express yourself, the more things can get out of control quickly when an opportunity finally arises to vent.

A laser gets its coherence from the atoms being in an inverted population: they are all excited, so when one drops down and releases a photon, that photon triggers a chain reaction of all the other atoms to release theirs. I worry that this is what will end up happening. Someday, something will happen and maybe the censors are a little behind or something, like the high speed rail crash near Shanghai, and it triggers everyone's pent-up disillusionment and feeling unable to change anything. I don't think this would be a happy time for anyone, and, ironically, is just the sort of thing that the control is intended to prevent.

I hope the government reconsiders this idea.

> I have heard it said that people don't need to get their way, but they do need to feel heard.

But this is in itself an illusion no? It's equivalent to not being heard anyway, just that you could be heard.

Now that I think about, yes I agree that's how I would prefer to feel.

But this sort of "stability" without massively greater levels of repression† is only metastable, it sets the rulers up for things like preference cascades, such as the one that sparked the "Arab Spring". The PRC's nomenklatura ought to be worried about this recent example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceau%C8%99escu%27s_final_speec... 4 days later he and his wife were summarily executed (and large numbers of public/publicized executions remain a tool of control for the PRC's nomenklatura).

†In the context of the PRC, say a return to ration coupons being required to buy food, this allowed your local block or village committee to trivially starve you to death if you get on their wrong side. My 1988 roommates, straight from the PRC to the US for grad school, told me the development of an open market for food was the single greatest change on the ground, getting on the committee's wrong side "only" increased your cost of food.

please don't educate me on China. I was born there and much older than your 1988 roommates. China is not perfect, but it's way better than what western media depicts. On the other hand, you have to be political correct in every country, even in US ...

Care to show how western media depicts China? Do you want to bet that for every negative article you cite, I can find a positive one?

I was in China last week. Major Western news sources such as NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, BBC are all blocked as far as I can tell. So Chinese audience is deprived of major alternative sources, political correct or not.

Also, not sure how your age is relevant?

I feel like we don't really place any emphasis on the pragmatics of seven billion people having ideas. In reality you probably have a million truly unique ideas that should be explored. People don't really read much anyway and don't think for themselves as much as I like them to. Then there's also cultural bias and societal bias and of course all the many levels of peer pressure.

The fact that people feel good wearing "good" clothes is telling, no? Unless I'm missing something there's no real reason to wear "good" clothes and feel good about it.

Ask an adult to read this book to you: http://www.george-orwell.org/1984

If no adults are around, watch this movie: http://www.ebaumsworld.com/video/watch/81753727/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com