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Comment by jondubois | Hacker News Reader

The Great Firewall actually makes a lot of sense. Everyone thinks of themselves as being rational and unbiased - But in fact, we are all irrational, biased and at times hypocritical. Those people who think that they are rational and objective are usually the least rational and most hypocritical of all because they lack self-awareness.

As westerners, as much as we like to pretend that we know the whole truth, in reality, what we know is only a biased approximation of it. The west likes to impose their version of the truth on the whole world but China is determined to stick to their version - I don't see anything wrong with that; especially if it works in their favour.

Regardless of how you look at it; the west is aggressive when it comes to spreading its ideals and values. If China wasn't so protecive, they would have become economically dependent on the west (as opposed to being the powerhouse they are today).

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yeah man, good thing china is shielding its people from the history massacre at tiananmen square or the random killing of people who disagree with the government.

and how about even being unable to speak about how much of a womanizer (and thus a hypocrite) mao was because you fear for your life.

how would any of that make china vulnerable economically to the west? i mean they're already doing a good job of that themselves.

imagine if you couldn't make a joke about bill clinton, or had to worry about trump killing you if he was elected president. i would rather china get "influenced" by the west than continue going that route.

edit: how does limiting the information of your citizens allowing them to make rational decisions? it doesn't.

Martin Luther King was also a womanizer, and Western media self-censors that aspect of him. Propaganda and bias happens everywhere.

uhm, no? you are free and open to say MLK was a womanizer. like literally right now you are allowed to post this onto HN with no repercussions to your well being. try printing that mao was a womanizer in a chinese newspaper.

There's a difference between biased reporting and citizens being forbidden from talking about something online.

If you made the same post but about some Chinese politician and in China, you could get in trouble for that.

This is known as the "And you are lynching negroes" argument, from the Soviet rhetorical tactic used to deflect attention from their own human rights abuses without actually having to address them. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_you_are_lynching_Negroes

> If China wasn't so protecive, they would have become economically dependent on the west (as opposed to being the powerhouse they are today).

You're claiming that China's economic growth and independence is because they censor their citizens?

They censor outside influence and ideas that are influenced from the outside. Obviously ideas that infect people within China would be in practice censoring "Chinese" people.

> They censor outside influence and ideas that are influenced from the outside.

Well, no, they censor all ideas that run contrary to the party line, period, regardless of origin. I suppose you could try to claim that no Chinese person could ever independently conceive of an idea that contravenes the will of the Party, so if such ideas occur then they must have been crowbarred into their innocent minds by foreign propagandists, but that would be stupid.

> Obviously ideas that infect people within China would be in practice censoring "Chinese" people.

Huh?

I find the many "the West is a problematic too" responses here a bit troubling.

Not that I don't find the West problematic but the many problems of the West don't actually make China's problems any better and I'm not sure there are many who seem to think they do.

History suggests that China's main problems in the last couple of centuries were Japan and the West themselves. (Not that one can wish others out of existence.) Curtailing the influence of Western ideas makes perfect sense for them.

> History suggests that China's main problems in the last couple of centuries were Japan and the West themselves

Individuals take responsibility for themselves. Countries can too

> Individuals take responsibility for themselves. Countries can too

Sure. Controlling the influence of Western ideas seems to be exactly they way they're doing it. Reasonable IMO.

It is not reasonable to round up protesters and throw them in jail. That's an authoritarian regime who's afraid of its population. At the same time, they ask this population to lead China to greater economic growth. It does not make sense.

That's an entirely separate matter - and kind of off-topic, considering how this thread is about Internet censorship, not treatment of dissenters.

It's totally related. Protesting is speech that is censored when the government throws people in jail.

It has the same effect as internet censorship. People who speak up are prevented from communicating with the rest of society.

China definitely has its problems but my point is that there are problems everywhere and we shouldn't single-out any specific country because we think that their problems are worse than ours (maybe they have the opposite opinion).

The reality is that no one has the moral high ground; we are all competing for resources and relevance and every country is willing to resort to dirty tricks to get ahead.

China has the Great Firewall, the US has the NSA...

One is allowing free information while the other has the great firewall and random arrests for people writing negative comments about the party in power.

Although the US is not as democratic as it should be your comparison is not even laughable.

I find it hard that people can be so misled, or maybe you are just trolling. China has a brutal dictatorship that executes people for trying to get more power and were responsible for the Tiananmen massacre and still will not even admit it happened.

If you think you could live in China and even write anything about the party the way you write about the US government from your comment you are delusional. The US has a very free press and free speech for everyone.

> If you think you could live in China and even write anything about the party the way you write about the US government from your comment you are delusional.

Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression

Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content.

Source: http://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-a...

Yeah. Combine that with the fact that protesters are thrown in jail willy nilly and the above comment still stands

No; we should single them out in this thread. Because this thread is about them.

We talk about the NSA about five times as much as about the Great Firewall. And when we do, it's off-topic to butt in with "but China has TGF!" Just as much, this is not the place to dismiss anything based on the NSA.

This is as literal an example of changing the subject as you can get. A hypocrite isn't wrong. He's just a hypocrite. Everybody is. Can we please move on and actually discuss the subject at hand instead of deflecting?

OP is completely right.

(Btw I thought your gp comment was good, this is just about the "hypocrisy means you can't criticise" part. +1 man!)

> No; we should single them out in this thread. Because this thread is about them.

Amen! In my experience, on articles critical of China, 90% of the comments are deflections about the West. Here's one thread that's easy to count [1]. 9/10 comments talk about how the West does it too

[1] https://archive.is/HnyDk

Here is a general argument for giving more criticism to countries (or, in general, bad actors) who do worse things: It provides a better incentive gradient to avoid doing bad things than complaining equally about all countries that do at least some of a bad thing.

If there is no-one who has the moral high ground isn't a universal and free internet all the more important?

Who is "China" who picks "their" version? The Chinese Communist Party, or the Chinese people?

How would China become dependent on the West if Chinese people had access to non-CommunityParty ideas?

Chinese people would be consuming western media through Facebook, Twitter etc... Through this media, they would be shown advertisements for US companies selling US products.

Soon enough, Chinese people would no longer be content with Chinese-made goods and services from small Chinese suppliers (e.g. through decentralized marketplaces like Alibaba) - Instead they would start buying US goods through centralized marketplaces like Amazon and Apple store - Basically the money would leave China and they would all be worse off on average.

By keeping western media out, they keep Chinese money in. Don't ignore the fact that media is paid for almost entirely by advertising and that advertising is paid for entirely by companies who need to sell products.

> Instead they would start buying US goods through centralized marketplaces like Amazon and Apple store

Both totally available in China already via their local forms (store.apple.cn and amazon.cn). My wife orders from Amazon a lot.

Letting the Chinese people choose what the Chinese people want is what's right for the Chinese people. If they are advertised US products and Chinese products, and they purchase US products, so be it. It happens in the other direction all the time, and it funds China from the west.

Economics aside though, there are enormously dangerous consequences to controlling the exchange of information.

>Soon enough, Chinese people would no longer be content with Chinese-made goods and services from small Chinese suppliers

Seeing China's nouveau riche and the general demand for western luxury goods, and hell even Buicks, you don't know what you're talking about.

Instead they would start buying US goods through centralized marketplaces like Amazon and Apple store

What "US good" - all that stuff is made in China to begin with! Well, OK, not literally everything, but as interconnected as the global economy is, what you are proposing strikes me as pretty much nonsensical. China won't benefit from "protecting" itself from trading with the West.

> The Great Firewall actually makes a lot of sense

To whom? Isolation won't do any good in the long run.

20 years seems like a good run so far.

GFW project was started around 2004, and google was blocked years later. Let's see how it will turn out in 2024.

> [...] we know the whole truth, in reality, what we know is only a biased approximation of it.

well.. clearly, censorship is the answer, then.

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