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Comment by rms | Hacker News Reader

>Do they really expect to be able to keep a lid on political speech within their country long-term?

No, but they expect to be able to do it in the short term. I think at this point they are just hoping to delay a more open internet for five or seven years -- much beyond that begins to seem laughable.

I suspect the leaders of China understand better than we do just how tenuous their control is, and I think their fear of free political speech is legitimate. A protest in Tiananmen Square once almost brought down the government, and I don't think the CCP could withstand another protest of that magnitude, though of course less-lethal crowd dispersal technology has come a long way.

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This is going to sound tin-foil-hattish of me, but...

Maybe they think they don't need a long-term strategy. They only need to hold out short-term, until western governments take care of the problem for them.

With all the nonsense going on over kiddie pr0n, copyright infringement, etc., we are hearing a lot of scare stuff that would require even the "free world" to implement the kind of controlled infrastructure that China would love.

I think the CCP is very long-term oriented.

The majority of their policies I think would support this. If anything, the CCP is willing to give short-term concessions if it will guarantee long-term success.

This is not so-much the case now as China has more to bring to the bargaining table. But if you look at China's trade policies in the 80s and 90s they were very accommodating to western demands, even if it put China in a weaker position.

I've bounced some of this stuff off of Chinese friends, and the results have been ... unexpected. The surprising thing was that the overwhelming majority of them thought that China needed an iron fist controlling the country. The folks I bounced this off of included people from Hong Kong, whom I would have expected to be very western-calibrated.

I won't pretend to have a grasp of Chinese culture, but what this indicated to me is that there's a value gap between Chinese and western expectations and that our framing for these issues in China may be western naïveté. If what deeply offends our sensibilities does not offend the Chinese, it would also seem to indicate that our forecasts for the direction of progress may be way off.

This is pretty common for people living under some sort of dictatorship. They rationalize and justify the status quo. All the propaganda reinforces this effect.

I think that they are even more subtle in their ideas.

They know they can't control 100% over speech, nevermind information. They can have some control, say 60%. They are concerned with yielding that 60% effectively enough that the 40% doesn't matter. Maybe in the future they'll have 40%, they'll deal with that too.

The Google thing was very instructive. Control was far from 100% but newspapers and Chinese sites were highly controlled. Many foreign sources, for the more skeptically inclined, were blocked, but many weren't. They selectively let in more misquotes of Google employees making absurd sounding claims. As always, the truly motivated could get to whatever news sources they wanted.

The upshot is that they can control the story and public perception without preventing facts from penetrating.

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