From laboratory in far west, China’s surveillance state spreads quietly

> I agree that AI-powered surveillance is worrying, but it's not going to look like Stalin. It's going to look like something completely different.

China is in the hands of Xi now. So that entirely depends on what he's willing to do to try to retain power, and what he regards as necessary to pursue his vision. Dictators get increasingly paranoid and erratic with time, with few exceptions in the last several hundred years. Erdogan is the latest example of a dictator losing his mind and running a country into the ground to preserve his power and pursue his vision. That's in part because the people get tired of a leader over time, even in the best of circumstances. The only choice to maintain the position Xi has is to crack down more and more on the population, restrict them further and further. Eventually every squeak is perceived as a threat.

The real question is whether Xi leads them back to more Mao-like hyper authoritarian policies, to ensure his dictatorship and his vision for China. I'm skeptical it can end any other way, the path seems to have already been decided. The people that say China is different, are ignoring that this is no longer Deng's China, there has been a fundamental recent change in where they're going. China had to either continue liberalizing, or had to turn back, you can only float inbetween for so long. They chose (both Xi and the party that has handed him the reins).

gait

Pebbles in one or both shoes, plus a thick insole, and some sort of tourniquet on a leg just loose to allow blood to flow will be sufficient to trick these for sometime so long as one can carefully conceal any other uniquely identifying factors.

North Xinjiang is much more Han than south Xinjiang, which is much more Uighur. The cities are obviously more Ham, especially around Urumqi, but even the countryside is more diverse in north Xinjiang with kazaks and Tajiks.

I’m surprised the PLA isn’t being harsher near kashgar, they have more problems there than in Urumqi.

The only demographic I can think of that would dedicate so much time denigrating a country with such force and vitriol are the ex-pats. SV types, though very left leaning, are far too busy.

A common pattern to look for is large blocks of hand-wavy, conjecture-fuelled text with little in the way of facts and substance.

So you're saying things in China are actually pretty good? How about some specifics.

Those are just normal what aboutisms. Either side will feel like they are the underdog anyways, critical-China will complain about too many pro-China posts, pro-China will complain a bit too many anti-china posts. There is still enough of the latter because HN has plenty of Chinese readers and hasn’t been blocked in China (yet).

It seems like any thread about China or Microsoft or xxxxx devolves into a pissing match between A is better than B types.

The good thing? about these posts being so common is it's a HUGE sign that I'm done with the thread and time to go somewhere new.

The bad thing is that sometimes those comment threads do have good information. Such is life I think.

Legal/constitutional is the only difference that really matters. The tech is globally available to anyone. The law determines how it may be used.

Overall I think mass surveillance and other cyber-intrusions into civil liberties can only be realistically solved by legislation. It's far too easy to spy on a people who insist on carrying around little location-aware transponders and posting all their activities to the Internet. It's legislation that limits this, and much more importantly limits what it's legal for the government or private actors to do with this information.

The main difference is cultural in fact. The legal / constitutional aspect entirely derives from cultural underpinnings. If you remove the cultural, you remove all support for the existing constitutional protections and the politicians in DC will promptly begin revoking rights at will. The reason China can't support a rights based Constitution as in eg the US or parts of Europe, is due to the lack of a culture that overwhelmingly believes in the premise. There are pockets of resistance in China, that push back against the tyranny, the problem is that they're modest and fairly easy to contain. If Trump passed an executive order to revoke freedom of speech tomorrow, he'd be impeached by his own party, and there'd be tens of millions of people protesting in the streets across the country. Trump would be lucky if his own military didn't coup him at that point, their first oath is to the Constitution, not the Presidency or a party. That's an intense cultural underpinning, which China is lacking.

To overly simplify it: if you have cultural protections, then the people revolt and get very pissed off, when politicians try to take away rights. The culture is the real shield for a constitution, without which it's just worthless paper that can be shredded. The people have a viseral reaction, it's instantaneous, because the culture is in their blood so to speak. Politicians in the US constantly test that live wire to see what they can get away with. They typically have to be extremely sneaky about what they do, or use emotional events as cover, if they want to take some ground on rights (eg the Patriot Act et al.).

You might be thinking of the border. Within the US, the constitution applies generally to foreigners, IIRC