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Posted 10 mins ago and already downvoted. Do HN not have algos to stop this astroturfing behaviour? It’s becoming very prevalent for anything that criticises the CCP.

Yep, every time I post anything that mentions China I lose Karma, but I don't particularly care. Sometimes the comments start with 10+ upvotes and then suddenly a wave of downvotes comes. Most recently some very new accounts with mostly pro china submissions and comments began using my real name and posting it in comments, apparently thinking I would be scared of having my real name associated with anything critical of China.

Karma is just a counter in database. Hong Kongers do not afraid to face a death sentence for opposing the regime. Don't afraid to tell the truth, the worst may happen to you is a couple of downvotes by troll factory workers from Beijing.

Comments about voting are generally off-topic.

Although if you have genuine concerns about astroturfing, I suggest emailing hn@ycombinator.com.

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The paradox there is that ‘it takes one to know one’. Maybe the adage is wrong?

These isn't something vague, we're talking about a specific authoritarian government who's already been caught manipulating social media.

https://about.fb.com/news/2019/08/removing-cib-china/

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We know manipulation is occurring, and to me that's an argument for greater transparency and openness so we can tell when it's happening. I don't agree with the "head in the sand" approach where manipulation is glossed over, ignored or rebranded under terms like "online reputation management".

That being said, the "anyone who disagrees with me is a shill" attitude is just as poisonous to online discussions as the shilling itself.

And tactic #2 I've noticed often used now, when they refer to themselves as "we" or occasionally "we in the west", as if they are westerners being self-critical. Yah, right.

This happens in real life as well. There are propaganda efforts in foreign countries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7tsXtk7psUc

I went to Beijing in 2019 and while I felt the security of subway stations was a bit overdone (metal detectors and bag scanners) I had little trouble buying things: while shops wanted me to pay with wechat they accepted cash all the time.

I also found the security of tiennam square not much different from the eiffel tower (which I didn't enter because the security seems such a hassle at that time). Security of very high profile spots seems to be high in general these days.

Not to deny your experience, I just had a different one. When talking to other travelers, it seems difference in experience happens all the time while traveling.

I've been to the Eiffel tower several times. The security there is not even in the same league as the security as Tiananmen Square.

My experience in tienanmen: Showing my passwort and a bag scanner, going through. Area was limited with small metal fences.

My experience at the eiffel tower: Bag scanner, didn't go through (because I had a huge bag which was not allowed). Area was limited with huge glass panes. (Don't know if they want to see any ID)

So it felt very much the same to me, but the security in Paris was probably not police (I didn't go fully in, so I don't remember).

You just ignored the armored vehicles and police station permanently setup at one end of the square? The facial recognition when you go through the scanners? The guards posted at vantage points with rifles?

You were either paying no attention at all, or you are intentionally misrepresenting the situation.

> The guards posted at vantage points with rifles?

Your other points notwithstanding, rifles aren't particularly special in French policing. Gendarmerie are basically everywhere.

> You just ignored the armored vehicles and police station permanently setup at one end of the square?

Apparently yes, at least I can't find them on my pictures and don't remember them (but that doesn't mean they weren't there, human memories are notoriously unreliable). But I didn't took that many pictures either way, because it was slightly raining and not that interesting, I accidentally went when the forbidden city was closed.

> The facial recognition when you go through the scanners?

I have a hard time telling facial recognition and non facial recognition security cameras apart. They are common in many places of the world, so I stopped noticing them all that much.

>The guards posted at vantage points with rifles?

I mostly remember the honor guards and police at the entry. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were some with rifles somewhere, as those are not that uncommon at high profile places.

> You were either paying no attention at all, or you are intentionally misrepresenting the situation.

I'm sorry you get that impression just because it doesn't fit with your experience. I personally think that both our experiences are likely to be true, but are like snapshots of a given time.

Appreciate your reasonable responses. It's of course possible that they change the security level at times especially if the Forbidden City was closed as you say. It likely also changes around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

Examining my own feelings on this matter further, I think I had a sense that the security at the Eiffel was very focused on keeping weapons and bombs out, while the focus at Tiananmen was more on controlling the crowd and tracking who was there. For example the police station and armored vehicles were inside the square. At the Eiffel the security was outside only.

> Area was limited with huge glass panes

Having lived in Paris for several years, I don't recall ever seeing access to the Eiffel Tower area restricted at all except during restoration construction. It's a giant pass-through surrounded by park where thousands of people congregate daily.

They installed it in 2018 apparently: https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=620268193 wish I could have gone there before.

I was there last July and there were huge plexiglass lanes restricting access. Once I made it through bag checks, I could wait in line to buy passes to climb up.

All previous times (2000, 2005, 2011) I could just walk under without any restriction.

> The entire time I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in a dystopian future [...] they use facial recognition at crosswalks and then put up the name and picture of violators on a huge screen at the intersection

"feeling of a dystopian future"? That sounds straight like from an episode of Black Mirror.

Yeah actually I did get a Black Mirror kind of vibe at certain times for sure.

I regret that I wasn't able to see HK before China got to it. While I hope for the best for Taiwan, it might be one of the places I go next for that reason.

Completely agree. I lived and worked in HK a number of years ago and find China and Chinese people to be some of the most beautiful and interesting cultural assets in the world.

So it sucks that I likely will never visit again in my lifetime. China is already dying, the oppressionist leadership just is self-deluded and doesn’t understand it yet. The further you move away from liberal democracy with deliberately decentralized power, the more isolationist your economy becomes.

On the scale of years, sure you can manipulate markets, send elite spy teams to kill foreign dissidents, pressure other developed economies to buy your exports and respect your authoritarian escalations.

On the scale of decades you can’t. China foolishly underestimates how smart and hard working everyone else is, how easily a generation can be disenfranchised from Chinese exports, and how little of a threat Chinese cyber warfare truly is.

China is just a large, slow North Korea with enough starting capital to superficially appear OK in the short run.

I'm not sure China is underestimating anything. They had an asset, in the form of millions of underqualified workers, and they've used it, to manufacture cheap stuff. But with increasing automation, that asset was never going to last; every passing year it's becoming easier for other countries to replace Chinese manufacturing with local developments, and I think they know it.

In order to stay relevant, China needs a better educated workforce, but in order to control those better educated people, they will need ever better control mechanisms. I doubt they'll be able to make it work in the long run, so they likely will need to change strategies, but right now it makes sense.

I think you misunderstand

> “ but in order to control those better educated people, they will need ever better control mechanisms.”

This is like a building whose own load directly undermines its own stability, or a roller coaster whose own construction dynamics tears itself apart little by little with each run.

Trying to institute mass social control while changing a population to be highly educated knowledge workers is like boiling the ocean.

In some small local patch of time, it looks scary (ooooh social credit system, face recognition everywhere, disappeared artists and journalists, cyber warfare.. spooky)

Zoom out on the scale of 50 years and it’s farcically stupid.

Wanting an enduring human population asset and wanting authoritarian control are fundamentally incompatible desires. At best they can be sustained through force on short time scales, then ending up very very bloody for the leadership involved.

You can be highly educated at engineering and still know nothing about politics or philosophy.

I think the best thing they can do is induce political apathy. Discourage people from trying to get into even the Party apparatus, except as functionaries doing repetitive, menial jobs, and then keep people prosperous so they don't question.

I've certainly known a lot of engineers - Western engineers, even - who didn't care about politics because they simply didn't need to.

I don’t agree. To become highly educated in really any type of knowledge work, it requires a type of intellectual curiosity and openness to the scientific method applied to all possible policy decision making that is incompatible with the generalization you claim, at a fundamental level.

The drives simply can’t coexist in the same mind at the scale of a society. The drive of scientific inquiry required to be literate in almost all knowledge work is an incompatible internal drive against mindless acceptance of authoritarian policy.

I once hoped the same thing for religion.

Unfortunately it's a misleading, nearly ethnocentric belief, like the one where we assumed wealth and prosperity results in democracy.

https://www.economist.com/leaders/2018/03/01/how-the-west-go...

This is hubris. "Our model of society is optimal for scientific progress".

The recent Chinese diaspora are largely aggressively pro-china regardless of whether they are here as students or highly educated workers. Everyone who is not Han-Chinese a laowai, or "foreigner", even in their own country.

China is showing the world an alternative to Western democracy, and they can point to clear failures of democracy with populism, corruption, and white people's ridiculous inability to wear masks ;)

Which model will be more resilient when the sea levels start to rise?

I last visited China a few years ago. I felt a bit sad, because I felt like it was the last time. It was.

I got the same same feeling. They are building a new and technologically "better" Soviet Union, actually implementing a bunch of the ideas from Orwell's '1984' novel about totalitarian communism.

I feel (selfishly) happy that I got to experience Hong Kong a bunch of times while it still existed as free city.