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Comment by DiogenesKynikos | Hacker News Reader

It's not difficult to visit China (except that you'll probably have to apply for a visa, but Chinese people have to do that to visit Western countries too).

You won't experience much about the government while there. Police aren't really that present in public. Border control is like any other country. The only issue you're likely to run into is the Great Firewall, for which you can just install a VPN before arriving in country.

Many Westerners experience a sort of shock when they first visit China, because the dystopia they're expecting to see never materializes.

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Very much this. The only area where I felt uncomfortable was in Xinjiang, as two friends in that region have effectively been “disappeared”. While I am skeptical of much of what has been written on this topic, due to its obvious use as propaganda, many of the tours I had there reminded me of those in DPRK. There was an obvious level of orchestration designed to show you a face of Xinjiang which lacked any warts.

When were you there? Did you choose to have a tour instead of freely traveling on your own, or was it not a deliberately choice?

This was right before COVID. I was there as part of an economic cooperation summit, so the tours were part and parcel of that event. I am supposed to visit again later this year.

So presumably you can wander out into town in the evening after work? Maybe you should try doing that next time.

Even bog standard tourist bus trips in literally every country have obvious levels of orchestration designed to show you a face of that region which lacked any warts.

I did visit parts of the area on my own. My issue was with the discordance between what the Chinese press and my more militant Chinese friends say and what I saw in the totality of my time there. I had no less than 6 seemingly non-extremist Uighurs express their desire to live in the states for religious freedom reasons.

I still can't forget how the immigration tried to disassemble my camera lens in Shanghai (not just remove them from the camera, but also tear them down), so visiting China might lead to some unexpected bad impressions. Also being barely able to see sun in Beijing due to fog/smog everywhere when arriving from pristine New Zealand looked very unwelcoming.

American police are actually much more scary tbh. Physically, many Chinese cops are fairly scrawny and usually don’t carry guns, maybe just handcuffs and a baton. Their main weapon is their body camera. Sometimes they do carry guns but it’s not the norm imo.

I will add one more aspect is the almost complete absence of traffic cops. A lot of the most dangerous situations with cops in the US have been at traffic stops. But in China there are cameras that send out tickets automatically. I’m sure there are due process concerns with that implementation, but there is also a zero percent chance you will be killed by police at a traffic stop.

Every cop I saw in Guangzhou had at least an old makarov in an aging holster, except the metro police.

Are "many Westerners" really expecting China to be a dystopia? I'm a westerner and my impression of the Soviet Union (and now Russia) was intuitively dire (probably exaggerated compared to reality) but my intuitive expectations of China isn't really.

I feel like "westerners" today treat China like they used to treat Japan in the 70s/80s, not like they used to treat the Soviet Union. There's plenty of positive reporting about how things "just work" in China compared to the west (especially constructing infrastructure) and strong economy development.

If you bring your own cell data plan you won't even need to futz with VPN. Cell data tunnels back to the carrier and the Great Firewall doesn't block anything.

The dystopia is right in your face. VPNs don’t work well and with them turned off there is a ton of stuff you can’t access.

You may be surprised to find out that outside of HN, not many people use Internet freedom as a prime measurement of dystopia.

As a techie I am personally also very annoyed at the lack of Internet freedom. But as a Chinese I also recognize that there are many more aspects in life and society that are more important than Internet freedom, and that China scores pretty high at (especially in historic context).

Like the right to protest?

Well people protested against 0-covid during a time that the media reported as "Xi wants to maintain 0-covid forever because he wants more control". Mere days later, 0-covid was lifted. Sounds like a prime example of "the expected dystopia never materializes" to me.

Uhm, people were protesting 0-covid in China for almost a year before Xi lifted it. It wasn't like there was a protest, and Xi lifted it right away. It took the CPC sometime to figure out they were doing the wrong strategy.

I'm sure people that protested were taken care of. Like the one that just got out of jail after 3 years (he reported the spread in Wuhan).

BTW. How is Wikipedia looking from China, blank spots?

When you dismissively say “internet freedom”, what you really mean is “free expression”, “freedom of association”, “right to peaceably assembly”, and “right to petition your government for a redress of grievances”.

Even this photo is still censored: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tank_Man

I'll give you something much simpler than all of those things: having enough food, having housing that doesn't leak, having running water, having electricity, having access to schooling, having toilets, not having nearly every street in the city be a dirty mud pool full of trash, having safe streets mostly devoid of violent crimes.

None of those things were a given when I grew up. Those things ard still not a given in many countries in which the west tried to forcefully introduce western liberal democracy, where they all focus on things like "freedom of association" at the expense of freedom from poverty.

When you are poor, you are not free, no matter how much you can voice your opinion.

I am sorry but seeing my parents and grandparents working their asses off in a society where your next meal is not guaranteed, lifting 800M people out of poverty, seeing my hometown stop being a trashy mudpool and seeing the elimination of child abductions, count for much more to me than any amount of VPN annoyance. In the grand scheme of things, these are still literally the best 30 years out of 3000 years.

Why are you pretending these things are mutually exclusive?

You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.

Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism. We’re discussing basic human rights, not “VPN annoyance”.

If you truly want to know what I think and why I think it, feel free to email me and take this discussion off HN. You can find my contact through my profile.

If you can’t make the case for China’s authoritarian capitalism here, I don’t see how picking it up over e-mail is going to help.

It’s also counterproductive to take the debate offline, as further discussion would be for the benefit of anyone else that might read this thread. I’ll never agree that lifting people out of poverty requires authoritarian control over the populace.

It's not necessarily that it requires authoritarian rule, but rather that if you grew up in a rich country, you have a very different view on what is important.

Internet censorship generally ranks very low on your list of concerns if you're struggling to put food on the table. People in China have seen a complete transformation of their lives for the better, in just a few decades. They've gone from bicycles to electric cars, from not having reliable electricity to paying for everything with 5G-connected smartphones. From the point of view of how people live their everyday lives, things are better than ever.

Issues like censorship will become more important over time, but right now, they're still secondary. There are other issues at play as well, such as the legitimacy the Party still enjoys from the revolution and from its management of the economic boom of the last few decades, and people's fear of the sort of chaos that consumed China for much of its modern history.

It's not a case of not having arguments. HN moderators told me not to talk too much about China on HN. It's just me following the rules.

> You can, in fact, lift a country out of poverty without also inflicting an authoritarian state on the populace.

> Half the world managed it — you’re just making excuses for authoritarianism.

You mean the half of the world that enriched itself by inflicting "authoritarianism" on other populations - or indeed, their own populations too - unless you don't consider the treatment of Black and Native people in the US to be authoritarianism, or the Irish in the UK, etc etc?

...said the Russians. Until they got drafted into an illegal war...

I am not Russian and China is not Russia

What protections does China have from an abusive government that Russia didn’t?

My stron belief is that freedom of speech (free internet) together with democratic elections are the only things that combined can prevent the government from coming up with their own rules when it so suits them.

And when they eventually do, you will have nothing to say about it

Just like the russians today.

They too have a rich culture of writers, poets and composers that they should have the right to be proud of.

Said the Americans. Until they got drafted into an illegal war in Vietnam or were given no other chance to earn a living than getting paid to kill in illegal wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And let’s not even talking about all the coups the State Department and the CIA nurtured across countless countries

And here you are. With the possibility, and legal permission, to say just that.

Good that you are.

Just because I pose no real threat to the system and by being allowed to ineffectively ranting I help to build the illusion of freedom. Now, try being Chelsea Manning and watch in awe the speed of the boot coming into your face the minute you really threaten the system.

Is it allowed for foreigners to travel to where the forced labor re-education camps are? I’d assumed it was not.

> XINJIANG, China (AP) — The razor wire that once ringed public buildings in China’s far northwestern Xinjiang region is nearly all gone.

https://apnews.com/article/coronavirus-pandemic-lifestyle-ch...

To the extent you are all you'll see is buildings. This illustrates the limits of using personal observation to learn things if you aren't an expert.

A lot of the forced labor involves people involuntarily working alongside voluntary workers at ordinary factories. As a foreigner you won't see anything notable there.

If you ask Chinese people outside of China, they also really don't care. They know what happened, its like the Kent State shooting for them.

The west severely exaggerates every bad thing that happens over there then pretends like every misstep is solved with execution. Sure there's censorship but its exaggerated to a level of fiction in the west, like a movie that's "based on real events".

More than likely if you ask a Chinese person in China about Tiananmen, they'll see you like one of those Nazi streamers who call girls whores in public. Just a weird edgelord looking to stir up trouble.

No, I mean the person I had in mind knew full well about it. Just thought of it as something that was bad, but not an indictment of an illegitimate state like people talk about it.

Most people know what happened, but nobody refers to Tiananmen Square because 1) that's a pretty notable place on its own and 2) the protests were a nationwide movement, of which international journalists only ever saw any of it in Beijing. Akin to calling the January 6 protests the Capitol Hill protests. You'd call the Tiananmen Square protests June 4, or if you're being rather cheeky, May 35.

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