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Comment by phoe-krk | Hacker News Reader

> Discrimination against Korean and Chinese nationals in Japan is, sadly, not an isolated phenomenon.

The whole article is based on two premises:

* that the Great Firewall of China blocking all instances of 六四天安門 in website text is expected and normal,

* that leveraging that behavior in any way (see Hyrum's Law) is unexpected and abnormal.

If the government seeks to filter any and all websites containing a given string, why would the Tokyo University be guilty of discrimination just by adding that string to their website? They are not the actor performing the filtering. One can argue it's the government of China discriminating against Chinese people who want to access information abroad in general.

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>If the government seeks to filter any and all websites containing a given string, why would the Tokyo University be guilty of discrimination just by adding that string to their website? They are not the actor performing the filtering. One can argue it's the government of China discriminating against Chinese people who want to access information abroad in general.

Blame isn't a zero sum game. A swatter is just as culpable for someone getting killed/hurt, even if theoretically the actual act was caused by police negligence. Likewise, if the university added the keyword with the intention to dissuade chinese students from applying, they should be raked over the coals for doing so. The fact that actual block was implemented by chinese censors doesn't absolve them of any responsibility.

Yup.

This sort of fallacious thinking happens a lot on the Internet. "X can't be the bad guy because look at what Y did".

One group doing something bad doesn't automatically make the other group innocent.

It's also true that terrible acts by members of a group does not (nesissarely) justify harsh punishment to all members.

> Blame isn't a zero sum game.

That actually is a very good summary of your whole post, and it clarified a little bit for me. Thanks, I'll steal that quote for later.

> Blame isn't a zero sum game.

...agreed...

> A swatter is just as culpable for someone getting killed/hurt, even if theoretically the actual act was caused by police negligence.

...but this is a horrifying and repugnant example. Police violence is not "theoretical", and the critical vulnerability in society which renders an anonymous, unsworn phone call as cover for one person to murder another is bound to be exploited, regardless of we sum the blame.

If we simply disband SWAT teams, there will be nothing to blame so-called "swatters" for because these murders and other acts of terror will be brought to a swift end.

> they should be raked over the coals for doing so

Human rights are not granted for free, they are won and they protected collectively. If malicious actor is deliberately and intentionally undermines human rights they should not not be granted them themselves automatically. If some community works to devolve and degrade education, free speech and other rights for themselves, and then claims they are owed those same rights by the outside groups, they should not be granted them automatically, they should earn them. This should be a collective norm in the developed countries - treat outsiders just like those outsiders want to treat themselves. Instead of appeasing and losing those appeasements time after times. "When will we learn?"(c) Churchill about appeasing dictators

>If malicious actor is deliberately and intentionally undermines human rights they should not not be granted them themselves automatically.

I don't get it. Who's the "malicious actor" here? The chinese? Is your point that because the chinese government doesn't respect human rights, that it's fine to discriminate against chinese students?

Against chinese government censored students. It was a discrimination against all students behind the great firewall. Not all of whom are chinese.

Human rights are called human rights because they are inherently granted by the sole virtue of being a human being. By their very concept, they are unconditional and inalienable. It’s what sets them apart from other rights.

It’s too easy to fabricate criteria why they shouldn’t apply to certain people. The concept of human rights was devised to designate rights whose deprivation should be impossible by definition.

> By their very concept, they are unconditional and inalienable.

That is just the theoretical approach. The fact that someone says that human rights are unconditional and inalienable does not mean that they are so in practice.

It is the execution of those human rights, including prevention, education, and punishment, that makes them seem unconditional and inalienable. How do you execute human rights or facilitate their execution in a situation, where they are neither unconditional nor inalienable in practice?

Having a right and receiving justice are two different things.

The point is that you can’t say that something is a human right and at the same time define conditions upon which they don’t apply to some human(s), which the GP comment tried to do.

I understand the second paragraph, but:

> Having a right and receiving justice are two different things.

That doesn't yet make sense to me. What good is a right if it stays theoretical, without an ability to execute that right in practice?

Or, in other words, if a person has a right but there are no ways to execute that right, how is this situation practically different from that person not having a right at all?

There is no human right to university application ina foreign country

There's a balancing act here. Each individual Chinese citizen is innocent, but their government isn't; how much should each citizen suffer the consequences of their government's actions?

On one hand, it could be argued that they're innocent, and shouldn't be punished. It's not their fault, and they nave no real ability to change their state policies. They're the primary victims, we should be helping them, not hurting them.

On the other hand, any attempt to hold the government accountable for their actions will invariably impact their citizens. Tariffs, sanctions, war, all can punish a populace because of the actions of a corrupt leadership... and yet it can still be just (see the sanctions against Russia, for example). Being too precious about hurting their population just perpetuates the regime.

All very true, but in this case there is no balancing act. Blocking prospective Chinese students from receiving education abroad punishes only the students and also helps the government in perpetuating their censorship, as this student will now never get to enjoy uncensored access to the internet.

The democratic Japanese government could simply ban Chinese admissions as a matter of policy, but there isn't a diplomatic or security justification for doing so. The fact that U Tokyo resorted to a sneaky and underhanded tactic speaks to a bigoted motivation.

> speaks to a bigoted motivation.

There is smoke there so it should be investigated. Alternatively maybe they wanted to admit more Chinese students who normally use or were willing to use proxy serves. Maybe because they think these students would be less effected or boxed in by propaganda, essentially giving more support to those they favor ideologically.

Not clear from the article if this is going to get investigated and cleared up though.

It is discriminatory because someone at the university acted specifically to block Chinese students from accessing the website.

They didn't block anyone. They're making a mockery of Chinese censors. It's a political and satirical act.

They took an action with the intent of making the website inaccessible in China.

It is political, and it is satirical, and it is discrimination. Better to argue that it is righteous discrimination than that there was no discriminatory intent.

Yes, it's the famous satire and political stance that is invisible to people.

(this was satire)

I can't believe the question was even asked.

Maybe they want the Chinese students who are smart enough to open their eyes to the world.

You mean a Chinese student who bypasses government restrictions? Yes, surely such a student will be great at your university and follow all your rules...

You're making a different point than you think...

A student who believes in the freedom of information and is curious probably will do great in school. A great institution understands rules are meant to uplift and protect us, and that a student who sees beyond black ink and chiseled stone for a better tomorrow is the very same breed of rule maker which creates such great institutions in the first place. I know first hand from colleagues, bypassing the censorship is common for intelligent youth in China. We must always ask ourselves what the best is we can do and always avoid the "dangerous slippery slopes"

Japan generally doesn't see rules as meant to uplift people, they are meant to instill discipline.

Look, I'm on HN, I agree with looking beyond rules and freeing information. But universities and institutions generally don't want to be filled with non-conformists

Usually, users are not seeing the keywords. It's hidden from their eyes.

Still racism, even if there is a noble goal behind it. If an university in the US deliberately skipped over black schools when it came to recruitment drives, with the excuse that "they want the black students who are persistent enough", they would (and should) be raked over the coals for racism.

Japan is not US and Chinese are not black. Context is everything.

I'm not even sure what you're arguing for. Are you claiming that "racism" means different things in US compared to china? Or that "context" needs to be considered when determining whether an act is racist?

Yes, I’m arguing that. Japanese racism against Chinese (and vice versa) is very different from white-black in the states.

I fail to see how "context" can materially change whether an act is racist or not. There might be some edge cases around "dog whistles" or whatever, but hard to see how this act isn't an intentional act to dissuade chinese students from applying. That's racism. How does the history between chinese and japenese materially change this?

What if it was a Chinese dissident who is opposed to the censorship and authoritarian behavior of the CCP?

Are there any true Chinese dissidents? I know in the west there is this fantastical view of Chinese struggling against oppression. But in reality I don’t really believe that. Yes, Chinese will look to emigrate outside for better quality of life. It’s not because they’re feeling oppressed at home.

Most Chinese are quite content with the CCP for improving their quality of life in China. Lifting that many people out of poverty in 4 decades is not a simple feat. I’m someone who doesn’t like the CCP. But we have to give credit where credit is due.

Another point - a lot of Chinese students and workers abroad are fair targets by their government to willingly or unwillingly engage in IP theft and industrial espionage.

There are obviously good reasons to doubt the cruder ‘fantastical views’ that circulate in the West, but I cannot see why those reasons would lead one to doubt that there is a single ‘true Chinese dissident’. Am I to believe that every Chinese overseas I have met who freely discussed politics in a régime-sceptical way was paid off by the CIA or just trying to please me? Is every overseas dissident really just an empty NED shell? (I am sure many take money, but that doesn’t mean they also don’t have their own beliefs.) Does survey evidence that most Chinese are satisfied really mean that /all/ are? Are living standards so improved that nobody could possibly oppose the central people’s government? Is 润学 completely fabricated or reducible to economic factors?

"ALL" is subjective. You're never going to find "ALL" American or EU citizens satisfied or "non-dissidential" (if that's a word) to their government. What fraction of 1.2B Chinese are is your statistical threshold?

You're never going to satisfy every humans need. It's impractical. But using that lens on an extremely small set of Chinese citizens to derive a world view based on that assumption is incorrect.

No, ‘all’ is not subjective. My threshold for ‘any’ is one, and threshold for all is, well, all of them. My threshold for a majority is the usual one, as is my threshold for eighty or sixty per cent. I am deriving the worldview that it would be absurd to deny that there is at least one dissident. It doesn’t matter whether I derive this based on an understanding of a sample that is representative of China as a whole so long as it is representative of a subset, since that is such a modest claim.

If you want to make a different point about the majority, or a very big majority, or two people, you should make that point instead. Obviously the Chinese with whom I interact are of a certain class and intellectual formation of which I must remain aware; in particular, the closeness of some to the party breeds a unique type of contempt. That is why I am not trying to generalise; seemingly, you are.

Think again what's happening.

If this whole thing is true then this is not evidence that anyone at Tokyo uni stops Chinese students from applying. But it is evidence that CCP stops them. By not loading Tokyo uni's site.

It is very well known that China blocks access to sites containing that term, there has been overwhelming evidence for many years.

What reason could there conceivably be for including that term into a meta tag of a thematically unrelated website, other than to trigger the well-known blocking of access from China?

The fact that you can eliminate an entire country from the conversation due to their politics, just by including a place name on a website, is *hilarious*. This is something that would be amusing to just do, no matter the target.

To be clear, if you could remove someone's internet connection by emailing them a picture of Winnie the Pooh, that's all every junior would be doing with their free time. It's too stupid of a situation to leave alone.

I'm not about to be burdened by the ramifications of other people living under that much control. Part of being inside a shitty system is that it's going to suck for you.

People were inserting "Ukraine" or "BLM" or whatever on tons of thematically unrelated sites

Some would say not doing something to combat a problem is supporting a problem. Maybe some people think that state-induced amnesia is a problem. "nothing interesting happened in 1989"

> well-known blocking of access from China

it is not well known even for me who been to China a few times that China defeated HTTPS required to read the text of a website to determine whether it contains forbidden terms. I only knew that their censors maintained a blocklist

It's about the intention of who inserted that keyword into the page.

"remembering the victims of Tiananmen massacre" is an intention that has nothing to do with student admissions

Yes, I'm sure the intention was remembering the victims of the Tiananmen massacre when they put it in a non-visible part of the HTML of a student admission webpage.

Yes?

Sure Chinese Japanophiles maybe got in this crossfire but that's life. ordinary Russians like me get affected by sanctions even though we hate Putler and sometimes we get hurt in ways that cannot be worked around by just using VPN. If everything was just business as usual for ordinary people many of them probably would not even think about the war but now it is an issue impossible to hide

And they have every right to discriminate against anybody who isn't Japanese. It is standard procedure everywhere in the world.

You're right that they are not the actor performing the filtering but neither are the students being discriminated against the actors performing the filtering. You spell it out in your post; they are "leveraging that behavior" for the purpose of preventing Chinese applicants. It would be no different than blocking all Chinese IPs if you believe that intent matters.

>why would the Tokyo University be guilty of discrimination just by adding that string to their website?

because we all can put 1 + 1 together and aren't stupid and understand that the intent here is to discriminate against Chinese applicants, secretly at that? The university of Tokyo is a public university, I'm pretty certain like most other universities in the world they have obligated themselves to not discriminate foreign students outside of what the law stipulates.

Or is the intent to resist the authoritarian behaviour of the CCP?

And if that's the case, isn't that a noble goal that all citizens and institutions of democratic societies should strive to do?

If all major websites did this it would severely degrade the ability of the CCP to function and they may be forced to stop denying the atrocities that they've committed.

>Or is the intent to resist the authoritarian behaviour of the CCP?

No, the intent is to discriminate against Chinese people. I've lived and worked in Japan, stereotyping of Chinese and Koreans as the article points out is common. If you wanted to convince young Chinese students of democracy you'd probably take them up on the opportunity to educate and have a dialog with them. That is the liberal democratic way, instead of aiding their government in censoring them.

There's nothing democratic about some random person at a public institution pulling a stunt like this, they have no authority to do so. If they don't like what students are coming to their university, in a democracy they're free to vote for people who want to change that.

Do you think there is ever a role in using an authoritarian's tools like censorship against them? Why or why not?

If so why is this particular instance not a good example of it?

No, I don't believe in using authoritarian tools as a means to an end because that means you've already given up believing in the strength of your own values. At that point you've already accepted the authoritarian's point of view. They justify their measures the exact same way.

And this case in particular, anyone who reduces an 18 year old Chinese kid, who had no choice in what system they grew up in to "the CCP", not even treats them like a real individual, they have a lot of poison in their heart and I think don't care about liberty, or education or democracy as much as the pretend to do.

This is a grossly uncharitable interpretation of my comment.

I specifically mentioned the CCP to distinguish it from Chinese citizens who I consider to be oppressed by the parasitical CCP.

Your position regarding not using the tools of an authoritarian entity against them is untenable. Would you also refuse to use the the mass surveillance apparatus that the CCP has constructed to find weaknesses in their system to exploit with the purpose of bringing out revolution in China?

>Or is the intent to resist the authoritarian behaviour of the CCP?

Given that US sanctions hasn't caused the CCP to change their behavior, I think it's fair to say that the actual impact of the CS department putting an anti-CCP keyword on their home page to be approximately zero.

>If all major websites did this it would severely degrade the ability of the CCP to function and they may be forced to stop denying the atrocities that they've committed.

China blocks major sites like facebook, most western media, and all of google, and they seem to be doing fine. Adding a japanese university to that list, can again be rounded to approximately zero.

I’m also confused because based on that screenshot, the page has HTTPS, which would mean either the block would be client-side, or the entire domain is blocked.

Or that China uses rogue root CA's to MITM their citizens' HTTPS traffic.

Or they scrape sites and block domains that have pages that contain keywords.

Wikipedia says "The National Intelligence Law of the People's Republic of China theoretically allows the Chinese government to request and use the root certificate from any Chinese certificate authority,[60] such as CNNIC, to make MITM attacks with valid certificates." [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Firewall#Active_filterin...]

Keyword is "theoretically". Thanks to certificate transparency, such misissuances would be detected relatively quickly, eg. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42284202. To my knowledge it hasn't actually happened in practice.

Or has a backdoor in all China-built hardware.

Or maybe it's just an selectively enforced ban using on software that doesn't accept their root certificates.

This is the real question. One that I would love to know the answer to.

If it's a Chinese run spider that flags websites that contain banned terms, does this mean that we can effectively block certain websites from China as a form of denial attack?

There are many sites which allow user submissions without a strong administrative overview. E.g. Could Booking.com be blocked to the Chinese audience by a listing including certain keywords on their page or in imagery.

>If it's a Chinese run spider that flags websites that contain banned terms, does this mean that we can effectively block certain websites from China as a form of denial attack?

Yes? That's basically why a bunch of western social media sites are banned in china, because people post subversive content there and the site's administration refuses the government's request to take it down. If you tried it on booking.com or whatever, it won't work, both because your comments will be taken down by site administration for being off topic, but also because the site is big enough that they won't take automated actions (hopefully). At best you can take down small to medium sites that don't have active moderation teams. Moreover, this isn't an attack that's limited to china, it can be used against any sort of content blocking system. Sites have been blocked from google browsers (via google safe browsing) due to malicious UGC, and you can even take down the whole site if you email the abuse department of their hosting provider.

I have deep experience with black listing on the net, and nothing compares to the Chinese censor machine. A comparison with mundane things like malware is dishonest. You should not attribute the great firewall to anything else than the malice it is.

>I have deep experience with black listing on the net, and nothing compares to the Chinese censor machine. A comparison with mundane things like malware is dishonest

The comparison was with how both the chinese censorship system and other blocking systems can be susceptible to the same attack (ie. people posting UGC to get a site banned). At no point did I imply that they were comparable in any other way.

> ...does this mean that we can effectively block certain websites from China as a form of denial attack?

I believe this is known. I have a file saved somewhere with a list of terms that allegedly trigger Chinese blocking.

I won't post it here :) It's pretty useless, in a practical sense. If I say anything the Chinese government wants to block, I'd rather their citizens see it.

Chinese censors use active probing to scrape hosts and block anything with problematic content or services. It's not just DPI based.

No need to bypass HTTPS. Just crawl any server that shows up in the logs and block the domain if it has any blacklisted keywords.

> If the government seeks to filter any and all websites containing a given string, why would the Tokyo University be guilty of discrimination just by adding that string to their website?

They are building on it, and continue the discrimination. And the reason for this is also discrimination in itself. Or is there any other legit reason for adding this specific keyword in an unrelated site?

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