Comment by themeek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by themeek | Hacker News Reader

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I don't have time for anything comprehensive, but if you feel like doing your own research look into:

- NGOs and CSOs the US has in China and their support of Civil Society; Civil Society is a comprehensive word that means signon to US standards, expectations, culture, economic norms, etc

- Source code (hosted on GitHub) that supports civil dissidents and websites (greatfirewall) that align with US narrative work that have US support or funding

- DoD MINERVA's study of housing crises in China and the possibility to use home ownership (surveillance of) for prediction or (propaganda of) nudging into unrest

- Broadcasting by the Board of Broadcasting Governors, such as VOA into China

- Anything you can find via FOIA requests from the Bureau of International Information Programs (this was born to take up responsibilities formerly in charge of by the late USIA)

If you want to get hypothetical there are number of suspicious events and coincidences - but these have no definitive link (smoking gun) pointing to the United States so they are excluded here.

It's important to note that NGOs do not mean that they are not related to government or the USG's national security objectives. ZunZuneo for example was set up through a series of NGOs that were ultimately CIA fronts.

This is very interesting, do you have any sources of information where I can read up about this? Even a general site where information like this is curated.

Alas I do not know of a general site where information like this is curated. Cryptome sometimes posts similar information. Wikileaks, too. Following a variety of journalistic outfits with integrity (get to know the individual journalists - do not follow 'brands') helps (I do not feel comfortable sharing my personal list here). Reading reports from Washington Thinktanks, especially in the national defense arena is very helpful as they speak sometimes very plainly about the US strategic purposes of things that otherwise seem very odd. It's also really useful to have the patience to trawl through boring documents for key terminology and to use search engines to be your own poor man's investigative journalist.

There are people who spend 100% of their time focused on any particular country or issue you are interested in. Find professors of foreign policy or cultural studies and security advisors for the country or area. There are similarly task forces that try to provide insight into the whatever issue - many of these are public.

The short answer here is that no, there isn't any easy place. But the great thing is that, if you care enough about it, some reasonable representation of 'what's going on' is available to you.

http://www.voltairenet.org/en is a good site with many essays on these themes.

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