829 karma · joined April 10, 2015
That said, here's another perspective on China's recent rise, translated from Chinese:
> The argument is simple: when China joined the world economy in the reform and opening era, capital flocked to China to take advantage of low-wage labor and what Qin calls China’s “low human rights advantage,” i.e., the state’s commitment to development at any cost (land-confiscation, suppression of workers’ rights, exploitation of migrant workers, etc.). Over time, China became the “world’s factory,” producing quality goods at low prices, at the expense of jobs and tax revenues in the developed world previously inhabited by the capital that had now fled to China. Despite a surplus of capital and increasingly frequent labor shortages, the naked power of the Chinese state keeps the machine running, lending the profits back to the developed economies so that the “exchange” can continue. Such debts only intensify the crisis of the developed world, as governments are already attempting to supply more “welfare” to increasing numbers of unemployed despite a fall in tax revenues.
These sites are also saying it's blocked: https://viewdns.info/chinesefirewall/?domain=news.ycombinato... http://www.chinafirewalltest.com/?siteurl=news.ycombinator.c...
I know it's popular to be critical of America, and it's good to shine light on the darkest parts of America, but there is no comparison between it and what goes on in other parts of the world.
> I’m in Laos, a close ally of China, & whenever I “Like” a post on @instagram related to Tiananmen Square it comes up with a message saying “Action Blocked”. When I switch on my VPN it allow me to “Like” the images. I wonder if China provides internet infrastructure to Laos.
https://twitter.com/robert_spalding/status/11346006020953702...
Democracy was also one of the major themes of the May Fourth Movement of 1919. In these decades, China was busy importing Western ideas because they believed that was the key to rejuvenate China.
The Communist Party eventually won power in China, but it was only following the Korean War that all hope was lost that China could transition to a democracy.
Still, the spectre of democracy remains. The Chinese Communist Party still talks about democracy positively sometimes and the Chinese constitution describes China as a democracy. They do this partly by ignoring what democracy means (the constitution also guarantees "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration"), and partly by redefining what democracy means. It's Western-style democracy that the CCP treats as an unambiguously bad and dangerous idea.
What if people started creating repositories with nothing but information about topics that the Chinese government considers sensitive (like the Tiananmen Square massacre or other human rights abuses)?
1) "Political correctness" has always meant "excessive language policing from the left" rather than anything more concrete—it was a pejorative term even before it was introduced to the general public in 1990 on the pages of the New York Times—so it's no surprise that it has a bad reputation.
2) It's kind of ironic to use a research paper by a group called More In Common, who seek to counteract polarisation, to slam a particular political group.
The chips on Elemental servers were designed to be as inconspicuous as possible, according to one person who saw a detailed report prepared for Amazon by its third-party security contractor, as well as a second person who saw digital photos and X-ray images of the chips incorporated into a later report prepared by Amazon’s security team. Gray or off-white in color, they looked more like signal conditioning couplers, another common motherboard component, than microchips, and so they were unlikely to be detectable without specialized equipment.
But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device’s operating system to accept this new code. The illicit chips could do all this because they were connected to the baseboard management controller, a kind of superchip that administrators use to remotely log in to problematic servers, giving them access to the most sensitive code even on machines that have crashed or are turned off.
To me, that makes it sound like they could download from a remote host and inject code and do literally anything.
And don't forget that this lack of knowledge about the true state surely contributed to the famines that killed tens of millions of Chinese during the Great Leap Forward. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Chinese_Famine
Lavee describes how his attitude changed dramatically when a patient told him he was travelling to China for a scheduled heart transplant. This idea was shocking to Lavee, because the circumstances of death that allow heart donation cannot be predicted.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4919373/
The CCP claimed that they stopped using organs forcibly taken from prisoners in 2015, but not everybody is convinced by that claim.
Overall, they are treated as inhuman. There's also the photo on the Wikipedia page for cattle prods: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_prod
Some of my libertarian tech friends like the idea of more encryption and decentralisation to resist what they perceive as increasingly oppressive governments, but I'm confident that this tech-first approach can never work. A truly oppressive government can easily outlaw these things and identify the users, and they'll be the first to disappear.
Consider also the bigger picture. There is no rule of law in China. That guy who is being forced to install spyware on his phone is probably in Xinjiang, where hundreds of thousands (and maybe over a million) people have been detained without charge and on no legal basis. Conviction rates are extremely high because trials aren't fair. Lawyers and activists disappear. Torture and forced confessions are common.
https://www.asiasentinel.com/politics/plagiarism-and-xi-jinp...
Also, that professor mentioned, Xu Zhangrun, has apparently been forced to return to China. I don't envy him, but I'm sure he knew what he was getting into. These dissidents seem to have a surprising high ability to accept their fates. Not the same guy, but an interesting read: https://chinachange.org/2018/09/16/four-years-afar/
Nobody knows anything about China. https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/21/nobody-knows-anything-a...
You can tell from the percentage of the labour force who worked on farms that most people couldn't have been wealthy, and the industrial revolution changed everything.
Terra Australis (Latin for South Land) is a hypothetical continent first posited in antiquity and which appeared on maps between the 15th and 18th centuries. The existence of Terra Australis was not based on any survey or direct observation, but rather on the idea that continental land in the Northern Hemisphere should be balanced by land in the south. This theory of balancing land has been documented as early as the 5th century on maps by Macrobius, who uses the term Australis on his maps.
In the early 1800s, British explorer Matthew Flinders popularized the naming of Australia after Terra Australis, giving his rationale that there was "no probability" of finding any significant land mass anywhere more south than Australia. The continent that would come to be named Antarctica would be explored decades after Flinders' 1814 book on Australia, which he had titled A Voyage to Terra Australis, and after his naming switch had gained popularity.
Edit: I guess people aren't interested. My bad.
There are so many things wrong with China and the world today, there is simply no reason to make things up, and much of what is in this piece is wild speculation or outright fabrication, belittling the real struggles of some featured in it.
More: https://www.chinalawtranslate.com/seeing-chinese-social-cred...