I work in Chinese publishing, and the same thing is absolutely happening there. Books are being pulled off the shelves, publishers are being warned away from anything potentially controversial. The basic attitude is, "Don't risk it", and it's absolutely deadly to creativity and culture. On the one hand, the central government is trying to encourage Chinese culture to "Go Out" and wow the world. On the other, it is absolutely strangling the country's cultural creators.
This is very concerning. I'm curious how all this is delivered as far as the actions of officials to enact this behavior in general populace. How exactly do they pull it off? Are there new strategies employed or do they leverage years of chilling requests and punishments for people to generally know better not to cross the government? Do people personally know political prisoners and what not or see punished individuals paraded on TV and what not? Thanks for sharing.
The framework of control has been in place for a long time, it's just that they've been tightening down the (already-in-place) screws over the past couple of years.
The basic mechanism is control of ISBNs: the supply of these numbers is tightly restricted, and a book cannot be published without them. A fixed number of state-owned publishers is able to issue ISBNs, though privately-owned publishing companies can buy the numbers or work with a state-owned house to publish their books.
An ISBN acts as a chain-of-custody token for the publication of books. While some books are subject to approval before publication, the vast majority are not, and publication is done at the publisher's discretion. Should a book cause problems after publication, however, the consequences are catastrophic. The ISBN (and a "responsible editor" whose name appears on the copyright page of the book) allows the government to track down everyone who was involved in the production of the book, and squash them. People lose their jobs, in some cases publishing companies are suspended or dissolved outright.
It's a system carefully designed to make writers and publishers more cautious than they would actually need to be.
Publishing, while highly controlled by the government, isn't really an area where people end up in prison, or you see televised trials. The worst that usually happens is the ruining of a career, or in extreme cases the dissolution of a company (in journalism, by contrast, people get put in jail, or disappear). I've written about this distinction before[1], which I think is lost on most international observers.
Well, I feel for any form of censorship, the essence is to disrupt the communication among the people in the society. The goal of this disruption is to prevent a formation of synchronization in the population. It could be carried out on all kinds of communication media and for all their different stages.
A system of censorship could be much easily implemented when one has the visibility over the entire society and the access to all its social resources. Before the age of internet, their focus was on book/newspaper publishing; and in our current age of internet, the focus was on internet as well as book/newspaper publishing.
And in terms of their practical methods, you can just imagine what you would do when you want to disrupt the information flow and when you have the absolute control of every sub-system in a society (i.e. the courts, the police, all the newspapers/websites/tv channels/radio stations, as well as the ability of not needing to worry about your livelihood when you do not work on anything else...)
It's almost an impregnable castle, as long as it does not crumble from inside the ruling system itself...
One of the most well-known political prisoners in the country is Xiaobo Liu, who was awarded a Nobel Peace prize in 2010. He has been a long time dissident there. He participated in the Tiananmen Square protest in 1989 and led the drafting of the Charter 08 (in brief, one can think of Charter 08 as some document in a similar strain as Magna
Carta to early Britain -- but of course, this document was easily ignored by the Chinese government...)
Xiaobo Liu has been sent to jail for multiple times in the past 30 years, and was just released on a medical parole from his latest imprisonment -- as a result of being diagnosed with terminal liver cancer -- 10 days ago.
> Trump said that many companies were "getting away with murder" and that there would be more competitive bidding practices for federal contracts in his administration.
> Dow component Pfizer's (PFE) stock fell more than 2% immediately after the comments.
> Mylan (MYL), which has already come under Congressional scrutiny for dramatic price hikes of its life-saving allergy medication EpiPen, fell 3.5%, and Bristol-Myers Squibb dived 4%.
> Allergan (AGN) and Valeant (VRX), two other biotechs that have been criticized for raising drug prices, also fell more than 3%. And the iShares Nasdaq Biotechnology ETF (IBB), which owns many of these companies, fell 3% too.
That's just the first hit for "stock prices fell after criticism". There's plenty of that, and four percent are nothing. What's so chilling? That 4 percent of anything can mean billions of dollars? The mechanism of stock markets? That social media and "traditional media" have this reach and effect just by things being said? That the gaming industry became this huge and heartless after such short time, and how some in it would LOVE to be able to "capture" audiences like the pharma industry can? None of these things? Or really just mostly the Chinese Communist Party, the one thing most of us have no say and no responsibility in, rather than those aspects of this which we share in every day?
And what comes after chilling? Freezing? Is it really "gross" to merely call this chilling? What would be neither an under- nor an overstatement?
To say they lost $14b is not even remotely true. Their stock dropped $14b in market cap. they are certainly making money on the game, not losing money.
Probably not Xi's problem but China will lag economically and creatively because of this restriction. It's just ceding the entertainment initiative to other creators, outside of China. Even if they ban all creative content from outside China, don't they know that a terabyte HDD can hold enough movies to last for a year, and be copied easily?
That was a totally different China. Since then there was the communist cultural revolution and then "capitalism with Chinese characteristics" which is where China is currently.
Given the ever increasing amount of garbage on the Western internet being pumped into peoples minds 24*7 I find it incredulous that people believe the western internet is an healthy environment that fosters creativity. People including the best in society seem to be spending much more of their time reacting to information overloading their minds. At least the Chinese are doing something about it. The west has it head deep in the sand.
Well, it certainly seems to be working, as most western countries seem to be coming apart at the seams, China continues its breathtaking transformation.
Don't mistake a curated highlight reel for ground truth.
I used to live in China when I was a kid. There are vast aspects both wonderful and terrible that never seem to make themselves known in the Western world. China has tremendous potential. It also has deep, systemic problems with no easy solution (or even a solution at all) in sight.
No. Amplified. The problems we're having in the West, even today, are a hangnail compared to the societal-structural issues currently facing mainland China.
Can you give any examples? Undoubtedly there are still numerous problems, but is it not just that they can't fix the entire country simultaneously, and some areas just have to wait their turn?
One of the biggest (possibly THE biggest) economic issue facing China in the near future is a demographic crisis resulting from the One Child Policy. A large part of China's economic growth has been the result of the growth of its workforce. Historically, Mao believed "people are power" and encouraged high birth rates--leading to China's gigantic present-day population. This has worked out great in making China an attractive place to manufacture.
As a reaction to the population explosion though, the CCP imposed the One Child Policy in 1980 (1979?). Consequently, China will now start to face the aging and shrinking workforce problem that has slowed Western economies in recent years--except China's version of the problem will be MUCH worse due to the extreme nature of its fertility swings. In fact, I believe the size of China's labor force hit its peak a few years ago.
In addition to the shrinking workforce, a historically rapidly aging society will have to face an explosion in healthcare costs... which tend to be a drag on the economy (though are obviously necessary). Furthermore, China doesn't have the retirement home infrastructure that the West has, which will absolutely need to expand as China has a huge retiring population who have few children compared to the rest of the world.
Is it not true though that a massive portion of the country remains unindustrialized, so even if on a percentage basis the population is aging, in absolute numbers there will still be plenty of young people from the farms that could take the place of the current manufacturing workforce?
It is not. It is also a matter of education: many of the rural poor would simply not be able to take over non-manual-labor jobs. The severe sex ratio imbalance that resulted from the OCP has also had significant, negative effects on relationships in general.
Rich poor divide. Transportation. Pollution. Environment. Ethnic separatism/unrest. Energy. Public Health. Rights of criminally accused. And a not quite as well refined legal system...for instance I was reading about how drivers who accidentally hit a pedestrian are actually incentivise to backup to make sure to kill the pedestrians. And the social acceptance and ability to talk freely about social issues in public forums.
Maybe it's just a difference in perspective, but I see all these problems and I think, wow, China has come so far DESPITE all these issues, yet there is so much more low hanging fruit to be picked and so much more potential to be obtained. All these problems seem incredibly manageable, and many are being fixed rapidly, and with their resolution growth will speed up even faster.
The question is not how far China has come in recent decades, it is what is going to happen in the future. You seem to be taking the position that it is absolutely impossible that China will get in serious trouble and wind up going backwards.
Why would it? Aside from a black swan like a war or a super disease or something. The common list of problems I see are all problems that China always had and like I said, still grew despite those problems. Every single problem I see is becoming less problematic and any tiny bit of progress on them are tailwinds for growth.
The 'Great Leap Forward' killed more people than the entire population of Canada. And that was only a handful of decades ago. The party that did so maintains an iron grasp on power, and corruption at all levels is rampant.
There are many, many Chinese who are working very hard for the betterment of their country, and there are many, many wonderful things about China. But it is virtually impossible to overestimate the difficulties they are going to be facing in the coming years. Their economic success, by becoming the manufacturing powerhouse of the world, has come at tremendous cost, and is not maintainable in the long term. We live in interesting times.
Emergentorder's list is a fine start. I didn't see a need to repeat. :)
I recommend watching a few more of the video series that I linked earlier, as well. I've watched several of them since I last posted in this thread, and (for what it's worth) I find his observations accurate and fair, both the good and the bad.
I don't disagree with that. But I do think the lack of free speech/press/elections is a basic foundational problem which will hamper progress on the rest of these problems.
It probably does hamper progress, but China never had free speech since the cultural revolution so it's not like things can get worse, the free speech situation is still much improved from the 70s and the 90s (the 80s were a rare period of relatively free speech). So any political changes will be yet another turbo boost on the economy.
Lack of free speech brings certain risks, but I don't see any reason that it must necessarily hamper progress. In fact, by simple observation of earth for the last 30 years one could easily come to the opposite conclusion.
Speaking as someone who lived in China for many years: one of the biggest culture-shock differences Westerners (and particularly Americans) experience in Chinese cities is how people will straight up refuse to help strangers they don't know.
This is not because Chinese people are dicks. Frankly, if you're a (white) foreigner, you're going to be treated better than average by almost everyone as it is. But people hold back, because helping other people has the potential to have huge negative consequences if you get involved.
Here in the states, people are amazingly open to helping someone they've never met. This cultural assumption works because everyone 'just knows' that the person helping is not responsible for anything beyond that particular interaction. We even have Good Samaritan laws on the books that ensure that it is legally safe to do your best to render assistance in extreme circumstances.
It is the complete opposite in China. If you help someone, it is assumed that you are taking responsibility for their entire problem. (Yes, I am oversimplifying, there's more to it than this. But this is an accurate general gist.)
I don't know anything about this fellow, but this particular video of his, at least, does an excellent job explaining what is going on:
He is talking about the modern experience, but it is the same as what I remember from the 80's. The only thing I disagree with him about is that I do not see it as a new phenomenon.
I've been in China off and on from 2003-2008, and I've also noticed the phenomenon this video describes whereby people do NOT help out strangers in need, but never really knew the legal why. I always just assumed it was a cultural aspect I was told (can't find the name of it) whereby if you are not part of a Chinese person's social network, then you are effectively irrelevant to them, which was the reason why you should never be offended when people don't wave or smile back at you.
But anyway, I'm not optimistic considering the legal/cultural reasons for the pedestrian issue and the "Broken Vase Scam" in the video will get applied to bigger social challenges.
watching some more of this YouTuber's videos...interesting stuff...autoplay sent me to this other scam described as:
"driving in China can be really frustrating sometimes. Now China has a problem with people baiting each other to break the law so that you can break the law and they can claim a reward. This is blackmail and extortion inCARnate"
I don't know if that's true or not, but if the penalties described in that article are accurate, I'd say the penalties for killing someone with a vehicle, either from recklessness or malice, are shockingly lenient.
Yeah. My impression is that Chinese penalites for many crimes are out of whack and need to be tuned better so the punishment fits the crime. (Not saying that The West is perfect, but as I said above, I don't think China's legal system is quite as well-refined.)
There was actually quite a lot of discussion on HN on the slate article, with many people who live(d) in China attesting to the truth of the article: https://hackertimes.com/item?id=10173395
To me, most of these are works in progress and simply a matter of timing and priority. The others, while they feel very "wrong" when viewed through the eyes of someone raised in our culture, I don't think are necessarily that harmful provided leadership is reasonably benevolent in the aggregate, which is my impression of China.
In a way it has also brought creativity for many things. Baidu and others can't exist without this. And I think it is very wrong to say that there is no creativity in copying.
Singapore's not that bad as long as you're not gay (which is illegal and punishable by a prison term), a political activist for the opposition party, too independent thinking or otherwise labeled as undesirable by the government.
In terms of cultural-inspired creativity, Taiwan isn't a great representative of Chinese creative media, Taiwan can only represent certain parts of the Southern Coastal and South-Eastern China/Asia culture in terms of where they draw inspiration for their creativity. Also the general Taiwanese "creative media" industry like films isn't particularly welcoming to Mainland culture or influences.
This is a sort of shorthand for discouraging people from developing strong, dissident, aberrant or divisive political positions. Discouraging people from taking on political identities in general, other than a unified chinese identity. Discouraging people from disparaging and/or distrusting the government. Keeping fringey social trends out of the mainstream.
If you think of how strong political identities are currently in the US, this is exactly what they are trying to prevent. They want to keep everyone on the same page in terms of political and social norms.
The skeptical take is that the CCP is protecting itself from popular and democratic revolutionary movements.
China will consider democracy only when the credit bubble pops which will delegitimize the Communist party. Tianamen square was at the inflection point when Investment flooded into corrupt post maoist china, democratic movement was everywhere but was quashed by increasingly belligerent communists apparatchiks.
The CCP has only been able to eliminate dissent by eliminating moral hazard. They promised that the bubbles won't pop, so when they do, it isn't going to be pretty at all.
>The skeptical take is that the CCP is protecting itself from popular and democratic revolutionary movements.
On the other hand, a country with 1.x billion people and several languages/ethnicities can become a huge hell-hole without social harmony.
This "revolution" thing didn't end that well in Libya, even if they managed to get rid of the old leader. Same with the "democracy" that was re-installed in Iraq and elsewhere.
I want to add that historically Chinese people (not the modern sense of china) went through brutal revolutions either started by powerful individuals or as grass root riots against the central dynasty. The lesson learned is clear, the people are suffering no matter what. So there is a strong sense to be stable for the people, even it means tolerates a less than perfect government.
It doesn't seem like a crazy idea to me at all. Nationalism and solidarity among citizens has always been a great source of unity in countries, but in the last decade or so it seems to become interpreted as a cardinal sin, and has has split several countries down the middle.
If I was leading China I'd most definitely want to keep this sort of bizarre thinking out of my country.
I didn’t mean that literally. The biggest idea that the CCP specifically wants kept out of China is open elections. Anti-nationalism is not really on the radar, and the CCP itself has some anti-nationalist roots from its Marxist heritage.
Anti-nationalism is synonymous with Nazism with many people in the west, and the west sets many cultural trends, I think it is perfectly reasonable for Chinese leadership to be cautious.
>Newbie question but what is China's rationale for their internet censorship and firewall? What are they afraid of?
Aside from the CCP wanting to maintain its control in-land, there's this little real issue, that 80% the internet is mostly controlled from a handful of companies, all in the hands of foreign nationals (who are all "patriotic" and all reside in countries other than China).
That is, things like search, social media, etc services are not a neutral international ground, but mostly dominated by a single country's companies. Those foreign countries get to siphon the data, dictate what's acceptable, promote their culture, viewpoints and national interests 24/7, censor or bury what they don't like, etc.
So, while lesser countries might bend over and take it, it makes sense for a country that is a superpower in itself, and has billions of people, to take control of its own web and have its own search, social media, etc -- orthogonally to if they censor them or not.
Ask yourselves: if Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft where e.g. Russian or Chinese, would the US (as a state and as citizens) be using them them all the same?
We had no issue with Nokia or Toyota. We consume Anime. Lots of companies use Kaspersky despite apparent ties to RU intelligence services. There is some talk of the DoD pulling out from a contract --but that's DoD and I imagine Chinese version of DoD would do something similar.
Neither Nokia not Toyota were relevant on the pipes and on the culture/interest/spying/etc level. It was just buying foreign consumer products. (And neither is Anime an example of that).
None of those things are like using a foreign Google, Facebook, etc.
And even for those (which are entirely time), there were huge worries about the Japanese "buying everything" (in the 80s), and people saying people should "buy American" etc.
People were rightfully concerned about the lack of reciprocal trade. While true American cars would not attract much of a market in Japan (due to a few issues like gas consumption, size, etc.) the market was not as open to US products as the US market was open to Japanese products, despite the inherent handicap.
It is not just the foreign aspect. China government will shut down private Chinese actors who voice opinions or provide an independent platform which goes against the party line.
The CCP is the only political party in China and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep it that way. The CCP is also known for abducting journalists for reporting on "rumors" (i.e. reporting on stuff the CCP doesn't like), the Tiananmen Square massacre, hiring an army of paid internet trolls to advance the party line on domestic and foreign websites, and trying to set up an Orwellian "social credit" system where things like support for the party line affect whether you can take out a loan from the bank or use the public transit system. I could go on but I think you get the point.
EDIT: Not sure why I'm being downvoted, everything I mentioned has been widely reported on and can be confirmed in ten seconds with a Google search.
They care about social harmony.
Don't want to make people upset.
That's the official version.
It's most probably about rejecting the influences from the West, preservation of Chinese culture. Recently there's also quite a huge war on influence of Korean culture.
Just as Fox News won't tell the truth, and hold on to their line even in the face of evidence, so do the Chinese. Most of us are guilty of not trying to be inclusive enough with other people and prefer to live in our little bubble. There is always a cost for that - just look at what happened in 2016-17.
I have no beef in this fight, not being an American, but I see the same behaviour from Fox, CNN (probably the biggest offender), MSNBC, Breitbart and sometimes even BBC.
I don't know, I think it might be more beneficial for those who can accurately observe the political cirque de jour in whatever locale (opposed to being caught up in it) to engage amongst themselves, than trying engage with those who belief systems are dominated by a particular local/flavor (unless such engagement is exploiting another particulars beliefs against another for some gain).
Said another way a bit more reductionist, it seems that any engagement between CNN vs Fox types is rather marginal (for expected outcomes), vs playing both sides and exploiting the cognitive dissonance/norms differential between the two.
I think this chapter in human nature could be described as a conundrum that arises from the allegory of the cave.
They've known for ages that the biggest threat to China is not some foreign enemy but China itself. This also applies to the US btw, we just haven't fully realized it yet.
Eh? Don't think socialism is to blame here. Sweden, as an example, is a very socialist country and also with a high degree of freedom to look at whatever you want (almost).
I think the confusion is that socialism is used to refer both the economic policies as well as political policies, which are actually orthogonal to each other..
In the case of China it is socialism in political policies but very capitalist in economic policies.
Sweden is socialism in the economic sense but politically it values freedom much more than China , you will see this if you notice the differences in tax rates in Sweden vs China.
Socialism is about collective ownership of industry. It has nothing to do with tax rates. The source of this misconception is likely decades of misinformation spouted by ahem certain American political groups that wanted to keep taxes low.
Communism can be considered a form of socialism. It's like socialism but with additional requirements. There are different interpretations of it (Leninism, Trotskyism, Maoism, etc.). What I would consider a "pure" definition of it would be socialism without the presence social classes, money, or the state (source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communism). This is necessarily much different from just socialism by itself.
My understanding is that although Sweden may have high tax rates, it on the other hand has a more-free market than the US. Hard to place Sweden on either side of the Capitalist/Socialist spectrum.
I feel stringent censorship is among the most unbearable things.
If we look at the censorship history in different countries over the world, such as France (before the 20th century) and USSR, the only way to end a very stringent censorship in a society is by ending the ruling government itself, which is usually an autocracy, or an oligarchy at best. But that could mean a period of turmoil that would destroy many people's lives across the entire country. It seems one way to avoid this great destruction is for most of the population in the country to rise up in synchrony and simultaneously topple down the government together -- but this concurrency at a society level is one of the major targets that the current censorship implemented in China aims at.
Sigh...It just seems impossible to have hack out a consensus in a distributed system when the powerful system admin with his privileges at the root level constantly interferes...
Xi Jinping is pushing massive censorship because he thinks it is good for China, but I think that is a big mistake. History has shown that when you don't have open, public debate on important issues, the government becomes close-minded and makes poor decisions. Yes, democracy is messy, but the alternatives are worse.
Part of the problem here is that China is still running according to Confucianism, which was a wonderfully effective political philosophy for a largely agrarian society, but is quite ill-suited for the modern world. The Chinese need to think out what is the right form of government for the modern industrial world, but to do that they need free discussion, which is just what Xi is making impossible.
5 years? China has been closing ever since the Olympics ended in...2008. Its been almost a decade now. Theory is they'll start opening up again in the run up to 2022...they can't really hold an Olympics while blocking all the major worldwide internet sites, too much face lost.
