[aj7]

When the NY Times covered the Chinese robotic moon landing, it was in the top 10 stories for more than a week. In the most space-jaded country on the planet. The rating was sustained by constant comments by Chinese studying in the US and burnishing their reps with the Party. You can almost always make Chinese English, an AI program could be trained to do it. I wrote to their ombudsman. Down in a day.

[JohnJamesRambo]

Very interesting. I always get that uncanny valley feeling even on Hacker News, especially when the comments concern China. This would explain a lot.

[qiqing]

50c party is widely accepted as real a thing as Russian troll farms during the election, but I'd be skeptical if HN is a target. (I don't think you need an academic paper to 'prove' it's a real thing.)

The reason you read defensive comments on HN (even from me) is due to how easily anti-China criticism slides from legitimate policy discussion into raw, tribal racism. I simply feel it is my duty to call out anti-Chinese racism when it comes across my path, not just because it makes me mad.

[aaron-lebo]

In the interest of productive discussion, what do you perceive as racism?

It's rare that I come across comments about China that are legitimately racist on HN. I get some people are and some discussion is that, but more than anything I see genuine concern about how the government is acting and given how the government controls that nation, that's where the criticism can seem so wholesale.

But what do you feel is a racist criticism? I ask because I'm a huge critic of the Chinese government (and many other governments) but don't desire to be racist or to be perceived as that way.

One of the most stubborn critics of China (and Chinese culture) I know is Chinese. If I didn't now that I'd perceive him as racist but he just doesn't like what decades of the Cultural Revolution etc have produced no more than many Americans don't like what decades of materialism/world domination has produced.

[qiqing]

> It's rare that I come across comments about China that are legitimately racist on HN

Perhaps your threshold has a different set-point from mine (and from people who are the target of similar comments). I include conscious and unconscious bias, and Chinese people are just as capable of anti-China racism as women are capable of being sexist.*

The same people who criticize the Chinese government for not allowing Facebook and Google to operate in China (even after Cambridge Analytica) will defend not allowing Huawei to be sold by carriers in the U.S. The same people who, when it is pointed out that Foxconn's suicide rate is lower than the population average, will say that any non-zero number is too high. Do they change their tune if it's pointed out that Foxconn is a Taiwanese company and not a Mainland one? You know the type -- in a later breath, they will just as easily say that Chinese people can't / won't innovate, and can only copy.

There was a story in Sheryl Sandberg's _Lean In_ about an experiment where 2 resumes were being considered for a police chief: one candidate had more solid work experience, and the other had more impressive education history. The 2 experimental conditions assigned a male or a female name to each resume, and most subjects (including female participants) chose the male resume, and they'd say it was because of work experience or education that they picked it. If your threshold for sexism includes that, and you adjust your racism threshold similarly, you'll find that a lot of comments have this ... _unconscious bias_ for some reason.

* Criticism of what the Cultural Revolution has produced does not fall under the same umbrella. No one likes what it produced, even the leadership currently in power in China, who suffered in their youth.

Edit: comment in threads down below include ">his stupid uneducated bimbo of a wife" in reference to China's first lady. Here's what CNN has to say about her:

"Peng is arguably more famous than her husband. She has millions of fans... She is a major general in the People's Liberation Army and is China's AIDS ambassador to the United Nations." http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/20/thursdays-intriguing-pe...

[foodislove]

I'm sorry. Where were you when your counterparts kept calling Michelle Obama a "monkey" or Tsai, the President of Taiwan a "old maid", "japanese collaborator" and other things?

[mc32]

I'll believe that when people begin identifying anti-Russian racism. Almost anything can be framed to look like a certain thing it wasn't.

I guess one could claim anti-Russian racism if we take all the "Russian trolls" comments as being not about the alleged actions and their contexts but rather about how that represents Russians in general to the American audience.

[DenisM]

Could you please provide some example of hacker news comments you consider racist or otherwise worth fighting against?

[fspeech]

How about right there the post he is responding to? Especially considering the context provided by the earlier post:

"... constant comments by Chinese studying in the US and burnishing their reps with the Party. You can almost always make Chinese English, an AI program could be trained to do it. "

Do you think following up that with

"Very interesting. I always get that uncanny valley feeling even on Hacker News, especially when the comments concern China. This would explain a lot."

has racism undertone or not? If you don't see things right in front of your eyes I don't know what else could convince you.

Add: Okay I see there are people who don't like what I said, so I will spell out more about my rationale. Firstly I didn't call out the earlier post other than using it as the context. I don't think that author could have known that the comments truly were from "Chinese studying in the US" and for "burnishing their reps with the Party", but in the context of discussing propaganda I accept that at least has plausibility. The follow-on post then points to HN, which concerns the posters here including myself. The exact meaning of the poster is somewhat ambiguous to me, however in light of the earlier comment I get the feeling that anyone who comments on China with a view and maybe language skill different from his is stereotyped both with race and motivation.

[putlake]

I see you're being downvoted but I agree with you. I cringed when I read "Chinese studying in the US" and "burnishing their reps with the Party". OP is probably not racist but this is a clear case of ascribing motivations to people you know nothing about.

If I was permitted the same liberty of ascribing, I'd guess that it betrays an unconscious bias against Chinese people. It's probably not something Americans would be attuned to. But as a non-white (but not Chinese) immigrant myself, my radar is probably more sensitive to it.

[galo_sengen]

yeah thats quite a reach you’re making my dude

[dragonwriter]

> 50c party is widely accepted as real a thing as Russian troll farms during the election, but I'd be skeptical if HN is a target.

I wouldn't; HN is obviously recognized as something an important influence node for an important (if not necessarily large number itself) segment of society. Why wouldn't 50c or Russian troll farms target it just as non-state-sponsored activists obviously do?

[notahacker]

Counter point: lots of people are just very, very passionate about their country and have even less sense of perspective on social media.

I remember well over a decade ago a student wrote a comment piece about the PRC in my UK university, which had a large Chinese student population. It was a fairly bad comment piece that felt like the student in question was angling for a slot at one of the UK's very right wing tabloids (funnily enough the student journalist is now a well-respected commentator at the FT) but its fundamental point was the fairly uncontroversial observation that the Chinese government isn't democratic and has very different foreign policy priorities than the West. It's possible, of course, that some of the outrage on the threads below the article on the website from people apparently incapable of distinguishing between disparagement of government and insults to ordinary people was orchestrated by a higher power, even though English student media probably isn't top of the CCCP's list of priorities now, never mind in the early 2000s.

But a lot of the hysterical commentary about how deeply offensive and discriminatory it was towards Chinese people that ended up in the print edition came from named people who were actually overseas students at the university.

People being willing to spend their free time manufacturing the same outrage or enthusiasm others receive full time incomes for manufacturing isn't exactly a uniquely Chinese thing either...

[Aunche]

You get an uncanny valley feeling because the Western media always exaggerates the degree of how Orwellian or how much influence the Chinese government really has, so that they can get more clicks from people unfamiliar with China or who are mildly racist.

[cirgue]

So I find this view really interesting because there is ultimately very little racism about dislike for the Chinese government. Most people’s misgivings have much more to do with the fact that a) no one wants to see fellow humans living in a distopia, and b) people look to China as an indication of where the world may be heading in the next few decades. Feeling apprehension about seeing an opaque, oligopolistic, and decidedly undemocratic system adopt a set of policies that are frankly unthinkable to people raised in the us or Europe is completely understandable. Using the term racism is interesting because this has much more to do with ideaologies and values than it does with race.

[xkcd-sucks]

To someone that believes the CCP, "China" and the Han ethnicity are equivalent, it is racist to dislike the government. This equivalence is basically official policy, and also ambiguous phrases like "Chinese people" further such equivalence.

[fermienrico]

I disagree. Having been to China more than 30 times, I can tell you that the reality is worse.

[aaron-lebo]

This is based on what?

[Aunche]

Based on all the articles published about China in the past decade. Wired is especially egregious because they start a lot of misinformation.

In 2011, their headline of Foxconn was "1 Million workers, 90 Million Iphones, 17 suicides" despite the US suicide rate being much higher. Now, you still hear people talking about how terrible Apple and Foxconn are despite both being very desirable places to work for.

More recently, Wired released an article about China's plans for a social credit system. The article equated this with private credit scoring systems such as Sesame credit, even though they have nothing to do with each other. Yes, the social credit system is a bit extreme. Yes, Sesame credit is kind of creepy (but so is Facebook). No, China didn't decide to turn itself into a Brave New World.

[noobermin]

Or something like a comment thread where half the comments pointing out other governments do propaganda are flagged to hell, like this section.

[pmlnr]

In this very case, the topic is how the country in the post is doing it.

Isn't talking about another country a distraction from that?

[noobermin]

The topic is propaganda, that other countries and organizations like companies do that is related to the topic. If that's unrelated, pointing out the random articles dealing with China ever is also unrelated. (A freaking article about the Moon lander for pete's sake)

I don't think "China" is a reason enough for things to be under the same topic.

[pmlnr]

No, the topic is "How the Chinese Government Fabricates Social Media Posts for Strategic Distraction, not Engaged Argument" which is the topic of the paper published.

It's not "A paper on country propaganda".

[noobermin]

The paper is about the CCP's propaganda techniques on its own people, not driving numbers for nyt articles (US media). The people in this thread are tying it to other events that are related only because they have to do with China. That's what I mean in that it's tangentially related.

I don't think tangentially related things are bad. I do think it's upsetting when some tangentially related things are bad but others aren't for strange reasons.

[Lionsion]

> pointing out the random articles dealing with China ever is also unrelated. (A freaking article about the Moon lander for pete's sake)

Which was observed to have had anomalous commenting behavior.

I think it's an important question to consider if the 50 Cent Party operates on non-Chinese forums, and the observation in that comment is relevant to that question.

> The topic is propaganda, that other countries and organizations like companies do that is related to the topic.

And the topic of the Xinjiang re-education camp thread, judging by the comments, must have been "everything bad that any country has ever done ever." /s

[Sangermaine]

The inevitable "whataboutism" comments that any discussion of China generates are indeed just noise.

[noobermin]

That's probably a good reason. The thing is I get sick of the moralizing that underlies all these threads, as if our media doesn't do the exact same thing. re: manufacturing consent.

The thing is there's this strange, "uncanny" feeling I get whenever these things are shared too, all of a sudden, HN readers who are usually critical start to coalesce around a common fear of the other.

[Sangermaine]

>The thing is I get sick of the moralizing that underlies all these threads, as if our media doesn't do the exact same thing. re: manufacturing consent.

But this is exactly the whataboutism I'm talking about.

The point of the article is that our media doesn't do the exact same thing. When Chomsky and Herman talked about "manufacturing consent", they didn't mean that there is literally a cabal of media companies and the government guiding the American media. However in China there is, in fact, a documented, government-sponsored program to manipulate Chinese media.

If you want to discuss the problem of manufactured consent in the US or the West, start a thread about that, but don't clutter this discussion with irrelevant derails seemingly designed to muddy the waters and deflect from the point of the discussion.

[lstyls]

> The thing is I get sick of the moralizing that underlies all these threads, as if our media doesn't do the exact same thing

You do realize this is false equivalency / whataboutism?

[Lionsion]

> The thing is there's this strange, "uncanny" feeling I get whenever these things are shared too

I posted this because I got super frustrated with all the derails and distractions that utterly destroyed the Xinjiang indoctrination camp post from yesterday. If you don't believe me you can look at my comment history.

[dang]

Your comment history is extremely problematic for Hacker News, because you've been using it to engage in nationalistic flamewar. I don't care what your views are or which nations you have feelings about: doing this is as toxic as it gets.

Edit: actually you went so far over the line that we banned the account. No one is allowed to turn HN into nationalistic hell, regardless of which nation they're fighting for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17108836

[noobermin]

Okay, so I understand how you feel. The thing is I clicked on that post and the top comments are critical of indoctrination camps. There's one top-level comment you replied to that pointed out an irony given the imprisoned population here in the US.

The article details, AFAICT, the CCP's attempts to spread propaganda to its own people, not to the west, although I have no doubts it does try to spread it elsewhere. So given that, what is the likelihood that most of the critical, anti-US comments are in fact CCP propaganda hires? I don't know, but it seems a little bit much to assume everything is a plot to subvert people's opinions.

I'm not a propagandist. I agree with the sentiment in the comment on that article (I missed) about the US imprisoned population. People can disagree with you and point out opinions you disagree with.

I said earlier, somewhat sarcastically, it sucks that people are pushing things in this comment thread and voting down and flagging comments that point out other countries do the same. I am always somewhat paranoid, and anyone would given Snowden leaks and having read history about things like COINTELPRO, etc., but it was somewhat tongue in cheek (yes, I'm not perfect, I say mean things online like most people). Do I really believe all of you are US gov't plants trying to sway people to be belligerent to China? I don't think so.

I get we should keep our eyes open, but we should be willing to accept that there are people who disagree with us, and not everyone who disagrees with us is a Russian/Chinese/etc bot. I'm actually really bothered by the attitude online these days that calls everyone who disagrees with us as being an astroturf. I'm not saying it doesn't happen, but it really helps to further strengthen the echo chambers we've created for ourselves.

[_jgvg]

Your post is pretty much the definition of whataboutism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

[kolpa]

Which Social Network was this observed on?

Wasn't that landing 5 years ago? Any more recent examples?

I get nothing when I search HN for the NYT article

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=As%20Rover%20Lands,%20China%20...

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=https:%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F...

[John_KZ]

Personally I was disappointed by the lack of coverage this landing got. Same with their space station. I'm genuinely interested in this, but the Chinese won't translate articles/sources themselves, and given the (strategic? image-preserving?) indifference by the US, I can't find any content about them in English. I find this really annoying.

[Sangermaine]

>(strategic? image-preserving?) indifference

Neither, it's apathy. The US media doesn't really cover the space exploits of its allies in Europe or Japan either, unless it's something really huge. I think the US views other countries doing things in space it already did decades ago as boring. When China does something that surpasses what the US has done, like building a Moon base or a manned Mars mission, there will be plenty of coverage.

Even this specific point of discussion, the Chinese "moon landing", is just landing a rover there, not a person, so it's not really very notable for Americans.

[yorwba]

I'm not sure what kind of articles you're looking for, but here is the English website of the China National Space Administration: http://www.cnsa.gov.cn/n6443408/index.html

As a non-government source, the South China Morning post is the closest thing to an independent newspaper and they have a collection of articles about the Yutu rover: http://www.scmp.com/topics/jade-rabbit-lunar-rover

[kolpa]

https://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/world/asia/china-lands-pr...

[MrLeap]

What corpus did you train off?

[saagarjha]

Sounds very Markov-chain like, doesn’t it? But I think it’s just written in an annoying way: sentences that seem short, choppy, and cut off, with very little context to string them together.

[Lionsion]

> The rating was sustained by constant comments by Chinese studying in the US and burnishing their reps with the Party.

I can believe it. The Chinese government apparently paying students to wave flags when their officials come visit [1]. Since they manage to do that successfully, it wouldn't surprise me if they do similar things with internet comments.

[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/07/chinas-long-arm-reaches-...

[MekaiGS]

There is a more specific term for folks like that, they are being referred as the 50 cent party.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party