[dang]

It's absurd to say that slurring "the general attitude of Chinese people" was civil, polite, and on topic. If you say that, I can only imagine that you're not coming into contact with the very large numbers of people who would find such a comment to be the opposite of civil and polite. That's not our situation, and we have to take care of all HN users. Everyone has the right to come here and not see their country or race or ethnic background (or similar groupings they may belong to) put down in that way.

Perhaps you don't feel like this matters, but I can tell you for a fact that people have been hounded off this site by comments of this nature (e.g. China-related slurs), including extremely ugly personal attacks. I don't want to have anything to do with a site where that happens, and I don't believe that the vast majority of this community would either. None of us wants that community. But we can easily end up with it anyway, if we're not careful, because that's how group dynamics work.

Part of the problem here is that the forum feels like an intimate conversation, and in intimate conversation there is more latitude for talking in a grand and speculative way about this stuff, especially if you have high trust from previous interactions. But when you post to HN what you're actually doing is broadcasting to millions of people. Public broadcasting has to have different standards. Imagine what would result if a million people heard the things that you (or I, or any of us) said to your friends, without any mitigating context.

[oxAAAFFB]

I just respectfully disagree. So it’s not possible to be civil or polite while pointing out an unfortunate or unpleasant fact? This is obviously ridiculous. It isn’t hounding and it isn’t slurring and it isn’t personal attacks. You have trouble seeing the difference for some reason. All national groups have problems and the only way they get fixed, the only way we’ve made progress, is by refusing to overlook problems for the sake of not stepping on anyone’s toes. Or for the sake of political expediency, Dan.

[dang]

The flaw in your argument is the grand canyon between "pointing out an unfortunate or unpleasant fact" and putting down an entire country's "culture".

I don't know what you mean by political expediency but it doesn't sound like something the moderation job is replete with.

[leafboi]

Unfortunate and unpleasant facts can apply to an entire country and culture. There is no physical law in the universe that prevents this from happening.

In reality, for this specific topic, the canyon is not so wide as you believe and I don't think you have the relevant cultural context to make such a judgement call on how wide it is. It's a century old question... how much freedom of speech and how much censorship and at what cost?

In this case you chose to censor something that could potentially be flame bait (but wasn't) at the cost of preventing any discussion about a very real and general truth about China.