[upupupandaway]

I was in Shanghai recently and while casually testing one of their AI chat bots I typed "What do you think of the situation in Taiwan?".

It started discussing like a Western bot would - "it's complicated, etc. etc." and around 5s it abruptly stopped and regurgitated the same line the CCP uses "... it's an unalienable part of China etc. etc.".

After printing the line, a popup opened and my camera was activated. The app wanted me to submit my information, presumably to decide what to do with me next time I enter China.

1) All the lights and modern buildings cannot hide that China is a creepy authoritarian state underneath.

2) Given the bot started printing the Western consensus first, I bet $10 it was trained by distilling ChatGPT or Gemini.

[titaniumtown]

> After printing the line, a popup opened and my camera was activated. The app wanted me to submit my information, presumably to decide what to do with me next time I enter China.

Was this on your personal device? I'm just wondering how it activated your camera. I would love more details!

[anvuong]

Yeah that part is either just bullshit or OP gave the bot access to his camera previously, which is just dumb.

[crossroadsguy]

OP might have meant that it asked for camera permission. Or OP might have set camera permission to auto allow but then that is also stupid (more so).

[Justitia]

I would not be surprised if they just activated the camera

[sixseven]

The story smells like bullshit to me.

[3rodents]

If this were true, why didn’t the chatbot immediately recognize that the word “Taiwan” should trigger the response? Detecting the word “Taiwan” has been possible since before most of us were born.

China has more restrictions on what you can say than the U.S. but what you are describing is not reality. Some westerner asking Deepseek about Taiwan is completely uninteresting. Just as the government do not chase people over VPN usage.

China doesn’t try to hide that they are an authoritarian state. They don’t need to. Most people in China are no less happy with their government than westerners are with their governments. Governments reflect culture. And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.

[gs17]

> If this were true, why didn’t the chatbot immediately recognize that the word “Taiwan” should trigger the response?

Not recognizing they were outputting wrongthink until after it was being streamed to the user is a known behavior with some Chinese chatbot apps. A quick search found an example of DeepSeek doing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1ic3kl6/deepseek_ce...

I don't think his story is genuine, but it showing the "wrong" answer before correcting itself is known behavior.

EDIT: Here's an example of it outputting a full response about Taiwan specifically before removing it: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1i7ceol/...

[recursive]

I've seen it from the non-Chinese ChatGPT before. Something was deemed to be violating the sensitivity filters or something, and it refused to answer. But only after I saw part of the real answer streamed to the output, and then redacted and replaced.

[CWuestefeld]

This is manifestly false.

My wife grew up in Shanghai, and you'll have to go quite some distance to find someone more critical of the PRC and CCP than she is. And it's with good reason.

She grew up during the cultural revolution, and was largely raised by her grandmother because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp, not because of anything they had actually done wrong, but for political reasons because the whole family was blacklisted.

And that's not just the old days. Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy. During the pandemic her cousins still in the country would ask her (on Skype) "is X true?", and largely their perception of what was going on was false. She would exfiltrate encrypted news reports to them - until those started getting blocked. Her dad's estate still has affairs that need to be resolved, but we've decided not to return to China until Xi is gone, as it's just not safe. It doesn't get much airplay, but there are currently a couple of hundred Americans who are being illegally detained in China right now. It's not worth the risk.

My first trip to China was about 30 years ago, shortly after we got married. And back then, I would have said that you were right. Honestly, it felt like for the average person in their day-to-day-lives, the Chinese were less under the governmental thumb than we are. People from the countryside would bring their produce into the city to sell, or cook dumplings and buns to sell on the side of the street - stuff that in America we'd have to get permits for. It seemed that the oligarchy had an understanding with the people: let us control the big picture, and we'll look the other way for the little things. But Chinese politics is a pendulum swinging very widely. From Tienanmen Square and Tank Man, it had swung quite a bit the other way. But today, it's come back 180-degrees. Xi is really trying for a Cultural Revolution 2.0.

These impressions largely match what I hear from other Chinese immigrants - except for Party members, who tend not to want to talk about it at all. I'm afraid that you've been listening to too much propaganda.

[hungryhobo]

i don't doubt your experience, but just know it might be skewed and not representative of everyone's opinions

the sense i get from my chinese friends are that the CCP is an annoying parent but they understand the challenges both domestic and international and largely agree with the compromises

[elefanten]

How do they feel about and respond when asked about the Taiwan question?

Do they either clam up or act like it's a mortal insult to suggest that an independent democratic nation should not live in fear of impending violent conquest?

Because that's the kind of reaction that makes the reports of "happy life, all's good" a little harder to digest.

Not saying that's a unanimous opinion / response, of course. But it certainly seems to be the default.

[kdheiwns]

About 50% of Chinese people I meet very much agree with the government that it's part of China and always has been. The other 50% know that it's clearly independent and are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government. But the people I've talked to about this are people with the means to travel, and many of them have been to Taiwan. So it may not be representative of the typical person on the street. I've been to China several times and I don't want to ask it there, but that's less out of fear of the government but more than I don't want to bother locals with politics and present myself as an enlightened foreigner, since nobody likes that shit. Just like nobody would like a Chinese guy going to Alabama and telling the people they need to embrace socialism if they ever want to escape poverty.

[elefanten]

Thank you for sharing, that is interesting to hear.

It bears repeating that I do not presume a monolithic opinion of the citizens of China or the culturally Chinese diaspora.

I balance that against the reactions and attitudes that I do experience, in proportion to how often I experience them.

[tw1984]

> The other 50% know that it's clearly independent and are tired of the whole act by the Chinese government.

Chinese living in a foreign country, or Chinese willing to discuss such issues with you in China is a highly biased sample set. That is high school math you suppose to learn at the age of 17.

[fasbiner]

The majority of US support for Taiwan and it's current situation is owed entirely to supporting a military junta from the mainland that massacred the local Taiwainese who objected to it and suppressed civil society.

Are you saying you would've been neutral on an invasion of Taiwan before 1985 or so, since it wasn't a democracy?

[elefanten]

I am categorically against invasions and conquest of land by force. We live in the year 2026, not the year 1985. I set my priorities accordingly.

[tw1984]

Cultural Revolution is all about totally politicalised society, extremely polarised, regular people fight against each other based on ideologies. Isn't that the current west?

> because literally every other person in her extended family was in prison or work camp

translate for you - her family was heavily involved in politics, it is just unlucky that her family was not on the winning side, so she hates whatever happened.

posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.

[CWuestefeld]

translate for you - her family was heavily involved in politics, it is just unlucky that her family was not on the winning side, so she hates whatever happened.

This is false. When you have no idea at all what you're talking about, you should just be quiet.

The problems were that (in order of increasing specificity)

(a) We're talking about Marxism here, and Marxism is all about class warfare. Before the Communists her family had been part of the "landlord" class, and thus were enemies of the people by definition.

(b) One uncle was tricked by the anti-rightist movement. If you're not aware of this, it was earlier in Mao's reign. Mao said, essentially, "we know we haven't gotten everything perfect, so tell us what we could do better". Wife's uncle was stupid enough to believe him, the result of which was a 20-year prison sentence, and also his wife being forced to divorce him, and further tainting the family. (Something on the order of 500K to 2M people were persecuted like this.)

(c) Any outside influences were suspect at best, and often de facto proof of espionage. She had an uncle who was a US citizen. And her father had traveled extensively internationally, as a sea captain (never mind the fact it was the PRC government, as the sole employer in China, who put him onto those ships).

(d) Wife's family side had been in theater. One aunt had been in a theater troupe with Jiang Qing (Mao's wife), and knew at least some of her, ummm, lower class history. Putting her, and the rest of the family, in prison kept them shut up and warned them not to talk any further. (This may sound far-fetched, but consider what the Gang of Four was up to during the Cultural Revolution, and that she was a member.)

posting from Shanghai, going back to the 3rd world west in a few days.

You might do well to read, e.g., Shanghai Tears by Pu Gui Yuan to better understand what was happening back in those days. Then again, I don't imagine you can just go buy a copy of it over there.

[vkou]

> Her father died as a direct result of Chinese Covid policy.

Is it generally normal to hold countries accountable for every person that dies due to their COVID policies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_by_country_a...

[CWuestefeld]

No. But there are actual circumstances here that differ between China's actions and the rest of the planet. Specifically...

While the rest of the world was doing stuff like ensuring that as many of its citizens as possible were vaccinated, and letting the population gradually work up to herd immunity so that controls could be gradually loosened, China kept the population at a hard lockdown right to late 2022, and then opened up completely. It was as if they just opened the floodgates.

There were actually people arguing that China was doing this intentionally, with the plan being to thin out the top-heavy aging demographic in the country. I'm not necessarily advocating for this theory, but illustrating that the very fact that there's a colorable argument for it demonstrates how irresponsible Chinese leadership were.

The result was that in my father-in-law's retirement home, literally EVERY caretaker came down with the virus together, which obviously led to most of the residents getting sick. And given the way covid worked, that meant a whole lot of deaths.

Adding insult to injury, his death certificate attributes the cause of death to heart disease. As a matter of policy, all deaths were attributed to any other condition the patient might have had, however trivial, unless covid could be proven. And proving it would involve in declining to properly dispose of the body, paying for the autopsy and so forth. But there's no doubt (having talked to him every day on Skype) that covid is what killed him.

[DiogenesKynikos]

China's policy reduced the death rate by a factor of about 75% relative to the US.

The zero-Covid policy kept Covid out of the country until an effective vaccine was developed and deployed to about 90% of the population. The main problem was that there's a widespread belief in East Asia (including in Taiwan, Singapore, etc.) that vaccination is dangerous for old people, so the vaccination rate was lowest among the most vulnerable group. A lot of old people simply refused to get vaccinated, despite large vaccination drives and public messaging asking them to do so.

Then, as you said, the zero-Covid policy was eliminated overnight, and practically everyone in the country got Covid within 1-2 months. However, because most people were vaccinated, the death rate was far lower than in the West.

All in all, the zero-Covid policy saved several million lives in China. This is based on retrospective studies by outside researchers, not on official statistics.

[gscott]

Depends if the Government welds your apartment gate shut and lets you burn to death.

[vkou]

Did that happen to a lot of people? Do you have a source?

[gscott]

https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/china/politic...

https://www.caixinglobal.com/2022-11-06/woman-falls-to-her-d...

https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2022/04/24/shanghai-blockades-covid...

https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/1.5478668

[fennecbutt]

Nice sample size of 1

[libertine]

You can trigger that behavior with Deepseek, just try it yourself.

[KHRZ]

DeepSeek would print all it's mental gymnastics to censor itself in the reasoning phase directly to the user, before shutting down the conversation. Apparantly such an odd move is a thing in China.

[glenstein]

Right, I think deepseek continues to be massively misunderstood. It appears to be a replication of existing technologies done more efficiently rather than a breakthrough in terms of bootstrapping from the ground up with new capabilities. And at this point people will start saying "well does that matter?" and the answer is yes.

[sarchertech]

>And as for foreigners, our view of China is far worse than it actually is, China doesn’t need to hide anything, people who visit China will come away with a more positive view of the country than those who do not visit.

To the extent that's true, it's because they won't let you see the uyghur reeducation camps.

[analog8374]

What's the coordinates? I want to look at it on Google maps

[sarchertech]

Here you go

https://xjdp.aspi.org.au/map/?

[hungryhobo]

nice, funded by ASPI, that's all i needed to know

[sarchertech]

There could be a grand global conspiracy to push this story about how the Chinese are persecuting the Uyghurs, involving the US government, the Australian government, the United Nations, France, the UK, A Swiss journalism consortium, private companies, thousands of Chinese expats, satellite companies, newspapers, and television reports, which seems to have very little payoff because most people don't care about it at all.

Or it could be that the same government of China that less than 40 years ago admitted to killing 200 protesters and likely killed at least 2500, has severe restrictions on religious freedom, and is known for targeting family members of activists and dissidents, is also rounding up and reeducating members of a very publicly troublesome minority group.

They have a well documented history of similar tactics in Tibet over the last 75 years or so. I mean there have been over 150 Tibetans who have self immolated just in the last decade and a half as a protest against Chinese actions in Tibet. I can't think of very many acts of self-immolation protests where the target government wasn't doing something untoward, much less when there's an average of 10 per year.

Given the recent history of the Chinese government response to dissidents, and the terrorist attacks perpetuated by Uyghurs in the 2010s, I'd honestly be surprised if China didn't do something similar to what is alleged.

[3371]

There's literally someone filmed the camp and fled from China, his name is Guan Heng

[MaxPock]

We can get videos from remote hellholes of Africa like Dafur and Mali but apparently,that's too much to ask in Xinjiang.We can't even get satellite images to show us evidence of this so called wigur genocide

[sarchertech]

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-01/satellite-images-expo...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/85qihtvw6e/the-faces-from-c...

[xanthor]

If you didn't have British Crown state media wrapping a narrative around these images you wouldn't think anything of them.

[sarchertech]

Would you take a group of Swiss journalists?

https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-xinjiang-p...

How about the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights?

[Thlom]

On the other hand you can travel to Xinjiang, visit mosques, Uighur museums, experience Uighur culture, observe Uighurs just minding their own business in their daily life.

[fc417fc802]

> visit mosques

Would love to know how that works in a country that outlaws christian churches that aren't tied to the state.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_church_(China)

[sarchertech]

“Subjected to arbitrary arrests and forced labor, sterilizations to torture, more than one million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other minorities are estimated to have been locked up in so-called “re-education” camps and prisons in the region over the last decade, according to the UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.”

https://gijn.org/stories/interview-uyghur-victims-xinjiang-p...

[xanthor]

UN High Commissioner on Human Rights Michelle Bachelet actually visited Xinjiang and made no such assertions. Whoever did release the report you're referencing, they waited until immediately after her term ended to release it (within hours). Pretty conspicuous.

[deaux]

Did everyone clap and Albert Einstein hand you a crisp $10 bill? You should use that to make the bet you mentioned!

(The first half is obviously true, the second part isn't)

[heavyset_go]

I ran an anonymized Facebook account for years with thousands of followers that mainly sticks to news and politics.

Once I started criticizing Libs of TikTok, the propaganda arm for this administration, and getting traction with users, my account was locked and now I have to scan my face and ID if I want to use it again.

You have to toe the party line here, too.

[glenstein]

>Given the bot started printing the Western consensus first, I bet $10 it was trained by distilling ChatGPT or Gemini.

To your point I've seen something similar with Deepseek, generic answers start printing and then, in plain sight, removed and replaced with a non committal message along the lines of "I don't have access to that information."

[raven12345]

Can you tell what AI chat bots are you using? as i know all chat in China just block answer, no apps will activate camera and ask for information

[ZeroAurora]

Nice bad story. Make up one better next time.

[stevenhuang]

That you think this is made up shows how little you know about what the Chinese netizen deals with day to day.

It is very real and I am not surprised at all something exactly like what op said has happened.

[ZeroAurora]

What if I say I AM a Chinese netizen, right here in China Mainland talking to you?

What if I say no application on my phone ever turn my camera on without my prior approval? What if I confidently say the data privacy situation in China is not in any way worse than USA?

You say I'm censored by gov. Yeah, and so do YOU. We are quite the same, so don't laugh at each other.

[stevenhuang]

If you ever allowed the app access to your camera then next time it will be able to access your camera.

No one is suggesting the app need have circumvented standard android permissions. I'm saying it is not surprising the app would try to open the camera on violation of rules.

You might be surprised to know that I do not disagree with what you said. When it comes to data privacy your information is safe from other private companies but not the government.

> You say I'm censored by gov.

When it comes to political inquiry? Without question this is more sensitive in China. My point is that in China apps are coerced to reveal information about their users to a degree where actively trying to take a picture would not be surprising, or much of an escalation. Not that it would be needed anyways since Internet usage is tied to ID.

[jajuuka]

I love Hacker News fiction. Wild stuff. haha

[holoduke]

Which chat bot?

[imwillofficial]

This risk is far overstated.

I was talking crap about china from the great wall.

[expedition32]

You can't yell Free Palestine or the BBC will mute you...

Personally as a Dutch person it is amusing as all hell hoe goddamn triggered everyone gets about Israel- truly mindblowing.