361–370 of 391 posts
I am interersted in how did China convince those people to move to this "harsh and painful" city. I assume with their top skill, they had options to live anywhere they want, and a lot ot places want them.
The "stick" does not always work, you have to use "carrot" too.
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+1 The long gap between 2016 when the original article was written in Chinese and 2025, the fact that the Substack article does not cite the original Zhihu article (until someone other than OP linked it in this thread), not linking previously English translations of this article, and the financial incentive of the LLM-translated article being on Substack make OP's claim of authorship of the Chinese article very sus.
The first comment can answer your question, go and check whether I am OP https://www.zhihu.com/people/yan-mou-ren-63/posts
I think it would be helpful to dispel any confusion if you added somewhere on the Substack post (e.g. at the bottom) the above message you are the author of the Zhihu post.
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What exactly are you advocating? You seem to be going back to Cold War logic. Your initial assertion that people online criticizing the West are "often" criticizing "absurd" things is simultaneously wrong and condescending, some sort of thought-terminating cliché.
Liberal democracy, I suppose.
"Useful idiots" etc is the language of Cold War logic.
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From someone neither from the US nor from China, you sure did your share of weird things too. So I think that yes, you are romanticizing it as an outsider. Almost all of the stories we get told in the West are from the US perspective, so there's that: anything from China feels fresh in comparison.
As an American, the US perspective is pretty dominate in the US. But still, I never went through a protest that ended in a massacre before, I never had to apply for travel permits to leave my town, nor did I need an exit permit to travel abroad. My first trip to China was in 1999 and things were pretty trippy even that late in their development. The US...what sort of stories do you get told? Are they experiences that…
Yet these happened in the US. Bizarre and secret government projects also happened. Executions also happened.
That you didn't witness them doesn't mean much. I'm sure most Gen X Chinese, as you call them, had pretty uneventful lives without any massacres either. I do think this is a case of laser-focusing on those who had more "interesting" lives, much like focusing on US antiwar activist who got shot or imprisoned during Vietnam war protests, or KKK activity: interesting, but surely not the norm.
> I never had to apply for travel permits to leave my town, nor did I need an exit permit to travel abroad.
Doesn't seem too exciting to me. It does reinforce the narrative that China = bad, US = good (though this is harder to believe in the Trump era). But it's not something particularly interesting to read about, plus every HN reader "knows" this is life in China, they are authoritarian, etc etc.
Hi HN, OP here. I grew up in "Factory 404," a secret nuclear industrial city in the Gobi Desert that officially didn't exist on public maps. This is a memoir about my childhood there. It was a surreal place: we had elite scientists living next to laborers, a zoo in the middle of the desert, and distinct "communist" welfare, all hidden behind a classified code. This is Part 1 of the story. I'm happy to answer any ques…
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Short generalised answer; I grew up in Europe. The dominant media was of course Western media, more specifically American media, think Hollywood and Silicon Valley. It is extremely difficult to break out of that bubble.
Well, that's true enough. I was bracing myself for something edgier. I don't know what I expected, "China has freer speech than America because Facebook censored antivax content" or something :)
You picked a very fringe and bizarre belief (I honestly never read anything even remotely paraphrasing what you just typed) and made it seem so common that "as often as not" this is what people claim when they criticize the West.
It reeks of dishonesty. This isn't defending "Liberal democracy" as you claimed in another comment, it's attacking dissenting opinions by picking (or creating) the worst, most bizarre argument possible and presenting it as the norm.
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FYI, 418 is the HTTP status code that means the server is a teapot.
Technically a HTTCPCP status code I think?
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The development programme was haphazard. They got bits and pieces off the Soviets and had to figure the rest out.
Right, but the statement extends to the present state of mind of the writer. They're saying that they currently find the notion that nuclear energy can be clean or the cleanest as absurd based on their childhood in the infancy of the program. Isnt it currently the consensus that nuclear energy can be one of the more clean energy sources? Because they seem to hold their childhood view that thats crazy