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The China Cultural Clash

stratechery.com

261–270 of 379 posts

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

counter-counterpoint: much right-winged content is associated with hate speech and violence. Further, many users of websites such as this are young and tend to skew more left of center, and therefore will gravitate toward that content anyway.

Something to think about: > “We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC. Hate speech is off the table in the US because historically it's been used to stoke eth…

You have a good analogy in that China has different systems of political correctness. But it's not just fear of the consequences as to why criticizing the government offends China.

First, criticism, or rather, speech welds actual power in China and can effect real change in the power structure, unlike that in the West where freedom of speech is like freedom of wild animals - free, but powerless. And second, the CCP is actually totalitarian in the reverse sense that it is the total responsibility of the CCP to run every aspect of the country, listen to all the people, and solve all grievances and problems, because if they don't, they lose legitimacy and heads will roll, starting from the highest place then millions. This is coming from both politically Leninist vanguardism and culturally the notion of the Mandate of Heaven.

Now we can argue this form of government lacks checks and balances and likely produces extreme outcomes, but it can also be argued that it is truly held accountable to the people to deliver what the people want in contrast to the west where the government is merely responsible to the strongest lobbies.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The solution is quite simple: mind your own business. Let time and history to tell. China never send army or CIA to overthrow other countries. If the other side don't want to do the business that's fine. Westerner like to spread their values, often with force.

“Mind your own business” the Chinese say while simultaneously getting upset when an individual in their individual capacity says something on an American website banned in China. Is irony not a thing in China?

Posting a picture of Winnie the Pooh gets you jail time in that country, so irony is reduced to things made of metal. They read 1984 and treated is as a manual instead of a warning.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#263
post #109
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody, including Chinese citizens thinks this is "ordinary people boycotting offensive speech", this is government action.

How do you know? I see literally zero direct evidence for this in the linked post -- only that some people in China responded. Not everybody in China is working for the government. When analogous statements are found offensive in the US, US citizens, US tech companies, and the US media can act with astonishing speed and coordination to stamp them out. That doesn't mean that the US government is directing all of it.

The Chinese government is heavily intertwined in every single business of some size in China. They ultimately do Xi Jinping’s bidding.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#264
post #252

> The internet is an amoral force that reduces friction, not an inevitable force for good. This is well said and something everyone in tech should remember. Unintended consequence is a law with teeth.

Why would you care about "good", a relative notion that means different things to different people, over reduction of friction , a clearly beneficial thing that accelerates technical and scientific progress? If we could only "dissolve" all those parts of society and culture that are mostly pure friction, and spin the wheels 100x faster to the future...

they say power tools allow you to make mistakes faster. the internet is the same.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#265
post #37

The Chinese get pissed off at political statements Americans find innocuous. Europeans are angry over the dominance of American tech companies which they are unable to control. Americans are panicked at the very idea of anybody non-Western being associated with any technology they use, as we saw with FaceApp and 5G. This was all inevitable, and it's going to lead to siloed-off, separate internets for every region in…

as an European i'm mildly irritated with US companies and scared shitless of what the Chinese are doing.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#266
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The US is still special in this context where free speech is really taken to heart and extends to not only dissent against the government but even vile extremely unpopular political opinions are protected ...which is something you don't always find in every western country. For example, in Charlottesville 2017 [1] the local government tried to prevent Neo-nazis from using a park for a protest but ACLU sued the gov an…

> “We are strongly dissatisfied and we oppose Silver’s claim to support Morey’s right of free expression. We believe that any speech that challenges national sovereignty and social stability is not within the scope of freedom of speech,” CCTV said in its statement in Chinese, which was translated by CNBC. I normally find the "hate speech is free speech" argument to be pretty tiring, but it's also true that once you s…

It's much worse than that. The claim is "you criticizing our government is hate speech". That is, they presume to have the right (or perhaps the moral authority) to say what the rules for free speech should be in other countries. I find that rather staggering.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#267
post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

try non-PC speeches in US, race, LGBT or gun related speeches you'll see

We have a lot of examples of that occurring in the past decade. There's no need to speculate (the "you'll see" part). The op's statement was obviously correct about speed of action. In the US protests about something tend to build and stretch out over many days or weeks more typically. See the prominent example of the famous Chick-fil-A protest (which went on for months). It took Walmart a month to take measures rece…

This has already been going on for months, though. It's gotta be front-of-mind over there.

The image of English-speaking westerners talking about "liberate hong kong" is a bit triggering for the average Chinese person, due to Hong Kong and England's history. It must be incredibly easy for CCTV to point at that and say that it's just the western imperialists trying to take HK away.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#268
post #45

Since diversity is a strength, it would seem that the ideal situation globally is to have a diversity of economic, political and legal systems. If instead, these systems around the globe tend towards similarity and strong coupling, the result is likely to be fragility and instability. By having weakly coupled diverse systems with well defined interfaces, the overall global system becomes more robust and disturbances…

+1, well said! Diversity, having individual countries do their own thing and embrace their own ethnicity, and where it makes sense support free trade.

Sometimes in conversation I hear people talk about how we have to save the world, interfere with other countries, etc. I think this should never be done unilaterally. If something really bad and evil is going on in the world then many countries should agree and cooperate to try to fix things.

The trouble with unilateral intervention is that it can so easily devolve into just serving the needs of special interests.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#269

It helps to know a little bit about what's been going on in Hong Kong, before you all line up and take your daily dump on China. It all started a few months ago when someone committed a crime in Taiwan and fled to Hong Kong. To prevent HK from becoming a safe haven for criminals, the Chief Executive of HK proposed a new law to facilitate extradition of these crime suspects from HK to various jurisdictions in the regi…

This is unintentionally the clearest demonstration of the clash of cultural values in the whole thread.

Between harmony and human rights, it's absolutely clear to a westerner which one is more important.

From your tone, it is also absolutely clear which one you would choose.

> If anything I said is untrue, please correct me

It's possible to only say true things and still be biased. This is probably the most common way of spinning a story for "fake news". Some major events I would definitely include are:

- The 2015 Causeway bay disappearances which justified the fear of extradition: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causeway_Bay_Books_disappearan...

- Carrie Lam doesn't actually have autonomy and needs confirmation from beijing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOft2Y6mH_g

- Escalation of force, hiring triads to attack citizens, blinding journalist with rubber bullets, shooting live ammo at students in the chest, etc etc.

There are a lot more I can add but halfway through I realize the details don't really matter. The difference in cultural values will make the interpretation of these events irreconcilable anyway.

To an individualist, the only fact that matters is that at least 2 million in a city of 8 million want the right to their own destiny. To a collectivist, the only fact that matters is that the government is building a more harmonious society so the ends justify any means.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#270
post #221

One thing you learn from spending time studying China is that the Chinese state has an asymmetric advantage in much better understanding the US than the US understands China and being very good at deliberately structuring their systems and policies in a way that consistently exploits the weaknesses in how Western liberal democracies are organized. I think the much bigger story here is how China's state capitalism is…

It appears you have a good understanding of the motivations of both US and China. What's your take on the HK protests? It's impossible to find an unbiased news source and any request for information that even hints you're not completely in support of the activists is immediately attacked.

There's no such thing as an unbiased news source, but you can try looking at differently-biased news sources.

RTHK is the public broadcaster in Hong Kong: https://www.rthk.hk/?lang=en

SCMP is owned by Alibaba Group: https://www.scmp.com/

HKFP is funded by donations: https://www.hongkongfp.com/

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