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The China Cultural Clash

stratechery.com

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Re: The China Cultural Clash

#341

Post by mlyle »

yourbandsucks wrote: post #326
mlyle wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a strawman. Morey did not tweet anything containing "liberate Hong Kong". (That was subsequent, different events, by different people). China promised 50 years of "one country, two systems"-- people in Hong Kong want to cash that check.

I wasn't trying to take sides on the HK situation itself, though, so it can't really be a straw-man on that topic. The topic was whether the outpouring of sentiment from mainland China could be 'organic' rather than some immediate government dictate.

Picking something that is more extreme than what was said, and asserting that this could prompt swift Chinese organic reaction... does nothing to address whether the reaction to what was actually said was organic.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#342

Post by remarkEon »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #339
remarkEon wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And actually, we have to move up this value chain anyways to justify our higher standard of living. This is the part that makes absolutely no sense to me. The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. They require advanced degrees and highly technical specialization and experience. Not everyone can do that. Unless you have a parallel plan to, perha…

> The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. Yep. But that is a problem better solved via some kind of wealth redistribution, rather than maintaining low value jobs that couldn’t pay enough to keep up anyways. China was just the first thing to suck away low value jobs, eventually automation will be much much worse.

You mean, the jobs that could support a family on a single income?

Those jobs?

It's a unique aspect of tech-people that the disappearance of a class of work that was actually able to support people at a reasonable standard of living is cause for advocacy of "more wealth redistribution, please". Where I come from this is viewed as both naive and insulting. I don't mean to imply you were trying to come across that way - but realize that it can. "Look I know we took your dirty disgusting low skilled manufacturing job and shipped it overseas ... but here's a welfare check from Uncle Sam" has not exactly done well as a political strategy for the last few election cycles.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#343

Post by ericd »

guelo wrote: post #85
zarro wrote: post #41

I see lots of Anti-China sentiment. I would be very careful here into not falling into their deliberate trap of making "The West" China's "Enemy". China in its current totalitarian form needs an "Enemy" to survive, without it, it has to deal with difficult internal questions which will force it to adapt and change - and this what scares them. Totalitarian governments rely on distraction and misdirection of the popula…

This theory has proved wrong. China has been welcomed into the WTO over the last 20-30 years and it has not reformed. It is now extending it's economic superpower into political and cultural power. It's not about making an enemy, it's about limiting this unwanted influence.

I think the parent’s hypothesis has some truth, but I think it acts over much longer timescales than we assumed originally. I think as long as the elders remember the really bad times before their relatively recent prosperity, they’re willing to put up with a lot from the government, and they’ll serve as a stabilizing force. Once they die off and there are only people who remember the good times, I think we’ll see a population that feels much more “entitled” to reform. But those are human lifetime timescales, not a couple decades.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#344

Post by ktln2 »

baby wrote: post #78

I have an interesting take on this, from knowing a bit about Chinese culture (lived there) and for having friends and coworkers who are Chinese. Culture in China is about unity. If you look at Chinese history, and if you watch Chinese movies, this is a recurrent theme. Unification through blood and war. This is the goal and China will get stronger and more stable over time. At what cost? Tiananmen, xinjiang, hk, the…

"Culture in China is about unity. If you look at Chinese history, and if you watch Chinese movies, this is a recurrent theme."

This is because the governments (ROC and PRC) deliberately construct and promote this ideology. The idea of Chinese nation 中华民族 did not exists until roughly 100 years ago.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#345

Post by ktln2 »

godelski wrote: post #285
4gotunameagain wrote: post #243

> There’s one rather glaring hole in this story of immediate outrage from Chinese fans over Morey’s tweet: > Twitter is banned in China. I didn't even realize until now. They are simply censoring (mainly)American social media posts. On the internet.

Wikipedia is also banned. Most social media is banned. Though these sites are generally allowed in HK. Many people also do use VPNs, but that's a different topic.

Not now - Chinese is turning Wikipedia into a censorship weapon. What you can see on Wikipedia (in Chinese) are largely edited by Chinese government.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49921173

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#346

Post by thrwy_01 »

smackay wrote: post #34

It is rather interesting to see Stratechery talk about values when normally the articles are about markets and capital. I don't how the latter, since they are inherently amoral, can accommodate values either. As a result the argument seemed a little forced. Surely if China is an important market for western companies then the rules of that market apply. It is only to be expected that in a global market there must a c…

For the uninformed, the Chinese communist party has historically been the foremost destroyer of (traditional) Chinese culture and history. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#347

Post by mlyle »

Merrill wrote: post #99
mlyle wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Every large organization has firewalled The primary purpose of this is to enforce security for connections. Not every large organization employs content filtering, and those that do mostly only enforce a minimal standard of what is acceptable for work.

Not all subnets have Internet access, HTTPS is proxied for those that do, email attachments are scanned, and there is a large list of web sites to which access is blocked, likely including social networks like twitter and facebook. Depending on your employer, they may ask you to cease posting on social media when hired since they do not want to deal with employees causing controversy.

Clearly filtering for security and workplace appropriateness is equivalent to filtering an entire country's discourse and media. /s

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#348

Post by seanmcdirmid »

remarkEon wrote: post #342
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The farther you move up this value chain, the fewer and fewer people you can find that can actually do those jobs. Yep. But that is a problem better solved via some kind of wealth redistribution, rather than maintaining low value jobs that couldn’t pay enough to keep up anyways. China was just the first thing to suck away low value jobs, eventually automation will be much much worse.

You mean, the jobs that could support a family on a single income? Those jobs? It's a unique aspect of tech-people that the disappearance of a class of work that was actually able to support people at a reasonable standard of living is cause for advocacy of "more wealth redistribution, please". Where I come from this is viewed as both naive and insulting. I don't mean to imply you were trying to come across that way…

Your choice of using tariffs to keep the rubber dog poop factory jobs in America eventually fails because they’ll just be away automated anyways. Trump-style protectionism doesn’t make the problem go away because it is ultimately one of a huge value gap. And this is why his tariffs have closed factories rather than actually helped them.

If capital continues to become much more valuable than labor (via robotics, automation, etc...), then eventually we have to decide what to do with all the obsolete humans who we don’t need labor from anymore. We can hand them welfare checks, give them a basic income, have them do pointless jobs (eg move dirt back and forth, or make rubber dog poop that doesn’t justify their paychecks), or...just throw them away. Some of those choices are more moral than the others.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#349

Post by godelski »

ktln2 wrote: post #345
godelski wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wikipedia is also banned. Most social media is banned. Though these sites are generally allowed in HK. Many people also do use VPNs, but that's a different topic.

Not now - Chinese is turning Wikipedia into a censorship weapon. What you can see on Wikipedia (in Chinese) are largely edited by Chinese government. [1] https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-49921173

Let me clarify: Wikipedia is banned in Mainland China (what Westerners mean when they say "China"). It is allowed in Hong Kong and Taiwan - which are outside the great firewall. That doesn't mean they aren't censoring and editing the Chinese language Wikipedia. They definitely are. Also consider that many people from China (read: mainland China) are coming to the US and the west for school. They tend to read the Chinese language versions of Wiki, not the English ones.

Re: The China Cultural Clash

#350

Post by dang »

emanreus wrote: post #149

Pot, meet the kettle. You're both niggers :) An amusing tirade but politics and economy tend to go hand in hand, especially when it comes to superpowers. And there are far more brutal examples of it going on as we speak. Blocking access to essential medicine and food comes to mind. Outside the virtue signaling bubble and PR facades the world is a very Machiavellian place.

Between this, the bit about "women are dead weight", and numerous violations of the site guidelines in the past, we've banned this account for trolling.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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