President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment • Hacker News Board

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#561

Post by marderfarker2 » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

montblanc wrote: post #469

kiba wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to know if the information we get out of China is reasonably accurate, for a given value of 'reasonably accurate'. It seems that the Chinese has problem with rampant cheating by both authorities and corporations, leading to many projects that seems impressive at first but are of questionable quality.

For sure. The lack of transparency is a given in an authoritarian regime and I'm sure there are consequences. Isn't Covid a good example? Chinese scientists who tried to ring the alarm where harassed or worse when the whole outbreak was beginning. Kinda reminds me of what happened in Chernobyl.

You also have to be aware of the language barrier/lack of voices from within China who can give you context of what is happening. News that you hear about China are mostly written by western media who has little to no clue about what actually happened (remember the Bloomberg report on the spy chip?). I would exercise caution when reading anything online, especially at this very low SNR climate.

Key to peace and tolerance is understanding, unfortunately China is like a blackbox to most, and people tend to get angry at things they don’t understand.

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#562

Post by pphysch » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

mrtranscendence wrote: post #536

pphysch wrote: post #350

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be crystal clear, the PRC does not view Tiananmen Square as a purely domestic affair. The extent to which students were radicalized, or signal-boosted by foreign influence is unclear. In that sense, a better comparison would be an event in America's history that had significant foreign interference. For example, 9/11. You can talk objectively about 9/11, sure, just like you can talk objectively about Tiananmen Squ…

I'm not sure what to make of this comparison. You're not sure the extent to which foreign influence played a role in radicalizing people leading up to an event where Chinese citizens were massacred by the Chinese state, so it's fair to compare it to a situation where foreign nationals murdered US civilians? This is apples and oranges. Apples and Teslas. Dogs and supercomputers. They're not the same thing. > just like…

There is substantial evidence that Washington was involved in amplifying misinformation and possibly directing student leaders to escalate the violence. Take student leader Chai Ling, for example [1]. She is on record advocating for bloodshed, yet apparently did not take part in the deadly rioting. Instead, she landed at Princeton and Harvard.

The sad truth is that most Americans have no interest in understanding what really happened that week, beyond reinforcing our ideological biases. We accept propagandistic claims of "organized massacre" when "chaotic, deadly riot" is far more accurate. There are pictures of charred government soldier corpses, burned alive in their vehicles. That simply does not happen in a one-sided massacre. Meanwhile, there is a suspicious lack of any photographic evidence of organized executions and other characteristics of a massacre.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chai_Ling#Documentary_controve...

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#563

Post by gkop » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

rdiddly wrote: post #544

stickfigure wrote: post #457

Earlier quoted context omitted.

200 Chinese students have no material financial impact in a body of 35,000 students. I'm inclined to take the statement at face value, and won't be surprised if more actions come as they work out the facts.

200 students who would be quickly replaced with 200 other students from the wait list, I might add.

Universities compete for the out-of-state and foreign students that pay their bills, they are not trivially replaceable. And if you exclude Chinese students from the replacement pool, it's even smaller.

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#564

Post by east2west » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:31 PM UTC

rkk3 wrote: post #507

vhgyu75e6u wrote: post #487

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ones that block freedom of the press, block and censore the internet, deploy military force against civilians, anex peaceful territories by force, push other democracies to overwrite their history, and commit genocide... So the Chinese government.

And those are all things the US, the UK and most western government's have done & will do again.

Do starving its own people and persecuting anyone who talks, thinks out loud, researches, or investigates it, work for you? The Great Leap Forward and the "Three-year Natural Disaster!" There was nothing natural about it and we still don't know how many perished.

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#565

Post by optimalsolver » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:35 PM UTC

zepto wrote: post #409

jeffh wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the 50s there was US agent repression and intimidation of beliefs around communism (see McCarthyism). The KKK was also still rampant and had members that were police or other "state officials". So ... maybe US isn't so different after all?

The KKK wasn’t a part of the state. And yes, there was state sponsored anti-communism in the 50s, but it is not even close to comparable. Nobody was being intimidated for mentioning communism, or even advocating for it. People were targeted for group membership. This is still wrong, but please stop trying to make it seem equivalent to what is happening today in China. The fact that you have to go back 50 years to fin…

The KKK was absolutely part of the state in the American South up to 60s.

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#566

Post by criddell » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

Nevermark wrote: post #522

criddell wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is an opportunity to raise the prominence of the issue. I wish Purdue had explicitly mentioned the Tiananmen Massacre in this notice. We should talk about it. Our diplomats should be applying pressure around Peng Shuai's status. I'd love to see a debate in Congress about our participation in the Olympics and what that says about our support of this regime.

I think it is better they didn't. Students are not being (considered for) expelled for their views of the Tiananmen Massacre one way or another. Taking any stance on that, in this context, would muddy those waters and make Prudue look like it was doing a political purge. The problem that produced the statement was harassment. Not political views.

Is saying the Tiananmen Massacre happened a political view?

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#567

Post by ltbarcly3 » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

If they had followed a student around campus harassing them and causing their family to be threatened:

- because they were LGBTQ

- because of their ethnicity or race

- because they were female

- because they spoke out on issues regarding any of the above

In all of these cases not only would those students already have been suspended from the university and on their way to expulsion (and rightfully so), the university would have acted within days of it being reported.

In some kind of ridiculous reverse-mccarthyism we currently have known agents of a foreign government harassing US residents and institutions are afraid to do anything about it for fear of reprisals from a foreign government!

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#568

Post by dfxm12 » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:36 PM UTC

justicezyx wrote: post #496

dfxm12 wrote: post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you met them at a $30k+/yr university? I think that's an important piece of context here. The current Chinese system affords these students the ability to go to prestigious universities abroad. Things are going good for these students, so why wouldn't they like the government that grants them such privilege? Folks who've immigrated for other reasons might have a different experience...

Does Chinese government pay the tuition for these students? That sounds like too good to be true.

For some of them, yes [0], but even beside that, if you're well off enough, in country that treats dissenters so poorly, to send your child abroad to study at an expensive university, you're likely in favor of the status quo.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Scholarship_Council

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#569

Post by SpicyLemonZest » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:38 PM UTC

stelonix wrote: post #257

someguydave wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no way you can truthfully say that the US went to Iraq to murder an ethnicity. Flagged.

I'm still waiting for the incontestable proof China is trying to get rid of Uygurs. No, a known anti-China source such as Adrian Zenz being propped up by adversaries of China does not count. If you have the slightest understanding of discourse, you already know this: you don't get a biased source to report on the subject they're biased about.

It seems unreasonable to require that all bad information about China come from previously neutral sources. Is Zenz an anti-China source because he's "biased", or because he's reached a reasonable evidence-based conclusion that the Chinese government is very bad?

Re: President Daniels responds to Chinese student's harassment

#570

Post by hindsightbias » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 4:39 PM UTC

ed312 wrote: post #335

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> should be only one remedy: imediate expulsion of any agent of repression of the Chinese state There should be the same remedy that is provided to any other bully. These are still kids. There is a learning opportunity. If they refuse to learn, yes, expulsion should be in the cards.

University students are emphatically not kids. The students who are US citizens are legal adults expected to vote an participate in democracy. At what age do you expect them to suddenly "grow up" and be responsible for their actions?

The day we let them drink.