Note that US citizens have long been warned about stuff like this, especially exit bans. From the state department in 2018:
> Exercise increased caution in China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws and special restrictions on dual U.S.-Chinese nationals.
> Chinese authorities have the broad ability to prohibit travelers from leaving China (also known as ‘exit bans’); exit bans have been imposed to compel U.S. citizens to resolve business disputes, force settlement of court orders, or facilitate government investigations. Individuals not involved in legal proceedings or suspected of wrongdoing have also be subjected to lengthy exit bans in order to compel their family members or colleagues to cooperate with Chinese courts or investigators.
> U.S. citizens visiting or residing in China have been arbitrarily interrogated or detained for reasons related to “state security.” Security personnel have detained and/or deported U.S. citizens for sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese government.
> Chinese authorities have the broad ability to prohibit travelers from leaving China (also known as ‘exit bans’); exit bans have been imposed to compel U.S. citizens to resolve business disputes, force settlement of court orders, or facilitate government investigations. Individuals not involved in legal proceedings or suspected of wrongdoing have also be subjected to lengthy exit bans in order to compel their family members or colleagues to cooperate with Chinese courts or investigators.
I mean, is it really such a rare thing to do? I know that in Poland if you have any outstanding and overdue unpaid fines/alimonies/traffic tickets, you will be prevented from boarding a flight out of the country at any airport until those obligations are paid.
Chinese government is constantly challenging the validity of foreign passport if the person is ethnically Han Chinese. Governments must apply diplomatic pressure go get their citizens free.
This is also something Iran does - in theory someone can renounce Iranian citizenship, but it never really happens.
Essentially, if your father is Iranian, you are Iranian, even if you were born outside Iran, and you must go to Iran to request renunciation - which can be denied, and is hardly inviting for someone criticising the regime.
"just" retaliation... this makes their detention arbitrary. After Meng Wanzhou was arrested (and placed under house arrest in her multi-million dollar Vancouver mansion), the Chinese government arbitrarily picked two high-value Canadians (an entrepeneur and a Candian diplomat) and threw them into solitary confinement, interrogating them 24/7 in shifts, and giving ostensibly no access to lawyers/representation.
Oh, and by the way, you don't need to be a diplomat or entrepeneur to be picked up. They do it all the time [0].
Well Canada really defied China by arresting Huawei CFO and (could then extradite to US). China is really in a weird coldish war with the West, especially when you throw in England defying them with sanctuary for HKers.
They must be getting pissed, curious how things could escalate.
“Defying” implies that they are in some kind of authority over whether another country offers an immigration path to willing immigrants. No one is defying them here. They are acting outside the bounds of whatever legitimate authority they have, and have been doing so for some time. They are being checked.
This is incorrect. The two Michaels have been accused of spying. You're thinking of a third Canadian Robert Schellenberg. His punished was suddenly changed from 15 years in prison to a death sentence after a recent retrial.
Leaving the discussion on right or wrong aside, the 2 Canadians were not targeted at random and were clearly on a Chinese government list of foreigners with close links to foreign governments' agencies that the Chinese let operate "at their pleasure". A bit like when e.g. Russia arrests and expels/imprisons Western spies the US/UK immediately know which Russians on their soil to target in the same way in a tit-for-tat response.
There are plenty of Canadians and Americans in China, including students, language teachers, expats, etc. and I don't think that they face any particular danger as long as they don't make waves. "Without explanation" (as per the article) is not the same thing as "at random".
But this is the same faulty reasoning that led the press to underestimate the danger of covid19. The probability of arbitrary and unbounded detention and torture is very small, but the change in personal utility would be so terrible that you have to consider the risk profile of travelling to China to be similar to wingsuit-skydiving or exposure to radiation.
At least Russia, the US and the EU expel each others' spies as opposed to imprisionment and torture. Tourture is even illegal and punished bt law in the EU, which adhers to the human rights charter.
I've been to China a few times, most recently in late 2018. I traveled overland by train from Beijing to Xian and then to Shanghai. Everything as a non-chinese citizen was just harder than it was when I visited in 2014. Buying train tickets was a massive hassle without a Chinese ID. Paying for anything was difficult because many places no longer take cash and you can't really get a proper WeChat account as a foreigner.
The entire time I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in a dystopian future. Security around Tiananmen Square in Beijing was so overdone it would almost have been funny if it wasn't scary. Facial recognition scans on the metro system. In Shanghai they use facial recognition at crosswalks and then put up the name and picture of violators on a huge screen at the intersection (I can only assume they also deduct from their social credit score).
If this is the direction China wants to continue to go in, I no longer want anything to do with it. As long as the CCP is in power I won't be visiting again. And now that includes Hong Kong sadly.
Posted 10 mins ago and already downvoted. Do HN not have algos to stop this astroturfing behaviour? It’s becoming very prevalent for anything that criticises the CCP.
Yep, every time I post anything that mentions China I lose Karma, but I don't particularly care. Sometimes the comments start with 10+ upvotes and then suddenly a wave of downvotes comes. Most recently some very new accounts with mostly pro china submissions and comments began using my real name and posting it in comments, apparently thinking I would be scared of having my real name associated with anything critical of China.
And tactic #2 I've noticed often used now, when they refer to themselves as "we" or occasionally "we in the west", as if they are westerners being self-critical. Yah, right.
I went to Beijing in 2019 and while I felt the security of subway stations was a bit overdone (metal detectors and bag scanners) I had little trouble buying things: while shops wanted me to pay with wechat they accepted cash all the time.
I also found the security of tiennam square not much different from the eiffel tower (which I didn't enter because the security seems such a hassle at that time). Security of very high profile spots seems to be high in general these days.
Not to deny your experience, I just had a different one. When talking to other travelers, it seems difference in experience happens all the time while traveling.
> The entire time I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was
living in a dystopian future [...] they use facial recognition
at crosswalks and then put up the name and picture of violators
on a huge screen at the intersection
"feeling of a dystopian future"? That sounds straight like from an episode of Black Mirror.
I regret that I wasn't able to see HK before China got to it. While I hope for the best for Taiwan, it might be one of the places I go next for that reason.
Completely agree. I lived and worked in HK a number of years ago and find China and Chinese people to be some of the most beautiful and interesting cultural assets in the world.
So it sucks that I likely will never visit again in my lifetime. China is already dying, the oppressionist leadership just is self-deluded and doesn’t understand it yet. The further you move away from liberal democracy with deliberately decentralized power, the more isolationist your economy becomes.
On the scale of years, sure you can manipulate markets, send elite spy teams to kill foreign dissidents, pressure other developed economies to buy your exports and respect your authoritarian escalations.
On the scale of decades you can’t. China foolishly underestimates how smart and hard working everyone else is, how easily a generation can be disenfranchised from Chinese exports, and how little of a threat Chinese cyber warfare truly is.
China is just a large, slow North Korea with enough starting capital to superficially appear OK in the short run.
I'm not sure China is underestimating anything. They had an asset, in the form of millions of underqualified workers, and they've used it, to manufacture cheap stuff. But with increasing automation, that asset was never going to last; every passing year it's becoming easier for other countries to replace Chinese manufacturing with local developments, and I think they know it.
In order to stay relevant, China needs a better educated workforce, but in order to control those better educated people, they will need ever better control mechanisms. I doubt they'll be able to make it work in the long run, so they likely will need to change strategies, but right now it makes sense.
I last visited China a few years ago. I felt a bit sad, because I felt like it was the last time. It was.
I got the same same feeling. They are building a new and technologically "better" Soviet Union, actually implementing a bunch of the ideas from Orwell's '1984' novel about totalitarian communism.
I feel (selfishly) happy that I got to experience Hong Kong a bunch of times while it still existed as free city.
For Australia as well. They recently gave an Australian citizen a death penalty sentence in retaliation for the ongoing conflict between Australia and China.
At the rate things are going, in another five years nobody from a liberal nation will be able to safely visit Xi's new hermit kingdom.
It's a shame. I always thought it would be nice to visit Hong Kong.
> Karm Gilespie, had been sentenced to death for attempting to smuggle 7.5kg of methamphetamine through a Chinese airport in December 2013.
The death penalty threshold is 50 gram for methamphetamine in China, in absence of other 'good behavior' such as collaboration, etc. If any Chinese citizen attempted to smuggle this much drugs into China, it's going to be the same fate, except maybe faster.
Drug dealers in China are executed for much less. To paint that as 'retaliation for ongoing conflict' is laughable.
I'm very glad that I managed to visit it in the early 2000s.
One of my abiding impressions and favourite photos of the trip was a street where signage had proliferated so much that it was solid, and the only constraint on incursion into the street was whether or not it got hit by a bus. The ubiquitous vendors of fake watches and shops offering to make you a suit. Skyscrapers on every surface that wasn't a 45 degree slope. The outdoor escalator. Huge, neat, organised, airconditioned subway.
A real "hermit kingdom" has no exports, though, no? If China is going that way, I can't imagine how it plans to keep its economy going. Does it think its urban centers are already self-sufficient centers of economic demand for the products it produces currently?
I've visited China nearly every year for the past 6 years and never had any sort of issues. I thought all the security personnel I encountered at the airport, immigration, subway stations etc in China were very professional and respectful. In contrast to one of the last times I was returning from China to the U.S. and witnessed a highly unprofessional U.S. CBP officer who was yelling and berating incoming international visitors because they couldn't understand his English, which was infuriating. All this to say that if you want to visit China recreationally (outside of pandemics), you'll almost certainly be fine and treated well.
*Edit: I'm just offering my personal experience here for others to consider amongst other sources of information.
Not sure how you went from an article warning people that the new security regulations to well they're ok people. This security letter means that could have non-citizens detained/charged (penalties range from 10 years prision to life). Their decision to charge you is very badly defined. The offense doesn't even have to happen in their own country. Mentioning how Hong Kong is an independent region is one of those violating items in that letter.
Fellow Canadians have had to watch as an increasing number of Canadians are arbitrarily detained and held in torturous conditions.
These Canadians range from high-profile and wealthy[0] to low-profile [1,2], and the conditions in which they are detained are an affront to human rights.
I don't mean to be snarky, but is it possible that your personal experience in the past cannot perfectly predict the experiences of other people in the future, who may well visit different parts of the country, encounter different personnel, and will say and write different things?
Of course, if it did not happen to you, it may never happen to anyone else, like to these Canadian citizens who have been here taken hostages, or Australian citizen sentenced to death.
In China if you're a (especially white) foreigner/tourist you tend to be treated better than the locals might be. But you should remember that you're a guest and not push your luck.
This is certainly not a cold war - it's a trade war, it's competition, it's different cultures... but it is not war frozen in place by the threat of annihilation.
It's more than just a traditional (import/export) trade war. It's very economically driven, with government-backed businesses buying up businesses all over the world and then trying to exert (economical) control via those, while they barely allow businesses to do the same in China.
One-sided cold war perhaps. China has no interest in turning the US communist. Because of Chinese exceptionalism, it doesn't think that's desirable or even possible. Can the US picture a future where it coexists with a communist China though? Based on comments from most Anglophone commentators, that doesn't seem to be the case. Their only two end goals for China is eventual democracy or eventual collapse.
The Cold War had regular threats of nuclear annihilation as well as constant military testing of each other's response times and perimeter. There are no Chinese nuclear bombers violating US airspace forcing USAF jet scrambling.
This is far far less antagonistic. ...at least for now.
Well considering China's been harassing Philippino fishing boats and starting minor skirmishes along the Indian border. Both countries are trading partners and have ties with america and America's now sent naval forces to the south China sea.
The threat of nuclear war isn't the only thing that makes a cold war. It's the constant small economic, social and military pushes by these countries against eachother.without ever formally declaring war.
Maybe not with US territory directly but China has been extremely aggressive in the South China Sea. Despite this being international waters, Western aligned nations and US ships have been directly harassed and threatened. The Chinese island military bases are a direct move to allow area denial. They [the CCP] also export Chinese-style internet controls and ideological ideas around censorship and the acceptability of mass surveillance and targeting of dissidents. The loans given to countries by China are often neo-colonial in nature, tying African countries to China by debt.
This is definitely Soviet-Era style cold war tactics. Could be ripped out of the 60s with the names replaced.
More to the point, how does a country end a Cold War? Hot wars have a formal end via truces and armistices; undeclared wars may continue unabated in other theaters and fronts, as well as different domains entirely.
Use this to negotiate hazard pay with your company when traveling to China. There's money to be made by leveraging the difference between perceived and actual risk.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Thanks, I didn't notice this guideline and I apologize for taking over this thread. Apparently, my post is upvoted heavily 20+ votes and it's clouding the actual discussion.
I've also noticed a large influx of new accounts posting low quality, politically charged comments in the past few months. You can find plenty of those in this thread.
I think its pretty likely that we're headed for an extinction type event for upvote based "anonymous" message boards like HN, reddit ... or at least a significant decline in their usefulness
What's a good alternative architecture that promotes quality content/comments and prevents regression short of manual compilation, moderation and curation?
Edit: Jotting down some ideas:
1) Occlude/Delude/Fog-up the votes for newly created accounts. Mature accounts get to see gray posts.
2) Consesus amongst mature accounts has higher weight over newly created accounts.
3) Penalty for being flagged is higher for mature accounts as with power comes responsibility of good behavior.
4) Karma should have more meaning that just a tally of points. Upvoting costs Karma (-1 from balance). So, people are more careful and have to strongly agree to upvote. Probably some caveats and downsides here.
5) Buffer out the oscillations of upvotes/downvotes. Sort of like a mass-spring-damper system.
6) Hire moderators that are vetted and publicly funded by HN members.
7) Verified accounts with work email or some other means. These accounts would have the highest weight in anything they do.
I just reloaded the page and, let me see the top comments:
1. Note that US citizens have long been warned about stuff like this ...
2. I just noticed - all anti China comments were heavily upvoted but just in last 30 mins ... (this comment thread)
3. Not just arrested but tortured ...
4. This is bad for Canadians recently, with many arrests and accusations of spying ...
5. I've visited China nearly every year for the past 6 years and never had any sort of issues ...
6. I get the impression that we're now in an undeclared Cold War with China.
7. Use this to negotiate hazard pay with your company when traveling to China.
The rest are greyed out:
8. ... If this is the direction China wants to continue to go in, I no longer want anything to do with it ...
9. ... Of course anything and everything is a sign of a "New Cold War" so I'm not surprised this is as upvoted as it is.
10. The current administration has been bullying China incessantly ...
So, 1/3/8 are clearly anti-China, 4/6/7 can be read either way, 5 is questioning the premise (so we could consider it mildly pro-China, if you will), and 9/10 are the only explicitly pro-China comments. They are also at the bottom.
I am seeing the same that you're seeing now. Those grayed comments are back to black.
Why do we even have such a huge oscillation? I am extremely suspicious but cautious with allegation without data.
What I am sure of is the following:
Comments start out positive, then comes the hammer and they go extremely gray (the lightest color and bottom out at -4?) and then we have them back to normal levels. This is a really concerning behavior. If we had a plot of vote vs. time, we'd see this hammer come down. I strongly suspect.
Readit News
> Exercise increased caution in China due to the arbitrary enforcement of local laws and special restrictions on dual U.S.-Chinese nationals.
> Chinese authorities have the broad ability to prohibit travelers from leaving China (also known as ‘exit bans’); exit bans have been imposed to compel U.S. citizens to resolve business disputes, force settlement of court orders, or facilitate government investigations. Individuals not involved in legal proceedings or suspected of wrongdoing have also be subjected to lengthy exit bans in order to compel their family members or colleagues to cooperate with Chinese courts or investigators.
> U.S. citizens visiting or residing in China have been arbitrarily interrogated or detained for reasons related to “state security.” Security personnel have detained and/or deported U.S. citizens for sending private electronic messages critical of the Chinese government.
travel.state.gov archived from 2018: https://web.archive.org/web/20180112180843/https://travel.st...
AKA taking hostages.
Dead Comment
Edit: British-employed not actually British
Essentially, if your father is Iranian, you are Iranian, even if you were born outside Iran, and you must go to Iran to request renunciation - which can be denied, and is hardly inviting for someone criticising the regime.
How do they ascertain that? DNA testing?
Check out the BBC interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_2TzuNsZDM
Oh, and by the way, you don't need to be a diplomat or entrepeneur to be picked up. They do it all the time [0].
You can read more about Spavor and Kovrig, the Canadians detained in solitary confinement in China for over a year, here: https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-michael-kov...
[0] https://torontosun.com/news/national/123-canadians-detained-...
They must be getting pissed, curious how things could escalate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53104303
https://globalnews.ca/news/5257482/robert-schellenberg-death...
[0]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/03/04/asia/china-canada-kovrig-spav... [1]: https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/30/asia/canada-china-death-sente...
Deleted Comment
There are plenty of Canadians and Americans in China, including students, language teachers, expats, etc. and I don't think that they face any particular danger as long as they don't make waves. "Without explanation" (as per the article) is not the same thing as "at random".
- Expelling people back to their home country where they are still free as a form of diplomacy
versus
- Imprisoning, torturing and passing the death sentence as a form of diplomcy.
The entire time I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in a dystopian future. Security around Tiananmen Square in Beijing was so overdone it would almost have been funny if it wasn't scary. Facial recognition scans on the metro system. In Shanghai they use facial recognition at crosswalks and then put up the name and picture of violators on a huge screen at the intersection (I can only assume they also deduct from their social credit score).
If this is the direction China wants to continue to go in, I no longer want anything to do with it. As long as the CCP is in power I won't be visiting again. And now that includes Hong Kong sadly.
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Although if you have genuine concerns about astroturfing, I suggest emailing hn@ycombinator.com.
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I also found the security of tiennam square not much different from the eiffel tower (which I didn't enter because the security seems such a hassle at that time). Security of very high profile spots seems to be high in general these days.
Not to deny your experience, I just had a different one. When talking to other travelers, it seems difference in experience happens all the time while traveling.
"feeling of a dystopian future"? That sounds straight like from an episode of Black Mirror.
So it sucks that I likely will never visit again in my lifetime. China is already dying, the oppressionist leadership just is self-deluded and doesn’t understand it yet. The further you move away from liberal democracy with deliberately decentralized power, the more isolationist your economy becomes.
On the scale of years, sure you can manipulate markets, send elite spy teams to kill foreign dissidents, pressure other developed economies to buy your exports and respect your authoritarian escalations.
On the scale of decades you can’t. China foolishly underestimates how smart and hard working everyone else is, how easily a generation can be disenfranchised from Chinese exports, and how little of a threat Chinese cyber warfare truly is.
China is just a large, slow North Korea with enough starting capital to superficially appear OK in the short run.
In order to stay relevant, China needs a better educated workforce, but in order to control those better educated people, they will need ever better control mechanisms. I doubt they'll be able to make it work in the long run, so they likely will need to change strategies, but right now it makes sense.
Dead Comment
I got the same same feeling. They are building a new and technologically "better" Soviet Union, actually implementing a bunch of the ideas from Orwell's '1984' novel about totalitarian communism.
I feel (selfishly) happy that I got to experience Hong Kong a bunch of times while it still existed as free city.
At the rate things are going, in another five years nobody from a liberal nation will be able to safely visit Xi's new hermit kingdom.
It's a shame. I always thought it would be nice to visit Hong Kong.
The death penalty threshold is 50 gram for methamphetamine in China, in absence of other 'good behavior' such as collaboration, etc. If any Chinese citizen attempted to smuggle this much drugs into China, it's going to be the same fate, except maybe faster.
Drug dealers in China are executed for much less. To paint that as 'retaliation for ongoing conflict' is laughable.
One of my abiding impressions and favourite photos of the trip was a street where signage had proliferated so much that it was solid, and the only constraint on incursion into the street was whether or not it got hit by a bus. The ubiquitous vendors of fake watches and shops offering to make you a suit. Skyscrapers on every surface that wasn't a 45 degree slope. The outdoor escalator. Huge, neat, organised, airconditioned subway.
*Edit: I'm just offering my personal experience here for others to consider amongst other sources of information.
Fellow Canadians have had to watch as an increasing number of Canadians are arbitrarily detained and held in torturous conditions.
These Canadians range from high-profile and wealthy[0] to low-profile [1,2], and the conditions in which they are detained are an affront to human rights.
[0] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/politics/article-michael-kov...
[1] https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-canadian-sente...
[2] https://torontosun.com/news/national/123-canadians-detained-...
Deleted Comment
Who can guarantee they never choose a mass arrest as the way to exert pressure on the West?
This is far far less antagonistic. ...at least for now.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a332183...
The threat of nuclear war isn't the only thing that makes a cold war. It's the constant small economic, social and military pushes by these countries against eachother.without ever formally declaring war.
This is definitely Soviet-Era style cold war tactics. Could be ripped out of the 60s with the names replaced.
It’s not the same exactly as Russia, but there are parallels.
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Simple, just don't cooperate with western capitalists looking to plunder an area, a Cold War will be declared shortly after.
Deleted Comment
You think the risk is not that big?
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
I think its pretty likely that we're headed for an extinction type event for upvote based "anonymous" message boards like HN, reddit ... or at least a significant decline in their usefulness
Edit: Jotting down some ideas:
1) Occlude/Delude/Fog-up the votes for newly created accounts. Mature accounts get to see gray posts.
2) Consesus amongst mature accounts has higher weight over newly created accounts.
3) Penalty for being flagged is higher for mature accounts as with power comes responsibility of good behavior.
4) Karma should have more meaning that just a tally of points. Upvoting costs Karma (-1 from balance). So, people are more careful and have to strongly agree to upvote. Probably some caveats and downsides here.
5) Buffer out the oscillations of upvotes/downvotes. Sort of like a mass-spring-damper system.
6) Hire moderators that are vetted and publicly funded by HN members.
7) Verified accounts with work email or some other means. These accounts would have the highest weight in anything they do.
This is why you should flag every political submission to HN.
1. Note that US citizens have long been warned about stuff like this ...
2. I just noticed - all anti China comments were heavily upvoted but just in last 30 mins ... (this comment thread)
3. Not just arrested but tortured ...
4. This is bad for Canadians recently, with many arrests and accusations of spying ...
5. I've visited China nearly every year for the past 6 years and never had any sort of issues ...
6. I get the impression that we're now in an undeclared Cold War with China.
7. Use this to negotiate hazard pay with your company when traveling to China.
The rest are greyed out:
8. ... If this is the direction China wants to continue to go in, I no longer want anything to do with it ...
9. ... Of course anything and everything is a sign of a "New Cold War" so I'm not surprised this is as upvoted as it is.
10. The current administration has been bullying China incessantly ...
So, 1/3/8 are clearly anti-China, 4/6/7 can be read either way, 5 is questioning the premise (so we could consider it mildly pro-China, if you will), and 9/10 are the only explicitly pro-China comments. They are also at the bottom.
So I'm not really sure what you're saying.
Why do we even have such a huge oscillation? I am extremely suspicious but cautious with allegation without data.
What I am sure of is the following:
Comments start out positive, then comes the hammer and they go extremely gray (the lightest color and bottom out at -4?) and then we have them back to normal levels. This is a really concerning behavior. If we had a plot of vote vs. time, we'd see this hammer come down. I strongly suspect.
Dead Comment
It does not have to be "foreign power". To me it looks like HN has groups of "concerned participants" on either side of a fence.