Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

Last paragraph is terrifying, does China not have privacy laws at all?

More interesting than prospects for some may be the sheer volume of intimate data available and leeway to experiment in China. Tencent’s now-ubiquitous WeChat, built by a small team in months, has become a poster-child for in-house creative license. Modern computing is driven by crunching enormous amounts of data, and generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners. Local startup SenseTime for instance has teamed with dozens of police departments to track everything from visages to races, helping the country develop one of the world’s most sophisticated and extensive surveillance machines.

You're not asking the right question. The answer was right in what you quoted:

> generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners

They are already so used to being watched that they don't find it odd to be watched.

in china nothing is private, not even your medical info. Your employer can see your medical records if they want and often force employees to get yearly medical checks that are forwarded to HR and it is often used to figure out which female employees are pregnant and they will try to get rid of them rather than pay maternity leave. There are laws against all this but not enforced

Why is this? Is it a cultural thing?

People don't view privacy the same way we view them in the west. The government is obviously not too keen on passing Privacy Laws that itself has no intention of obeying.

I still attribute the success of Tencent and Alibaba significantly to both the public perception of privacy as well as what I expect to be a tacit compliance with the government on making available the data that they gather.

The Chinese government can find ways to shut down any company pretty much at will. I can't imagine Tencent or Alibaba or Baidu got to where they are today without playing ball with the government.

That has been my impression. Sometimes people find little ways to insulate themselves (I know a guy who doesn't put his license plate in the right place so his car can't automatically be tracked when he drives around the country), but in general lack of privacy is just the way it is. Kind of like taxes in the US. People may be annoyed with how much they pay and some people use dubiously clever means of reducing it, and people have concerns about the details, but not many people really think taxes overall are a bad thing and should be abolished or greatly restricted.

Are you truly having a hard time understanding how life under a Communist dictatorship and a Representative Democracy would differ for the average citizen?

It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.

Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?

I think it's cultural and lack of technological awareness

1) People aren't raised with a mind to combat discrimination. Despite recognizing and celebrate some 50+ ethnic groups, the majority of Chinese are Han and look like each other. There are some laws in place to protect against discrimination against certain classes (e.g. Gender/Ethnicity) but they're not strongly enforced. The legal system simply isn't there for individual plaintiffs to succeed against corporations or government.

2) Chinese have culturally accepted authoritarian rulers as "heaven's mandate". As long as people can be fed, clothed, have a roof over their heads and even prosper, then the ruler continues to carry "heaven's mandate", regardless of what Machiavellian means by which the ruler achieves prosperity for the majority. If the government has to read my letters in order to find evil schemers to keep me safe then so be it. But if the government did all these things and the safety/prosperity of significant communities are still constantly at risk, then the ruler has lost the heaven's mandate, and it's time for a revolution to install a new ruler.

3) Chinese people are raised on family, piety, and harmony, not individualism. Many place a sense of family/community acceptance above individual will. I think most are protective of the very private -- maybe on the class of secrets -- what I say to my friends or my own journals as private, but there are very few that even think that the metadata about how they carry out their lives should be considered private. Ultimately I think most people's mindset is that if I went to a restaurant and ordered food and they kept a record that I went there and ordered XYZ off the menu then it's no longer a secret. People haven't really come around to the power of what can be done when enough information has been gathered by simply going about your everyday business.

> Are you truly having a hard time understanding how life under a Communist dictatorship

While its certainly at least authoritarian and perhaps an actual dictatorship, and I recognize that the ruling party still calls itself “the Communist Party of China”, still we wouldn't be talking about Tencent if it actually was a Communist (defined, most centrally, by the prohibition in private ownership of the means of production) dictatorship.

> Are you truly having a hard time understanding how life under a Communist dictatorship and a Representative Democracy would differ for the average citizen?

The difference aren't that great. The most heavily surveiled society on earth is britain.

> It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.

And it's confounding how the older generation thinks the west is any better.

> Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?

They do but just a lot better than they did in the past.

In my experience as a non-American, a lot of younger Americans have adopted a sort of dark, distorted view of history that casts the US as a villainous entity. For these people, any suggestion that other states, particularly non-Western ones, are even more villainous is met with scepticism.

Maybe they understand the differences between a representative democracy and an authoritarian regime in theory but believe there's no real difference in practice. It's a deeply unfortunate type of cynicism.

What would you say if a Chinese national asked you the opposite question: Why is data privacy the de facto standard all humans should enjoy?

Just because we're American and we sort of have that here? No privacy allows for greater systems efficiency and easier time in law enforcement investigations.

Doesn't make it right either; I'm a US citizen after all and abhor state-based intrusions of privacy more than even the average HN reader, but projection of societal norms is kinda silly.

Every generation goes through this; it's not just this one. It's naive idealism sparked by learned helplessness, fueled by a lack of maturity/experience and amplified by foreign influence.

It used to be every generation of Americans had its subset of youth who become infatuated with Communism, for example. They generally grow out of it and come to appreciate their global standing once they graduate college and accumulate some wealth.

Europeans are accustomed to being more mobile and studying abroad seems to be almost expected. America is a very insular culture by comparison; depending on academic program a lot of schools don't have meaningful study abroad programs ("let's go spend a week attending some lectures in London then go home") and support for things like working holiday visas is pathetic. We don't have anything like Erasmus. The only people I ever seem to meet who have traveled more than a few hundred miles from home have only done so on deployment with the military.

In aggregate we know virtually nothing about the rest of the world, so it's easy for disillusioned kids to be convinced that their minor dissatisfactions are on the level of human rights violations and that North Korea or ISIS-held Syria are favorable by comparison.

> It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.

Oh look, more ageism on hacker news.

> a lot of younger Americans have adopted a sort of dark, distorted view of history that casts the US as a villainous entity

Or they have adopted a realistic view of history. The US has done loads of shitty things.

They have never had stalin like purges or a hitler like dictator.

An educated person, old or young, might look at Iran and be less likely to think "horrible regime hell bent on the destruction of Israel and the west" and more likely to think "huh, we probably shouldn't have fucked with their government decades ago".

Also that whole thing about voting being worth less for huge chunks of the country. Oh, and getting constantly screwed over by previous generations.

Being cynical doesn't make you naive.

Huh, it is kind of hard to make an argument for the self evidence of our inalienable rights.

Especially int he context of talking to someone who lives with tyranny and doesn't really care.

> but projection of societal norms is kinda silly.

It's not when you are talking about basic human rights. China is wrong about this.

The US plays a unique role in the world and has not played it perfectly, that's very true. But it is nowhere close to being the primary villain of the 20th century. I would indeed say you are naive to think so.

Every generation everywhere feels they've been "screwed over" by their parents, or their parents' parents. You lack perspective.

Yes, very true. I suppose the internet just amplifies something that's been around for decades. To add to your examples, it amazes me that people favourably compare Russia's fixed elections with the failings of the Electoral College.

Sorry, are you saying "it's the cost of doing business"?

I wonder if this was also true of the 'Great' Britain back in the day.

Note that there are bad people and bad emperors and everything in between, having vastly different abilities to affect people. They are hardly equivalent, though bad they all are.