The Big [Censored] Theory

I don't really agree with this, but consider this argument : Is it really a bad thing if different countries have different understanding of what's allowed/not allowed? If the whole world had the same system of governance, that could be dangerous too.

Because the people of China didn't choose this: their oppressive and authoritarian government did it for them.

This is right. If people vote for censorship in a democracy, that's a perfectly fine form of governmental heterogeneity. What's happening in China is not that.

I find it slightly amazing how often commenters here (hello aero-glide2) fail to see that the people in a country are not the same as the dictators controlling the country.

When such misunderstandings are common here at HN, where people are a bit brighter that elsewhere (or so I think) -- then, such misunderstandings must be dangerously common outside HN. I wonder what consequences follow from that

Their comment feels like astro-turfing. I see it on reddit pretty often when anything CCP roles around

Keep in mind that this is government censorship; as opposed to private services performing the censorship to meet the desires of their users.

I really don't have a problem with services offering edited, family-friendly versions of media as long as its disclosed and there's a way to see the original.

Given the scale of the demographic collapse in China -- the over-reporting of girls by 100M, the situation where 20M men have no chance of the possibility of having a stable heterosexual relationship due to the lack of women, the rapidly aging population (highest in the world) that is post child bearing age -- doesn't it begin to seem reasonable the steps that the government is taking to curtail and shape public opinion?

China has no replacement generation, and they are facing internal turmoil within the next decade on a scale that has no historical precedent.

The Communist Party is the reason China is in this mess in the first place, and further control and oppression by them isn't going to magically fix it.

That's a fair observation. I'm curious though, do you have any ideas to improve the situation? What would you do if you were responsible for 1.5B people and were facing a situation where the labor force participation drops by half over the next ten years and continues to drop every year since? Will you be able to arrange for the population to be able to be fed, clothed, housed, and given medical care?

It's not possible to "magically" create several hundred million young people, communism or no, to "fix it". So what do you do?

I completely disagree.

An individual's rights should have nothing to do with the people who happen to surround them and what they happen to think.

If different countries allow different things, that would mean that what a person is allowed to do would depend on where they happen to live, which is usually close to where they happened to be born. That doesn't make any sense to me- the lottery of birth should have no impact on one's rights.

I guess it's hard to see this when you are steeped in it, but a lot of the censorship in democracies isn't exactly democratic.

Two American credit card companies have an insane amount of say on the shape of the content on the internet. Beyond that, small special interest groups have time and time again successfully lobbyied for censorship that is far beyond what the majority thinks is reasonable.

The CCP isn't 'responsible' for the people under its boot. It is their lack of responsibility for the people of China that has led to this problem. You act like the socio-demographic situation is not the direct outcome of the policies pursued by the CPP regime.

"Will you be able to arrange for the population to be able to be fed, clothed, housed, and given medical care?"

The government of China does not do any of these things. China, despite their lip-service to historical Communist revolution, has some the worst social programs in the world.

Despite the ideology that it shouldn’t matter, the lottery of birth is probably the single largest factor on someone’s life trajectory today - changing that is incredibly difficult and would likely require the dissolution of many countries

A reason to allow different people groups to do different things could be uncertainty about what is harmful. Letting the various restrictions and allowances play out can give a better understanding of the consequences of these.

Well for starters, you don't limit each family to a single child.

> Because the people of China didn't choose this: their oppressive and authoritarian government did it for them.

Though to be fair, the political ideas that say that is a problem are pretty Western and (relatively) recent.

I guess I'd try to find a comfortable place to live in exile, start pocketing cash, and figure out how to get there before the doomed ship sinks and angry mobs try to kill me.

And if a population doesn’t like it and/or wants access to the original, then the corrective action is less destructive, more equally available, and more quickly realized.

I.e. “stop subscribing to the censored service and back any company with the means and intent to stream the originals and everyone wins” as opposed to “vote and/or overthrow the dictatorship or die trying and possibly nobody wins”.

At some point, one has to make a decision on the values the have, and which ones they consider universally valuable.

>people of China didn't choose this

Of course they did. PRC is country that skews old and conservative. Half the reason behind media crack down are cantankerous parents and grand parents telling governments they don't want loose western morals spoiling impressionable minds. Outside of western reporting, PRC libtards are relatively extinct compared to vast amount numbers of papa / grandpa wang who don't want to accidentally watch tits n ass or have uncomfortable imported culture war talks with their live-in kids. The only aggregious censorship that lowkey half of the population wants to get rid of is pornography but that's an Asian thing (also guess which half). There are many of policies easily explained by CCP having to appease the people where feasible because their legitimacy depends on it, unlike "democratic" systems where competing parties bunts the responsiblity to the next guy. Or that fractous multi-cultural societies make cultural wars different political party has idpol positions staked very difficult to win. In China, CCP gets pulse on mass culture and enforces it. Yes they can also manufacture identity for political ends but for something like imported mass media, much simpler/easier/pragmatic to embrace opinion of a billion conservative prudes.

Two wrongs don't make a right and all that jazz.

So, is your answer to let them starve? I'm trying to understand if you are answering my question or attempting to dodge by discussing something else.

Too late for that, they already raised the limit to 3, but it won't help in time for the demographic collapse.

Well, because it's a totalitarian regime, they actually don't have to do anything. The party members just live in wealth and let the others live with the problem.

That's the difference with democracy. In a democracy, the leaders have to explain themselves to the entire public. Also in a democracy, you can criticize governmental decisions, which might lead to better solutions, or even prevent them.

The solution? Make your country attractive for young Indian (and other) immigrants. Or just make the older generation "disappear". Communist seem to be especially well trained in letting people disappear.

That's because the people who say this are the only ones who believe it. In particular, Chinese people themselves don't believe it, and do believe their government is the same thing as "them" and represents them, so they still take it personally/nationalistically when you criticize the government.

The issue isn't a different cultural perspective, its censorship. In this case, the censorship is vast, arbitrary, and sweeping. Making it illegal to criticise North Korea is not protecting anyone, its oppressive.

There's tremendous variance in what different societies, and segments within societies, find acceptable and unacceptable. That's not what this is about. This is about an unaccountable government imposing its idea of what is acceptable and unacceptable.

As long as it is mostly the will of the people that dictates the form of government. A dictatorial regime controlling what information and ideas the people are allowed to be exposed to is a different story.

If you believe that there are such things as universal human rights, and that they remain rights regardless of whoever says they aren't, and you think free speech is one of those rights, then yes, it's a bad thing. Not everybody does, and those who do cannot always agree on the details. But, some people do.

If the current generation votes for censorship, should the next generations have to live under those rules also?

It’s certainly an interesting philosophical problem, finding the balance between the individual and the society. My take on it is this: decisions should be made by the people who those decisions affect. In the case of censorship I agree with you completely- my watching a slasher flick does not give you nightmares. If I were playing devils advocate I might say that it corrodes the national character or something like that- but that to me is a very weak argument.

I have to wonder, if your government is so threatened by what's discussed or shown in entertainment/art content, you are the opposite of anti-fragility.

What good can they even accomplish if they get triggered by a disney character or a specific flag?

I'm glad that the CCP will disappear in our life time. Question is, how petty will the next Han Chinese led government be? They've always sucked badly at maintaining large bureaucracy.

Possibly true, but can we at least agree that a democratic majority deciding to censor something is significantly better than a dictatorship deciding to censor something?

Whether or not they would choose it if they could is orthogonal to the fact that they did not and could not choose.

> did not and could not choose

Implying formal enfranchisement is required to choose when being loud in numbers petitioning/screaming at officials is enough and frequently more effective when said officials gets drown in shit if they fail to maintain political serenity. There's a reason Chinese trust in government is near record levels compared to declining trust in western systems which sure are good at choosing but miserable at delivering. Being performative is orthogonal to being performant. "They can't choose" is such a tired and useless gotcha when plurality of "choosers" / voters in prominenant democracies don't actually think voting is useful mechanism for choosing, until compared to highly performant authoritarian systems. Then it is, because reasons.

Neither did the majority of Americans watching non-cable television. Instead a small religious minority got their say what was profanity and what was not.

The CCP claim they have the support of the Chinese people, but they won't allow that claim to be tested by the trial of political freedom and fair elections.

So if the majority of a country vote in a party on their discriminatory position towards minorities, that's all well and good? Legal, sure, but is that ok?

There’s elections in China. There isn’t freedom, but the population of old people with PTSD from the Cultural Revolution seems happy to not have it as long as noone else has it either. And as long as the government is competent and delivers economic growth, which may be coming to an end.

Do you have a source for the 50% drop? It seems excessive.

well, depends with whom your views align with more

The main propagator in the US of the Chinese demographic collapse is Peter Zeihan, who may not be the best source here. Even if some of his predictions have been right wrt Europe, he tends to have and present unsourced information for anything Asia/China related.

I don't think it's accurate to imply that at the time of strictest FCC rules only a small minority of Americans thought the standards were appropriate.

I disagree. The majority is never informed enough to make a good decision on something as nuanced as censorship. At least a dictatorship could, theoretically, be benevolent and act on the advice of experts.

ideally no one should be allowed to censor anything (using state power)

A democracy can act on the advice of experts too via representative democracy with representatives (or appointees of representatives) that rely on experts.

> Is it really a bad thing if different countries have different understanding of what's allowed/not allowed?

Categorically yes, if your understanding of what's allowed doesn't allow your understanding of what's allowed. Not being able to discuss different politics isn't cultural diversity.

I've read some of his material, and have tried to find some independent sources regarding their demographics, agriculture, and imports. Those sources (via naive online search, filtered by bias) seem to line up pretty well: China's population is rapidly aging and their pyramid has inverted, China subsists on grains and pork but they must import corn to feed the hogs and struggle with outbreaks of ASF. Extreme weather (drought, rain) is ravaging their harvest. The war in Ukraine and the Russian sanctions have pushed up global fertilizer costs to which China -- the top producer -- has responded by implementing strict quotas on phosphate exports, a strange choice.

"As the top-producing country, China puts out 90 million MT annually for 30 percent of global supply." -- https://investingnews.com/phosphate-outlook-2022/

So, I'll give you that Peter Zeihan might be trying to sell his books, but it's not like there's zero corroborating sources.

Chinese people are not a hivemind. Some believe what you have described, others do not.

There's no reliable polling on Chinese trust in government.

> being loud in numbers petitioning/screaming at officials is enough and frequently more effective when said officials gets drown in shit if they fail to maintain political serenity.

Laughs in Hong Kong.

But sure, look at China's long history of protest and tell me they respect the will of the people. You're right about one thing, "serenity" (or "harmony") is the name of the game. Lots of ways to pacify the people, giving them what they want is only one.

>There's no reliable polling on Chinese trust in government.

Lots of long term systematic survey/polling methods from western institutions in last two decades (i.e. pre-Xi) all comport with basic trend that PRC citizens don't trust local gov but trust central gov. One could be cheeky as insinuate Chinese polling more reliable than western polling that has many predictive failures vs CCP polling because CCP still in power and PRC hasn't collapsed but have only gotten institutionally stronger.

>Laughs in Hong Kong.

Laughs in mainland PRC who overwhelmingly wanted to tame HK. 99% of population versus <1%, so obviously respecting the will of the people. Well minor exaggeration, if CCP respected will of the people they would have subdued HK 5 years earlier during Unmbrella. There's always implement lag, no system's perfect.

I'm familiar with protests in PRC, local protests get loud enough, concerns get forwarded to central gov... and where feasbile gets addressed, because central gov actually scared shitless to mass mobilization. Except CCP tends to deliver tangible results not like western short term virtual signalling.

>giving them what they want is only one ... >pacify the people

Isn't that governance 101, preserve peace and give people what they want?