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.
>For 2012, the US Department of Justice reported a 93% conviction rate.
Japan also looks like it has a 99% conviction rate. Most countries have the ability to exit-ban foreigners visiting their country. It's not unique to China at all. US does it. Canada does it. South Korea does it.
I think the warning from the US Government is that, in their opinion, China will illegally detain you over made up charges, be careful.
> In 2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that among defendants charged with a felony, 68% were convicted (59% of a felony and the remainder of a misdemeanor) with felony conviction rates highest for defendants originally charged with motor vehicle theft (74%), driving-related offenses (73%), murder (70%), burglary (69%), and drug trafficking (67%); and lowest for defendants originally charged with assault (45%).
No he didn't. The link itself shows both the lower 2018 percentages from the justice statistics bureau and also mentions the 2012 DOJ 93% rate. No clear explanation is given for the divergence over those years or how it fits together overall but he didn't lie about the source.
In 2018, the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that among defendants charged with a felony, 68% were convicted (59% of a felony and the remainder of a misdemeanor) with felony conviction rates highest for defendants originally charged with motor vehicle theft (74%), driving-related offenses (73%), murder (70%), burglary (69%), and drug trafficking (67%); and lowest for defendants originally charged with assault (45%).
Those examples are of civil infractions, which are not criminal offenses. So yeah, that would be weird. Maybe if you injured someone in a car accident or stole money.
But it gets even worse. Imagine if you went to Poland, got into an argument with the manager of a factory there, and had your exist visa revoked. Imagine if someone from a state service showed up and told you, off the record, that you needed to hash things out to leave the country.
Isn't that pretty crazy? I think so.
The exist visa ban is a broad sweeping power than can be used by the state for almost any purpose.
I don't think anyone would disagree that she's a pawn in a geopolitical struggle, but it also sounds like she absolutely and intentionally violated US law. There's pretty clear evidence, mostly in emails, of Huawei execs knowingly flaunting the export laws.
It's unclear if the westerners detained in China have committed crimes. I think their detention is a good example of what this warning is about. Detained for unclear reasons under broad state security rules with little presented evidence of crimes. Indefinite detention without any hope of a trial, kept in total isolation, without any formal representation.
Meng got her day in court, will the Michaels ever get that?
>I don't think anyone would disagree that she's a pawn in a geopolitical struggle, but it also sounds like she absolutely and intentionally violated US law
Someone that didn't visit the US was arrested for "breaking US law"...replace "US" with "China" and see how this sentence rings.
She provided false statements and evidence to the US Government (and US banking entities) in order export US products to a sanctioned regime. All for a tidy profit.
So, while you're correct that she didn't commit a crime within the USA, she did commit one directly against US businesses and the US government.
As a non-American, I do find the extraterritoriality of US law very concerning, but I don't think this serves as a good example of overreach. She'd have been fine if she didn't enter a country with an extradition treaty with the US. That wasn't the smartest move.
Why do you have to visit the country to commit crimes against that country? Isn't that how every sovereign nation state works?
The host country can choose not to extradite, but most countries generally accept this basic idea that sovereign nations can charge and warrant the arrest of individuals as pertinent.
There is a difference between China is 'uniquely evil' and 'China has an especially bad record on human rights and fair enforcement of the law.' Remember, in China there is pretty much no freedom of thought, including religion. And they are oppressing 3 large groups of people - Tibet, Xinjiang, and now Hong Kong. Of course it is not a binary good/bad thing, but some kind of false moral equivalence between China and Western countries is just as ridiculous and harmful.
The West has 100% done more "evil" if we're going by "oppression olympics". One can simply look at the violence exported by the respective groups. Also keep in mind how often America lies and sends agents to destabilize China (I'm sure vice-versa is also true yet Americans choose to blame Russians instead? Not sure why.). Now, I do not believe that is a fruitful or meaningful argument to have but your argument seems to come from a place of American exceptionalism over weighing both sides.
The US has been oppressing indigenous people, black people, and communists for decades and decades. And crackdown on protests against equal application of the law for mainland and a territory after letting the protests run on for a whole year is barely controversial. Everyone should compare China against the West without seeing China as some unique evil.
> If Assange leaked Chinese intelligence secrets, would he be free right now? I expect so.
Probably not, because he's made enemies of pretty much every country or nation state. Maybe Russia would take him in or something but the amount of geopolitical enemies he has is enormous.
> "China is uniquely evil"
I don't think anyone has expressed this. I think it's more, China is totalitarian with little respect for free speech, the rule of law and human rights, and often, arbitrary enforcement of laws. Before you say, "the US does this too!", it's true, but that's also a tu quoque" logical fallacy and is just gaslighting.
I really don't think the West has, currently, anything similar to their concentration camps or lack of religious freedoms.
People who do not follow these developments as they happen will also miss that this state department release is one of John Bolton's pet projects. Most of US messaging on China under this administration should be taken with a grain of salt.
The two high profile cases that has any info, Sandra Han + Liu siblings (which triggered the warning), and Huang Wan, all has to do with father being caught with massive corruption charges in China and family members directly profited from i.e. Han + kids had multi-million dollar realestate holdings in the US under their names. Chinese corruption is typically a family affair. I haven't seen any cases that was unambiguous hostage taking.
The broader issue is many Chinese financial criminals flee to the west where they're safe from prosecution, the west benefits and extradition to PRC isn't on the table. So there's nothing China can do except to wait for the extra dumb one's to return or more commonly, or coerce those abroad to return by threatening innocent family members which to my knowledge has been limited to Chinese nationals. Exit bans seem to be reserved for those complicit in crimes. State department is reaching hard to to make it seem arbitrary when tldr is don't go to China if they want you for crimes, double for dissident activities.
There is a serious problem with justice in the US though. We have in Norway seen cases of our citizens being unjustly imprisoned in the US through sham trials.
While the US has protected people doing serious crime in Norway.
I don’t defend China, but I wish the US held a much higher standard itself because it is hard for western countries to fight for justice and human rights when the US has such a poor record itself.
> There is a serious problem with justice in the US though. We have in Norway seen cases of our citizens being unjustly imprisoned in the US through sham trials.
Any links to support this?
> While the US has protected people doing serious crime in Norway.
Isn't that an indictment of the Norway justice system? Or would it be acceptable if Norway could protect its citizens in the United States?
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].
It's difficult to determine whether it is arbitrary (in the legal sense) because the Chinese government does not communicate on these issues and the Canadian government will obviously not want to spill any beans.
What is plain to me is that a Canadian guy who can live in China at the border with North Korea, can run a business there, and personally knows Kim Jung Un is not just any "entrepreneur"...
Likewise we cannot know exactly what "diplomat" means for someone stationed abroad (including Afghanistan, and Beijing).
I'm not defending the Chinese government but these 2 guys were clearly not arbitrarily picked, it's a little disingenuous to claim that they were.
Strange, because this comment, as well as the vast majority of your comment history, expressly come to the defence of the CCP.
Being an entrepreneur nor a diplomat is not probable cause for an arrest, and the opaqueness of the CCP on all their criminal cases is by design for this very reason; it's a smoking gun, not a smoke screen.
You're right that these two weren't entirely arbitrarily picked, they chose two people high-profile targets as you normally would in a hostage situation.
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.
Oh sure, I used the word with some attempt at seeing things from their perspective. China has been mostly seen as a rational amoral actor in the global stage, but it’s entirely possible over time their perspective is taking on a, you know, authoritarian shape.
‘You don’t just arrest our business leaders’, there’s a lot of face to save there.
I don't think there's a time in living memory for most people on HN when China wasn't authoritarian. If anything, they've become more relaxed in the last 3 decades, but we're seeing them more recently re-exert authority.
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.
IIRC, Schellenberg requested re-trial to try to take advantage of the politics despite that a re-trial had the possibility of increasing the penalty to death penalty even without political motivation. That is, he gambled and lost.
Sort of. In many Asian countries, the rule of law is very weak or nonexistent. This means you will eventually come into contact with the police - usually for the purpose of extorting a bribe from you.
To be honest, as European I think China and US are pretty similar in many ways (propaganda, law enforcement etc).
So said each country has their own problem but if anybody focus more on resolving their internal problem before teaching everybody how to live would be better.
In this forum is very hard to discuss anything serious that doesn't follow the prevalent opinion that you get down votes without reason.
You're probably attracting downvotes because comparing China (show trials, double jeopardy, arbitrary and whim-based penalties) to the US when it comes to capital punishment is not even remotely accurate.
The US has a police brutality problem, not a fair trial issue like China. And yes, long prison terms, a private for profit prison system and the death penalty in some states.
> To be honest, as European I think China and US are pretty similar in many ways (propaganda, law enforcement etc).
As a non-European, non-American and non-Chinese I find this utterly confused line of thinking depressing. It is clear Europeans are subject to their own propaganda in this regard.
Even if you acknowledge that a global hegemony lead by the US currently exists, it certainly has not "for the past few centuries". Value judgements on whether that hegemony has been a net positive or net negative for the world, aside. I'd say your viewpoint of the world is not based on reality.
The U.S. (1865) and Britain (1833) abolished slavery before China did.
> Slavery in China has taken various forms throughout history. Slavery was abolished as a legally recognized institution, including in a 1909 law fully enacted in 1910, although the practice continued until at least 1949. Illegal acts of forced labor and sexual slavery in China continue to occur in the twenty-first century, but those found guilty of such crimes are punished harshly.
Briton still holds colonies to this date. As a citizen of former colony[India] its laughable when you say slavery was abolished in 1833 because people in my country were treated no better till our independence.
> The practices of slavery and human trafficking are still prevalent in modern America with estimated 17,500 foreign nationals and 400,000 Americans being trafficked into and within the United States every year with 80% of those being women and children
You do understand that much of the news you read about the US is wildly exaggerated?
Having traveled and met various young Europeans they were often suffering from amazingly ignorant ideas about life in the US(particularly the Germans).
One couple was scared they might get shot while traveling along coastal California. Surprise, gun violence is not evenly distributed, most Americans don't encounter any gun violence.
Police violence? Never seen any except on TV. Weird hu?
Seems to be plenty of propaganda in your own news media, why do you think you are equating China & USA?
The same problem you're referring to is also true for news regarding China. Have you ever thought about it?
I've traveled for an extended time in both US and China and as you say you hardly get shot on a trip in California you also will not get arrested just for holding a foreign passport in Shanghai
As far I'm concerned I felt much safer in China for many reason that I'm not here to explain.
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".
That's besides the point. The point is that this is tit-for-tat retaliation that targets specific people whom we don't know the whole story about (You can try to set up a business at the border with North Korea and to get to know Kim Jung Un like one of the Canadians arrested... I doubt you'll get far). This does not tell you anything about life in China as a Canadian.
Edit in response to jlokier below: I think everyone with a bit of common sense understands what "making waves" means when travelling abroad, and especially when travelling to China (or any country with an authoritarian regime). Be respectful, don't challenge officials, don't get involved in politics, don't make strong political statements on sensitive topics. When you're a guest somewhere, behave like one.
The point is that the retaliation is life-destroying levels of severe, and "making waves" is extremely vague. Something nobody knows if they themselves are thought to be doing.
I visited china about 10 years ago, on a working trip. Nothing to do with government, just a very mundane bit of electronics we were collaborating on. While there I asked what I thought were innocent questions about ordinary life and politics, and it became clear that people there did not feel safe answering some of those questions.
To this day I don't know if that counts as "making waves".
These days, I would not feel safe returning to China for work. I recently turned down an excellent job opportunity that would require very occasional trips to China, because it seems just that bit too much of a risk at the moment.
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.
I think the faulty reasoning is to assume that the arrest of these 2 Canadians means that Canadians are not safe in China. This is FUD. As said, this overlooks who these 2 Canadians are: There are apparently hundreds of thousands of Canadians in China and the 2 arrested clearly have links to the Canadian government and/or intelligence agencies.
The probability of being mugged and shot in the US is probably higher but I don't see articles telling people to stay well clear.
Other Michael is buddy-buddy with Kim Jong Un and operated NGO with North Korean dealings. Like when China retaliatory arrested Canadian Garrats who operated a Coffee shop in a prefecture level city on the border of China/North Korea in response to Canada extraditing a Chinese spy to US. No country is going to confirm their spies, but these are pretty obvious hints. Ex-diplomat/NGO is also typical spy cover in China - the country cracked down on foreign NGOs a few years ago with NGO laws packaged with counter-espionage and national security legislation. Both Michaels were also picked up by Ministry of State Security (national security), it was exceedingly clear messaging on day one, months before official chargers, that these two were picked up on espionage in retaliation. There's nothing particularly baffling that a surveillance state which compromised every CIA asset in country 10 years ago knows where foreign intelligence assets are. As someone who follows the space, Chinese retaliatory arrests are calibrated to separate diplomacy and commerce, hence arresting spies and (threatening to) execute drug dealers. Spies because historically spies have no rights, Michaels are fortunate that ICJ ruled spied get consular access last year, so there maybe some movement on that. Regardless, until they start detaining random expats there on business or travel, this is pretty much business as usual. That said, Canadian intelligence assets should GTFO out of the country, because if anything China has under-retaliated for Meng. They arrested 6 Japanese when Japan detained a Chinese fishboat captain over Senkaku. There will be more pressure coordinated with different phases of Meng's trial.
For the most part I was unable to decipher your comment. At least insofar as to how it provides any evidence whatsoever that either of the men are spies.
All you seem to have said is that one of men is involved with North Korea (a close China ally, so I'm not sure how that supports your argument) and that "NGO is typical spy cover in China".
1. The Michael's fit the profile for spies that operate in China to a T. One Michael is ex-diplomat working at NGO, another works in NGO affiliated with NK and a source of NK information. Hint: Chinese officials with access to NK aren't the ones soliciting him for insights.
2. China has proven record to exposing spies domestically, seen in 2010 CIA debacle where every CIA asset in the country was compromised.
3. China doesn't detain expats arbitrarily. That's what western media tells their useful idiots to spread FUD. There are hundreds of thousands of expats in China, they don't need to waste time detaining innocent people. Just like how the drug dealer being executed has trafficking priors in Canada.
4. Ergo the Michael's were most likely spies, Chinese surveillance tech has only improved since.
Obviously, China is opaque on this issues so there won't be smoking gun proof. But people who watched this space for along time can connect the dots, and in fact did so immediately, before official charges were levied. One would need compelling evidence to demonstrate why they aren't spies, i.e. Canada doesn't spy on China or China doesn't have the capability to expose Canadian spies. But many people can't seem to accept China is a rational geopolitical actor who retaliated intelligently instead of randomly kidnap expats for shits and giggles.
Edit: You know what, after looking at your post history, I'm not interested in a response. Nor will I respond. That's because your entire post history (as far back as I went) consists exclusively of vehemently defending China on a wide array of topics. That's a bit of a red flag (pun intended).
Original post:
1. Sorry but "fitting the profile" is not compelling evidence. Of course they will pick people who "fit the profile". It's incredibly naive of you to think otherwise.
2. Since we don't know what percentage of spies they've caught I don't know how you can say they have a "proven track record" and therefore they are likely spies. What is their "proven" success rate exactly? What percentage? Can you provide citations?
I'm only vaguely familiar with the CIA incident you describe but - doesn't it follow simple logic that the CIA would support and encourage the narrative that all their spies were caught? Come on. Use your head.
3. It wasn't arbitrary. That's been established. As you said they "fit the profile" and served a political purpose.
4. Ergo nothing. The only "evidence" you've offered is that they "fit the profile". Laughable.
>One would need compelling evidence to demonstrate why they aren't spies
Wait what? Really? Is that how your version of justice works? The CCP has a proven history of lies and manipulation probably unparalleled in the world. I'm flabbergasted that you'd give them the benefit of the doubt without any evidence.
>But many people can't seem to accept China is a rational geopolitical actor who retaliated intelligently instead of randomly kidnap expats for shits and giggles.
You're intentionally conflating rationality with justifiability. They acted in their own self interest, which (by definition) is indeed "rational". Nobody disagrees that they made a smart (and wholly expected) chess move. The question is whether the move was justified.
None of the amateur armchair spymaster opinions you've offered come close to proving the move was justified. You've offered no compelling evidence other than "China wouldn't do that!" and "they fit the profile". Please.
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.
They expel spies who are under diplomatic cover. Otherwise they get arrested and jailed. Well after that there is a hope that imprisoned spies could get exchanged.
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.
Karma is just a counter in database. Hong Kongers do not afraid to face a death sentence for opposing the regime. Don't afraid to tell the truth, the worst may happen to you is a couple of downvotes by troll factory workers from Beijing.
Any possible measures to oppose such a behavior? Chinese do not hesitate to use freedom of speech when it works for their interest, like vandalizing GitHub pages of regime critics, however Chinese platforms protected against any foreign meddling by design.
Wow, nobody's scolded you yet for breaking site guidelines.
I'm amazed the subject of vote manipulation is so taboo on this site, especially when half the people here know how easy it is to do, given the proper resources.
We know manipulation is occurring, and to me that's an argument for greater transparency and openness so we can tell when it's happening. I don't agree with the "head in the sand" approach where manipulation is glossed over, ignored or rebranded under terms like "online reputation management".
That being said, the "anyone who disagrees with me is a shill" attitude is just as poisonous to online discussions as the shilling itself.
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.
My experience in tienanmen: Showing my passwort and a bag scanner, going through. Area was limited with small metal fences.
My experience at the eiffel tower: Bag scanner, didn't go through (because I had a huge bag which was not allowed). Area was limited with huge glass panes. (Don't know if they want to see any ID)
So it felt very much the same to me, but the security in Paris was probably not police (I didn't go fully in, so I don't remember).
You just ignored the armored vehicles and police station permanently setup at one end of the square? The facial recognition when you go through the scanners? The guards posted at vantage points with rifles?
You were either paying no attention at all, or you are intentionally misrepresenting the situation.
> You just ignored the armored vehicles and police station permanently setup at one end of the square?
Apparently yes, at least I can't find them on my pictures and don't remember them (but that doesn't mean they weren't there, human memories are notoriously unreliable). But I didn't took that many pictures either way, because it was slightly raining and not that interesting, I accidentally went when the forbidden city was closed.
> The facial recognition when you go through the scanners?
I have a hard time telling facial recognition and non facial recognition security cameras apart. They are common in many places of the world, so I stopped noticing them all that much.
>The guards posted at vantage points with rifles?
I mostly remember the honor guards and police at the entry. But I wouldn't be surprised if there were some with rifles somewhere, as those are not that uncommon at high profile places.
> You were either paying no attention at all, or you are intentionally misrepresenting the situation.
I'm sorry you get that impression just because it doesn't fit with your experience. I personally think that both our experiences are likely to be true, but are like snapshots of a given time.
Appreciate your reasonable responses. It's of course possible that they change the security level at times especially if the Forbidden City was closed as you say. It likely also changes around the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Examining my own feelings on this matter further, I think I had a sense that the security at the Eiffel was very focused on keeping weapons and bombs out, while the focus at Tiananmen was more on controlling the crowd and tracking who was there. For example the police station and armored vehicles were inside the square. At the Eiffel the security was outside only.
Having lived in Paris for several years, I don't recall ever seeing access to the Eiffel Tower area restricted at all except during restoration construction. It's a giant pass-through surrounded by park where thousands of people congregate daily.
I was there last July and there were huge plexiglass lanes restricting access. Once I made it through bag checks, I could wait in line to buy passes to climb up.
All previous times (2000, 2005, 2011) I could just walk under without any restriction.
> 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.
> “ but in order to control those better educated people, they will need ever better control mechanisms.”
This is like a building whose own load directly undermines its own stability, or a roller coaster whose own construction dynamics tears itself apart little by little with each run.
Trying to institute mass social control while changing a population to be highly educated knowledge workers is like boiling the ocean.
In some small local patch of time, it looks scary (ooooh social credit system, face recognition everywhere, disappeared artists and journalists, cyber warfare.. spooky)
Zoom out on the scale of 50 years and it’s farcically stupid.
Wanting an enduring human population asset and wanting authoritarian control are fundamentally incompatible desires. At best they can be sustained through force on short time scales, then ending up very very bloody for the leadership involved.
You can be highly educated at engineering and still know nothing about politics or philosophy.
I think the best thing they can do is induce political apathy. Discourage people from trying to get into even the Party apparatus, except as functionaries doing repetitive, menial jobs, and then keep people prosperous so they don't question.
I've certainly known a lot of engineers - Western engineers, even - who didn't care about politics because they simply didn't need to.
I don’t agree. To become highly educated in really any type of knowledge work, it requires a type of intellectual curiosity and openness to the scientific method applied to all possible policy decision making that is incompatible with the generalization you claim, at a fundamental level.
The drives simply can’t coexist in the same mind at the scale of a society. The drive of scientific inquiry required to be literate in almost all knowledge work is an incompatible internal drive against mindless acceptance of authoritarian policy.
This is hubris. "Our model of society is optimal for scientific progress".
The recent Chinese diaspora are largely aggressively pro-china regardless of whether they are here as students or highly educated workers. Everyone who is not Han-Chinese a laowai, or "foreigner", even in their own country.
China is showing the world an alternative to Western democracy, and they can point to clear failures of democracy with populism, corruption, and white people's ridiculous inability to wear masks ;)
Which model will be more resilient when the sea levels start to rise?
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.
One interesting part is that, when the authorities lose the people’s trust, people can’t rely on what they say to be accurate and you end up second guessing everything they say or do. It’s actually an important Chinese (Confucian/daoist-sometimes) idea to emphasize the importance of legitimacy and that the working of society is relies on it
Why would someone smuggle meth into China? Surely with China's fairly lax regulations on the chemical industry someone would be more likely to be smuggling it out...
A lot of regulation in China is barely/at all enforced, but if you think that also apply to drug regulation then you're very very wrong.
Entertainment figures regularly gets shunned by the whole industry because they were caught smoking pot, which is not even a criminal offense in China. The whole mentality is worth a book but to the Chinese society (not just government) drugs are taken very seriously.
Which is a lesson China has probably learnt, painfully well, after the Opium Wars: they have swift death penalties for traffickers, but, in a move that would seem hypocritical for us, but completely normal for them, flood the US with fentanyl and other addictive substances.
Did anyone think what was the reason to smuggle drugs into China, while it is notorious for outgoing drug trafficking? I bet they detain a random man and accused of a crime he did not commit. Why? Because they can.
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 don't think total isolation in every regard is a requirement.
Wikipedia refers to it as:
"The term hermit kingdom is used to refer to any country, organization or society which willfully walls itself off, either metaphorically or physically, from the rest of the world."
Seems reasonable.
China is going to become increasingly walled off in terms of physical access into China (and they'll likely further restrict foreign travel by their citizens), matching how they've already walled the country off with regards to the Internet & foreign press. It had to happen, the smothering process has to continue indefinitely until or unless they reverse course on liberalization. These processes tend to spiral down by necessity. The more you clamp down, the more you have to clamp down; you can't allow challenges to the vast number of invented narratives (which comes from foreign injection: outside press, outside visitors, allowing a large number of your citizens to visit other nations and see that the narratives are falsified, etc).
The exports would be the last thing to get walled off, I'd expect. Neither side of the wall really wants that. It's not hard to see a scenario where China is highly isolated socially and culturally, while still being an immense export power.
pre 1975 China was pretty different and thinking that it will go back to that state is pretty arrogant.
Now, compared to then, China has a huge internal market thanks to the rising of the middle class that could take the clash of a potential export collapse by leveraging their internal market.
So said, whenever there's somebody exporting there's another one importing. Perhaps we should ask ourselves where are we going to get the goods that now are produced largely in China.
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.
Are you calling Vietnam a western-aligned nation? I'd say it just looks like China versus whoever stands in their way as they invent new claims to resources in the region.
Vietnam at this time clearly an ally of the US and other Western countries, against China of course. There was a plan to create a naval base in Cam Rahn, but new US administration cancelled this.
I was thinking more of the Philippines / Taiwan / Indonesia, but fair point. Vietnam has also received a fair amount of Chinese aggression despite being "socialist brothers".
Vietnam and China have never been "socialist brothers", and even just brothers. They are adversaries on the civilizational level, 17 big wars during the last 20 centuries, half of them for Vietnamese independence. The last armed conflict happened in 1989, when China occupied disputed islands in the South-China sea. Vietnam would side to anyone against China (source: I live here)
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.
The most famous one ended when the soviet union collapsed (fatigue, economic stresses, random misunderstandings). I'm looking forward to the same thing happening to CCP/china in about a decade or so.
Here's hoping the US isn't the one that collapses in on itself this time. My perception of China is that it's government makes life pretty terrible but it seems better organized over there (because of state control).
Until the cracks start opening up. What you see is just them showing their best side all the time. This is not "organization". This is theatrics. You should differentiate between the two!
I don't think a routine election counts as a collapse. A govt collapse in the US would mean some combination of elections failing, leaders keeping or gaining control through force, and a breakdown of rule of law with a lot of chaos, violence, and disruption.
I very much do not want to see the US collapse; it would not be a pleasant experience. I don't think it's too likely in the near future, but it's certainly possible and these sorts of developments often only seem obvious in hindsight.
A "collapse" in the US would be civil war 2.0. That's what a "collapse" in China was from 1916 to 1949.
Still, a civil war requires the civilian government to lose control of the military or a central military to splinter into regional militias. That doesn't seem likely in the US or China. Another scenario for a US "collapse" would be a military coup or some other end to the democratic experiment.
A lot of what they're doing is BS/Potemkin villages. Imagine everything being built with the attitude that the only thing that matters is time and price. In a country with 1.4B people. Same shitty "if it looks good on the surface it's good enough" ideology everywhere, at every single level in society. Then imagine this has been going on for decades.
No wonder the CCP banned the construction of very tall skyscrapers recently.
You obviously haven't lived in a communist country. It's merely just pretending to be better organised, and yes, state control. People will do things out of fear and because they're forced to but when the central power collapses everything becomes dis-organised and a few opportunists helped by X outside power take control and/or profit.
I sincerely hope that the US doesn't collapse because we'd be left at the mercy of Russia and China.
I do wonder if that cold war did indeed end with the fall of the Soviet Union or if it's in fact still going on, but the US and some of its European partners aren't aware of it.
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 think you essentially need something pseudonymous and reputation based. Something where getting banned has a reasonably high cost in terms of re-acquiring reputation required to post.
Slashdot only gave out a small number of moderator points per day (5 IIRC). Also you could not moderate and post on the same topic, which means you cannot downvote opposing views so easily.
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.
Well I'm no HN admin, but from my own experience, a comment can switch between grey/black with only a few votes. You are basically saying that a controversial comment gets upvotes, downvotes, and then upvotes. A pro-China commenter would see the exact same data as you see, and claim this is an evidence of anti-Chinese brigading ("hammer").
* While I was writing this my original comment score went from 1 to 2 to 0, which kinda proves my point...
I see, if there is benevolent behavior, I think that's fine.
What I am concerned about is a coordinated astroturfing that is perhaps state sponsored to change the western narrative. That's pretty fricking scary and should be investigated if that's the case.
This is a very uncharitable and pedantic reading of it. If there were a law to "kill political dissidents of party x" then enforcement of that law would technically be enforcement of the law, but it would certainly not be for the purposes of maintaining law and order in the manner that the term is commonly understood to mean.
Law and Order the euphemism is not the same thing as Law and Order as it's commonly understood, even if the euphimistic usage appears more often in modern politics than the common usage. It's unfortunate that euphemisms dillute meaning (and it's probably unfortunate that they must exist at all), but that doesn't mean the actual meaning no longer exists.
> A bit of an oxymoron there isn't it. How do you enforce a law without maintaining law and order.
The point is just that the intent of applying the law is not maintaining law and order.
Lika a policeman seeing 100 people jaywalking, but only arrests the rich/poor/black/white/foreign/blonde/girl/guy, not because they want to maintain law and order by policing jaywalking, but for some other reason.
> Of course anything and everything is a sign of a "New Cold War"
Unfortunately. The respective threads are also often emotional, light on facts and relatively unreflected.
The current administration has been bullying China incessantly. I'm not going to say if the reasons were justified or not because it's complicated, but we shouldn't be surprised by China's response. It's not like we're actively trying to improve relations either.
The world needs to start bullying China. I am sickened by how weak the EU is with china. They care only about profits. We need to start treating China like we treat Russia. They are a serious threat to the rest of the world environmentally, politically, and militarily.
Sure bully China some more. Today they're kicking out foreigners, tomorrow they will take Taiwan. No dobut. Just like the world stood by as Hong Kong fell, the same will happen with Taiwan. China is only testing the waters with Hong Kong.
That's what being tough is all about. Be careful what you wish for.
China's state-sponsored IP theft has been called the largest transfer of wealth in history. I'm honestly curious what the best diplomatic strategy is to combat it, other than declaring war.
It’s nothing new though. IP theft has a long and honorable history. It’s only recently that we have decided that it’s such a terrible thing, now that we own so much of the IP in question.
There's no good way of combating it that doesn't end in war. Sanctions will lead to more Chinese public support for that war. Perhaps this leads the CCP to become complacent and fight us before they can win. That's probably the best conventional scenario (for the West)
Unconventional scenario: We steal traditional Chinese medicine and deny we took it. It achieves pretty much nothing but hopefully some Chinese people will understand why we did it and realise their government was naughty.
We can just start stealing back Chinese IP. They're inventing and designing a lot of their own stuff now -- fabs, for example. Let's just do industrial espionage and use it to build up domestic production!
The same way the MPAA sues single mothers for quintillions of dollars.
Copyright, patents, and trademarks are all just customs to facilitate creation. They run counter to the obvious Schelling point of information being easily propagated. Bundling these customs up into "IP", attempting to cement them into some iron-clad property regime, and then complaining when that is not respected is mostly just a symptom of western corruption.
The immediate remedy is tariffs that compensate for the lack of royalties for goods imported back into the western market. The longer term solution is to accept the reality, and hope that as China develops they will want to buy into the paradigm.
China is the bully here. Just see what they are doing at the borders with India at Galwan Valley! I don't see how you can come to that conclusion! US is doing the right thing!
China has illegally extended its maritime boundaries to include boundaries of other ASEAN countries (read up on UNCLOS: [2] and what is considered International Waters and what is not. It even lost a legal battle with Philippines [3] but still continues to illegally expand its maritime boundaries). It can lead to blockade of essential goods and services including oil and gas to Japan and South Korea. US doesn't claim any of those lands or sea except for the base where it has military presence. All major powers in the World have military bases spread across the globe. None of them are considered "expansionist". Many of those bases are setup either through an agreement with the Country in possession of the land or by leasing it. The bases can be removed at any time. But China is claiming territory. Both are totally different! So yes I stand by my point: China is the bully here!
It is doing the same in India as well. Expansion. Please don't compare the two again!
Trump's tactics with China haven't been great, but he was right to do something about Chinese IP theft, security concerns, and Chinese joint venture model. The US should have pushed forward with the TPP (blame starts with Obama on this) to build regional support, and not pushed hard for trade negotiations with strategic allies. WTF are you doing making Canada mad over trade, especially when there's a trade war with China?
Looking back through old news, in 2016, Clinton was not in favor of the deal, probably because of the anti-globalist faction in her party. Trump was against it because America first...which is slightly different.
I think I blamed Obama a bit because it looked like all outcomes of the election lead to no TPP, so he didn't push it hard enough, didn't negotiate hard enough to at least get Clinton to support it, or didn't rush it through while he was in power. It felt like he saw it wasn't going to happen and gave up. Maybe it's not fair to put some of this on Obama, Trump was the one who made it official.
> 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...