[HN Gopher] Xi's Security Obsession Turns Ordinary Citizens into...
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Xi's Security Obsession Turns Ordinary Citizens into Spy Hunters
Author : alphabetting
Score : 39 points
Date : 2023-09-18 16:25 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bloomberg.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bloomberg.com)
| tromp wrote:
| > Police in Henan province have urged citizens to quiz neighbors
| they mistrust on pop culture to ascertain their patriotism, while
| Shandong province state media published posters with the tagline
| "spies might be all around you."
|
| All this campaign will do is generate a ton of false positives.
| They'll end up duplicating Russia's practice of reporting people
| you don't like as unpatriotic. The US also has some experience
| with the practice [1], but fortunately those days are way behind
| us.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarthyism
| csense wrote:
| > All this campaign will do is generate a ton of false
| positives
|
| The way a totalitarian government thinks, false positives are a
| feature, not a bug.
|
| Better a hundred innocent people are kidnapped by the secret
| police and tortured to death than a single person who disagrees
| with the CCP is allowed to live. -- Xi Jinping, probably
| l3mure wrote:
| > The US also has some experience with the practice [1], but
| fortunately those days are way behind us.
|
| You must have been in a coma for several years after 9/11.
| There's also the recent anti-China initiatives by the Justice
| Department / FBI indicting dozens of professors and
| researchers, the majority of which have failed to secure any
| convictions for spying or espionage.
| jagraff wrote:
| I think the idea with campaigns like these is not to actually
| root out spies - it's to get people to self censor because
| they're afraid that their neighbor is going to report them to
| the government. If everyone is afraid of saying any forbidden
| ideas, nothing "subversive" can spread because everyone lives
| in too much fear to spread it. Knowledge of this campaign is
| more important than the function of the campaign itself
| prewett wrote:
| It's kind of impressive to watch Xi continually double-down
| on disastrous policy. The memory of the Cultural Revolution
| is still there, and nobody wants to revisit those times. But
| after the disastrous Shanghai lockdowns, a lot of ordinary
| people realized that the government can just arbitrarily lock
| you up and destroy your ability to earn money / run your
| business. Young people who sacrificed their childhood to
| relentless studying only to find no jobs get tone-deaf
| messaging about "eating bitterness". People can only take so
| much. The Covid lockdowns turned out to be too much. But I
| think that many people, especially youth, are still pretty
| near too much. You can only pile on so much pressure before
| things explode, and Xi doesn't have Mao's charisma.
| klibertp wrote:
| Same here, the first thing I thought after reading the
| title was "wait, again?!" - knowing what inciting people to
| hunt witches usually turns into, I thought that guy is
| utterly fearless, at the very least.
|
| Though, maybe he counts on this push not to work. He might
| see it as a temporary measure that will fizzle out quickly,
| giving him some time and not many headaches down the road.
| He'd be an incurable optimist then...
|
| If this incitement works, it'll leave a mark on society for
| many decades into the future. In the best case, people will
| enjoy the ride for a few years and then tacitly agree not
| to speak of it. In the worst, there will be widespread
| lynches, pogroms, bloodshed on the level of Stalinist
| purges, then either a revolution or Great Terror for years
| to decades, and it'll take a century to fully (if that's
| even possible) heal.
|
| What does Xi want to get out of it, really? Surely he's not
| stupid enough to think he'll catch any of the _actual_
| spies that are bound to be there anyway? Is whatever he
| wants to gain really worth playing with this particular
| fire? It would be safer to start an actual war, like his
| buddy did...
| gottorf wrote:
| > It's kind of impressive to watch Xi continually double-
| down on disastrous policy.
|
| "Well, did it work for those people?"
|
| "No, it never does. I mean, these people somehow delude
| themselves into thinking it might... but it might work for
| us."
|
| Autocrats' egos are bigger than history lessons, I suppose.
| Moldoteck wrote:
| Idk, NK does this for a pretty long time and at allowed Kim to
| stay in power
| alphabetting wrote:
| https://archive.ph/ZcCBf
| drt5b7j wrote:
| He's paranoid about spies because he know how much effort China
| has made to place spies everywhere abroad, and he assumes that
| the West is doing the same.
| bell-cot wrote:
| Worth adding to the Evil Overlord List:
|
| When making decisions about my security forces, I will bear in
| mind the example of East Germany's supposedly all-knowing and
| all-powerful Stasi...and of how utterly useless they proved to
| be. Better to be accidentally killed by the Hero's comic-relief
| Sidekick than to have my Evil Empire collapse without the Hero
| having had to lift a finger.
| cirgue wrote:
| The point of the Stasi wasn't to find/prosecute dissent, it was
| to create an environment that prevented it from occurring,
| spreading, or gaining traction. The Stasi existed to sow the
| fields of popular politics with salt through creating an
| environment of paranoia.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _how utterly useless they proved to be_
|
| Worse than useless. Consider the social and economic utility of
| people that piss others off.
|
| No actual harm caused. Not bad people. Just those neighbours or
| colleagues or friend's significant others that, through
| selfishness and lack of awareness or simply bullheadedness,
| question everything and come up creative (sometimes not totally
| legit or invited) workarounds.
|
| Those people do not survive such regimes. And the societies
| blighted of them show it rather quickly.
| bell-cot wrote:
| From the worldconquer.org version of the Evil Overlord List:
|
| > 208. Members of my Legion of Terror will attend seminars on
| Sensitivity Training. It's good public relations for them to
| be kind and courteous to the general population when not
| actively engaged in sowing chaos and destruction.
| fnordpiglet wrote:
| This stuff isn't intended to do anything but point the finger
| away from the man behind the curtain for the current social and
| economic problems in mainland China. By creating an external
| boogie man all problems can be attributable to that.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Stasi was very efficient in suppression of German dissent.
|
| East Germany collapsed on the account of persistent information
| inflow from the West (TV, radio, zero language barrier against
| West Germany), plus its ideological allies (the Warsaw Pact led
| by USSR) abandoning them. A country of 17 million isolated in a
| sea of non-friendly powers would be unviable. Once USSR dropped
| the Brezhnev Doctrine of Limited Sovereignty and Poland started
| introducing democracy, GDR was in a very tight spot.
|
| China won't become isolated anytime soon, and there isn't
| really an efficient way to supply dissenting news to Chinese
| people in Chinese _en masse_. Unfortunately, I believe that
| Chinese secret service can stay efficient for a long, long
| time.
| flangola7 wrote:
| They also have AI now. Listening in on every phone call and
| monitoring every video camera is a real possibility for the
| first time in history.
| euroderf wrote:
| Particularly when Hollywood too is self-censoring w.r.t.
| China.
| OfSanguineFire wrote:
| It's perhaps wishful thinking to believe that oppressive states
| will automatically fall apart. Stasi-infested East Germany
| could well have kept existing had it not been located next to a
| Western democracy that everyone was looking towards. Look at
| Eritrea or North Korea, for example. China, too, doesn't have a
| direct neighbor that exerts the same influence on it as West
| Germany on the GDR. Moreover, China already began to roll out
| years ago surveillance tech that the Stasi could have only
| dreamed of.
| bell-cot wrote:
| In time, all states fall apart. Or get conquered. Or lose a
| civil war / revolution. Or whatever.
|
| Sure, China has a bunch of advantages (large scale, distinct
| ethnic/national identity, etc.) that the GDR didn't have. But
| Chinese history records ~4,000 years of dynasties, emperors,
| generals, etc. with similar authoritarian ambitions -
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dynasties_in_Chinese_history
|
| Saying "This Time _Will_ Be Different, Because
| $Yet_Another_New_Reason " also has an extremely long history.
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(page generated 2023-09-18 23:02 UTC)