[HN Gopher] A Spark Extinguished
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A Spark Extinguished
Author : conanxin
Score : 203 points
Date : 2024-03-23 14:06 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (chinabooksreview.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chinabooksreview.com)
| bckr wrote:
| My life is so sweet and easy.
|
| Edit: thought it would be obvious I meant "After reading this in
| its entirety, I realize that compared to the troubles these
| people went through, my life is so sweet and easy"
| yourapostasy wrote:
| I've learned over the years of traveling and speaking with ethnic
| Chinese and Chinese nationals that I make my acquaintance with,
| that there are numerous tragic stories like this in China and
| throughout the diaspora. Many are only preserved through family
| oral traditions and many of those will die out with the
| population decline. I've heard it expressed that modern day China
| has a lot of spirit (energetic vigor), but is still seeking its
| soul (embodied contemplative wonderment and compassion for all
| around ourselves, as opposed to dogmatic spirituality _per se_ ),
| and was struck by how apt that was to political leadership in all
| nations, and to an equal or lesser extent their peoples,
| depending upon the nation.
| woooooo wrote:
| What I've heard is that the great leap forward and associated
| famine are acknowledged in official accounts, but the cultural
| revolution is increasingly downplayed.
|
| The latter is more worrisome to me because it required
| enthusiastic participation by lots of normal people to get off
| the ground. That lesson should be remembered.
| rfrey wrote:
| In the west we can't even seem to hold on to the lessons from
| 1930s-40s Europe, despite an incredible amount of
| documentation and retrospection. What hope is there when the
| history of the cultural revolution is being actively
| suppressed?
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Somehow, our ancestors built a free democratic world
| without having all our advantages. As what we've taken for
| granted as been assaulted and damaged, it would be good to
| remember what they acheived, and how they did it, from much
| worse positions - without even a prior example or history
| to build on.
|
| They created democracy, women's rights, etc. despite almost
| an entire human history of doing otherwise. We only have to
| look back 10 years.
| Cheer2171 wrote:
| The lack of modern technology is an advantage, not a
| disadvantage.
|
| It is harder to start any democratic revolution against
| authoritarianism now than in the past. The modern
| information age makes it harder, not easier. To search
| someone's papers, you used to have to get police officers
| to physically enter their home and break their locks, in
| front of all their neighbors.
|
| You used to need to enlist 5-10 people to spy on a single
| potential dissident 24/7, and that surveillance is easier
| to detect. To effectively spy on a population, you used
| to need to enlist 10-30% of the population to spy on
| their neighbors and filter reports.
|
| To get the people's attention, you didn't have to get
| your message through a chaotic attention economy powered
| by the platforms that filter the information overload.
| There was literally a public square where you could reach
| your audience by handing out hand produced pamphlets.
| yorwba wrote:
| Between the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution,
| there were the Four Cleanups, which are even less remembered,
| probably because they mostly affected the countryside and
| didn't hit urban citizens as hard as the Cultural Revolution
| did.
|
| From Huang Shu-min's _The Spiral Road_ :
|
| _We decided to attack the five bad elements first, to set an
| example for the villagers and to intimidate anyone who dared
| to challenge our authority. Members of the five bad elements
| were brought up to the podium and forced to kneel down facing
| the crowd. There was a middle-aged woman among the bad
| elements. The high-level cadre from the prefecture signaled a
| poor peasant to come and asked him at close earshot: 'Is that
| a "landlord's wife" (_dizhupo _)? ' The poor peasant
| answered: 'Yes, cadre,' went up to that woman, and pressed
| her head down to the floor throughout the struggle session.
| At the end of the meeting the high-level cadre asked this
| poor peasant, 'Why did you force that woman's head down for
| so long? I thought that this campaign was supposed to avoid
| unnecessary physical abuse.' The poor peasant answered: 'But,
| cadre, I thought you had given me the order to force her
| "head down" (_dizhetou _)! '_
| shikeerzhi wrote:
| The political stronghold in China appears well fortified. With
| every year that passes, the optimization gradient from government
| to people re-enforces the complicity. The differences in written
| and oral language make clandestine operations difficult. How many
| of the 2600 Politburo members are intelligence assets? Likely few
| to none.
|
| The situation is clearly suboptimal from a human perspective:
| oppressive power is categorically bad, we take this truth to be
| self-evident.
|
| In terms of catalytic change, what are some out of the box ideas
| that would rise to the challenge?
|
| 1. New forms of biotechnology minorly resemblant of targeted mind
| control. For example, any nanotechnology-based vector
| sufficiently power to trigger behaviors like a voluntary mass
| resignation of party members. Alternatively, a controlled
| pandemic that somehow interfaces with compromised electronics to
| temporarily modulate behavior. But this ask is too high, and such
| technology would surely be deployed towards even geopolitical
| goals first.
|
| 2. Incredibly high velocity targeted counterpropaganda that is
| also historically truthful. Some of the earliest StarCraft bots
| that defeated humans were simply very good at controlling mass
| mutalisk swarm. A rapid and unexpected infiltration with truth
| bombs, ideally physical or written rather than electronic to make
| censorship challenges, could cause a (probably uncontrolled chain
| reaction).
|
| 3. Inducement of a Taiwan takeover, and subsequent loss. Very
| high collateral damage and seems widely destructive rather than
| more "peaceful."
|
| 4. Weird deus ex machinas. In the Three Body Problem, theoretical
| physicist start hallucinating a countdown timer. A covert leap in
| physics or technologies to induce "mystic breaks" in relevant sub
| populations, particularly those in power, could lead to mostly
| voluntary abdications of power.
|
| 5. Something more insidious or pernicious related to improved
| clandestine operation.
|
| 6. Straightforward domination, such as through a deployment of a
| sovereign but appropriately aligned or controlled AI fleet that
| maintains the balance of a covert takeover / disassembly of the
| power structure but phase transitions organically to redistribute
| power to the wider populace before halting or terminating itself.
|
| A lot of these require sci fi, non-existence technology, or risk
| of armageddon. Are there alternatives (that don't require
| classified information or a SCIF) that don't rely on these or is
| the task complexity simply at that scale?
| paradox242 wrote:
| All of these technologies would be very useful to a government,
| especially an authoritarian government. Who do you imagine
| wielding this technology, exactly? Agents of a foreign power?
| Internal dissidents? In either case it is difficult to imagine
| a circumstance in which the same technology is not already
| available to the CCP themselves.
| exceptione wrote:
| Dictatorships look strong from the outside, but are weak
| inside. What looks like a monolith is in fact multiple tribes
| seeking a position closer to the throne.
|
| The most brutal few that make it to the top have to spend much
| of their energy to get there or defend their position. That is
| not saying they don't have any ideologies, but leadership in
| these systems rewards obedience and tribute paying first of
| all. So you get a system that optimizes optics for a hierarchy
| of overlords.
|
| Contrast that with the chaotic looking processes that happens
| within free democratic societies. Leadership has a much broader
| accountability, faces scrutiny from all sides, has to tolerate
| opposition, are bound to laws and have term limits. This
| system, with all buts and ifs, allows societies to innovate,
| learn, adapt and prosper.
|
| Chinese leadership should thank the late Kissinger for the
| enormous transfer of wealth, intellectual properties, and
| highly favorable trading conditions from the West. It is still
| very dependent on it for its economics. Totalitarian states
| will in the long run not be able to compete with free states.
|
| The collapse of the Soviet Union was inevitable, but that stuff
| can take decades.
| ordu wrote:
| (2) wouldn't work. People agree with propaganda not because
| they think it is telling the truth. On the contrary, they agree
| with propaganda and then they start believing it. I'd say it is
| more like a social adaptation, you need to be like others.
|
| (3) wouldn't work either, I think. Propaganda can absorb losses
| and paint them as a heroic struggle against overhelming odds.
|
| _> Are there alternatives (that don't require classified
| information or a SCIF) that don't rely on these or is the task
| complexity simply at that scale?_
|
| I don't know any, but I think that some way to form societies
| independent from the government might help. Some way to meet
| people, to discuss things with them, to plan actions and to do
| it at a large scale. But the problem is how you can distinguish
| a goverment spy from a freedom fighter? It is the key problem,
| everything else is just an implementation detail.
| the_af wrote:
| Almost all of the proposals in your comment seem authoritarian
| to me. I think at this point we should have learned that
| deploying totalitarianism to fight a regime the West doesn't
| like both doesn't work and, to use your words, is "self-
| evidently categorically bad".
|
| Dreaming of some mind-controlling bioweapon to change the minds
| of politicians we don't like seems particularly dystopian to
| me.
|
| If this technology existed, you can guarantee it will be
| deployed in _your country_ , wherever that is.
| amadeuspagel wrote:
| > In the 2000s, the underground filmmaker Hu Jie interviewed most
| of the survivors and in 2013 released online one of his best-
| known films, Spark.
|
| This film is available on YouTube:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iay4eXyUb7k
| CitizenKane wrote:
| What an interesting tale and gripping read. I've lived in China
| and surprised that I've never heard of this before.
|
| For those unaware, not a whole lot has changed since that time
| unfortunately. China has had certain periods where they had
| opened up somewhat, but those days are long gone to my knowledge.
| If anything the repression may be even greater these days in some
| ways, though at least there isn't any kind of mass starvation
| going on as far as I'm aware.
|
| The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old
| imperial system rather than something fundamentally new. In the
| past it was an imperial examination to join the Mandarin
| class[1], now it's a test to join the CPC [2]. Either way, if you
| don't get in your opportunities are limited.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandarin_(bureaucrat) [2]
| https://daily.jstor.org/communist-party-of-china/
| dist-epoch wrote:
| > I've lived in China and surprised that I've never heard of
| this before.
|
| Why is that surprising? The regime is very thorough in
| scrubbing history.
| like_any_other wrote:
| That is why it is surprising - to them.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > The current system also seems to be more of a riff on the old
| imperial system
|
| From a distance it seems like government policy is, in many
| ways, also the imperial system returned, almost like the CCP is
| the new dynasty (though not hereditary). The focus on
| corruption (not among political allies, of course), which the
| imperial system saw as its eventual downfall - IIRC Chinese
| history at least traditionally taught there were three
| repeating phases to a dynastic cycle: ascendency, corruption,
| chaos, then ascendency again .... The perspective on other
| countries as inevitably inferior. The attempt, post-Opium Wars,
| to hold onto power by adopting Western technology without
| adopting Western culture, such as political, intellectual, and
| economic freedom (it never went well, as you might expect).
| Even the nine dashed line geographical claims are, IIRC, from
| the Qing dynasty.
| kurthr wrote:
| Yes it does, but they also imported the credit based
| fractional reserve monetary system. This really does require
| constant growth for positive (or even near zero negative)
| interest rates. Although there are a lot of monetary
| controls, there are really only trade-offs not fixes, if
| loans are made for which the asset does not cover a loss. You
| have to pick winners and losers.
|
| That said monetary controls are much stronger than you'd see
| in an open market country, and one could force a digital
| currency with negative interest rates.
| skybrian wrote:
| Constant growth in monetary terms doesn't require real
| growth. Most currencies are at least somewhat inflationary.
|
| Bad loans, like broken promises, will always be with us.
| Sometimes you take a risk and trust someone, and it doesn't
| work out, so you're poorer than you thought. It doesn't
| mean we shouldn't take risks.
| Tevo wrote:
| _" If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the
| systematic patterns of thought that produced that government
| are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in
| the succeeding government."_ - Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art
| of Motorcycle Maintenance
|
| Though I don't know enough about Chinese politics to tell how
| much the quote actually fits.
| Terr_ wrote:
| > People on the side of The People always ended up
| disappointed, in any case. They found that The People tended
| not to be grateful or appreciative or forward-thinking or
| obedient. The People tended to be small-minded and
| conservative and not very clever and were even distrustful of
| cleverness.
|
| > And so the children of the revolution were faced with the
| age-old problem: it wasn't that you had the wrong kind of
| government, which was obvious, but that you had the wrong
| kind of people.
|
| -- Night Watch (2002) by Terry Pratchett
| taikobo wrote:
| Born and raised and stuck here, I can tell you that it
| absolutely fits. It is kind of a vicious cycle, the
| government breed ignorant people and these people cultivate
| the ruthless authoritarian regime continuously. But I do
| believe history is on an upward trajectory, just with some
| twists and turns, or "spirals" as the people here call it.
| The problem is that maybe few of the people alive will live
| long enough to reap the benefit of it.
| _tik_ wrote:
| In my home country, Indonesia, many of us were not aware of the
| scale of the genocide of the left, or the massacres of
| civilians after World War II and the War of Independence. Most
| people pretend that it never happened and avoid discussing it.
| Only recently have people started talking about it, but they
| often face backlash.
|
| Additionally, you will not find books on this topic in the
| local library.
|
| I think it is normal for a community to choose selected
| amnesia.
| roenxi wrote:
| The system described in the second link has a lot of
| interesting implications. That is one of those systems that
| reminds me a bit of Enron - it sounds like a good idea, it
| probably looks like a good idea in superficial results, but
| that sort of elitism doesn't have a history of working out
| well.
|
| The comparison to the Ivy League for example. I don't think
| there has been a plain Ivy League president in the US since
| George W. Bush. I don't really see how to comment on him
| without being political, but I note that his presidency was
| such a success the right wing of politics is uniting behind a
| man who very publicly said "[Bush] lied us into a war" as an
| argument for why his family members weren't competent to lead
| again based on his record. Elitism doesn't lead to excellence
| outside a fairly narrow definition of the word.
| boznz wrote:
| This story will unfortunately be told again and again, in a
| thousand languages, until the end of time.
| em500 wrote:
| Many years ago I read Animal Farm (1945) and Wild Swans (1991)
| almost back to back. It was startling how much of China's post-
| WW2 history was already written before it happened.
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