
Tsinghua law professor who criticized Xi Jinping barred from leaving China - abc-xyz
https://www.inkstonenews.com/politics/law-professor-xu-zhangrun-barred-leaving-china/article/3008103
======
learc83
If you're unaware, he was was suspended from his position and banned from
leaving because he questioned making Xi leader for life.

They are also scrubbing his name from the news and social media. Disappearing
him is a very possible next step.

Edit:

dang I know you've said that vote/flag manipulation wasn't happening in the
past when you've looked through the data.

But could you provide some insight on why this dropped from #1 to #26 in under
a minute?

~~~
bleriot
Dang has no interest in upsetting Chinese loyalists, so he’ll never release
the data behind his claims of “no voting manipulation”.

------
potatofarmer45
I've NEVER seen a post make it to the top of HN front page and then drop so
quickly. It's almost like there is a bot network that detected keywords that
may be negative towards the Chinese government and downvoted on masse to bury
the story

If the data is open, it would be very interesting to see who and how this is
being downvoted.

~~~
samfriedman
I've anecdotally noticed the same thing, but I have also noticed moderators
asking users to refrain from conspiracy comments like this.

I guess we have to trust that the administrators of this site, with full
access to account and posting data, would notice if a concerted network of
accounts was flagging certain submissions. I'd hope that their findings would
be discussed publicly, but until then I don't think there's anything you or I
can do to prove that this effect isn't due simply to many HN users disliking
China politics stories.

~~~
potatofarmer45
I've met quite a few of the YC team before and I know they don't have a person
with this sort of speciality. There is a reason the top fraud detection
analysts get paid so much on ecommerce companies - you have to be good at data
science, behavioral analytics, and know enough tech to be able to spot this
sort of patterns.

I wish YC would have something similar to FOI, where people can publicly
request for specific anonymized data. This way, we can a clearer idea of how
various actors interact with a forum... in this case HN.

If I could get anonymized data, I'd 1) filter first for all posts with keyword
"China" that have made it any given point to the HN front page over last 3
months 2) Categorize articles as "positive towards", "negative towards", and
"neutral" in content and tone 3) view upvote/flag rate before reaching the
front page vs post exposure on the front page. 4) Compare across the 3. If
people simply don't like China articles, then the pattern should be uniform.
If it's not the same pattern, then you have drill down to specifically where
the downvotes are coming from and when they start. 5) Since you can only flag
but not downvote stories, is there an automated surge of upvotes for all
surrounding posts excluding the targeted "negative" post?

There's a lot to look at, but based on my anecdotal experience, over the last
few months, negative Chinese articles are simply flagged/downvoted rapidly
which contrasts to just a months earlier where there were robust discussions
on each article. Real people predictably comment/interact consistently over
time- that's proven. The fact that counter-posts to China-negative posts have
largely disappeared suggests a large degree of coordination in the first
place. Almost like rather than trying to win the argument online, the default
is now to bury all negativity in the first place by promoting everything else
on HN rapidly.

If this is the case, there should be patterns of suspicious accounts. Key
questions to ask: how did these accounts that downvoted get to the 400? karma
threshold to vote. Was it a bot net where they upvote each others random
posts? Or is it a manual process like the paid online trolls where accounts
are created and provide interactions to reach the threshold, and then kept on
ice storage until needed to downvote/flag?

Just looking at the metadata and interaction patterns will give you a clear
idea if this is typical post interaction behavior, or something more sinister.

------
duxup
>But online, Xu himself has been virtually erased.

>Searches for his name return no result on the Twitter-like Weibo. Any mention
of him in the past year has been scrubbed from Baidu, a popular search engine.

The speed that they can digitally make someone's name unusable is pretty
scary.

And this is just for being publicly critical.

~~~
2bitencryption
Europe: "Citizens have the right to be forgotten."

China: "We can and will make you forgotten."

~~~
coldtea
Well, the first is a needed thing (and can benefit the "little man/woman"
too). The second is top down only.

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AFascistWorld
Well, Xi stated explicitly that he demands absolute loyalty, being barred from
leaving China is hardly news nowadays, but this certainly is a statement and
warning made prior to the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests,
in which universities palyed a seminal role.

A family in my small hometown had their 2 university sons vanished forever
after that crackdown.

Leica recently had an ad on it.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWgLOSm1rQA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWgLOSm1rQA)

------
NicoJuicy
Hi Inkstone, I once critized you because of your location.

You set me straight then and are proving it again that somehow, non-censored
news is possible there.

I wish you the best of luck, I don't know if I would have as much balls as you
guys.

I can't seem to find a rss feed somewhere ( on mobile...)? Is that possible?

Ps. Sorry for the previous comment a while ago.

PS2. Using cloudflare. Looks legit to hide the servers IP. ( Had to check the
infrastructure used :p )

~~~
sexy_seedbox
You should apologize to alanwong, he's been trying to promote Jack Ma's site
very very hard:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alanwong](https://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=alanwong)

[https://www.reddit.com/user/alanwong](https://www.reddit.com/user/alanwong)

~~~
alanwong
Thanks but no need to apologize to me!

You realize I'm an editor of Inkstone, right? I've been sharing stuff I think
would interest people here and on other sites. I hope you find it as
interesting as I do.

------
JPKab
This story very quickly disappeared from the top of the HN front page.

A surge of down votes from bots or state actors? No idea, but it was very fast
and that rings alarm bells.

------
fossuser
I'm currently reading the Three Body Problem by the Chinese Science Fiction
writer Liu Cixin.

It starts right in the middle of the cultural revolution and does not paint
the party in a positive light. It'd be interesting to know why this wasn't
censored.

I heard something about China being excellent at manufacturing, but having
trouble with creating new industries and President Xi noticed that in the west
those creating new industries often liked and were inspired by Scifi.

I wonder if this gives Chinese science fiction authors a free pass? It'd be
interesting to hear the perspective from someone who knows more about the
culture.

The beginning of the book touches explicitly on the removal of professors that
disagree with the party.

~~~
AFascistWorld
The Cultural Revolution is a special one, in which the party itself is the
"bigger" victim, so it's kinda okay to criticize it "the right way", many
movies and dramas have been made about it.

~~~
fossuser
How is the party itself the bigger victim? What does it mean to criticize it
in the right way?

~~~
analyst74
Cultural revolution was a political maneuver by Mao to suppress his
competitors, he won that battle, but not the war. People he sidelined came
back in power after he passed away, the biggest one being Deng Xiaoping.

------
Dravidian
China is setting a dangerous precedent for humanity as a whole.

Not caring about what's happening in China is not caring about humanity at
all.

Whats different from the attrocities committed by organised terror like ISIS
when compared to the atrocities committed by Chinese government towards
Tibetians, Muslims, Prisoners etc. ?

For all the boasting about Privacy, Humanity by Apple it gives away data to
Chinese govt for someone to rot in their prison or worse death. So is the
state of all other companies doing business with China.

Now that it's a super power, it's been flexing its power outside its borders.
It aided in the genocide of Tamil population in Srilanka during final Elam war
just to get to India at south. It has a military base in Myanmar & we all know
what happened there.

Edit:Typo

~~~
DesiLurker
This is the thing I worry about, technology is making it easier to speak up
against the power but its also making much easier to quash any rebellion
before it gathers steam. Autocratic empires like china are using technology
quite efficiently to do this. God only helps us if an AGI or near AGI gets
into the hand of a regime like this before anybody else.

------
debt
This is alarming. I think these kind of one-off things can feel somewhat
boring or unimportant if it were some very underdeveloped tiny country with a
small population.

But we're talking about a country with 1.5B people and a very sophisticated
technology sector, a powerful military and a modern economy starting to act
like a dictatorship.

~~~
Bayart
Starting ? China has always been a dictatorship. Now it's also a
technologically driven one. Although you could say that materialistic
ideologies have always been acutely aware of technical means. See Curzio
Malaparte's _Technique Of Revolution_.

------
superkuh
Anyone have a copy of the text of the article? The page itself doesn't include
the article and only shows empty gray bars to tease the reader. I'm unable to
get the javascript to execute and fill it in no matter what browser I use.

~~~
theandrewbailey
Maybe try the AMP version? [https://amp.inkstonenews.com/politics/law-
professor-xu-zhang...](https://amp.inkstonenews.com/politics/law-professor-xu-
zhangrun-barred-leaving-china/article/3008103)

~~~
superkuh
Thanks. That did it once I disabled CSS to clear their page blocking div.
Here's a copy of the article text that doesn't require even that for anyone
that is having trouble like I did:
[https://write.as/uiejj79fq4vxv.md](https://write.as/uiejj79fq4vxv.md)

------
lengxzai
i've spent nearly a decade in and around china (including some time at peking
university which is down the road from tsinghua), for anyone trying to make
sense of the contradictions that are china, i'd recommended picking up chan
koonchung's (陈冠中) excellent novel the fat years (盛世 - 中国2013年).

although the way the novel wraps-up is a bit outlandish and disappointing...
overall its does an excellent job of translating all the fascinating, bizarre,
and creepy headlines we're constantly bombarded with these days into a
plausible portrait of modern china (at least for me).

------
nojvek
As a thought experiment: what do you think the internet in the next 50 years
will look like?

------
woodandsteel
It's interesting we are not getting any Xi loyalists posting here. Not even
any trolls who try to divert the discussion with whataboutism. Maybe they have
finally realized they are not going to be able to persuade the world that Xi
is great, or at least not any worse than anyone else.

------
ausjke
this is truly an embarrassment

~~~
jessaustin
Unfortunately this reads like wishful thinking.

[EDIT:] I think there are ninja-edits here?

~~~
ausjke
yes to be honest I should not post the original post, I still need go there
for business trips, it's likely they can track me down and deny my visa if
they want to, you don't know how powerful and bad they could be, it's lawless
there when it comes to individuals. it's a shame, period.

~~~
0815test
Western countries have in fact denied visas to foreigners who publicly hold
"inappropriate" views. Visiting a foreign country is considered a privilege
not a right, so it's not something where there's much if any concern about
supposed "rights".

------
deepVoid
1984!!!

~~~
dang
If you continue to post unsubstantive comments to HN, we are going to have to
ban you.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

