
Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future - carterschonwald
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/27/world/asia/27china.html?_r=1&ref=asia
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online
I was one of the victims of this system. Lucky me i got the hell out of the
system a few years ago. I am a software engineer in Vancouver ,Canada browsing
this news now.

My files has been sitting in a cabinet of a government official build over 8
years and no one just care.

The interesting part was I had to pay the government for keeping my files. I
just left 8 years ago and i thought i would not need my files anymore (not
looking for a job anymore in china , at least a government job ) so i just
stopped paying them.

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d_c
Would they just throw them away if you stopped paying a 'storage fee'(?)?

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Hexstream
After reading this article... Apparently they'd "recycle" them.

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rottencupcakes
First that article on North Korea and now this. It's so sad that people live
like this in the 21st century. And there's no way for us to do anything about
it since their governments so actively block any real information.

"People's Republic" my ass. China's government is no government by the people
for the people. It's just an evil empire. And we're supporting them with every
Chinese product we buy and every attempt Obama makes to improve our relations.

After reading stuff like this, I'm not so sure we should be. I'm not
advocating sanctions or anything of that sort, I just feel like we should take
a harder line against such human rights violations.

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papersmith
PRC's government is known to be relatively insensitive to external pressure,
but is scared shitless of its own people. China doesn't rely on foreign aids,
and contrary to popular beliefs, value from export accounts for a very small
percentage of its GDP. This is part of the reason China is relatively
unaffected by the current downturn.

[http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1052429...](http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=105242965)

If there's to be any changes, it has to be from within. That's why the
government is so paranoid about protests and is spending loads on censorship.
Recently it has been going after public interest lawyers, but these guys are
much tougher to crack than angry peasants.

[http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_i...](http://www.economist.com/world/asia/displayStory.cfm?story_id=14098751&source=hptextfeature)

~~~
yardie
You've got to be living under a bridge if you don't think the current crisis
is affecting the chinese. It hasn't hit Beijing or Shanghai in a major way but
all the manufacturing cities across the southern and east coasts are taking it
pretty hard. There has been a sizable exodus of laid off workers leaving the
cities.

I don't know what counts as a small percentage to you but exports make up
35-40% of their GDP since 2008. There has been a precipitous drop and changing
from an export economy to self-sufficiency doesn't happen in a day. Luckily,
the gov't has loads of reserves to weather that storm. But it's still a storm.

~~~
wallflower
One of the reasons unemployment is not higher in the United States is because
we have effectively outsourced much of our manufacturing needs to China. When
manufacturing needs dropped dramatically, Chinese factories were impacted
directly.

At one point, China considered a 9 percent annual growth rate the bare minimum
it needed to maintain to accomodate the migrants going from country to city
and/or to prevent social unrest (if those migrants could not find jobs). I
don't know what their revised minimum growth rate is now - but it is clear
China was dependent on its biggest customer, the American consumer.

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jacquesm
Every system like that should have checks and balances built in to the system.
The fact that there is no backup of this crucial documentation is quite
amazing, that there is no way to reconstruct it even more (because after all,
you did live that life and there are countless people that could testify to
that).

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nalbyuites
His files had vanished. But with his story in the NYT, how long do you think
it will take for him to vanish? :(

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jacquesm
Why do you think that will happen ?

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patio11
Because China is a Communist dictatorship which routinely kills people whose
continued life is an embarrassment to the regime.

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joez
The education system is an attempt at creating equality for over a billion
people. It's implemented by people for people so there will always be
corruption. It's sad that there are no checks for when these things do happen.
The media would be a good check but alas, not in China where the state
controls it.

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ams6110
A good lesson for those who think governments should be trusted with managing
dossiers of any kind about their citizens (e.g. health care records).

~~~
gorbachev
Yes, because thoroughly corrupt officials in remote parts of China are exactly
like Government officials in the US.

My God! Your post is a good lesson for those who think Internet commenters
have anything valuable to say.

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carterschonwald
I find the whole idea of the scenario this article describes horrifying, is
this portrayal of highly centralized sans backup documentation true? Is there
a technological solution to this that can become culturally accepted or is
deeper reform needed before even this problem can be fixed?

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adharmad
The problem itself is not technological but political. The system that has
evolved is pretty bad and the only reason it has evolved is because of the
government. Unless there is some third party (free press, independent justice
system) that oversees the government, there is no easy solution.

~~~
Herring
I wonder - has there ever been a case of an organization that big voluntarily
giving up power? I can't think of any, & in fact the opposite situation (eg
regulatory capture) is quite common.

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philwelch
Depends on what you mean by "voluntary", but maybe half of the British Empire
was ceded without bloodshed.

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adharmad
Can you clarify which half was ceded without bloodshed?

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xcombinator
I remember what my father told me when he was in england. He was a friend of a
Girl from east europe. She never talked about her live there. One day she
said: I can't talk to you about it, because if I talk, there are going to go
against my family, who is still living there.

Ten years later when he was working with URSS scientists, they behave very
strange, very serious, never smiled, never talked about life. One of them told
him: If we talk bad about the country we can't work because the state is the
only employer.

So I don't want communism(too much power in too few hands), and I don't want
the macro-capitalism we are living today in witch a few companies control
everything(and when they fail they are too big to fail).

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nazgulnarsil
economically support chinese companies that treat their workers well and thus
put pressure on the rest of the country to improve.

reform won't come from protests, it will come from the economy.

