Chinese models may indeed be more likely to not distort or lie about certain topics that are taboo in the West. Of course mentioning them here on Hacker News would be taboo also.
> mentioning them here on Hacker News would be taboo also
Tiananmen, the Great Leap Forward and Xi's corruption are way more than taboo in China. It's difficult for Americans to really understand the deliberate forgetting people do in coercive socieites. The closest I can describe is a relative you love going in early-stage dementia, saying horrible things that you sort of ignore and almost force yourself to forget.
(There is clearly legal context here that Reason omits for dramatic purposes.)
In a world where the presidents closest "friend" can do a Hitler salute, twice, people are more focussed on getting Pro Palestinians fired, arrested, etc.
That very much fits any of the censorship China has going on.
Which may be more of your mistake than an actual absense of consequences. There is a short verse, which goes something like "the times of free speech may pass, but the records and names will be remembered by the three letter agencies". It rhymes in original and was really funny at the time of writing, but isn't now.
> a world where the presidents closest "friend" can do a Hitler salute, twice, people are more focussed on getting Pro Palestinians fired, arrested, etc.
That very much fits any of the censorship China has going on
No, it doesn't. You're criticising in-group blindness. That's a problem. But it's mitigated by a competitive political system because each group has an incentive to call out the other's blinds spots. When this competition ceases, you get groupthink. The last major era of American groupthink was the W. Bush White House. It preceded America's greatest geopolitical disasters in decades.
Under Xi, China went from having quiet competition within the CCP to reigning in a state of groupthink. We don't know what moronic ideas Xi's friends hold because there is nobody in power with an incentive to call that sort of thing out.
