Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Do you guys have any takes on this Professor Jiang guy making the rounds recently?
I guess it's interesting to see which conspiracy theories are tacitly backed by the CCP. Apparently the duct tape holding American society together is OnlyFans.
...Again, what is the proof that Jiang is backed by the CCP? By that standard, everything in China is backed by the CCP. If the standard is simply that he works in China, is Chinese, and isn’t in prison, then sure, but even the “is Chinese” part is questionable since he holds Canadian citizenship. This guy is employed at a fucking Chinese high school, and that means he is backed by the CCP? He’s Canadian and was educated at Yale, ffs. Chinese nationalists might as well claim he’s a non-citizen who should be deported on the basis of his Yale diploma alone.
China, like America, is a land of wackos. Go on the Chinese internet and you’ll find Chinese Zionists, Chinese Dai-Nippon Teikoku lovers, Chinese Scientologists, Chinese communist femboys, Chinese flat earthers, and everything under heaven. Remember the Chinese brother of Jesus? We’ve had plenty of them throughout history, and things are not really that different now from 100 years ago, except that the wackos have even more exposure. Some of those wackos are employed by Peking or Tsinghua, which is far more meaningfully “CCP-backed” by any standard than Jiang.
The CCP also doesn’t really care about wacko history channels on Youtube. They care more about “muh protecting private business” than about protecting wackos who happen to be “aligned” with their ideology. They just took down a social media account with millions of followers for spreading the "fake news" that caffeine in boba tea is so damn high it's addictive (which harmed the business of a major Chinese tea chain), even though that same account had a track record of publishing negative coverage of Chinese real estate bubbles, Chinese local government debt, and how the Nationalist Party played a stronger role than the communists in the Sino-Japanese War.
Americans are practically blind to Chinese internal discourse, and the same cannot be said for the Chinese.
It’s all so tiresome.
I'll caveat that relatively small no-name accounts get smacked for often more-arbitrary causes than hitting a big business; the tea leaves for this point pretty heavily to the powers that be getting their collective panties in a twist over some queerbating.
That doesn't mean the CCP necessarily cares about Jiang, but it doesn't mean they're ignoring him.
I've heard of her and had the vague impression that she was more ambivalent toward the CCP, or mildly pro-CCP even, or at least not the usual kind of diasporoid hater. What’s the story there if you care to explain? Who is she, and why is she censored?
That said, my point is that Chinese censors seem to care far more about slutty outfits, trans, and gayness than about actual politics (with the obvious disclaimer that yes of course you get censored if you say really naughty things). You can see that in the crackdown on homoerotic novels, despite how popular they seem to be in the SEA market, which you might think pragmatic politicians interested in maximizing national power would be happy to let flourish.
Meanwhile complete nobodies or moderately well-known online accounts post things you would expect the censors to crack down on but turned out just fine. At the same time, accounts are also regularly banned for promoting “伪史论”, i.e. the claim that all western history from Mesopotamia to the Renaissance is fake. Plus the overt Han nationalists, plus the America haters who use too many curse words etc. If you're on the internet enough you certainly develop an intuition for the overall contour of Chinese censorship, but the frequency of both false positives and negatives suggest either that they are rather clumsy at it (which is definitely true), and/or they simply do not care enough to e.g. run sentiment analysis on everytihng (which I think is also true).
That the censor is incredibly vague and occasionally seem to act against "their" interest is incredibly frustrating. That might be the whole point, so called 罚不可知则威不可测. It also degrades the Chinese internet discourse dramatically. Shameful and wasteful, in that the discourse is discouraged at all levels of society which is detrimental, although I do not believe in free speech absolutism. That being said I think the usual American talkpoints re Chinese censors are still incredibly ignorant. I can hold both viewpoints at the same time without any internal contradictions.
Wu was a popular persona in the physical electronics space from 2016-2022. Some of that's downstream of her... assets, but she also provided a decent amount of hardware, software, and general guidance work, and while a lot of the actual hardware stuff she did was more focused on getting attention than genuine novelty, it at least passed the poc || gtfo test. Her biggest impact was explaining the cultural and social touchstones of a lot of Shenzen's lesser-known or 'obvious' bits, to the point she was doing semi-regular talks on the matter. Since this coincided with a lot of casual and hobbyist electronics people starting to trawl Shenzen, she got a good boost or two from 'bunnie' huang, and that
No idea. As you say, it could just be 'slutty' outfits, the lesbian Ughyr partner, or saying naughty things, although she'd been doing all those long enough that the censors would be pretty late. It could be that the norms changed. It could be that she'd been talking them up as ways to criticize Western governments more than China, and that was being read differently by her censors; it could be that her wording had changed in ways to subtle for me to recognize that they did; it could be any of a thousand other things.
But I think it points to the ideology mattering more than the private business, at least in her case. She does still give the pro-Shenzen writeups, even if that's the only social media she does now.
Thanks. That’s interesting.
I guess I should be more careful with my phrasing. I shouldn’t have conveyed that ideology matters less than private business in the eyes of Sauron of the East. The reason we have such pervasive censorship is obviously downstream of their ideology. What I was trying to say is that the actual contours of the Chinese censorship machine are hard to gauge, and you probably can’t capture them with a simple low-dimensional model. Plus the fact that censorship used to be handled manually by low-wage, barely educated workers (it’s a running joke on Chinese internet that they hire people who barely finished 9 year mandatory education to read and censor your posts) makes it unpredictable and inconsistent. So you can’t easily infer state ideology just by looking at what they censor and what they don’t.
I don’t think that is entirely what they intended, and intention seems more relevant here than actual outcomes. If they had (have, since were in year 2026) panopticon-like tools, I’m sure they’d be happy to use them. Maybe then it would be easier to infer the state-promoted ideology by looking at which kinds of wackos they allow to speak.
As a side note, I’m always fascinated by the obvious difference in preferences between Western and Eastern men when it comes to women. Wu is barely attractive to me, and I’d guess general Chinese netizens would rate her 5/10 tops. Not because she’s “fat” as my anorexic countrymen thinks, it’s about facial features. I have a friend I’d rate maybe 3/10, but she ended up with a blue-eyed German boyfriend who, to me, looks like the kind of guy you’d see in Nazi propaganda posters. And obviously in porn featuring EA women, the preference for EA men vs Western men also seems very different. It’s pretty fun to observe, and I’m curious whether anyone has studied it.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link