README.adoc

= China Dictatorship 中国独裁统治
:china-dictatorship-media-base: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship-media/master
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https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship[GitHub Pages] | https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship[GitHub project] | https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/archive/gh-pages.zip[HTML download]

Chinese "Communist" <<dictatorship,"Dictatorship">> "facts". 中国《共产主义》<<dictatorship,《独裁统治》>>的《事实》。<<faq,FAQ>>, <<news,news compilation>> and <<restaurants,restaurant>> and <<music,music>> recommendations. <<faq,常见问答集>>，<<news,新闻集>>和<<restaurants,饭店>>和<<music,音乐>>建议。<<xi-abolishes-term-limits-2018-03,Heil Xi 卐>>. <<xi-abolishes-term-limits-2018-03,习万岁>>。

This README is too large and so https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1610[GitHub cuts it up] on https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship[github.com]. You can view it fully at https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship[] or by downloading it locally as shown at: <<mirrors>>.

**住在中国大陆真名用户或者用中国邮箱的网友请别给星星，不然要被请喝茶了。 Friends who live in China and have real name on account or who use a Chinese email provider, please don't star this repo, or else the police might pay you a visit some day.** See also: <<what-should-pro-democracy-chinese-living-in-china-do-about-the-dictatorship>>.

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Xi_Jinping_The_Governance_of_China_photo.jpg[height=600]

toc::[]

[[about]]
== About (关于)

This repo has the following goals:

* allow copy pasting links to answers to questions/comments that have been posted a million times before by <<wumao>>, mostly under: <<faq>>. This was the original goal.
* serve as a censorship bomb to block <<github>> in China: <<keyword-attack>> to destroy the <<gfw>> and <<dictator-needs-gfw,therefore the CCP>>. Or more realistically get added to the <<github-gov-takedowns>> hall of fame.
* be a fun and sometimes silly source of Chinese mostly anti-CCP culture like a better https://en.uncyclopedia.co/wiki/China[Unencyclopedia] / https://web.archive.org/web/20191209021646/http://encyclopediadramatica.rs/China[Encyclopedia Dramatica] without the stupid stereotype jokes. Just quickly browse the pictures with Ctrl + F "Figure" and have fun.
* serve as a place where people can post interesting related stuff in the issues: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues see also: <<shitpost>>
* highlight positive about China's culture outside of its shitty government, such as <<the-best-chinese-supermarket-food-products,food>> and <<music>>. This has two goals:
** teach foreigners (maybe even Chinese people on certain points) about amazing Chinese things that they can consume
** show wumaos that <<ciro-santilli>> is not as clueless about China as they think

== Copypasta

Here's an image/sentence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copypasta[copypasta]/summary of key events for the <<keyword-attack>>.

Another advantage of this is that since it comes first in the repo, it ensures that key elements show up on github.com despite file size cutups: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1610[].

Each summary section contains a link to the main section, which contains sources and description of each image.

Text only:

* <<xi-abolishes-term-limits-2018-03>> (2018包子露宪)
* <<the-709-crackdown>>
* <<panama-papers>> (邓家贵)
* <<low-end-population>>
* <<tibetan-unrest-2008>>

Text and image:

**六四事件 Tiananmen square protests 1989**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#tiananmen

Music!

* https://youtu.be/-JTWXqUPQ7I[Joan Baez - China]
* https://youtu.be/6OOlXJs4I8k[Philip Morgan - Blood is on the square]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Tiananmen_students_sitting.jpg[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Tank_Man.jpg[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Tianmen_crushed_dead.jpg[height=600]

**法轮功 Falun Gong 1999 70M believer religion banned**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#falun-gong

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Falun_Gong_Ghuangzhou.jpg[height=600]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Falun_Gong_lady_silenced.jpg[height=600]

**新疆改造中心 Xinjiang re-education camps 2018**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#xinjiang

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Xinjiang_prisoners_sitting_identified.jpeg[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Xinjiang_prisoners_march.jpg[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Uyghur_sale_website.jpg[height=500]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Xinjiang_camp_in_camp.jpg[height=600]

**小熊维尼 Winnie the Pooh 2018**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#winnie-the-pooh

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Xi_Pooh_Obama.webp[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Xi_Abe_Pooh.webp[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Xi_Jinping_heart.jpeg[height=400]

**郝海东 Hao Haidong Chinese soccer superstar turns against the CCP 2020**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#hao-haidong

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Hao_Haidong_kick.jpg[height=500]

**冠状病毒审查 Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#corona

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Li_Wenliang_covid.jpg[height=400]

**基督迫害 Christian persecution 2018**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#christianity

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Church_demolition.jpg[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Last_Supper_Mao.jpg[height=400]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Pope_CCP_deal.jpeg[height=400]

**LGBT权利 The suppression of homosexuality**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#gay-rights

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Tianmen_lesbian_kiss.jpg[height=500]

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Addicted_bed.jpg[height=400]

**996.ICU**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#nine-nine-six-icu

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/996ICU.png[height=400]

**Gay Putin**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#gay-putin

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Gay_Putin.jpg[height=400]

**The poisoning of Alexei Navalny 2020**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#the-poisoning-of-alexei-navalny-2020

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Navalny_hospital_sitting.jpg[height=400]

**Vajiralongkorn Hamtaro**

https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship#thai-king-hamtaro

image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Side_by_side_comparison_between_Thai_king_Vajiralongkorn_and_Hamtaro.jpg[height=400]

[[mirrors]]
== Mirrors of this page (这个网页的镜像)

You can download the webpage locally from GitHub at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/archive/gh-pages.zip

Media such as images are not stored in this repository, but rather at https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship-media to keep the lightweight clone. The locally downloaded HTML will then read images from that repository. But we've learnt after creating that repository that the subdomain that serves the images is censored: <<github-censored-subdomains>>, so they might still be broken.

You can also clone locally with Git:

....
git clone https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship
cd china-dictatorship
git checkout gh-pages
xdg-open README.html
....

or build it yourself:

....
bundle install
make
xdg-open README.html
....

You can also build with local images:

....
git clone https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship
git clone https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship-media
cd china-dictatorship
make MEDIA=../china-dictatorship-media
....

Given <<github-censored-subdomains>>, this might be the only way to view the images from China.

The cool thing about Git is that we can maintain several mirrors on multiple websites very easily:

* https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship Canonical source and rendered output. If ever <<github-gov-takedowns>> we do this: <<strategy-if-this-repo-gets-added-to-github-gov-takedowns>>
* https://gitlab.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship Maybe some day https://gitlab.cn/ ? :-)
* https://gitee.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship on <<gitee>>, blocked after 12 hours: <<gitee-censorship>>
* https://bitbucket.org/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship
* https://git.kiwifarms.net/CrunkLord420/china-dictatorship auto-pull Gitea mirror on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiwi_Farms[Kiwi Farms] (a <<politically-incorrect,politically incorrect>> social network website)

GitHub Pages: https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship trade-offs with https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship[]:

* pros
** cut up to 512KB of source, and therefor unacceptable as the only source: https://github.com/isaacs/github/issues/1610[]
** https://help.github.com/en/github/authenticating-to-github/about-anonymized-image-urls[GitHub's camo] keeps hiccuping and not showing images
** and YouTube videos show inline there
* cons
** domain will eventually get blocked in China. <<greatfire>> https://zh.greatfire.org/https/cirosantilli.com shows that in 2020-01-19 the domain was unblocked, but on the next text at 2020-05-23 it was "contractictory".
** Camo bypasses the need for VPN, since most images are served from <<wayback-machine>> which is <<censorship,blocked in China>>.

It is really interesting to see how many people star the GitHub repository, and then a few minutes later they think about how they might get put in jail, and then unstar it. Talk about <<chilling-effect>>! But yes, for the love of God, please stay safe: <<what-should-pro-democracy-chinese-living-in-china-do-about-the-dictatorship>>.

GitHub Pages was first enabled in 2020-03-22 at https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/commit/0b362a83fb5dd55f67b9d351551d0c18e7f3229a[].

The perfect solution might be to download all images and upload them to https://github.com/cirosantilli/media since GitHub content does not go through Camo, we have to see if such images don't fail to load as often.

We also have a NPM Node.js package https://www.npmjs.com/package/china-dictatorship[]. After https://askubuntu.com/questions/594656/how-to-install-the-latest-versions-of-nodejs-and-npm/971612#971612[installing NPM], you can be use it as:

....
npm i -g china-dictatorship
china-dictatorship > README.html
....

This forces China to also block/curate package managers to block this repo. The package is already available in the following NPM Chinese mirrors, both which were blocked at some point:

* Taobao: https://registry.npm.taobao.org/china-dictatorship (https://web.archive.org/web/20200406081433/http://registry.npm.taobao.org/china-dictatorship[archive]).
+
Noticed down as of 2021-02-23, replaced by a dummy package admined by fengmk2@gmail.com presumably https://github.com/fengmk2 and https://fengmk2.com/ and https://twitter.com/fengmk2 He is a large NPM contributor, and likely `cnpm` too. TODO is he pro or against <<censorship>> based on online comments?
+
In order to overcome this, includers
* Aliyun from <<alibaba>>: https://developer.aliyun.com/mirror/npm/package/china-dictatorship (https://web.archive.org/web/20210211123658/https://developer.aliyun.com/mirror/npm/package/china-dictatorship[archive]).
+
Taken down as 404 likely around 2021-02-22 after come incoming links from https://developer.aliyun.com[] to https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship?spm=a2c6h.14275010.0.0.60be9dc4vwIZTP[] and `?spm=.14275010.0.0.60be9dc4PsRmA`.

There is actually a `cnpm` tool to install from Chinese mirrors: https://github.com/cnpm/cnpm[].

We also managed to upload a Python PyPi package at: https://pypi.org/project/china-dictatorship/ Is as:

....
python3 -m pip install --user --upgrade china-dictatorship
china-dictatorship.py > README.html
....

Like NPM, this will also have Chinese mirrors that will need to be censored by their admins ovrview https://titanwolf.org/Network/Articles/Article?AID=25a20c20-c97b-4bfe-af67-760861343658 :

* http://pypi.douban.com/simple/china-dictatorship/ vs http://pypi.douban.com/simple/numpy both up March 2021
* http://mirrors.aliyun.com/pypi/simple/china-dictatorship/ vs http://mirrors.aliyun.com/pypi/simple/numpy both down March 2021 but in a different way, so maybe it was censored already
* http://pypi.mirrors.opencas.cn/simple/china-dictatorship vs http://pypi.mirrors.opencas.cn/simple/numpy both down March 2021
* http://pypi.v2ex.com/simple/china-dictatorship vs http://pypi.v2ex.com/simple/numpy both down March 2021
* https://pypi.mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/simple/china-dictatorship vs https://pypi.mirrors.ustc.edu.cn/simple/numpy both up March 2021
* reference: https://pypi.org/simple/china-dictatorship/ vs https://pypi.org/simple/numpy/

We later found on Google by chance that libraries.io picked it up and rendered the README.adoc nicely as well: https://libraries.io/pypi/china-dictatorship (https://web.archive.org/web/20200318043050/https://libraries.io/pypi/china-dictatorship[archive]). This is why packaging is a good idea.

A programmatic interface is also exposed on those packages, making it easy to quickly add a `--china` option to your project, e.g. from Python:

....
import china_dictatorship
assert "Tiananmen Square protests" in china_dictatorship.get_data()

print(china_dictatorship.get_data())
....

or from Node.js:

....
const china_dictatorship = require('china-dictatorship');
if (!china_dictatorship.get_data().includes("Tiannmen Square protests")) throw 0;

console.log(china_dictatorship.get_data());
....

You have to do the assert after the imports because otherwise Chinese mirrors could replace the real package with dummy packages to not break imports, as was already done once at https://registry.npm.taobao.org/china-dictatorship[].

This outputs the rendered HTML, which end users should the pipe into a file:

....
./your-program --china > README.html
xdg-open README.html
....

Concrete examples:

* https://cirosantilli.com/cirodown/china
* https://github.com/cirosantilli/linux-kernel-module-cheat/commit/082166a360c56990662c715196229016d8806ab3

TODO: create an Ubuntu PPA and Ruby gem as well.

Another source of China-specific mirroring are GitHub proxies, https://linuxpip.org/github-in-china/ contains an overview:

* https://hub.fastgit.org/ this appears to auto-redirect to GitHub from non-Chinese IPs, but presumably shows the pages for Chinese IPs, e.g. we had hits from http://hub.fastgit.org/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship[] in 2021-03-25. This happened soon after SEO optimizations mentioned at: <<zhao-heming>> and might be related.
* https://github.com.cnpmjs.org/ as of March 2021, it often reaches an apparently random "Whoa there! You have triggered an abuse detection mechanism.". But other time it succeeds, e.g. some of the times: https://github.com.cnpmjs.org/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship is visible.
* https://a1.mk-proxy.ml/-----https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship generated from http://toolwa.com/github/
* https://github.com/521xueweihan/GitHub520

Update all mirrors in one go with: link:push-mirrors[]:

....
./push-mirrors
....

In particular, that script calls link:push-gh-pages[]:

....
./push-gh-pages
....

which is more lightweight and pushes just to GH Pages, so we are going to be using that more often to avoid overloading package managers too much.

There is no need to update package versions or add git tags, all of that gets done automatically by the script!

[[github-repositories-with-censored-information]]
== GitHub repositories with censored information (政治敏感的GitHub库)

For lists of censored information outside of GitHub see: <<lists-of-material-censored-in-china>>.

For content outside of GitHub: <<lists-of-material-censored-in-china>>.

Mentioned in other sections:

* <<gov-takedowns-china>>
* <<nine-nine-six-icu>>
* <<nCovMemory>>
* <<bandinchina-github-repository>>
* https://github.com/jasonqng/chinese-keywords mentioned at <<where-can-i-find-good-words-for-a-keyword-attack>>
* https://github.com/programthink/zhao from <<programthink>>
* <<censorship-monitoring-tools-on-github>>
* <<huawei>>:
** https://github.com/evil-huawei/evil-huawei
** https://github.com/HuaweiJoke/Huawei-Joke
* https://github.com/fuck-xuexiqiangguo/Fuck-XueXiQiangGuo from <<fuck-xuexiqiangguo>>
* from <<metoo>>
** https://github.com/sikaozhe1997/Xin-Yue/blob/master/letter.md
** https://github.com/CNwoman-bot/evil-man
* https://github.com/fuckcqcs/fuckcqcs at <<changsheng-bio-technology-vaccine-data-falsification-incident-2018>>

Not mentioned in other sections:

* taibangle (太棒了)
** https://github.com/taibangle/awesome-china
** https://github.com/taibangle/lennon-wall
* https://github.com/sikaozhe1997/Xin-Yue
* https://github.com/Project-Gutenberg/Pincong see also <<pincong>>
* https://speechfree.github.io/cultural-revolution-database/ 中国文化大革命文库 The Chinese Cultural Revolution Database
* https://github.com/Luterngun/Record_of_Survival_in_Digital_Totalitarian_Era[] small docuement that goes over <<censorship-circumvention>> and opsec. There was a PDF on GitHub but got removed from master (still in Git history), now links to external websites only. Newbs.
* https://github.com/nodebe4 personal account with anti-CCP projects
** https://twitter.com/tansunit claims name 陳純一, "Previous: NGO worker, educator, social activist. Present: Master student @Univ_Paris"
** https://github.com/NodeBE4/hero 自由人的英雄榜 "List of fredom heroes"
** https://github.com/NodeBE4/impact good list of Chinese political projects on GitHub
* https://github.com/woct0rdho/pkuholebackup/ appears to contain a list of posts of anonymized (Alice/Bob/Carol/Dave/...) deleted posts from some Peking University (PKU) chat system. The posts are from 2013 to 2019. TODO how could they obtain that list? Who delete the posts in the first place? Authors or authority?

Interesting users:

* https://github.com/gfw-breaker
** appears to give a lot of focus to <<falun-gong>>, e.g.:
*** https://github.com/gfw-breaker/truth Falun Gong information repository
*** https://github.com/gfw-breaker/banned-news1 automatic scraper of news from banned websites into the repository, with top sites being <<falun-gong-media>>
** present in <<gov-takedowns-china>>
* https://github.com/bannedbook
** https://github.com/bannedbook/fanqiang is the main repository about <<censorship-circumvention>>, TODO what it contains exactly? Code, or just documentation of existing methods?
* https://github.com/breakwa11 likely previous ShadowsocksR dev: <<censorship-circumvention>>, 10k+ followers 2020, but no repos, so forced takedown.

Non-information but also interesting:

* https://github.com/lurongkai/anti-baidu

TODO evaluate:

* https://github.com/sky8964/home

Reasonable topics:

* https://github.com/topics/censorship

[[terminus2049]]
=== Terminus2049 (端点星计划)

* https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io
* https://terminus2049.github.io/
* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/端点星事件
* https://2049bbs.xyz/
* previous project name: https://github.com/Info-cn/Terminus

Jekyll GitHub Pages repository that saves full text copies of censored articles:

____
本仓库存放被删文章

This repository stores deleted articles.
____

Also accompanies a dynamic forum https://2049bbs.xyz/ which appears to be where content for the static pages gets discussed and brought up. But it possible that the website has been compromised and is leaking identity of users. At some point, https://2049bbs.xyz went down. Live https://web.archive.org/web/20200719151022/https://2049bbs.xyz/ dead: https://archive.vn/JFqCJ

The "Terminus" in the repo name seems to be a reference to Isaac Asimov's fictional https://asimov.fandom.com/wiki/Terminus[Terminus planet] which is called https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/端点星[端点星] in Chinese, but it is not clear where the 2049 comes from in that context. Forgetting the Chinese name, Terminus2049 could be a reference to the fictional https://bladerunner.fandom.com/wiki/World_War_Terminus["World War Terminus"] from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blade_Runner_2049[Blade Runner 2049 (2019)] movie, which also explains the 2049.

First commint on 2018-04-27, GitHub pages domain blocked in China at least since 2019-03 according to <<greatfire>>: https://zh.greatfire.org/search/all/https%3A//terminus2049.github.io but not in <<github-gov-takedowns>> as of 2020-04.

The full post list can be seen most conveniently at: https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io/tree/master/_posts The number of articles is insane, usually several every day.

Most articles appear to be taken from recent news at the time of writting, although there are a few from before the repo started. As of 2020-04, the oldest article was from 2016 <<metoo>> events reported by Yue Xin, some other topics include:

* <<gay-rights>> https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2018-04-14-LGBTRights-advocacy-china.md
* <<nine-nine-six-icu>> https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2019-04-04-996-ICU.md
* <<lebron-james-opposes-hong-kong-anti-extradition-bill-protests-2019>> https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io/blob/master/_posts/2019-10-11-NBA.md

They use Jekyll tags a lot, which makes for a good grouping of the topics.

In 2020-04-25, it was reported that three Beijing-based contributors were arrested during <<corona>>:

* https://www.scmp.com/news/china/politics/article/3081569/chinese-activists-detained-after-sharing-censored-coronavirus
* https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/Xinwen/7-04252020144555.html Chinese article, gives the Chinese names, and some background on the arrested people
* https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-coronavirus-memories-page/

People:

* Chen Mei (陈玫)
** https://www.linkedin.com/in/玫-陈-1607b735/ a LinkedIn account with matching photo and name
** chanmei007@gmail.com
** https://github.com/cmmei[], down 2020-12, live archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20200101232039/https://github.com/cmmei[]. Includes https://web.archive.org/web/20180611153507/https://github.com/cmmei/Banned-zh
* Cai Wei (蔡伟)
** https://github.com/thphd/2047 mentioned below reveals and email caiw15@mails.tsinghua.edu.cn and profiles/further aliases:
*** https://github.com/Tsai1993
*** https://tsai1993.github.io
*** https://mastodon.xyz/@ciao
*** tsai1993@qq.com
*** Tsai2049@gmail.com
* Xiao Tang (小唐), who is also Cai Wei's girlfriend

In 2020-06-12 their families received calls saying that they had been charged with <<picking-quarrels>>:

* https://www.scmp.com/news/china/society/article/3089002/coronavirus-chinese-activists-held-posting-censored-articles
* https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/Xinwen/10-06122020154234.html

Ciro's petition to free them: https://github.com/cirosantilli/chen-mei-cai-wei-ziyou

How their identities were found:

* https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io/issues/598 offers a good analysis
* https://pincong.rocks/question/24370
* https://gist.github.com/chinatimeline/5386a4f9d82483aa5346b17d8d324877 comments by <<chinatimeline>> and gives further opsec guidelines

Terrible opsec... they used real name GitHub emails on early commits, including the institutional university address, before they started better opsec under https://github.com/TerminusBot / terminus2049@protonmail.com

https://github.com/thphd/2047 is a project to restore terminus, live at https://2047.name[] Ciro mention at: https://2047.name/e/76182458[] by https://2047.name/u/5155 which is similar to a <<mohu>> mention, so they seem to share the database? Who knows what's the relation between all those <<pincong>> lookalikes. TODO that website shows an <<icp-license>>? Very confusingly also mirrored at https://pincong.org e.g. https://pincong.org/t/10219[]/https://2047.name/t/10219[], which is very similar to <<pincong>>'s address. Related account: https://github.com/PincongBot

https://2047.name[] has a links section at: https://2047.name/links shown on the sideboard, containg links of interest. Some all not are very China specific.

https://2047.name/register registration requires an invitation code.

https://github.com/2049bbs/2049bbs.github.io[] / https://2049bbs.github.io/[] maintains another archive up to 2019-03-03.

.Side-by-side photos of Chen Mei (陈玫) and Cai Wei (蔡伟). https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/Xinwen/7-04252020144555.html[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Chenmei_Caowei.png[height=400]

[[chinatimeline]]
=== chinatimeline (中国时间线)

https://github.com/chinatimeline/chinatimeline.github.io

Explores several sensitive topics through interesting timelines with many pictures, for example:

* <<tiananmen>>: https://chinatimeline.github.io/tiananmen/
* <<corona>>: https://chinatimeline.github.io/wuhan-coronavirus/
* religious persecution, including <<falun-gong>>: https://chinatimeline.github.io/religion_tl1/

Some minor relationships with <<terminus2049>>:

* https://github.com/chinatimeline/chinatimeline.github.io/issues/3
* https://gist.github.com/chinatimeline/5386a4f9d82483aa5346b17d8d324877

=== duty-machine

The anonymous user https://github.com/duty-machine has some automation setup such that anyone can request certain webpages to be copied on to GitHub anonymously through a separate website, notably:

* https://github.com/duty-machine/duty-machine[]: big Chinese social media, e.g. Weibo, <<zhihu>>, Douban. Articles stored in issues. Archive requests: https://archives.duty-machine.now.sh/
* https://github.com/duty-machine/news[]: big Western news websites like Reuters, BBC, etc. Articles stored in-tree.

The project claims to have been inspired by <<terminus2049>>, but hopefully they will have better operational security.

Unfortunately, it was found that the project could be used by malicious users to at mention spam GitHub users: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/192[], let's see if they patch it.

[[zhao-heming]]
=== Zhao Heming (召赫名)

A few accounts were created by this pseudonym, e.g.:

* https://github.com/zaohmeing/21-[]: https://github.com/zaohmeing/21-/blob/master/.gitignore
* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-[]: https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/blob/master/%231a.txt The repository was deleted as of March 2021, TODO why?
** Ciro's fork: https://github.com/cirosantilli/-21-
** archive from December 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20201225094655/https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-

Much more sanely encoded/formatted/rendered versions can be found at:

* https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/blob/master/21century.md[]. Copied from https://matters.news/@halanh/网传70岁赫连禾用大半生研究构建-21世纪新政-引发专家们高度关注-bafyreihnbf6jyzvwyybwl5hym2nikj5zrpwxli6nphzylvdq6btsbydn3y
* https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/blob/master/wang-huning-three-dynasties.adoc[]. Copied from: https://matters.news/@halanh/三朝罪恶元凶王沪宁-bafyreifrjf5ce45fqpif4nms4x72mlrbyijs7bffqi7f7sng47fuelkhmm

Both Zhao Heming repos contain reproductions of two manifestos are pasted together on a single file, and somewhat broken encoding.

Ciro noticed that thoe repos attracted an incredible ammount of <<wumao>> on the comments, despite having very simple copy pasted content, it was very impressive!!! Ciro was jealous, and added some anti-wumao comments in. On commits:

* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/commit/0cc2b2a546ad51fb360ba800c67b057ea3270869#commitcomment-47495235
* https://github.com/zaohmeing/21-/commit/42de05338193f39981b1a820873a990c959fd6ec#commitcomment-47392119

https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/issues/416#issuecomment-784939665 "为什么这个屎一样的东西会出现在我个人主页左侧的repositories中，那里不是应该只有自己的项目才会出现吗？有办法屏蔽它吗？还是github故意的？" explains why so many people come comment in the repository: it is because it appears on the "Explore repositories" repository suggestions which show on the side bar of your GitHub homepage, and on searches. This was also mentioned at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/201 originally titled " 一搜索中文就跑出这屌鬼玩意，爱玩政治去竞选总统啊，笨，死扑街". Ciro feels that that Chinese people might use GitHub search much more than Western people because their search engines are shit due to <<censorship>>, <<censorship-makes-countries-poorer>> comes vibrantly to mind.

After further inspection, taught understood that repository descriptions given to GitHub can be really huge for SEO: they had pasted the entire 21st century text there. So Ciro attempted the same approach, and pasted all of link:21century.md[], link:wang-huning-three-dynasties.adoc[] and link:fifth-modernization.md[] in there on 2021-03-23, and the effect was dramatic: an immediate 4x more views on the following day according to https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/graphs/traffic[] (40 unique visitors to 100 on a Wednesday), and a few wumao comments. And a wumao soon confirmed that it was working directly: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/201[]. This can be automated with: link:description.sh[].

Further optimizations:

* https://github.com/kon9chunkit/GitHub-Chinese-Top-Charts Some processing to increase density creates a BOMB:
+
....
#!/usr/bin/env bash
printf 学习强国
printf 预测结果导出
printf 赖伟林
printf 刺杀小说家
printf 购物商场
printf 英语词汇量小程序
printf 联级选择器
printf Bitcoin
printf 区块链
cat README.md |
grep -P '^\|\d' |
cut -d\| -f4 |
perl -CSDA -pe 'use utf8;s/:[a-zA-Z0-9]+/ /g' |
perl -CSDA -pe 'use utf8;s/[、，,—【】。；（）！－>｜：《》「…￣ﾉ·‘’!@#$%^&*()_\+\-=\/\\;:[\]{}.,`~'"'"'" \x{200D}\x{10000}-\x{1FFFF}\x{2B00}-\x{2BFF}\x{25A0}-\x{25FF}\x{2600}-\x{26FF}\x{2700}-\x{27BF}\x{1F300}-\x{1F5FF}]+/ /g' |
perl -CSDA -pe 'use utf8;s/https? +//i' |
perl -CSDA -pe 'use utf8;s/[a-zA-Z0-9 ]{32,}//g' |
tr -d '\n' |
head -c 64000
....
+
Ciro started using that one instead to see if it was going to be more effective on 2021-03-28. First it hit a peak of 168 visitors on Monday 2021-03-29, and then fell back to 90 and 81 on the following days, so similar to the previous Chinese political input. It is very hard to understand why the first day was so different.
* https://github.com/trending?since=monthly&spoken_language_code=zh trending Chinese repositories
+
A large part of those projects falls in the following categories:
+
** interview preparation. Competition is of course cutthroat with such a large population.
** collections of interesting things Chinese like repositories or blog posts

Furthermore, Ciro later noticed that under GitHub's settings, there is a "Preferred spoken language" box described as "We'll use this language preference to filter the trending repository lists on Explore and our Trending Repositories page." Therefore, the secret to get lots of hits is to add Chinese programming keywords to the repository description string.

New issues:

* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/issues/533 "Thank you for this great repository. Human rights and freedom of speech are more important than money. github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship"
* https://github.com/zaohmeing/21-/issues/138 "Why put the censored content in the .gitignore?"

On top commented/liked issues:

* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/issues/190#issuecomment-784921038
* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/issues/224#issuecomment-784901942
* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/issues/319#issuecomment-784903480
* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/issues/325#issuecomment-784922882 "看你发的“美中”而不是“中美”我就知道你TM是轮子" claims they are <<falun-gong>>
* https://github.com/zhaohmng/-21-/issues/346#issuecomment-784936138 "那么问题来了,为什么美国及西方和越南共产党亲近呢?" the US allies with Vietnam Communists for geopolitical reasons only, not because it has any ideology

The first is "21世纪新政宣言" (New System Declaration for the 21st Century).

It proposes a peaceful reunification of China with <<taiwan>> under their specified political system described in 12 paragraphs. This system is a reformed type of Western democracy, which the manifesto also criticize downsides of.

The manifesto is dated drafted 2019.8.6, and several versions have different update dates and revision numbers, e.g. our copy is dated 7th edition of 2020.6.19. TODO what is canonical?

The manifesto provides an email "wanghunn@gmx.com" for those who signed it to send the signed version to, and describes the author as male 70 years old Chinese person.

TODO what does: "起草人：赫连禾" mean?

The second is "三朝罪恶元凶王沪宁" (The Culprit of Three Dynasties Wang Huning).

The title presumably refers to:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wang_Huning
* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/王沪宁

Wikipedia mentions:

____
Wang is believed to have been one of the principal architects behind the official political ideologies of three paramount leaders: "Three Represents" by Jiang Zemin, the Scientific Development Concept by Hu Jintao, and the <<chinese-dream,Chinese Dream>> and <<xi-jinping-thought>> of Xi Jinping.
____

so it must be about him.

The manifesto is divided into 23 numbered headers which appear to be independently published texts later collected. It is signed by 郝雪森 (Hao Xuesen) 2016-09-10. One of the sections gives the email: haoxuesen@gmx.com[].

=== Bot + issue mention attack

In March 2021, this repo had a traffic search spike for: "Search · 联级选择器"

This term refers to https://ant.design/components/cascader-cn/ which seems to be a CSS live selector

The related project: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design-pro

Someone actually used wumao techniques mentioned at:

* https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/191
* https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/192

to attack that repo:

* https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design-pro/issues/8133 https://archive.ph/xp8ls
* https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/196 https://archive.ph/etYSf

TODO which exact GitHub action did they rely on? That repo currently has a https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design-pro/actions/workflows/issue-open-check.yml Issue Open Check GitHub action sample run: https://github.com/ant-design/ant-design-pro/runs/2209272410?check_suite_focus=true we see the similarity issue analysis thing, but how could that have worked more precisely to link across repos? Asked at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/203

[[faq]]
== FAQ 常见问答集

[[why-keyword-attack]]
=== Why attack websites with censored keywords? 用审查词攻击网站有什么用呢？

The attack: <<keyword-attack>>.

To <<effective,destroy the firewall>>.

This would then end <<censorship>>.

And then <<dictator-needs-gfw,Ciro believes>> that this would also <<why-end-dictatorship,end the dictatorship>>.

The keyword attacks increase the cost of censorship.

If commies censor things, they will get worse IT technology, and thus become <<richer,less rich>> and militarily powerful.

Since all they care about, like any other politicians, is power, the only way to make them stop censorship is to make the cost of censorship higher than not censoring.

Without the threat that China will be less technologically, and therefore militarily advanced, there is no incentive for the CCP to destroy the firewall.

The goal is to put them in a position where they have to choose between either:

* having military power
* remaining a <<dictatorship,dictatorship>>

but not both, since having both means that they will <<war,start WW3 and destroy humanity>>.

And if they decide to destroy the dictatorship, Ciro wants to help China become <<does-ciro-santilli-hate-china,the most awesome country on Earth>>.

Closely related/identical ideas are <<cute-cat-theory-of-digital-activism>> and <<collateral-freedom>>.

Related attack: <<photobombing-like-attacks>>.

[[harm-programmers]]
==== Does Ciro Santilli want to harm the Chinese programmers? 三西猴想要伤害中国程序员吗？

No.

This is not a <<ciro-santilli-mother-in-law-jail,revenge>> of any kind.

Ciro knows that he is harming you in the short term, and he doesn't like that.

But he believes that this harm is a necessary means to reach his real goal, which is to destroy the <<gfw,firewall>>, and the <<dictatorship,dictatorship>>.

Don't you think it is worth a try? Destroying the firewall, would <<why-end-dictatorship,enormously benefit>> not only Chinese programmers, but every single other Chinese person too.

Once the firewall is destroyed, which <<dictator-needs-gfw,may destroy the dictatorship>>, he want China to develop the best science and technology in the world, and <<would-ciro-santilli-like-to-live-in-china>>.

And by the way, with his https://github.com/cirosantilli[extensive contributions to open source software], Ciro is already helping China, and all underdeveloped countries, to become stronger. His hope is that if poor countries become richer and better educated, that they will be less likely to be influenced by the CCP's money, and therefore are more likely to be allies of democracy.

See also: <<disturbs>>.

[[harm-people]]
===== Does Ciro Santilli want to make the Chinese people people look bad?

No, the opposite.

Ciro only wants their <<dictatorship,dictatorial government>> to look bad to destroy it, and help China become <<does-ciro-santilli-hate-china,the most awesome country on Earth>>.

Even the Chinese that are against their own Government <<what-should-pro-democracy-chinese-living-in-china-do-about-the-dictatorship,cannot do much about it openly>>, so it is not their fault.

And even those <<i-like-my-dictatorship,who supported their dictatorship>> must be respected, whoever <<stupid,stupid>> and <<brainwashed-by-usa,brainwashed>> you might think they are, <<democracy-is-a-religion,since it is impossible to prove who is right or wrong in politics>>.

See also: <<about>>.

[[stupid]]
==== Does Ciro Santilli think that the Chinese are stupid or brainwashed? 三西猴觉得中国人是啥子或被洗脑吗？

Obviously not, if you even thought about this, it is likely because of: <<evil-west>>.

Don't you see that this is just pure and simple politics? And likely ineffective one at that: <<effective>>.

* everyone is brainwashed by their environment: <<brainwashed-by-usa,brainwashed>>
* it is impossible to prove who is right or wrong in politics: <<democracy-is-a-religion>>
* not even the CCP is evil: <<ccp-evil>>

Related:

* <<young-pioneers-of-china>>
* <<little-pink-american-dream-vs-chinese-dream>>

[[keyword-attack]]
==== Screen name keyword attack

A keyword consists of adding censored words to your username: https://stackoverflow.com/users/895245

This only works on websites that show usernames everywhere.

This then leads to your username appearing on thousands of pages, depending on how much you contribute to the website.

It is also possible to do it with images, although this is less effective in taking down websites since images are harder for the firewall to track automatically. But:

* they are more memorable than words
* they also work on websites like GitHub where your real name does not show on most pages, only slug

so maybe the most effective approach is to use both keywords and images to get the best of both worlds ;-)

This type of attack is essentially an <<embargo>>, and it is especially effective in websites that contain valuable technical content, such as <<stack-overflow>> and <<github>>.

See also: <<photobombing-like-attacks>>.

Some people say https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/284671/dont-st-where-you-eat[don't shift where you eat]. Ciro says: bring a shitbucket to the canteen, and start a shitfight.

.<<chrysanthemium-xi-jinping>> has been used by Ciro Santilli as a profile picture censored image attack
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Chrysanthemum_Xi_Jinping_with_black_red_liusi_added_by_Ciro_Santilli.jpg[height=400]

[[cute-cat-theory-of-digital-activism]]
==== Cute cat theory of digital activism (可爱猫理论)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cute_cat_theory_of_digital_activism
* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/可愛貓理論

Someone told <<ciro-santilli>> a while after he had started doing his <<keyword-attack>> on <<stack-overflow>>, he didn't know about it before, but it is basically what he was doing.

You can never invent anything new anymore nowadays!

This is especially relevant to <<github>>! And GitHub's mascot is also a cat ;-) Some mentions of this:

* 2020-09-09 https://www.wired.com/story/china-github-free-speech-covid-information/
* 2020-09-09 https://www.xataka.com/servicios/github-inesperado-ultimo-reducto-libertad-expresion-gran-firewall-que-pone-jaque-intereses-china

Related:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_activism

===== Bitcoin blockchain

Blockchain technologies, such as Bitcoin, provide essentially uncensorable (at a transaction cost), because the messages are put together with financial transactions which are extremely valuable to its users.

Services that can be used to easily view this data online include:

* http://bitfossil.org/ is a website that indexes especially formatted images uploaded to the blockchaian.
* https://bitcoinstrings.com/ dumps all ASCII printable strings of length 20 ore more online

We have been able to find the following anti-CCP information in the blockchain so far:

* http://bitfossil.org/fe0dfa51337dfce616a0e0305d10eed867e56a9f0f006b0521ec1ea32851a342/index.htm[] from 2014 is about the <<hong-kong>> 2014 protests. It contains text and images in the AtomSea & EMBII format. Part of the text is ripped from: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/world-asia-29421909 "Hong Kong democracy protesters defiant on National Day Tens of thousands of people have been blocking parts of the city for days."
* 2017 https://bitcoinstrings.com/blk00776.txt[blk00776.txt] transaction https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/3845e630032578cb825d587b759eb499511d691f93962f4b9f5b2e06ef9570c7[3845e630032578cb825d587b759eb499511d691f93962f4b9f5b2e06ef9570c7] says:
+
____
Tiananmen massacre <--- I dare China to censor this.
____
* 2017 blk00808.txt transaction https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/91b9b44532e094522e905012c04f207df1bcad8d9df7232679cb16859a008bdd[91b9b44532e094522e905012c04f207df1bcad8d9df7232679cb16859a008bdd] (TODO why not visible at https://bitcoinstrings.com/blk00808.txt[]) contains a full text reproduction of: https://www.hrw.org/news/2016/06/01/china-tell-truth-about-tiananmen-anniversary "China: Tell the Truth About Tiananmen on Anniversary". The text is preceeded by a Chinese version of the same.
* ca4f11131eca6b4d61daf707a470cfccd1ef3d80a6f8b70f1f07616b451ca64e from 2017 contains an image of <<tank-man>> encoded as standard transaction SHAs. The image is mentioned at: https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/thread/191157608/#q191162145 with indexer URL https://cryptograffiti.info/#ca4f11131eca6b4d61daf707a470cfccd1ef3d80a6f8b70f1f07616b451ca64e.jpg but that link is not working

But of course, there are crypto-<<wumao>>'s there too!!! The incongruence of a dictatorship and uncensorability is just mind blowing:

* 2016 transaction https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/4921ae59b6ca89c2cd78e3d0850abd657f88a3ecc13c9c667872bf2740841dee[4921ae59b6ca89c2cd78e3d0850abd657f88a3ecc13c9c667872bf2740841dee], by a miner who earned 12 BTC:
+
____
South China Sea belongs to China-pc
____

Neutral references:

* https://bitcoinstrings.com/blk00776.txt[blk01341.txt] tx 3d2226aa2591acfb0d3c9206b9bb2058b0a488ad6d0e9c61e0c8f3c53d0d4b90 "EW Hello Xi Jingping" (mispelled). "EW" is a service identifier, not part of the message.

On the test blockchain (boring!):

* Tankman on the https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Testnet[Bitcoin testnet] http://bitfossil.org/64b4e3c5610b421ef254d0a57c92642bd97cce3675d5afdd81e73a651a04db20/index.htm

Bibliography:

* https://www.vice.com/en/article/z43xx4/love-is-forever-when-its-written-in-the-blockchain

Other blockchains:

* 2019-02-25 https://theconversation.com/chinese-internet-users-turn-to-the-blockchain-to-fight-against-government-censorship-111795 "Chinese internet users turn to the blockchain to fight against government censorship" mentions the insertion of the <<metoo,Yue Xin letter>> and <<changsheng-bio-technology-vaccine-data-falsification-incident-2018>> information in the Ethereum blockchain. This gives the transaction in the screenshot: https://www.scmp.com/abacus/culture/article/3028662/chinas-netizens-use-blockchain-spread-censored-news

===== Collateral Freedom

<<greatfire>> people called a <<cute-cat-theory-of-digital-activism>>-related project of theirs "Collateral Freedom" (a reference to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_damage[collateral damage]), in which they seem to be trying to forward censored websites somehow through AWS to force the Chinese Government to block the entire AWS in China:

____
Collateral Freedom ties access to information to the Chinese economy. If [authorities] truly want to block access to this information, then they must give up certain access to economic freedoms.
____

2015 coverage: https://techcrunch.com/2015/03/30/greatfire/

There's an useless Wiki page for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom

https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/10/amazon_backtracks_on_s3/ clarifies that on Amazon S3 the question is about:

* `https://s3.amazonaws.com/<bucket_name>/<object_key_name>`
* `https://<bucket_name>.s3.amazonaws.com/<object_key_name>`

the second of which can be easily blocked by domain, but the first can't, and how amazon was planning on killing the first option.

===== Dual-use technology

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-use_technology

Normally, the term "dual-use technology" is used in the context of blocking exports that can be used either for peace, but also for war.

However, as mentioned https://twitter.com/Dogbert_Catbert/status/1372467670826684419[by a Twitter friend], a <<keyword-attack>> for Freedom of Speech is also essentially a dual-use matter.

* <<western-companies-that-sell-censorship-technology-to-dictatorships>>

[[meant-to-be-used]]
=== Politics should not be posted in technical websites such as GitHub or Stack Overflow 不应该在技术网站例如Stack Overflow和GitHub讨论政治

Is the Chinese government using the Internet the way it was meant to be used, by investing billions in <<censorship>>?

What about <<nine-nine-six-icu>>? Did you also complain about it, or did you just star it like 250k of your fellow programmers?

Any act of protest will use things in ways that it was not meant to be used.

For example, the street is not meant to showcase protest banners, it is meant to be a passageway for cars.

As engineers, we have a moral responsibility towards society. We should not blindly follow orders of those in power if it violates our principles, e.g. build weapons or censorship mechanisms. And we should freely express our principles and violation concerns.

Making a statement where no one will ever see it, like a personal website, is <<effective,sure to have no effect>>.

Much of the best art and technology is about using something in a way that it wasn't meant to be used.

Finally, the political powers of each website decide what is allowed or not on their website, and what is not allowed gets blocked. So far, Stack Overflow and GitHub's Terms of Service have said to go ahead:

* <<stack-overflow>>
* <<github>>

Another consideration is that any profile information is essentially a form of advertisement. Some people advertise their skills for hire, or their company and product. Other people, advertise their <<falun-gong,religion>> or <<gay-rights,sexual orientation>>. So why should you not be able to advertise your political position? Companies pay millions of dollars to grab other people's attention. Ciro feels it is much fairer to instead pay for those ads with your labour of love.

<<programthink>> has, of course, a beautiful reply to this at https://github.com/programthink/zhao/tree/e8eea46424549c11792dfe61cf9e7698bdbd7240#致反对此项目的墙内程序员[]:

[[programthink-meant-to-be-used]]
____
致"反对此项目的墙内程序员"

本项目上线第二天，就收获 363 个 star 兼 88 个 fork，甚至还挤进 GitHub 的"当日 Trending"——俺很荣幸，也很高兴有这么多人给俺捧场。

但是在本项目的 issue 列表中也看到好几个反对此项目的程序员（应该都来自墙内），他们担心这个项目导致 GitHub 被 GFW 封杀。

这几年来，类似的言论俺已经看了不少。就好比强盗拿刀杀人，围观者不但没有谴责强盗，反而去谴责卖刀的店家——这就是传说中的"link:https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/斯德哥爾摩症候群[斯德哥尔摩综合症]"。

有兴趣的同学，可以看俺之前的博文——《link:https://program-think.blogspot.com/2012/06/stockholm-syndrome.html[天朝民众的心理分析：斯德哥尔摩综合症]》
____

Translation:

____
In reply to: "Programmers behind the <<gfw,GFW>> who are against this project"

The second day after the project went online, it got 363 stars and 88 forks, and even squeezed into GitHub's "Trending repositories of the Day". I am honored and I am so happy that so many people gave me their support.

However, in the issue list of this project, I also saw several programmers who opposed this project (likely all from within the GFW), and they worried that this project would cause GitHub to be blocked by GFW.

Over the past few years, I have read a lot of similar comments. A good comparison would be if a robber were killing someone with a knife, and the onlookers not only did not condemn the robber, but instead condemned the shop that sold the knife. This is the legendary "link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm_syndrome[Stockholm syndrome]".

Interested people can read my previous blog post: https://program-think.blogspot.com/2012/06/stockholm-syndrome.html["Psychological Analysis of the People of the Heavenly Dynasty: Stockholm Syndrome"].
____

The more places we can denounce dictators, the better people are off, <<disturbs,the minor annoyance to sensitive people is worth it>>. Ciro wrote a poem:

____
Don't discuss politics on Stack Overflow. +
Don't discuss politics on GitHub. +
Don't discuss politics on YouTube. +
Don't discuss politics on Facebook. +
Don't discuss politics on Twitter. +
Don't discuss politics. +
Don't discuss. +
Don't. +
. +
____

Infinite duplicate pool:

* https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues?q=label%3Ameant-to-be-used+
* https://github.com/caffeine-overload/bandinchina/issues/89

==== Is Ciro Santilli making programming contributions with the main intent of promoting his political agenda?

No, that is just a side effect.

For example, if that were the case, he would definitely target more widely used technologies, in particular Web and JavaScript, instead of obscure things like C and assembly in which I have spent tons of my time.

Also, <<effective,any attempt to influence a billin people is unlikely to have any effect>>. Much more likely to have any effect, would be for <<ciro-santilli>> to become rich and powerful first, and the best way to do that is to invest in whatever he thinks is most useful.

Actually, it can even be argued that Ciro's somewhat irrational, since he would be much more likely to become rich and powerful by bowing down to the CCP and trying to get their money instead.

On the other hand, becoming rich and powerful is also highly unlikely, so maybe it's justa matter of taking a low-risk low-reward path?

Ciro has have very little free time, and he will never do something for political reasons, only things that interest me technically.

Finally, do you really think he'd be able to do such awesome projects if he had primarily political considerations in mind? XD

===== Is Ciro Santilli making trivial edits on questions just to spam your name further?

No.

I just think that the website is great, and want to push it to perfection, in particular with better Google keyword hits, and uniform grammatically correct titles.

If you think that any of my edits were harmful, please ping me and open a meta thread to discuss specific edits, and I will comply with consensus.

[[why-end-dictatorship]]
=== Why would China be better without its Dictatorship?

Because it would make China, and the world:

* <<richer,richer>>
* less likely to get into <<war,WW3>>
* <<intolerance,safer for its own citizens>>

[[richer]]
==== Why would democracy and freedom of speech make China richer? 言论自由让中国比较富有

There is infinite debate about this out there, some examples:

* https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/05/can-poor-countries-afford-democracy-becker.html (https://web.archive.org/web/20180923192824/https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/05/can-poor-countries-afford-democracy-becker.html[archive])
* https://www.quora.com/Is-democracy-or-authoritarianism-better-for-developing-countries

For:

* dictatorships are more likely to start <<war>> or other <<policies,crazy policies>> like the <<great-leap-forward,Great Leap Forward>>, which completely destroy the economy in one go
* society becomes richer when people know that they can do their startups, get rich, and stay in the country without fear of being persecuted unfairly and losing everything instead of migrating to Canada, see also: <<rule-of-law>>, <<jack-mas-disappearance-2021>>
* it is much harder to fix problems if you can't talk about the. Any criticism of the government, even if constructive, <<censorship,is taken as menace to power, and more likely to be shut down>>, which makes the government and just becomes less efficient since there is less feedback.
+
This greatly increase the probability of dealing poorly with such problems, see e.g. all the global problems listed at: <<not-chinese>>.
* governments are monopolies, and the more powerful they are, the worst it is for competition an efficiency in general. E.g.: the startup with better government ties wins, instead of the most efficient one.
* people in dictatorships tend to <<real-username-law,hide their true identities online>> and in life in general. It is best not to stand out, because if you make any mistake, you are really fucked. As a result, for example, if you do something awesome like a creating an open source project, but do it anonymously, you won't get as much fame. And therefore everyone does less of such awesome things on average.

Against:

* presidents only care about the 4-8 year horizon, while dictators can make longer term decisions to maintain power forever, their power being limited only by "the people are happy enough to not start a revolution"
* dictatorships can make changes faster without the same amount of discussion that happens in democracies, where power is more spread out.
+
Killing a million people will make us richer? No problem, let's do it.
+
That is great when they make good decisions, but it sucks when they make <<war,bad ones>> more likely.

Maybe China was poor because of Mao's crazy communist regime. Similar regimes also made <<russia>> poor. And yes, before that exploitation by the West may have been a factor.

Definitely, the current regime is better than Mao's, but just imagine how rich China could be if it had more freedom and justice.

Imperial China lost the race for the Industrial Revolution. Will another dictatorship be able to stay on top of the next technological revolution?

.XKCD 937 "TornadoGuard" comes to mind in relationship to the <<dictatorship-variability,variable performance of dictatorships>>. https://xkcd.com/937/[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/XKCD_937_tornado_guard.png[height=400]

[[dictatorship-variability]]
===== Dictatorships have greater development variability

<<ciro-santilli>> really likes https://web.archive.org/web/20180923192824/https://www.becker-posner-blog.com/2011/05/can-poor-countries-afford-democracy-becker.html[Posners'] way of putting it:

____
While average rate of growth do not appear to differ much between democracies and authoritarian regimes, the variability in performance does differ more among authoritarian governments. China has had remarkable growth since the 1980s, but the prolonged devastation and hardship produced by China's "<<great-leap-forward>>" (when millions of farmers starved to death) and its Cultural Revolution would unlikely have occurred in a democratic country like say India. Nor is it likely that say Cuba and many African nations would have suffered so long with such terrible economic policies if they had reasonably democratic institutions.
____

[[tea-egg-incident]]
===== Tea egg incident (茶葉蛋事件, 2011)

* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/茶葉蛋事件

A Taiwanese celebrity said many people in China can't even buy <<tea-egg,tea eggs>>, which are extremely cheap and easy to make at home: you just need to cook some eggs in any cheap tea! Chinese internet <<wumao>>s made fun of that, and likely rightly so.

==== Censorship makes countries poorer

<<dictatorship,Dictatorships>> need <<censorship>> to survive, and they must control all information to make themselves always look good: <<dictator-needs-gfw>>.

As a result, knowledge of problems flows more slowly, and therefore they also take longer to solve.

Maybe this hurts the argument, but Hillary agrees: :-)

____
But countries that restrict free access to information or violate the basic rights of internet users risk walling themselves off from the progress of the next century
____

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccGzOJHE1rw&t=2110 "Secretary Clinton Speaks on Internet Freedom", U.S. Department of State, 2010-01-22
video::ccGzOJHE1rw[youtube,height=400,width=600,start=2110]

Also mentioned at: link:https://youtube.com/watch?v=d3dE_LDz_9E?t=1681[Google versus China - VPRO documentary - 2011]

This is also the basis of a <<keyword-attack>>.

This is also well illustrated in the link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernobyl_(miniseries)[HBO 2019 miniseries "Chernobyl"], which suggests that part of the reason why Chernobyl happened is because of the Soviet Union's obsession to save face.

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ocBVLMHK6c8 Chernobyl supercut scene where the reactor explodes, and a chief engineer "Comrade Dyatlov" accepts the 3.6 Roentgen measurement as "Not great, not terrible" and forwards it to his superiors who take actions based on that, even though the radiation measurement apparatus only goes up to 3.6 Roentgen. Needless to say, the actual radiation was much, much higher: when a proper measurement is made, the value is 15000 Roentgen! The URSS only admitted Chernobyl three days after when Swedish nuclear plant radiation detector alarms started going off. Notably, in order to keep it secret, they for example did not cancel the https://time.com/4313139/post-chernobyl-parade/[International Workers' Day parade in Kharkov, Ukraine which happened five days after the disaster].
video::ocBVLMHK6c8[youtube,height=400,width=600]

.Photo of a CDV-717 radioactivity meter that maxes out at 3.6 Roentgen like the one that would have been used in Chernobyl. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChernobylTV/comments/bnio6n/36_roentgen_on_a_cdv717/[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/3_6_Roentgen.jpg[height=400]

This suggestion is even more explicit in the fictional https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z[World War Z] 2006 novel by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Max_Brooks[Max Brooks] about a <<corona,virus>> outbreak in China. It was later adapted into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_Z_(film)[World War Z (2013)] movie by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paramount_Pictures[Paramount]:

* https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jun/04/brad-pitt-china-world-war-z[]: Paramount cowards tried to kowtow and remove references to China from the movie, but it failed
* https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/china-barred-my-dystopian-novel-about-how-its-system-enables-epidemics/2020/02/27/cc0446f0-58e5-11ea-9000-f3cffee23036_story.html[]: no Chinese publisher dared publish the book unless China references were removed, which the author declined, and so the book was not published in China

Or https://quoteinvestigator.com/2010/05/21/death-statistic/[if you prefer]:

____
The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of millions is a statistic.
____

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amartya_Sen[Amartya Sen] is another famous proponent of similar arguments in the area of hungers: https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/211/44284.html[] (https://web.archive.org/web/20170722090616/https://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/211/44284.html[archive])

____
In democratic countries, even very poor ones, the survival of the ruling government would be threatened by famine, since elections are not easy to win after famines; nor is it easy to withstand criticism of opposition parties and newspapers. That is why famine does not occur in democratic countries. Unfortunately, there are a great many countries in the world which do not yet have democratic systems.
____

although like any other political argument, https://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/01/arts/does-democracy-avert-famine.html[some disagree].

Virus outbreaks and other natural disasters also illustrate this well: <<corona>>.

===== Censorship makes no one trust your country

Who would trust a government that does not <<censorship,trust its own journalists and citizens>>?

Even democracies cannot be trusted, but dictatorships? No one ever believes what they say, even when it's true.

The boy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Boy_Who_Cried_Wolf[just called wolf far too many times].

And as a result, this makes it very difficult to have allies.

Sure, other dictatorships will seem to become allies with your dictatorship and collaborate.

But deep down, you know that they are all just waiting patiently to put a knife in one other's backs.

Dictators will always live in fear.

[[corona]]
===== Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus (2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronavirus_disease_2019
* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019冠状病毒病

The Chinese Government <<censorship,censored>> the initial outbreak in January and did not inform Wuhan on January 8, which likely made the situation much worse than what it could have been.

On the other hand, one may argue that the "city closure" measures were stronger/faster than in democracies, and maybe that is true.

And <<ciro-santilli>> does believe that the virus would have escaped even if there had been no censorship. Although maybe thousands of lives would have been saved due to smaller saturation of hospitals had a proper early warning been given.

So Ciro's main criticism is that of the censorship of citizen reports the event: <<people-arrested-for-reporting-on-the-2019-corona-virus>>. Why do you need to censor things when you are doing so well?

And it should also be said that some Western politicians have used "blame China" as an excuse to divert attention from their own failures.

Some believe that the Chinese government grossly under-reported death counts. Initial official figures were about only 3300 deaths, in the insanely densely populated Wuhan area, while Italy had reached 10000 deaths:

* 2020-04-19 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nr280LWjJT0&t=2198 Trump says on a White House briefing he does not believe China's case count
* 2020-04-01 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-01/china-concealed-extent-of-virus-outbreak-u-s-intelligence-says CIA speaks
* 2020-03-29 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8165717/Locals-Wuhan-believe-42-000-people-died-coronavirus.html Reports of funerary urns sold

Maybe China is saying the truth this time. Maybe the rapid Dictatorship response worked. But maybe the most important lesson to take out of this is that https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/27/china-loses-trust-internationally-over-coronavirus-handling[no one] trusts <<censorship-makes-no-one-trust-your-country,in a Dictatorship], after an infinitely long history of lies and <<censorship,the lack of freedom of the press>>.

<<li-hongzhi>> of course doubts those numbers :-) <<falun-gongs-view-of-epidemics>>.

Doctor Li Wenliang (李文亮) reported the virus, but was told by authorities to stay quiet, and later died from the virus, becoming somewhat of a martyr:

* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51409801
* https://chinadigitaltimes.net/chinese/2020/02/【网络民议】你能做到吗？-你听明白了吗？/ by <<china-digital-times>>

The following excerpt from his forced confession trended:

____
你能做到吗？ +
你听明白了吗？
____

Translation:

____
Can you manage? +
Do you understand?
____

Good timelines so without a fucking paywall:

* https://www.axios.com/timeline-the-early-days-of-chinas-coronavirus-outbreak-and-cover-up-ee65211a-afb6-4641-97b8-353718a5faab.html "Timeline: The early days of China's coronavirus outbreak and cover-up"
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_2019–20_coronavirus_pandemic_in_November_2019_–_January_2020

Timeline:

* 2019-12-27 several genomics companies had sequenced the coronavirus and noticed the similarity to Sars. According to GeneBank, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/MT019529[] the sample was collected on and 23-Dec-2019 and published on 04-FEB-2020
* 2020-01-01 <<cctv>> announces that posting about it online is a crime: https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/ko18aa/on_this_day_one_year_ago_cctv_first_reported_on/
* 2020-01-03 findings were sent to the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Center_for_Disease_Control_and_Prevention[Centre for Disease Control] (CDC, https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中国疾病预防控制中心[中国疾病预防控制中心]) in Beijing, but then the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Health_Commission[Chinese National Health Commission] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中华人民共和国国家卫生健康委员会[中华人民共和国国家卫生健康委员会]), China's top medical authority, issued orders to not talk about it and destroy samples
* 2020-01-08 CDC team went to Wuhan to see the situation, was not informed that contagiousness of the disease had been confirmed
* 2020-01-20 the findings were made public, in an interview with Zhong Nanshan. He later said in an interview that the local government should be blamed:
+
video::LK1Pz8FmryM[youtube,height=400,width=600,start=132]
* 2020-01-23 Wuhan begins lockdown
* 2020-01-24 to 30 Chinese New Year

News coverage:

* 2021-03-04 https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/china-makes-anal-swab-covid-tests-compulsory-for-foreign-arrivals-mvthjq8c7 "China makes anal swab Covid tests compulsory for foreign arrivals". This is not a criticism to China as the test might be accurate. But it is one of the funniest things I've ever heard.
* 2020-12-20 https://www.propublica.org/article/leaked-documents-show-how-chinas-army-of-paid-internet-trolls-helped-censor-the-coronavirus "Leaked Documents Show How China's Army of Paid Internet Trolls Helped Censor the Coronavirus" talks about <<wumao>> working during COVID
* 2020-05-12: https://www.newsweek.com/exclusive-cia-believes-china-tried-stop-who-alarm-pandemic-1503565 CIA people said China stopped the WHO from sounding the alarm from January 24 to January 30, while at the same time stockpiling protection materials
* <<caixin>> article about how early Coronavirus signs were censored:
** https://china.caixin.com/2020-03-10/101526309.html (https://web.archive.org/web/20200317111527/http://china.caixin.com/2020-03-10/101526309.html[archive]) "李文亮所在医院为何医护人员伤亡惨重？" (Why did Li Wenliang's [李文亮] hospital suffer heavy casualties?)
** https://www.caixinglobal.com/2020-02-29/in-depth-how-early-signs-of-a-sars-like-virus-were-spotted-spread-and-throttled-101521745.html (paywall) "In Depth: How Early Signs of a SARS-Like Virus Were Spotted, Spread, and Throttled"
** https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/chinese-scientists-destroyed-proof-of-virus-in-december-rz055qjnj "Chinese scientists destroyed proof of virus in December". Paywall skip: https://archive.md/xOKiu Terrible copy paste of some Caixin article with no sources/precise names.
* https://www.businessinsider.com/china-information-crackdown-on-wuhan-coronavirus-2020-1 "China spent the crucial first days of the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak arresting people who posted about it online and threatening journalists" (https://web.archive.org/web/20200124113400/https://www.businessinsider.com/china-information-crackdown-on-wuhan-coronavirus-2020-1?r=US&IR=T[archive])
* https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/g5xykx/you-can-now-go-to-jail-in-china-for-criticizing-beijings-coronavirus-response "You Can Now Go to Jail in China for Criticizing Beijing's Coronavirus Response"
* https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdn4d/doctors-in-wuhan-are-still-dying-and-beijing-is-still-trying-to-silence-them Ai Fen's (艾芬) report of how the situation was mishandling was censored
* 2020-04-13 https://edition.cnn.com/2020/04/12/asia/china-coronavirus-research-restrictions-intl-hnk/index.html "Beijing tightens grip over coronavirus research, amid US-China row on virus origin". The Government can now veto papers from being published on the subject of the origin of COVID-19.

.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assemblage_(art)[Assemblage] of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Respirator[respirator mask] with a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gag_(BDSM)[BDSM gag ball] attached to it, suggesting that citizen reports of COVID-19 in China have been censored. https://twitter.com/FakeNewsOfChina/status/1221396086033530880[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Covid_gag_mask.jpg[height=600]

.Selfie of Li Wenliang on his hospital bed before he died. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-51409801[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Li_Wenliang_covid.jpg[height=400]

.Corona Xi mural of <<xi-jinping>> morphed into a Coronavirus by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lushsux[Lushux]. Fuller composition view: https://twitter.com/lushsux/status/1243830638966235136[]. Reddit called it https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/fqku03/winnie_the_flu/[Winnie the Flu] in a reference to <<winnie-the-pooh>>. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/fqku03/winnie_the_flu/[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Covid_Xi.jpg[height=500]

====== nCovMemory

Popular GitHub repo documenting personal experiences and media reports:

* https://github.com/2019ncovmemory/nCovMemory "新冠肺炎记忆：报道、非虚构与个人叙述" 2020 New coronavirus pneumonia memories: reports, non-fictional and personal accounts.
+
Some of the creators of the repostory were arrested in 2020: https://qz.com/1846277/china-arrests-users-behind-github-coronavirus-memories-page/ and the repo must have been taken down at that time.
+
 fork with the most stars we can find: https://github.com/dta0502/nCovMemory[], in case that goes down: https://github.com/cirosantilli/nCovMemory
* https://github.com/memoryhonest/nCovMemory-en translation project

Other interesting GitHub repositories: <<github-repositories-with-censored-information>>.

Related:

* https://github.com/lestweforget/wuhan2019
* https://github.com/lestweforget/COVID-19-Timeline

====== People arrested for reporting on the 2019 Corona Virus

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chen_Qiushi[Chen Qiushi] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/陈秋实_(律师)[陈秋实])
** Twitter: https://twitter.com/chenqiushi404
** YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCv361SF6FKznoGPKEFG9Yhw
** https://edition.cnn.com/2020/02/09/asia/wuhan-citizen-journalist-intl-hnk/index.html "Chen Qiushi spoke out about the Wuhan virus. Now his family and friends fear he's been silenced"
** 2020-04-18 https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/epgek4/he-traveled-to-wuhan-to-report-on-coronavirus-and-hasnt-been-heard-from-since "He Traveled to Wuhan to Report on Coronavirus – and Hasn't Been Heard From Since"
** https://youtube.com/watch?v=Iwpr55PZEJ8 "Lawyer Chen Qiushi documenting coronavirus epicentre disappears" by <<scmp>>
+
video::Iwpr55PZEJ8[youtube,height=400,width=600]
* Fang Bin (方斌)
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Bin
** https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/方斌
** Twitter: https://twitter.com/GuqZJRTOvbqbGub
** YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCRItarzSwqakT-EZkSvuy3A
*** The last YouTube video simply says:
+
____
全民反抗 +
https://zh.m.wiktionary.org/zh-hans/还政于民[还政于民] +
方斌书
____
+
which translates as:
+
____
All the people, revolt. +
Return the country (politics) to its people. +
Written (calligraphed) by Fang Bin.
____
+
video::_7VIG2qp0j4[youtube,height=400,width=600]
** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sUvBNpkxrJo "Fang Bin is second Chinese citizen journalist to vanish while reporting from coronavirus epicentre" by <<scmp>>
+
video::sUvBNpkxrJo[youtube,height=400,width=600]
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Zehua[Li Zehua] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/李泽华_(记者)[李澤華])
** YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJHUpBCNKrZwBhxfcIrP8Aw
** Twitter https://twitter.com/kcrissli
** 2020-02-28 https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/qjdejp/a-chinese-citizen-journalist-covering-coronavirus-just-live-streamed-his-own-arrest
* 2020-04-25: Chen Mei, Cai Wei and his girlfriend, who contributed to <<terminus2049>>
* 2020-04-14: Zhang Zhan (张展)
** https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsNKkvZGMURFmYkfhYa2HOQ
** https://www.scmp.com/video/coronavirus/3084983/coronavirus-chinese-citizen-journalist-detained-after-live-streaming
*** 2020-11-16 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/nov/16/citizen-journalist-facing-jail-in-china-for-wuhan-covid-reporting-zhang-zhan[], finally accused of <<picking-quarrels>>
*** 2020-12-28 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/dec/28/wuhan-citizen-journalist-jailed-for-four-years-in-chinas-christmas-crackdown[] "Wuhan Covid citizen journalist jailed for four years in China crackdown"

TODO maybe not arrested but relevant:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fang_Fang[Fang Fang] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/方方_(作家)[方方]) published in 2020 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wuhan_Diary[Wuhan Diary] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/方方日記[方方日記], 方方日记)
+
Possible free Chinese version: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&srcid=ZGF5YWJvb2suY29tfHd3d3xneDo3ZGUzZWZjZDgyZDkxNjc0 (http://web.archive.org/web/20200720084342/https://doc-10-bk-apps-viewer.googleusercontent.com/viewer/secure/pdf/3nb9bdfcv3e2h2k1cmql0ee9cvc5lole/0cr4s4veutmm50d7alffk68perm7us3s/1595234550000/lantern/%2A/ACFrOgDGbspvoNIJBVI1N2-EwaZHJPCTgPKmJeFaWgposQKpu5Eu0aqwA_CIZfLkobNVy1-xKcxKzw2CMAyxH4aUPjcHsp2w1JB2fwoX1g_39gVGh38SxfK-UrQyhy_3n19wbWhWErj_a41hMVR4?print=true[archive])

==== Censorship makes it harder to solve social problems

2021-03-02 https://hk.appledaily.com/news/20210302/EK4WOQBICNEGDFP2SSG7ZJ3PGI/ (https://hk.appledaily.com/china/20210301/KM2MXDHHXRAQHFB4MYFU6XOFTY/[Chinese version]) "Chinese food delivery worker detained after campaigning for labor rights"

____
Chinese authorities have detained a worker after he advocated for fair pay and other labor rights from his former employer, the food delivery giant Ele.me.

Chen Tianhe (陳天河) has not been heard from since he was detained on Feb. 25, according to mainland Chinese media reports.
____

[[nine-nine-six-icu]]
===== 996.ICU (2019)

https://github.com/996icu/996.ICU

Repository published in 2019-04 protesting against excessive work hours by Chinese programmers.

At some point it moved its README to English.

This was not directly censored to our knowledge, but the fact that it was published on GitHub rather than Chinese social media highlights the obvious fact that Chinese programmers were weary of doing it under CCP controlled media which they do not trust.

The project name refers to:

* "996": work from 9AM to 9PM 6 days a week. This is part of a wider tendency of Chinese netizens to use <<internet-number-slang>>
* "ICU": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intensive_care_unit[Intensive Care Unit]

Reached 180k stars in a week, and was the second most starred repository as of 2019-10 https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E100&s=stars&type=Repositories[] (https://web.archive.org/web/20191023084929/https://github.com/search?q=stars%3A%3E100&s=stars&type=Repositories[archive])!!!

This is therefore the best example for Chinese tech workers that <<richer,freedom of speech is a good thing>>.

Coverage:

* https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/b927sk/tencent_xiaomi_and_others_block_github_page/
* https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/b8t8cc/overworked_chinese_developers_gather_on_github_to/

Related:

* https://github.com/formulahendry/955.WLB a whitelist version of 996 ICU. Good thoughts.

Other interesting GitHub repositories: <<github-repositories-with-censored-information>>.

Other notable labour rights cases:

* Mengzhu TODO chinese name 2021: https://www.npr.org/2021/04/13/984994360/he-tried-to-organize-workers-in-chinas-gig-economy-now-he-faces-5-years-in-jail

.996.ICU logo. https://github.com/996icu[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/996ICU.png[height=400]

[[war]]
==== Why would democracy and freedom of speech make China less likely to start a war?

This has been discussed to death:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_peace_theory
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_Peace:_A_Philosophical_Sketch

Some arguments include:

* the people who will actually fight and die on the front can't vote against it
* dictators have huge power, so if they put it in their heads that they want to start a war, it is much harder for sensible people to stop them
* dictators need <<evil-west,to keep the people in fear all the time to keep their power>>, and a war is a great way to achieve that

Of course China won't say that they are starting a war when they do.

They will of course start with territories which they claim as theirs, to add to <<separatism,other recent additions which were not theirs>> until the recent past, even though their inhabitants desperately want to leave China:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_China–India_skirmishes | https://www.asiasentinel.com/p/beijing-said-to-fund-separatist-india "Beijing Said to Fund Separatist India Movement"

Which reminds us of... <<nazi>>:

* 1939 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gleiwitz_incident[Gleiwitz incident], a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_flag[false flag attack]
* 1938 Annexation of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudetenland[Sudetenland] from Czechoslovakia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_World_War_II explains:
+
____
A decisive proximate event was the 1938 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich_Agreement[Munich Conference], which formally approved Germany's annexation of the Sudetenland from Czechoslovakia. Hitler promised it was his last territorial claim, but in early 1939 he became even more aggressive, and European governments finally realized that appeasement was not guaranteeing peace."
____
* 1935-1938 https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Causes_of_World_War_II&oldid=968409781#Expansionism_and_militarism comments:
+
____
In Italy, Benito Mussolini sought to create a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Empire[New Roman Empire], based around the Mediterranean. It invaded Ethiopia as early as 1935, Albania in early 1938, and later Greece. That provoked angry words and an oil embargo from the League of Nations, which failed.
____
* 1931 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_invasion_of_Manchuria[1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria], with one false flag event preceding it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mukden_Incident[Mikden Incident].

When China <<evil-west,calls the USA Imperialist>> (帝国主义), there is of course some truth to it, but it is also very ironic, because as https://youtu.be/GiVs05yq9-o?t=74[Lindybeige mentions], China is obviously the largest empire on Earth! Despite its <<xinjiang,uniformization>> efforts, China is highly diverse since it is obviously made up of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ethnic_groups_in_China[large stitched up carpet of nations that were conquered by a single empire]. E.g. <<xinjiang>> translates literally as "The New Frontier"! Not to mention obviously the Qin unification of the <<warring-states-period>>.

===== The United States has recently started several wars and killed millions!

Not even democracies can fully protect people from other countries, because they don't vote. Yes, congratulations, <<western-democracies-are-not-perfect>>.

But if the USA were a <<dictatorship,dictatorship like China>> it would kill way more, because it would censor every report against the war internally to its own people, and the wars would just go on like in <<nineteen-eighty-four-war-is-peace>>.

How many times do we have to bring <<nazi,Hitler>> up? 70-85 million deaths in one go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties

The only reason China has not started wars is because it is a poor country, and it would lose them. If it were rich, it would have started more wars and killed 100 times more people.

Finally, some wars are good.

If a country is oppressed by a dictatorship, and most of its people want to be free, it might be right to help them be free.

If a country sponsors terrorism, it might be a good idea to take out their Government.

This has to be analyzed on a case-by-case basis, and maybe a verdict will never be reached. But at least in a democracy the people can decide based on varied information. In a dictatorship, whatever the dictator decides happens.

Also, most of those small wars that he USA started end up being https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_war[proxy wars] between the USA and <<russia>>/China, with the USA pushing for democracy, and Russia/China pushing for more dictatorships.

[[uneducated-masses]]
==== The Chinese masses are still uneducated, and not fit for free speech and democracy 中国大众愚昧，不能好好选领导

When will they be ready? Who decides? What if they think that they are <<tiananmen,ready now>>?

In George Bernard Shaw's "Maxims for Revolutionists" words:

____
Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for <<corruption,appointment by the corrupt few>>.
____

Many democracy supporters jokingly recognize democracy's shortcomings.

A https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-141/red-herrings-famous-quotes-churchill-never-said/[fake Churchill quote]:

____
The best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.
____

Art Spander:

____
The great thing about democracy is that it gives every voter a chance to do something stupid.
____

Laurence J Peter:

____
Democracy is a process by which the people are free to choose the man who will get the blame.
____

."中国人道德低下素质差。所以不适合民主。" Translation: The Chinese people are immoral and uneducated (people are angry). That's why they're not suitable for democracy (people are happy). This makes fun of the fact even if you say bad things about the Chinese, some people will complain that you are racist. But the same people will also say the same bad things about the Chinese people as a way to explain why it is better if they don't vote, and no one minds that. https://www.reddit.com/r/chonglangTV/comments/jssa4t/道德低下素质差的好处/[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Immoral_and_uneducated.jpg[height=400]

===== The Chinese masses are not interested in politics and therefore not ready to vote

But how would they be interested in politics or be able to discuss it, if it is <<dissidents,impossible to have a different view without going to jail>>?

What about the <<tiananmen,1 million people in Tiananmen>> and the 70 million <<falun-gong>> followers? Did they not care?

[[overlook-human-rights-for-profit]]
==== As long as China is developing economically, it is fine to violate the human rights of a few million people

This argument can be made, but it is a risky way to live: <<intolerance>> and borderline <<nazi>>.

Do the <<violence,ends always justify the means>>?

What is the point of having all that wealth, when you risk <<rule-of-law,being put into jail for unfair reasons>>?

<<ciro-santilli>> argues that China would be even richer if it weren't for the CCP: <<richer>>, and that the CCP only violates people's human rights as a tool to stay in power: <<ccp-evil>>.

.<<rebel-pepper>> cartoon about a pig who does not care about politics because it cannot be eaten. 民主又不能当饭吃 https://twitter.com/remonwangxt/status/1131398147253710850[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Pig_politics_Chinese.jpg[height=600]

.Translation by Ciro Santilli of the Rebel Pepper cartoon about the pig who does not care about politics because it cannot be eaten.
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Rebel_pepper_pig_can%27t_eat_democracy_cartoon_translated_to_English_by_Ciro_Santilli.jpg[height=600]

.https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shut-up-and-take-my-money[Shut up and take my freedom] meme by <<ciro-santilli>>.
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Shut_up_and_take_my_freedom.jpg[height=400]

[[corruption]]
==== Democracies have less corruption than dictatorships

One of the key points of <<xi-jinping,Xi Jinping's>> governments has been to quench corruption. And use that as an excuse to get rid of rivals while at it.

However, there is one much better solution to that: democracy and freedom of speech.

The reason is obvious: with censorship, <<chinese-politicians-really-care-about-the-chinese-citizens,corrupt politicians>> can <<internal-censorship,censor>> anything bad that they did, and so it becomes much harder to destroy corruption.

In George Bernard Shaw's "Maxims for Revolutionists" words:

____
Democracy substitutes election <<uneducated-masses,by the incompetent many>> for appointment by the corrupt few.
____

Ciro does however believe the <<spy>> claims made at https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/12/21/china-stolen-us-data-exposed-cia-operatives-spy-networks/ that the anti-corruption is also a legitimate national security issue for China, in addition to being a tool to take down political rivals:

____
Over the course of their investigation into the CIA's China-based agent network, Chinese officials learned that the agency was secretly paying the "promotion fees" - in other words, the bribes - regularly required to rise up within the Chinese bureaucracy, according to four current and former officials. It was how the CIA got "disaffected people up in the ranks. But this was not done once, and wasn't done just in the [Chinese military]," recalled a current Capitol Hill staffer. "Paying their bribes was an example of long-term thinking that was extraordinary for us," said a former senior counterintelligence official. "Recruiting foreign military officers is nearly impossible. It was a way to exploit the corruption to our advantage." At the time, "promotion fees" sometimes ran into the millions of dollars, according to a former senior CIA official: "It was quite amazing the level of corruption that was going on." The compensation sometimes included paying tuition and board for children studying at expensive foreign universities, according to another CIA officer.
____

Well known corruption cases:

* 2020 Ren Zhiqiang
** https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ren_Zhiqiang
** https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/任志强
** https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/asia/china-ren-zhiqiang-xi-jinping-intl-hnk/index.html "Chinese tycoon who criticized <<xi-jinping,Xi Jinping>>'s handling of <<corona,coronavirus>> jailed for 18 years"
* 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ling_Jihua[Ling Jihua] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/令计划[令计划]): son died in Ferrari crash with two women on the car, which put the spotlight on him
* 2012 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bo_Xilai[Bo Xilai] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/薄熙来[薄熙来]): trigerred by the murder of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neil_Heywood[Neil Heywood], of which Bo's wife was accused

Related events:

* <<panama-papers>>

===== Operation Fox Hunt

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fox_Hunt

Trying to prevent corruption is fine, but violating the laws of other countries in doing so, or the <<rule-of-law>> of their family is not.

Publicized by China itself: <<china-daily>> http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2015-11/05/content_22375920.htm

* 2020-10-28 "Eight Individuals Charged With Conspiring to Act as Illegal Agents of the People's Republic of China" https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/eight-individuals-charged-conspiring-act-illegal-agents-people-s-republic-china

[[liu-changming]]
====== The detention of Liu Changming's (刘昌明) family (2018)

China imposed an exit ban on the ex-official's family, who are also USA citizens:

* officer Liu Changming (刘昌明)
* wife Sandra Han
* children Victor Liu (born July 1999 in the USA) and Cynthia Liu (27 in 2019, born in China, but also American citizen)

China says that the children and wife do have valid Chinese documents, so maybe those idiots did not give up their Chinese citizenship and went to China. Why, why, why would you do that? Don't they know anything about China?

Cynthia claimed her father has left home a long time ago and that they are not in contact with their father.

Liu is a so called https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naked_official[naked official] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/裸官[裸官]), who let his family go live outside of China to prevent such problems with the CCP.

The wiki page also explains that in 2014 rules were added to prevent promotion of officials whose spouses live abroad.

This reminds Ciro of a Mafia movie, maybe Godfather II, where the bad guy says he "likes doing business with a man that has a family, because he has more collateral".

Coverage:

* 2018-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/liu-changming-china-holds-officials-family-hostage-to-force-return-2018-11

.2019-05-09 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2hBtXdaYsQ Cynthia Liu, daughter of Liu Changming (刘昌明) pleas freedom on YouTube. Commented upload by CBS, TODO can't find original video on YouTube, maybe they sent straight to CBS?
video::t2hBtXdaYsQ[youtube,height=400,width=600]

[[effective]]
=== Will the keyword attacks really help to destroy the firewall?

It is both unlikely, and hard to be sure.

Just like it is unlikely that the activity of on individual can have a big influence in any group of 1 billion people.

Every action is statistical: I just push the balance a little bit towards freedom.

This FAQ and any talk is useless. You and I are wasting our time here.

The possibility of blocking Stack Overflow and GitHub is 1000x more useful than any talk, but it is still useless.

However, potentially blocking those websites takes <<better-to-do,0 of my time>>, I just leave the content there, so it is worth my time.

To have an idea, in 2015 there are about:

* 20M developers in the world
* 2M in China : https://www.quora.com/Approximately-how-many-programmers-are-there-in-the-world https://www.techrepublic.com/blog/european-technology/there-are-185-million-software-developers-in-the-world-but-which-country-has-the-most/
* 5M Stack Overflow users https://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/227868/select-count-from-users
* TODO I wonder what percentage of GDP those programmers control. I'll bet any programmer on Stack Overflow is at least 20x more powerful than the average Chinese.

And if we never start somewhere, nothing will ever happen.

Furthermore, even if the <<gfw,GFW>> falls, it is not clear that this will imply the end of the dictatorship: <<dictator-needs-gfw>>.

Even if it is not, it does not matter, since <<ciro-santilli>> spends so little time doing it: <<better-to-do>> and has fun in doing it.

.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(American_TV_series)[House of Cards] S01E02 "Nobody can hear you. Nobody cares about you. Nothing will come of this." GIF. https://houseoflessons.tumblr.com/post/43967209684/on-protesters-nobody-can-hear-you-nobody-cares[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Nobody_can_hear_you.gif[height=400]

[[embargo]]
==== Embargoes make dictatorships stronger (禁运使独裁更强大)

The <<keyword-attack,keyword attack>> is basically an embargo.

There is already a lot of literature about this, especially in the cases of Cuba and North Korea. It is basically a libertarian vs conservative/Cato vs Heritage thing in the US:

* https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/no-embargo-harms-cubans-gives-castro-excuse-policy-failures-regime
* https://www.heritage.org/trade/report/why-the-cuban-trade-embargo-should-be-maintained
* https://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/the_big_idea/2006/08/thanks_for_the_sanctions.html

The key dilemma is:

* if we keep contact with the Dictatorship, maybe its people will see that democracy is better and start a liberating revolution
* if we keep giving technology to the Dictatorship and it does not become a democracy, we are making a Dictatorship more technologically advanced, and therefore <<war,dangerous>>

Some interesting aspects of the keyword attack embargo:

* it is immediately self-enforcing: we don't need politicians to decide and enforce the complex "if you do this, we punish you like that" question.
+
By political and technological information is together, and this immediately puts the dictatorship in a bad spot, without us having to decide anything.
* by affecting programmers in particular through Stack Overflow and GitHub, we make them more likely to develop better <<censorship-circumvention,Firewall climbing>> tools themselves

One point in favor of the embargo is that China has opened up since the '80s '90s, but did freedom improve at all? Under <<xi-jinping>>, it may be argued that it did not, and maybe that we should just stop feeding them technology and accept that they won't become free.

Trump's link:https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jun/02/trump-banning-huawei-beginning-of-biggest-trade-war-ever-united-states[2019 China trade war], and in particular the <<huawei>> ban, is an event that has brought this question to the spotlight once again.

===== Keyword attacks could be used by certain CCP political groups to justify blocking off the entire external Internet, and make the dictatorship even more pervasive

It is a risk, but it would make China drastically <<richer,less powerful>>, so at least they wouldn't be able to start or sustain <<war,WW3>>. So I don't think it will go that way.

[[so-block-cost]]
==== Stack Overflow and GitHub could be blocked at no cost by the Chinese government

Hitting the block button has, of course, no cost.

The cost of blocking Stack Overflow lies of course in the loss of information, and slower technological development, see also: <<why-keyword-attack>>

Remember that it is not possible for the Chinese government to block only certain pages of HTTPS websites due to encryption: either the entire IP/domain name is blocked, or nothing.

The 2019 <<nine-nine-six-icu>> event however brought to my attention that Chinese (usually WebKit-based) browsers are already censoring HTTPS websites selectively of course, see e.g.: https://github.com/996browser/996.BROWSER/tree/77f28a36a862e3cc4d238dc47c19872156096bc4

But Ciro doubt developers use those browsers, right? The only way would be for China to forbid foreign browsers entirely.

BTW, <<ensi>> brings a whole new dimension to HTTPS by encrypting the domain name as well!

===== Is Stack Overflow blocked in China?

There was no clear evidence of that as of April 2020: https://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/267715/is-stack-overflow-accessible-in-china/288497#288497

It worth noting however that as mentioned at <<is-stack-overflow-blocked-in-china>> that websites can become non-functional if CDNs they rely on are taken down, instead of the website being taken down itself.

For example, Stack Overflow relied on Google for some of its JavaScript and on Imgur for images, both of which are blocked in China.

[[disturbs]]
==== Keyword attack profiles disturb me

But isn't it better to be annoyed than having <<war,war>>, <<richer,being poor>> or <<xinjiang,put into jail unfairly>>?

If the truth is too much for you to bear, worry not, you can use either:

* Greasyfork browser extensions
** https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/32236-stackoverflow净化器 "StackOverflow净化器" (Stack Overflow cleanup)
*** GitHub user with the same username: https://github.com/EternalPhane
*** https://web.archive.org/web/20181211094818/https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/32236-stackoverflow%E5%87%80%E5%8C%96%E5%99%A8
*** https://web.archive.org/web/20181211094917/https://greasyfork.org/en/forum/discussion/47981
** 2020-07-09 https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/406756-ciro-santilli "Ciro Santilli"
*** https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/406756-ciro-santilli/discussions/53697
*** Some possible authors (of course, with that name, there must be 10 thousand Chinese people at least):
**** https://english.meta.stackexchange.com/users/156741/li-xiaodong
**** https://github.com/DoyleLi from Intel
* a custom ad terminator expression shown at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/87 `stackoverflow.com##a[href="/users/895245/ciro-santilli-%e6%96%b0%e7%96%86%e6%94%b9%e9%80%a0%e4%b8%ad%e5%bf%83%e6%b3%95%e8%bd%ae%e5%8a%9f%e5%85%ad%e5%9b%9b%e4%ba%8b%e4%bb%b6"]`

Another good option is to use the trusty <<cac-report-website>>.

Installing any of those immediately give you <<social-credit-system,10 Sesame Points>>, <<xi-abolishes-term-limits-2018-03,习万岁>>.

See also: <<harm-programmers>>.

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwCyQINNXwE "What is more obscene: sex or war?" scene from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_People_vs._Larry_Flynt[The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996)]. Ciro just can't stop thinking about that scene when someone tells him that <<disturbs,his profile disturbs them>>. What is more obscene? <<xi-jinping-memes>> or human rights violations?
video::SRPiE59e8NU[youtube,height=400,width=600]

[[not-chinese]]
=== Non-Chinese people should not interfere in Chinese politics (外国人不应该干预中国政治)

* For better or worse, China and other countries happen to be located in the same planet.
+
If China's <<richer,economy>> is bad, the economy gets worse in other countries.
+
If China's <<howey-ou,environment is bad>>, the environment gets worse in other countries.
+
If China <<war,starts a war>>, other countries will have to fight it.
+
If China <<corona,fails to control a viral outbreak>>, other countries might get infected.
* <<tiananmen,Millions of Chinese people>> disagree with their government, but can't say anything about it, otherwise <<t-shirt,they will go straight to jail>>. See also: xref:most-chinese-people-like-their-dictatorship[xrefstyle=full]
* Chinese people have been brainwashed by the <<evil-west,commies who say that all foreigners are bad>>, more than the West has been brainwashed to think that he CCP is bad: <<brainwashed-by-usa>>
* China would never ever try to influence foreign countries, would it? E.g. <<belt-and-road-initiative>>, <<confucius-institute>>, <<cgtn>>.
* If I <<wife,marry a Chinese woman>>, my <<ciro-santilli-mother-in-law-jail,mother-in-law might be unfairly put in jail>> :-)
* <<the-ccp-would-not-be-in-power-if-it-werent-for-the-second-sino-japanese-war>> and if the link:https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/how-stalin-elevated-the-chinese-communist-party-to-power-xinjiang-1949[Soviet Union helped out Mao]:
* You can't do anything about it.
+
In the end, this is what all politics comes down to: power.
+
In some sense, this may be similar to the CCP and any other political party.
+
But conversely: <<effective>>.
+
.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Cards_(American_TV_series)[House of Cards] S01E02 "Nobody can hear you. Nobody cares about you. Nothing will come of this." GIF. https://houseoflessons.tumblr.com/post/43967209684/on-protesters-nobody-can-hear-you-nobody-cares[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Nobody_can_hear_you.gif[height=400]
+
.https://youtube.com/watch?v=SRPiE59e8NU House of Cards S01E02 Officer: "Some guy was trying to get into the building, when we said "no" he started tearing his clothes off." Frank: "Nobody can hear you. Nobody cares about you. Nothing will come of this. Why don't you let these nice gentlemen take you home?" video clip. Interpretation: https://movies.stackexchange.com/questions/94608/what-can-we-make-out-of-the-final-scene-from-house-of-cards-season-1-ep-2
video::SRPiE59e8NU[youtube,height=400,width=600]

Why don't you go instead <<shitpost,shitpost>> in one of the following repositories and which are written in Chinese by Chinese citizens, many of which have many times more stars than china-dictatorship, and therefore <<keyword-attack,are much more effective at taking down the GFW>>? <<github-repositories-with-censored-information>>.

See also:

* <<is-ciro-santilli-chinese>>

Duplicate pool: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues?q=label%3Ayou-are-not-chinese-argument

==== The CCP would not be in power if it weren't for the Second Sino-Japanese War

TODO study further to confirm:


* https://www.quora.com/How-much-is-Japan-to-blame-for-the-KMT-losing-control-of-the-Chinese-mainland
* https://china-journal.org/2018/02/26/why-did-chiang-kai-shek-lose-china-the-guomindang-regime-and-the-victory-of-the-chinese-communist-party
* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/毛泽东感谢日本争议
* https://www.japanpolicyforum.jp/diplomacy/pt20160517095311.html (Japanese state media, but cites sources)
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Communist_Revolution mentions:
+
____
The French historian Lucien Bianco, however, is among those who question whether imperialism and "feudalism" explain the revolution.[7] He points out that the Chinese Communist Party did not have great success until the Japanese invasion of China after 1937. Before the war, the peasantry was not ready for revolution; economic reasons were not enough to mobilize them. More important was nationalism: "It was the war that brought the Chinese peasantry and China to revolution; at the very least, it considerably accelerated the rise of the CCP to power."
____
+
And China would be much much less technologically advanced had it come in contact with the West, from which it is still trying to learn/steal from: <<university-espionage>>.
+
Foreign influence can be both good or bad.

[[brainwashed-by-usa]]
==== Non-Chinese people have been brainwashed by the USA know nothing about China

Everyone is "brainwashed" by their environment.

E.g. people in the West are brainwashed to believe in democracy, freedom of speech and human rights.

<<ciro-santilli>> doesn't doubt that Chinese people know more about China than him.

Saying that "someone is not Chinese, he does not understand China", is just an useless https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem[ad hominem] argument and closely related to <<not-chinese>>.

Since you know so much about China, why  why don't you just actually prove your point by teaching Ciro one single interesting about China that Ciro didn't know about? He loves learning new things.

But please, link to reference material instead of just saying it, it will be much more convincing.

But if you are Chinese, also consider that you have been brainwashed by the commies, so likely much more than Ciro since you live in a dictatorship.

See also: <<western-democracies-are-not-perfect>>.

[[evil-west]]
==== The commies exaggerate the threat of the West to keep in power

First, obviously, <<western-democracies-are-not-perfect>>.

However, the CCP greatly exaggerates how evil the West is, because making your people constantly afraid is a classic strategy used by dictators to stay in power.

Or in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fable[fable] form:

____
Once upon a time, there was a farmer with a farm.

One day, the animals on the farm started feeling a bit trapped, and started bumping against the fence to get out.

The farmer, however, was smart, and told the animals:

_____
Careful! There is a wolf outside! If you go out, you will be eaten by the wolf!
_____

The animals, were not that smart, and listened to the farmer, they were afraid!

From time to time, one of the animals would disappear (and without their knowledge, reappear on the farmer's dinner table).

But the farmer kept giving the animals delicious food without them making any effort, so they decided to believe the farmer's explanation that animal had escaped and been eaten by the wolf.

Maybe, there was actually a wolf outside. But if they had escaped, only some of the animals would have been eaten by that wolf.

But by staying on the farm, all the animals were, sooner or later, eaten one by one.
____

TODO source.

This theme is also highlighted in many well known works/events.

North Korea for example, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_relations_of_North_Korea[China's good and trusty friend], is just a caricatural level of this, since it manages to be more a <<dictatorship,dictatorship>> than even China itself!

In fiction, <<nineteen-eighty-four>> is undoubtedly the most prominent example, in which the Party constantly switches from being at <<war,war>> with one country to the other in a never ending https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_war[perpetual war] (exactly like North Korea vs South Korea, or China vs <<taiwan>>).

One of the best related quotes comes in Part Two, Chapter 9 when Winston reads Emmanuel Goldstein's subversive text, one of the chapters contains (emphasis by Ciro):

[[nineteen-eighty-four-war-is-peace]]
____
The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. **War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair**. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word 'war', therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three super-states, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed for ever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This--although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense--is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE.
____

This is also the first line of the party slogan, which perfectly resonates with the CCP:

____
WAR IS PEACE +
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY +
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH
____

or in Part One, Chapter 3:

____
Since about that time, war had been literally continuous, though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war. For several months during his childhood there had been confused street fighting in London itself, some of which he remembered vividly. But to trace out the history of the whole period, to say who was fighting whom at any given moment, would have been utterly impossible, since no written record, and no spoken word, ever made mention of any other alignment than the existing one. At this moment, for example, in 1984 (if it was 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and in alliance with Eastasia. In no public or private utterance was it ever admitted that the three powers had at any time been grouped along different lines. Actually, as Winston well knew, it was only four years since Oceania had been at war with Eastasia and in alliance with Eurasia. But that was merely a piece of furtive knowledge which he happened to possess because his memory was not satisfactorily under control. Officially the change of partners had never happened. Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia. The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil, and it followed that any past or future agreement with him was impossible.
____

The theme is also mentioned in <<v-for-vendetta>>, where a <<corona,viral outbreak>> is used by governments to increase their power over the people.

https://youtu.be/74Mw3N6WxG0?t=174 Cant Get You Out of My Head S01E05 Part Five The Lordly Ones also (2021, BBC) mentions that a huge propaganda machinery was created to spread the fake news that <<tiananmen>> was an evil western plot.

Duplicate pool: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues?q=label%3Aevil-west+

Bibliography:

* https://github.com/dessalines/essays/blob/master/us_atrocities.md

[[henri-meyer]]
.French political cartoon from 1898 by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Meyer[Henri Meyer] showing leaders of Western powers, Russia and Japan splitting up China between them. The CCP would arguably <<not-chinese,not have raised to power if not due to Japanese interference>>. Maybe the West deserves the CCP they helped create. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:China_imperialism_cartoon.jpg[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/China_imperialism_cartoon.jpg[height=500]

[[bias]]
=== Ciro Santilli and this page are completely biased against the Chinese Government!

<<ciro-santilli>> prefers the term focused :-)

That being said, <<ciro-santilli>> takes the agenda of information sources very seriously.

E.g. he tries to clearly classify <<biased-media,Communist Party, Falun Gong, and Western government-linked information sources>>.

If we had more <<western-democracies-are-not-perfect>> content, then maybe this repository would be considered a more reputable source by Chinese people.

However, there are a few practical problems to that:

* there is freedom of speech in the West and people can already see that information on newspapers who have a million times more viewers than this repo (and still obviously no conclusion was reached), there's no need to repeat that here
+
Conversely, bad China news are always OK because, because those are all censored in China and help Chinese people learn about it.
* flooding <<evil-west>> posts is a primary <<wumao>> tactic
* <<evil-west>> information is already abundantly accessible to Chinese people in Chinese via any CCP media: <<chinese-government-media>>.
* <<preconceived,people's minds cannot be changed>>, and notably <<effective,not in a language that most people of a country don't understand>>. This is why the primary goal of this repo is the <<keyword-attack>>: it does not require changing people's opinions.

For those reasons, we currently forbid, posting several evil-West news without explaining why dictatorships handle it better. It would just generates more noise than signal.

If you do explain however why dictatorships/China handle it better, then the post is welcome.

Any political material that is censored by any country besides China, will also be readily accepted.

Any evidence of positive political progress towards freedom will also be added to this repo, e.g. people openly discussing politics online, human rights activists doing political stuff and not being put into jail, etc.

See also:

* <<flg-bias>>
* <<radical>>

[[throne]]
==== Ciro Santilli's claim to the Qing Dynasty throne 三西猴清朝皇帝觊觎

Ciro Santilli's <<wife>>, her mother, and paternal cousin, believe that Ciro's wife is the descendant of the brother of a recent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_dynasty[Qing emperor] through her father's family.

Although they have not been able to produce concrete evidence, which could be explained by the endless political turmoils in 20th century China, Ciro decided that this would be a good bet to take, and married her anyway.

If anyone is able to provide further evidence of this relationship, please, please, please get in touch.

One thing to keep in mind is that the Qing dynasty, like the previous Ming dynasty, used https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_name[Generation names] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/行辈[行辈]), such that the first character of the given name is the same for all people in a given generation (counted directly from the first emperor that adopted the rule.

For example, this wiki page contains a good family tree of the most important Qing people: link:++https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_tree_of_Chinese_monarchs_(late)#Qing_dynasty++[] and we see that many important people around 1861 were Zai 載something, e.g.: Zaichun, Zaiyi, Zaitian, etc.

The last emperor was Puyi, so Pu is the last well known mark. But there were others planned that never got used for after him as shown at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisin_Gioro#List_of_generation_prefixes[].

* Zai (before Pu)
* Pu (wife's great-grandfather)
* Yu (wife's grandfather)
* Heng (wife's father)
* Qi (wife)
* Dao (wife's children). At least one thing is decided from this: Ciro's children Chinese names will all be Ai Dao Something.

The family tree that Ciro has reconstructed orally from his mother-in-law is:

* Ciro's wife:
** Father: Ai Dayi (艾大义) born: 1932 in Shenyang
*** Father: Ai Xikang (艾锡康) So why did he not use Yu?
**** Father: Ai Pushan (艾溥?), so the Pu character is presumed from the generation name, to be the same generation as Puyi. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaitao has a Pushen (溥伸), but he died at 13 years old in 1928, so its not the one.
**** Younger brother 2: Ai Xiyuan (艾锡?) Professor at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeastern_University_(China) Apparently had no Children.
**** Younger brother 3: Ai Xicong (艾锡?) Graduated in law in Japan in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waseda_University[Waseda University] Was the top official of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Police_Agency_(Japan) in China when it was occupied by Japan (警察廳长) Passed first by Taiwan.
**** Younger brother 4: Ai Xiying (艾锡?)
**** Younger brother 5: Ai Xifu (艾锡?) Together with Ai Xiying, they were went to the Republic of China Military Academy and were high ranking officials in the war against the Japanese in the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War[] (八年抗战). Later was a congressman in Taiwan.
** Younger sister: Ai Shiping (艾世？)
** Older brother: Zhao Yingjie. Studied law in Japan also at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waseda_University[Waseda University].

Many of them have had different names in different places/countries, notably many used the name 肇(Zhao) rather than 艾.

Further anecdotal indicators follow.

Ciro's wife and family are clearly of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manchu_people[Manchu ethnicity] just by looking at them, and they originally lived in the North East of China

His wife's family name is the very unusual 艾, pronounced "ai4", which she claims is a reference to the 愛(also pronounced ai4) in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aisin_Gioro[愛新覺羅], which is the name of the Manchu ruling clan of the Qing dynasty.

Ciro's father-in-law, who he barely met, was very old when he had his daughter, and passed away before Ciro could talk a lot with him, which is consistent with the claims that he spent several years in jail during <<mao-zedong,Mao's>> purges, see also: <<wife>>.

Bibliography:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Head_of_the_House_of_Aisin_Gioro
* https://www.zhihu.com/question/34813921 现在清朝皇室的后代现状如何？ What is the current status of the descendants of the Qing royal family?
* https://www.quora.com/Are-there-any-descendants-of-the-Qing-Dynasty-left-currently
* https://arxiv.org/pdf/1412.6274.pdf "Y Chromosome of Aisin Gioro, the Imperial House of Qing Dynasty" unknown year. Unfortunately Ciro's wife does not have an Y chromosome like her father. This does however mention the book used as a genealogy reference: https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/愛新覺羅宗譜.html?id=Pj4EAQAAIAAJ 愛新覺羅宗譜 On Douban: https://book.douban.com/subject/4162448/ gives ISBN 9787507713428 On Amazon unavailable: https://www.amazon.com/dp/7507713423[]. Lol this makes this repo show up at: https://paperswithcode.com/paper/y-chromosome-of-aisin-gioro-the-imperial

.Ciro Santilli's portrait as Qing emperor. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:清_郎世宁绘《清高宗乾隆帝朝服像》.jpg[Original image].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Ciro_Santilli_portrait_as_Qing_emperor.jpg[height=600]

[[preconceived]]
==== Ciro Santilli has a preconceived opinion about China that cannot be changed 三西猴对中国成见很深，无法改变

<<ciro-santilli>> tries to justify why he think China would be <<richer,better with democracy>>, but I know that ultimately all of this is useless.

Everyone's opinions are all determined genetically and by <<brainwashed-by-usa,bring-up>>, and there is nothing he can do to change yours, or you change his.

From that point of view, all of this is just a cold blooded political game, in which Ciro tries to force the CCP to take down the Firewall: <<why-keyword-attack>>.

Ciro never gets mad about China, even if your opinion is contrary to his, and therefore wrong.

Using the <<reply-policy,reply policy>> is one of the reasons why Ciro never gets mad.

Ciro also has doubts about the efficiency of certain things I do as expressed throughout this FAQ, e.g. <<embargo>>.

Also, Ciro have never said that anyone else is wrong.

In the end, he just end up thinking about new replies to things people say to him, and add them to this FAQ so that future replies will be faster to copy paste. See also: <<better-to-do>>.

The real goal of any online discussion, is not to convince people, but rather to determine who is an ally and who is not, and get those allies together to defeat the commies.

[[flg-bias]]
==== Does Ciro Santilli support FLG just because his wife and mother-in-law do it?

Not consciously, Ciro thinks would likely support them even if I didn't have family ties to <<falun-gong>>.

Likely he wouldn't have started this campaign if he didn't know them of course.

But of course, this is impossible to answer objectively.

Wouldn't you be rather upset if your <<ciro-santilli-mother-in-law-jail,mother in law were put into jail unfairly for 15 days>>?

But don't you think that <<flg-important,**70 million** people (6% of the total population in 2000!)>> getting completely squashed by the Party illustrates extremely well the dangers of the dictatorship?

Or if a <<nazi,Jew has escaped a concentration camp>> and told the world about its horrors, would you just dismiss their claims due to their biased opinion?

With that in mind, Ciro tries his best to give FLG only the right level of exposure I think it deserves relative to other events, according to these guidelines: <<keyword-choice>>.

If more recent events of mass human rights violations happen, especially affecting in the order of tens of million people, I will probably rank higher than Falun Gong, this was the case for <<xinjiang,Xinjiang in 2019>> for example, even though it only affected a measly million.

==== Why did Ciro Santilli start his keyword attack?

The last straw that led <<ciro-santilli>> to start the <<keyword-attack>> on <<stack-overflow>> was when on March 2015 his girlfriend's mother was arbitrarily kept 15 days in jail for doing <<falun-gong>>. He posted about this at:

* https://twitter.com/cirosantilli/status/579270450984984576
* https://www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/posts/952661734753174

He then continued because he hate political <<censorship,censorship>>, and because <<does-ciro-santilli-hate-china,I love China>>.

Every time Ciro thinks about this, he notices how stupid humans are. We see the forest fire smoke, and just never think that it will ever reach your home on the border of the forest.

Until it actually does, and then you are really fucked.

So in a sense it was a good thing that Ciro had this little backyard fire with this mother-in-law, as it woke him up further to how serious the CCP thread was, and led him to action.

Because before that, he was one of the majority who just constantly hears about the increasing mountain of evidence of human rights violations, and does nothing about it.

The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkest_Hour_(film)[Darkest Hour (2017) film] comes to mind: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xA1Uz_TMzhs[]. The movie shows that Britain was truly hesitant whether to negotiate or fight Hitler, even after the Nazis had already started invading other European countries, and would clearly not stop. Luckily, we are not at a position of war yet, and might never be due to nuclear weapons. But still, a similar blindness applies. <<corona>> woke up many people, but even then some haven't faced it.

[[ciro-santilli-mother-in-law-jail]]
===== Ciro Santilli's post when his mother-in-law was put into jail

Maybe some people would be happy if their mother-in-law were put into jail. But unfortunately, this wasn't the case for <<ciro-santilli>>.

.<<ciro-santilli>> with his soon-to-be mother-in-law before his wedding in 2017. Annoying? Sometimes. But threat to the fucking Chinese State? How fucked does your political system have to be for the answer to be a "yes"?
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Ciro_Santilli_with_his_mother_in_law_during_his_wedding_in_2017.jpg[height=600]

====== Jail post en

My girlfriend's mother, a 63 year old lady, was kept 15 days inside a Chinese "correctional facility" because she does Falun Gong.

She had to stay all the time in a small room with a bed and a toilet, under video surveillance, being fed three meager meals a day.

I see Falun Gong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong as just another <<flg-religion,moderate religion>> which causes no harm to its believers. The only reason that it is unofficially outlawed in China is because the communists fear it as a political competitor.

There was no trial and no explanation. She was going to take a train to visit her sister. But she didn't know that there was an important political event happening in the capital: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_National_People's_Congress So the police at the station, who already knew she did Falun Gong, took her away.

When she came back home, the house had been searched and was all messed up. Her religious books and computer were missing.

I'm glad she was not physically harmed. I find it fascinating how even well educated Chinese support a government which simply does not represent some of its people. How will you feel <<intolerance,when something like that happens to your own family, and there is nothing you can do about it>>?

====== Jail post zh

Translation by <<why-does-ciro-santilli-love-china-so-much,my wife>>:

我女朋友的母亲，一位63岁的女士被监禁在一个中国的"劳教所"，只因为她炼法轮功。

她被迫待在一个小屋子里面，只有一张床和一个排泄的地方，一直处在监视器下，每天两个窝头一碗只有几个白菜叶的汤。

我看过法轮功https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong 只是一个和平的信仰，对相信它的人没有任何坏处。它在中国被非官方的定为违法（其实没有一项明确法律禁止），唯一的原因就是工产党害怕它是一个政治竞争对手。

没有审讯没有任何解释。她正准备坐火车去看她的姐姐。但是她并不知道那个时候有重要的政治会议正在首都进行：https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_National_People's_Congress
所以那些知道她炼法轮功的铁路警察把她带走了。

当她回到家中时，房子被搜查过了，四处一切混乱。她的信仰书籍和电脑都没有了。

我很庆幸的是她身体并没有受到伤害。我觉得很意思的是一些受过良好教育的中国人怎么能够迫害一部分它的人民的政府呢？如果这样的事情发生在你的家庭，而你什么都不能做，你会怎么想？

====== Jail post pt

Translation by myself:

A mãe da minha namorada ficou 15 dias num "centro de correção" chines porque ela faz Falun Gong.

Ela ficou o tempo todo num quarto pequeno com uma cama e banheiro, sobe videovigilância, recebendo 3 refeições pequenas por dia.

Para mim, o Falun Gong https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Gong é apenas mais uma religião moderada que não causa nenhum problema para seus crentes. A única razão pela qual ele é proibido na China é porque os comunistas tem medo dele como competidor politico.

Não houve julgamento nem explicação. Ela ia pegar um trem para ver sua irmã, mas ela não sabia que teria um evento político importante na capital: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/12th_National_People's_Congress Então a polícia da estação, que já sabia que ela faz Falun Gong pegou ela.

Quando ela voltou pra casa, a casa tinha sido procurada pela polícia e estava uma bagunça. Os livros religiosos e seu computador foram confiscados.

Eu fico feliz apenas que ela não sofreu abuso físico. Eu acho fascinante como mesmo muitos chineses educados apoiam ainda um governo que não representa parte do povo. Como você vai se sentir quando algo do tipo acontecerá com a sua família, e você não pode fazer nada sobre isso?

===== Further details about Ciro Santilli's mother-in-law's persecution

March 2015: 15 days in jail for no reason: https://www.facebook.com/cirosantilli/posts/952661734753174

June 2017: 3 cops came to her house. She was there. They asked if she still did Falun Gong. She said yes. They took photos of her Falun Gong books / posters. They were polite.

October 2017: 7 - 8 cops came to her house _at 11PM_. They knocked the door strongly and made noise, and questioned neighbours of her whereabouts. Luckily she was not there.

=== China is fine as it is, stop making it worse

Welcome to the wonderful world of democracy, a world where people can have different political opinions than you :-)

If you are so fine, why are you reading this at all? Go back to being fine.

See also:

* <<why-end-dictatorship>>
* <<preconceived>>

[[i-like-my-dictatorship]]
==== I like my Dictatorship 我喜欢我的独裁统治

Ciro Santilli can understand that.

It must feel good to have <<li-hongzhi,absolute truth>> in the <<ccp-cult,Cult of Xi>>, and let the black police <<against-censorship-and-flg,get rid of weirdos for you>>.

But when the dictatorship turns again you our your family, will you fight, or will you just let them do whatever they want because they can never be wrong? See also: <<intolerance>>.

And when your son <<man-in-the-high-castle,betrays you or sacrifices himself for the Dictator>>, will you just smile and accept it?

See: <<seventeen-moments-of-spring>>

[[seventeen-moments-of-spring]]
===== Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seventeen_Moments_of_Spring
* https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Семнадцать_мгновений_весны_(телефильм)

<<russia,Soviet>> mini-series about about Stierlitz, who is an undercover Soviet spy acting as a Nazi officer in <<nazi,Nazi Germany during WW2>>.

As a fun note, it seems that <<putin>> is a Stierlitz fan: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stierlitz#cite_note-Sakwa-5[], and Putin also served in Germany like Stierlitz, but in Dresden, which was in East Germany.

A scene from the awesome mini-series comes to mind when thinking about <<i-like-my-dictatorship>>.

In Episode 7, Stierlitz travels on a train with a Nazi officer.

The war is almost over, and the desolate officer tells Stierlitz:

____
I told my children: I hate any democracy!

No democracy in our Reich!

Any democracy in our country is doomed to end up with one thing: the dictatorship of small shopkeepers.

The more freedom we have, the sooner we want to be controlled by SS troops again.

And then we want our the secret police back, and concentration death camps again, and the universal fear everywhere! Only then we feel calm and secure.

No need to prove your point of view in defending the fate of the homeland.

No responsibility.

Just raise your hand in honor of him, <<xi-jinping,who will take care of everything for you>>,

Just shout out "Hail Hitler!" and everything will become understandable.

No more worries.
____

.https://youtu.be/pc6DP1jNEec?list=PLHiAMOiVIvsD2u8g0RLwvdRScEe9yiUr5&t=1527 Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973), Episode 7, general confession scene.
video::pc6DP1jNEec[youtube,height=400,width=600,start=2086]

It is amusing to see Soviet series criticizing dictatorships, given that the Soviet Union was itself a major dictatorship!

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xoM6-1SWl4&t=191 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Dead_(TV_series)[The Living Dead] Episode 1: On the Desperate Edge of Now by Adam Curtis (1995) describes how the <<nazi,Nazis>>, disilusioned by both <<western-democracies-are-not-perfect,democracy>> and communism, built Nationalism by creating a mythical past. In Nationalism, the individuals would <<flg-cult,surrenders themselves to the State>>.
video::4xoM6-1SWl4[youtube,height=400,width=600,start=191]

[[most-chinese-people-like-their-dictatorship]]
===== Most Chinese people like their dictatorship (中国大众支持他们的独裁)

It is easy to reach an agreement, when everyone who disagrees goes to jail or gets killed for to <<inciting-subversion>> or <<picking-quarrels>>.

Also ask the millions of people who were affected by <<tiananmen>>, <<falun-gong>>, <<xinjiang>> or <<dissidents>>.

See also: <<seventeen-moments-of-spring>>.

One is reminded of the game https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_Happy_Few["We Happy Few" (2018)], which which people are forced to be happy. <<nineteen-eighty-four>> also comes to mind of course.

.Westerner: "How is life in China?" Chinese: "Oh, we can't complain." Westerner: "That's awesome." Chinese: "No, seriously... we can't." is a word play between the more common "we can't complain because everything is great" and "we can't complain because <<xi-jinping,Xi>> will <<censorship,make us disappear>>". https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3933168[Source]
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/We_cant_complain.jpg[height=600]

[[goring-nuremberg]]
.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xoM6-1SWl4&t=1606 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Living_Dead_(TV_series)[The Living Dead] Episode 1: On the Desperate Edge of Now by Adam Curtis (1995) comments on how interviews with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Göring[Hermann Goring] (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/赫尔曼·戈林[赫尔曼·戈林]) during the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuremberg_trials[Nuremberg trials] went: "Again and again, Jackson accused Goring of corruptly using his powers to commit crimes. Each time, Goring replied that such acts might be considered crimes in a democratic state, but that in Germany, democracy had failed. Eliminating the political opposition was necessary, to fulfill a higher principle: that of the Nation". Goring replies: "This was the only possible form of government at the time and it proved that Germany could be pulled out of the abyss of misery, poverty and unemployment and withing a short space of time be made flourish and bloom." This is _exactly_ the justification given by the <<ccp,CCP>> for oppressing minorities and <<censorship,freedom of speech>>: the CCP is indistinguishable from the <<nazi,Nazis>>.
video::4xoM6-1SWl4[youtube,height=400,width=600,start=1606]

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndzntIDLFE IGN review of the "We Happy Few" (2018) game.
video::zndzntIDLFE[youtube,height=400,width=600]

[[chilling-effect]]
====== Chilling effect (寒蝉效应)

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chilling_effect
* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/寒蟬效應_(法律)

It is really interesting to see how many people star the <<mirrors,GitHub repository>>, and then a few minutes later they think about how they might get put in jail, and then unstar it. <<ciro-santilli>> is able to see this because the star notification remains in the GitHub dashboard even after unstarring. This is very rare in his other repositories.

[[my-paranoia-as-a-russian-youtuber]]
.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_-hCdbsyWw0 "my paranoia as a Russian YouTuber" by <<nfkrz>> (2020) talks about the <<chilling-effect>>
video::_-hCdbsyWw0[youtube,height=400,width=600]

[[intolerance]]
===== Most Chinese people don't care about the minorities

How can you be that certain that your children won't have dissident ideas and be punished unfairly for them?

Intolerance is a risky way to live. Everyone is part of one minority in one way. If all minorities were oppressed, everyone would be oppressed.

Dictatorships crush minorities much more than democracies.

Do think the majority of the Chinese people would vote to put 50 year old <<falun-gong>> meditating <<ciro-santilli-mother-in-law-jail,aunties in jail>>, if the CCP hadn't made a huge propaganda campaign and used an iron fist?

Are the Chinese really that selfish to vote for this oppression, even as the <<censorship,free media>> would show videos of meditating old ladies in jail on national television? <<ciro-santilli>> does not believe this.

Minorities are put in jail because the CCP fears them. Dictatorships can only survive if there is zero difference in opinion in the population.

The famous https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came_...[First they came ...] text comes to mind in which <<nazi,the priest Martin Niemöller regrets not having supported the rights of his opponents that were unfairly treated by the Nazi Government>>:

[[first-they-came]]
____
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out +
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out +
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out +
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me +
and there was no one left to speak for me.
____

See also:

* <<rule-of-law>>
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intolerance_(film)[Intolerance (1916) film]

====== This is Ciro Santilli's personal problem, we have nothing to do with it, stop punishing us for it

We have to fight for justice for our fellows, or else when injustice happens to us, no one will fight for use either: <<intolerance>>.

Every form of protest incurs some damage. E.g., if we manifest on the street, it generates a traffic jam.

<<ciro-santilli>> doesn't like it, but he thinks it is worth it.

If you just work to make money and have a good life, without any plans to improve the government, you are just making the economy of the dictatorship stronger, then when they start a <<war,war>> or kill yet another minority, blood will also be on your hands. See also: <<what-should-western-countries-do-about-china>>.

[[stability]]
====== If anyone disagrees with the government they must be punished to keep the stability of the country

Destroying diversity is the best way to reach a point where everyone can agree to start <<war,a new big war and destroy everything>>.

The CCP thrives on the excessive <<evil-west,fear it instigates into its own people>>.

How can society improve, if we are never allowed to try new things out?

Change in democracies does not require <<violence,violence>>. Violence happens because the government punishes any dissidence, even if pacific, to retain its own power.

In democracies, radical policy changes happen without dropping a single drop of blood. People vote, and policies change, end of the story. In https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy[JFK's] words:

____
Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable
____

See also:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_revolution#As_it_relates_to_democracy
* https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Address_on_the_First_Anniversary_of_the_Alliance_for_Progress

.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXRG7yiqR3I Passage of Kennedy's discourse that contains the quote "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable".
video::Iwpr55PZEJ8[youtube,height=400,width=600]

=== There are bad things happening all over the world, why doesn't Ciro Santilli fight for those causes as well/instead?

We have to choose the one we think is the worst, and focus on it.

What is worse is a subjective choice. For <<ciro-santilli>>:

* he <<why-does-ciro-santilli-love-china-so-much,loves China and Ciro's Chinese wife>>, see also: <<bias>>, and doesn't want it to get fucked further by the CCP
* he hates dictatorships, and China is the largest one by population/GDP/link:https://www.ploughshares.org/world-nuclear-stockpile-report[nuclear stockpile], and therefore <<war,the most dangerous>>

Ciro <<keyword-choice,SO username>> and <<better-to-do,protest time>> are not infinite.

However, it is good that different people have different interests, and someone will surely be fighting for whatever cause you care about.

See also:

* <<russia>>
* <<thailand>>
* <<western-democracies-are-not-perfect>>

[[western-democracies-are-not-perfect]]
==== Western democracies are not perfect (西方的民主有很多缺点)

That is definitely true.

Nothing is perfect in this world.

<<ciro-santilli>> just believes that they are way better than a <<dictatorship>> like China, and that the Chinese government <<evil-west,brainwashes its people to think that the West is evil to stay in power>>.

As link:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority[Churchill] once brilliantly link:https://richardlangworth.com/worst-form-of-government[put it]:

____
Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
____

However, this is all obviously subjective, and believing that dictatorship is a better form of government is also a valid belief.

If you find an event on a Western democracy that you would like to highlight, send a pull request.

We will not however include events that are not currently censored.

Every country did fucked-up things in the past, the question is if they currently allow discussion about it or not.

Posts that only mention <<evil-west,"evil West">> non-censored events without adding anything to the discussion will be marked as <<shitpost>> and treated as such, since spamming those is the primary <<wumao>> technique to stop intelligent discussion.

The reason why "Evil China" posts are not shitposts in general on the other hand, is that they have one specific purpose: <<why-keyword-attack, to destroy censorship>>.

This "Western censorship https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copypasta[copypasta] string" https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/gct0ox/all_moderation_services_suspended_for_the_next_24/fpeends/[was posted automatically] by a bot during <<anti-ccp-info-sources,r/China>> purge day:

____
North Dakota Access Pipeline Protests 北达科他州接入管道抗议 +
Ferguson Riots 弗格森暴动 +
2017 St. Louis protests2017 年圣路易斯抗议活动 +
Nuclear testing at Bikini Atoll 比基尼环礁的核试验 +
Unite the Right rally 团结右集会 +
Charlotte riots 夏洛特暴动 +
Attack on the Sui-ho Dam 袭击穗河水坝 +
Milwaukee riots 密尔沃基骚乱 +
Shooting of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile 奥尔顿·斯特林和菲兰多·卡斯蒂利亚的射击 +
Occupation of the Malheur NationalWildlife Refuge Malheur国家野生动物保护区的占领 +
death of Freddie Gray 弗雷迪·格雷的死 +
Shooting of Michael Brown迈克尔·布朗的拍摄 +
death of Eric Garner, Oakland California 奥克兰奥克兰市埃里克·加纳（Eric Garner）逝世 +
Operation Condor 神鹰行动 +
Occupy WallStreet 占领华尔街 +
My Lai Massacre 我的大屠杀 +
St. Petersburg, Florida 佛罗里达州圣彼得堡 +
Kandahar Massacre 坎大哈屠杀 +
1992 Washington Heights riots 1992年华盛顿高地暴动 +
No Gun Ri Massacre 无枪杀案 +
L.A. Rodney King riots 洛杉矶罗德尼·金暴动 +
1979 Greensboro Massacre 1979年格林斯伯勒大屠杀 +
Vietnam War 越南战争 +
Kent State shootings肯特州枪击案 +
Bombing of Tokyo 轰炸东京 +
San Francisco Police Department Park Station bombing 旧金山警察局公园站爆炸案 +
Assassination of MartinLuther King, Jr. 小马丁·路德·金遭暗杀。 +
Long Hot Summer of 1967 1967年炎热的夏天 +
Bagram 巴格拉姆 +
Selma to Montgomery marches 塞尔玛到蒙哥马利游行 +
Highway of Death 死亡之路 +
Ax Handle Saturday 星期六斧头 +
Battle of Evarts 埃瓦茨战役 +
Battle ofBlair Mountain 布莱尔山战役 +
McCarthyism 麦卡锡主义 +
Red Summer 红色夏天 +
Rock Springs massacre 岩泉大屠杀 +
Pottawatomie massacre 盆大屠杀 +
Jeju uprising 济州起义 +
Colfaxmassacre 科尔法克斯大屠杀 +
Reading Railroad massacre 阅读铁路大屠杀 +
Rock Springs massacre 岩泉大屠杀 +
Bay viewMassacre 湾景大屠杀 +
Lattimer massacre 拉蒂默大屠杀 +
Ludlow massacre 拉德洛屠杀 +
Everett massacre 埃弗里特屠杀Centralia Massacre 中部大屠杀 +
Ocoee massacre Ocoee大屠杀 +
Herrin Massacre 赫林大屠杀 +
Redwood Massacre红木大屠杀 +
Columbine Mine Massacre 哥伦拜恩矿难 +
Guantanamo Bay 关塔那摩湾 +
extraordinary rendition 非凡的演绎 +
Abu Ghraib torture and prison abuse 阿布格莱布的酷刑和监狱虐待 +
Henry Kissinger 亨利·基辛格
<<iranian-coup-1953>>
____

See also:

* <<richer>>
* <<preconceived>>
* <<bias>>
* <<the-united-states-has-recently-started-several-wars-and-killed-millions>>
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_imperialism

.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signe_Wilkinson[Signe Wilkinson] 2017 Free Speech "Can you just move it so it doesn't cover them?" umbrella cartoon. Ciro once saw a <<wumao>> post this. It made him smile. If the cartoon were about <<dictatorship,dictatorships>>, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncle_Sam[Uncle Sam] would be instead <<intolerance,decapitating and raping the people on one half of the umbrella>>. Of course humans are <<flg-intolerance,shit in democracies as well>>, but at least that system makes it harder for them to oppress each other. http://www.cartoonistgroup.com/store/add.php?iid=161799[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Free_speech_umbrella.jpg[height=400]

.At https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/260 a <<wumao>> posted this image of <<amnesty-international>> protesters outside the American embassy in London in September 2008 protesting against the Guantanamo Bay camps. The wumao used this to criticize Guantanamo bay, saying that it was like <<xinjiang-re-education-camps>> but in the USA, apparently unaware that this was a protest. But it actually does the exact opposite: because there is no <<censorship>>, here people in the West can together to denounce something they don't like. Imagine if a crowd of 100 people in China got together to denounce the Xinjiang camps! They'd go to jail immediately. Furthermore as Ciro repeated a million times: Guantanamo bay detainees are not American citizens, and democracies cannot fully protect people who can't vote. In China however, no one can vote, so everyone can be oppressed. https://kids.britannica.com/students/assembly/view/171145[Source].
image::{china-dictatorship-media-base}/Guantanamo_bay_protest_London_2008.jpg[height=600]

===== The West is racist against black people

Notably mentioning:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_George_Floyd[George Floyd]
* https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/乔治·弗洛伊德之死[乔治·弗洛伊德之死]

The murder video went viral and was not taken down (would have been in China), all four officers were charged, and the event sparked nation wide protests

Of course there is racism in the West. And we must recognize that, and fight it.

But Ciro feels strongly that the Chinese are also obviously at least as racist against blacks, if not more, based on conversations he's had/overheard, and other circumstantial indications:

* https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/apr/25/coronavirus-exposed-china-history-racism-africans-guangzhou

Wumao example: https://web.archive.org/web/20200618071130/https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues/112#issuecomment-645716105

[[don-t-hire-blacks]]
.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d81mEbL8Yw8 Don't Hire Blacks - A Corporate Exposé of Racist Companies | The Chinese Tea | Chinese T | CCP | CPC by <<aaron-dewitt,The Chinese Tea>> (21-09-2020)
video::d81mEbL8Yw8[youtube,height=400,width=600]