FAQ.md



FAQ

Do you hate China?
On the contrary. China is my favorite country. It has many, many wonderful things. As Bjarne said:

There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses

I only focus here on negative things to provide content that will activate the Great Firewall.

This repository is completely biased against the Chinese Government!
I prefer the term focused :-)
That being said, I take the agenda of information sources very seriously.
E.g. I try to clearly classify Communist Party and Falun Gong linked sources.

Are you a radical?
Radical: I don't consider myself a radical because I actually have doubts about doing this sometimes.
Also I don't consider the Chinese Government Evil or anything like that. To me, it's just another non-democratic empire like the Qing Dynasty. 共产朝 as I call them. But alas, I'm not the inventor of the expression: http://web.archive.org/web/20161025220242/http://tieba.baidu.com/p/752094668
I never get mad. Only a slightly sad or annoyed sometimes.
But I do admit that I am hard headed like almost all humans, and it is very unlikely that anything anyone says will change my mind about subjective political matters.
In the end I just end up thinking about new replies to those arguments and adding them to this FAQ.

Are you a SJW?
SJW: there is a seed of SJW in me.
One major difference between me and the stereotypical SJW is that I never engage in lengthy discussions.
I believe that you cannot change people's mind's, and that learning tech is more worthy of my time.
I limit myself to listening as much as I can to learn new arguments.
So the rationale of my actions is not to convince anyone, but rather:

increase the monetary cost of censorship by binding politics to tech
group up like minded people who don't like censorship


If programming websites get blocked, there will be less good programmers to fight against the dictatorship
This is a good point, and one that does make me think.


The commies calculate their actions very well to stay in power.
Why don't they just take down the entire Internet like they did in Xinjiang in 2010?
Because that would hurt them:

people would go mad, and revolt
people would work less efficiently, making the country, and thus themselves, poorer

So this puts pressure on them to take away the firewall.


Programmers are more likely to develop better Firewall climbing tools if SO is blocked


If we don't take any action to show our dissatisfaction, the dictatorship never ends.
The commies exist like any other organization for a sole purpose: maintain their own power.
If nothing is done to show dissatisfaction, they will never give up on that power.
There are two extremes of action (both which I don't support):

everyone become a willing mindless slave of the leader: perfect stability
everyone take up arms and do terrorism: perfect instability

But between those two extremes, what is the right measure? I think that saying nothing is too close to stability.
I do see that one alternative scenario is that if we do nothing, maybe there will be more and more contact with Western countries, and the Chinese will see for themselves that we are not that bad, and eventually request democracy.


Even if programmers get very powerful, it is not very likely that they will succeed to undo the dictatorship, they simply don't have enough power.
I'd rather have a less strong dictatorship, than one with good programmers.


You are harming the Chinese programmers
What is the root of the harm: me or GFW?

There are bad things happening all over the world, why don't you 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 me:

I love China and my Chinese GF
I hate dictatorships, and China is the largest one

My SO username and protest time are not infinite.

You are not Chinese, you can't interfere in Chinese politics


If I lived under a dictatorship, I would welcome foreign intervention.


The commies say that all foreigners are bad.
I disagree. There are good and bad ones.
The commies do this because most foreign countries are telling the Chinese to get rid of the dictatorship.


We live in the same world.
If China's economy is bad, my economy is worse.
If China's environment is bad, my environment is worse.
If China starts a war, I might have to fight it.


You are not Chinese, you have been brainwashed by the USA know nothing about China
I don't doubt that you know more about China than me.
If you know something I don't, please tell me, I always want to learn.
But if you are Chinese, also consider that you have been brainwashed by the commies, and likely more than me since you live in a dictatorship.

In the Tweet you say "correctional facility", but reeducation through labour has been abolished
My bad here, the precise term is "jail". I'm not talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_through_labor Unfortunately I can't edit a Tweet.

You have nothing to lose by doing that, but we Chinese programmers do
I think I have the most to lose personally: no enterprise who wants to do business with China will ever hire me for a high position.
I also have an increased risk of being hacked.
Chinese programmers all know how to climb the wall.

This is your 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.
Every form of protest incurs some damage. E.g., if we manifest on the street, it generates a traffic jam.
I don't like it, but I think it is worth it.

What you are doing will never have any effect
That is true with high probability, just like any other individual which tries to influence 1B people.
Every action is statistical: I just push the balance a little bit towards freedom.
And if we never start somewhere, nothing will ever happen.
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 http://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 http://data.stackexchange.com/stackoverflow/query/227868/select-count-from-users


You are using Stack Overflow in a way that it was not meant to be used, so what you are doing is in principle wrong
This is somewhat true, and I don't like myself for it.
But I think freedom is worth it.
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.
Making a statement where no one will ever see it, like a personal website, is sure to have no effect.

The Chinese masses are still uneducated, and not fit for free speech and democracy
When will they be ready? Who decides? What if they think that they are ready now?

Does your employer support this?
My employer has nothing to do with this.
He doesn't approve or disapprove of the Chinese government or of my private actions.
The only thing that my employer does believe in is that employees can have their own political opinions, and that this should not affect hiring decisions.
Obviously, this action limits my ability to lead high profile deals with China.
Also I'm quite curios if this would limit my ability to go to China for business, but I haven't applied for a visa since I've started this.
But my employer believes that inclusion and non-discrimination is more valuable.
I will always do my best to not let my personal opinions affect my professional decisions, as that would be unfair to my employer.

Falun Gong

Many people have died because they stopped taking medication because of Falun Gong, you should not support it
http://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27529/have-many-falun-gong-practitioners-forgone-medical-treatment-and-died-of-treatab
This is a point that makes me worry, but consider:

what matters are statistics. Maybe FLG people live longer than non FLG in average. But we will never have statistics because of censorship
maybe people should be allowed to choose how they want to die, not to take medication if they don't want to
maybe the number of people killed during persecution vastly outnumbers those who died because they would not take medication
several religions, including Christianism have miraculous cure claims
maybe the main reason why communists banned FLG is the political threat it posed, but that a ban was unjustified given the situation. Christian crosses are being taken down as of 2016, have they stopped taking their medications as well?
many some of those people would also have died soon if they had taken medication
maybe not all Falun Gong believers thought that it was wise to stop taking medication. But their religion was banned anyways.
riding motorcycles and smoking also reduce people's lifespan. Forbidding them, also has huge humanitarian costs. So why not forbid them as well?


There is danger that FLG

Falun Gong is completely different in the West than it was in China
I believe that it has changed.
It has become more organized.
People are better educated in general, and discourse must be different to appeal to them, e.g. underplaying the religious aspect.
If you know more ways in which it has changed, let me know.
But I still don't think it justifies the ban.
And once again, we can know nothing for sure about the past in China because of censorship.
Even if you saw something yourself, how can you be sure that it is representative?
And now that it has changed, maybe China should unban it?

FLG is dangerous because LHZ has too much power over followers
I agree that there is danger in every religion, and specially new religions.
However the same point can be made about political parties and in particular the CCP and it's chairman.
Couldn't a charismatic leader chairman gain more and more power (like Xi seems to be doing), and eventually start a war and kill millions? Or just kill some minority which is not happy about the situation.
Similarly, any charismatic leader of a pro democracy movement could become the leader of a terrorist organization.
If you ever want democracy, you will have to learn to accept the beliefs of others, and only punish them when they actually break a law.

FLG downplays the fact that it is a religion
I think that most people in the West would classify FLG as a religion if they are told that it mentions higher intelligent beings, other dimensions, and have weekly meetings where they read from a sacred book.
Or a cult, which is nothing but a new / small religion with negative connotation, and thus meaningless.
But consider this: how to classify what a religion is?
Some would answer: science is what everyone can perceive with their own senses.
But FLG followers claim to feel FLG energies when doing the exercises, and a few of them have the power of seeing the other dimensions.
On the other hand, how many of your friends have experienced the laws of quantum field theory or general relativity in a very direct way?
You may argue all, because e.g. of gravity. But so can FLG followers, saying that large historical events are due to their gods and daemons.

FLG media is not transparent about its affiliation
Agreed, and it is a point that hurts more than helps their cause: e.g. New Tang Dynasty TV, Epoch Times and Shen Yun.
But are all media forced to state their affiliation? Should all major newspapers start taking pools of how many employees follow which religion, and put that in their print?

FLG is a fake religion
Similar to the question: does God exist?
And thus unanswerable, and not interesting to me.