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README.adoc 543.38 KiB

China Dictatorship 中国独裁统治

Chinese "Communist" "Dictatorship" "facts". 中国《共产主义》《独裁统治》的《事实》。FAQ, news compilation and restaurant and music recommendations. 常见问答集，新闻集和饭店和音乐建议。Heil Xi 卐. 习万岁。

Video and images may be better viewed at https://cirosantilli.com/china-dictatorship or by cloning locally, see also: Mirrors of this page 这个网页的镜像.

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1. About 关于

This repo has the following goals:

2. FAQ 常见问答集

2.1. Why attack websites with censored keywords? 用审查词攻击网站有什么用呢？

This would then end Censorship 审查.

And then I believe that this would also end the dictatorship.

The keyword attacks increase the cost of censorship.

If commies censor things, they will get worse IT technology, and thus become 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:

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

Related attack: [photobombing-like-attacks].

2.1.1. 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 revenge of any kind.

He knows 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 firewall, and the dictatorship.

Don’t you think it is worth a try? Destroying the firewall, would enormously benefit not only Chinese programmers, but every single other Chinese person too.

Once the firewall is destroyed, which may destroy the dictatorship, he want China to develop the best science and technology in the world, and [would-you-like-to-live-in-china].

And by the way, with his extensive contributions to open source software, Ciro is already helping China, and all underdeveloped countries, become stronger.

2.1.1.1. Does Ciro Santilli want to make the Chinese people people look bad?

No, the opposite.

Ciro only wants their dictatorial government to look bad to destroy it, and help China become the most awesome country on Earth.

Even the Chinese that are against their own Government cannot do much about it openly, so it is not their fault.

And even those who supported their dictatorship must be respected, whoever stupid and brainwashed you might think they are, since it is impossible to prove who is right or wrong in politics.

See also: About 关于.

2.1.2. 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: The commies exaggerate the threat of the West to keep in power.

Don’t you see that this is just pure and simple politics? And likely ineffective one at that: Keyword attacks on programming websites will never have any effect.

2.2. 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 审查?

What about 996.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 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:

Infinite duplicate pool:

2.2.1. Is Ciro Santilli making programming contributions with the main intent of promoting your political agenda?

No, that is just a side effect.

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

Also, as I’ve said elsewhere, my actions are very unlikely to have any actions. Much more likely to have any action, would be for me to become rich and powerful first, and the best way to do that is to invest in whatever I think is most useful.

Actually, it can even be argued that I’m somewhat irrational, since I 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 I’m just taking a low-risk low-reward path?

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

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

2.2.1.1. 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.

2.3. Why would China be better without its Dictatorship?

Because it would make China, and the world:

2.3.1. 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:

For:

  • dictatorships are more likely to start Why would democracy and freedom of speech make China less likely to start a war? or other crazy policies like the 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.

    Any criticism of the government, even if constructive, 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.

  • 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.

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 bad ones more likely.

I really like 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 大跃进 (1958-1960)" (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.

Maybe China was poor because of Mao’s crazy communist regime. Similar regimes also made Russia 俄罗斯 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?

2.3.2. Censorship makes countries poorer

Dictatorships need Censorship 审查 to survive, and they must control all information to make themselves always look good: Would ending the Great Firewall truly end the dictatorship?.

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

This is also the basis of a What is a screen name keyword attack?.

This is also well illustrated in the 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=M6kYod3_gwk 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 International Workers' Day parade in Kharkov, Ukraine which happened five days after the disaster.
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Figure 1. Photo of a CDV-717 radioactivity meter that maxes out at 3.6 Roentgen like the one that would have been used in Chernobyl. Source.

This suggestion is even more explicit in the fictional World War Z 2006 novel by Max Brooks about a virus outbreak in China. It was later adapted into the World War Z (2013) movie by Paramount:

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

Amartya Sen is another famous proponent of similar arguments in the area of hungers: 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, some disagree.

Virus outbreaks and other natural disasters also illustrate this well: Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查.

2.3.2.1. Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查

The Chinese Government 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.

Good timelines so without a fucking paywall:

Timeline:

News coverage:

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

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: no one trusts a Dictatorship, after an infinitely long history of lies and no freedom of the press.

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

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:

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?

110803696 drli1
Figure 2. Selfie of Li Wenliang on his hospital bed before he died. Source.
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Figure 3. Corona Xi mural of Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) morphed into a Coronavirus by Lushux. Fuller composition view: https://twitter.com/lushsux/status/1243830638966235136. Reddit called it Winnie the Flu in a reference to Comparisons between Xi Jinping and Winnie-the-Pooh 小熊維尼 (2017). Source.
2.3.2.1.1. nCovMemory

Popular GitHub repo documenting personal experiences and media reports:

Other interesting GitHub repositories: [github-repositories-with-censored-information].

2.3.2.1.2. People arrested for reporting on the 2019 Corona Virus

2.3.3. Why would democracy and freedom of speech make China less likely to start a war?

This has been discussed to death:

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 to keep the people in fear all the time to keep their power, and a war is a great way to achieve that

2.3.4. 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 ready now?

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

Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.

Many democracy supporters jokingly recognize democracy’s shortcomings.

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.

2.3.4.1. 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, if it is impossible to a different view without going to jail?

What about the 1 million people in Tiananmen and the 70 million Falun Gong 法輪大法 followers? Did they not care?

D7OImmpWsAEYXEN
Figure 4. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 cartoon about a pig who does not care about politics because it cannot be eaten. 民主又不能当饭吃 Source.
Rebel pepper pig can%27t eat democracy cartoon translated to English by Ciro Santilli
Figure 5. Translation by Ciro Santilli of the Rebel Pepper cartoon about the pig who does not care about politics because it cannot be eaten.

2.3.5. Democracies have less corruption than dictatorships

One of the key points of 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, corrupt politicians can internal censorship 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 by the incompetent many for corruption,appointment by the corrupt few.

2.4. Will the keyword attacks really help to destroy the firewall?

Even if it is not, it does not matter, since Ciro spends so little time doing it: Doesn’t Ciro Santilli have anything better to do than pissing off China?.

tumblr mirhy5eQPY1s6tut4o1 r1 500
Figure 6. House of Cards S01E02 "Nobody can hear you. Nobody cares about you. Nothing will come of this." GIF. Source.

2.4.1. Embargoes make dictatorships stronger 禁运使独裁更强大

The 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:

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 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 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 习近平 (2012-∞), 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 2019 China trade war, and in particular the Huawei 华为 ban, is an event that has brought this question to the spotlight once again.

2.4.1.1. 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 less powerful, so at least they wouldn’t be able to start or sustain WW3. So I don’t think it will go that way.

2.4.2. Keyword attacks on programming websites will never have any effect

That is true with high probability, just like any other individual who tries to influence 1B 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 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:

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

Furthermore, even if the GFW falls, it is not clear that this will imply the end of the dictatorship: Will the keyword attacks really help to destroy the firewall?.

2.4.3. 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 attack websites with censored keywords? 用审查词攻击网站有什么用呢？

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

2.4.3.1. Is Stack Overflow blocked in China?

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.

2.5. 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.

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 or kill yet another minority, blood will also be on your hands. See also: [what-should-western-countries-do-about-china].

2.5.1. 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 法輪大法 meditating 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 free media would show videos of meditating old ladies in jail on national television? Ciro Santilli 三西猴 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.

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.

2.6. 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 a new big war and destroy everything.

The CCP thrives on the excessive 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 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 JFK’s words:

Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable

See also:

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".

2.6.1. Keyword attack profiles disturb me

But isn’t it better to be annoyed than having war, being poor or put into jail unfairly?

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

Installing any of those immediately give you 10 Sesame Points, 习万岁,

2.7. Non-Chinese people should not interfere in Chinese politics 外国人不应该干预中国政治

  1. 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’s environment is bad, my environment is worse.

    If China starts a war, I might have to fight it.

    If China fails to control a viral outbreak, I might get infected.

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

    Even if you don’t, I know several Chinese who do.

    Are you certain that your beloved CCP would be in power today if the Japanese hadn’t weakened the Guomindang and the Soviet Union helped out Mao?

  3. You have been brainwashed by the commies who say that all foreigners are bad :-)

    The commies do this because most foreign countries are telling the Chinese to get rid of the dictatorship.

    Most foreigners actually want what is best for China.

  4. Oh, China would never ever do anything like that, would it?

  5. You can’t do anything about it.

    I don’t like this argument, but in the end, this is what all politics comes down to: power.

    I recognize that in that sense, I may be similar to the CCP and any other political party.

    tumblr mirhy5eQPY1s6tut4o1 r1 500
    Figure 7. House of Cards S01E02 "Nobody can hear you. Nobody cares about you. Nothing will come of this." GIF. Source.
    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

Why don’t you go instead 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 are much more effective at taking down the GFW? [github-repositories-with-censored-information].

See also:

2.7.1. Non-Chinese people have been brainwashed by the USA know nothing about China

Everyone is "brainwashed" by their environment.

I don’t doubt that you know more about China than me.

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

So, instead of saying that, why don’t you just actually prove your point by teaching me something interesting about China that I don’t know about? I love learning new things.

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

2.7.2. The commies exaggerate the threat of the West to keep in power

This is a common strategy, but the West is not as evil as they say:

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.

438px China imperialism cartoon
Figure 8. French political cartoon from 1898 by Henri Meyer showing leaders of Western powers, Russia and Japan splitting up China between them. The CCP would arguably not have raised to power if not due to Japanese interference. Maybe the West deserves the CCP they helped create. Source.

2.8. Ciro Santilli and this page are completely biased against the Chinese Government!

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 prefers the term focused :-)

That being said, Ciro takes the agenda of information sources very seriously.

E.g. he tries to clearly classify Communist Party, Falun Gong, and Western government linked sources.

Any evidence of positive political progress 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.

Party promises do not count, only reports of activities by individuals.

See also:

2.8.1. Ciro Santilli’s claim to the Qing Dynasty throne 三西猴清朝皇帝觊觎

Ciro Santilli’s Ciro Santilli’s wife 三西猴的老婆, her mother, and paternal cousin, believe that Ciro’s wife is the descendant of the brother of a recent 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 Generation names (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: 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:

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 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 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’s purges, see also: Ciro Santilli’s wife 三西猴的老婆.

Bibliography:

Ciro Santilli portrait as Qing emperor
Figure 9. Ciro Santilli’s portrait as Qing emperor. Original image.

2.8.2. 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 三西猴 tries to justify why he think China would be better with democracy, but I know that ultimately all of this is useless.

Everyone’s opinions are all determined genetically and by 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 attack websites with censored keywords? 用审查词攻击网站有什么用呢？.

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

Using the 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. Embargoes make dictatorships stronger 禁运使独裁更强大.

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: Doesn’t Ciro Santilli have anything better to do than pissing off China?.

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.

2.8.3. 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 法輪大法.

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 mother in law were put into jail unfairly for 15 days?

But don’t you think that 70 million people (6% of the total population in 2000!) getting completely squashed by the Party illustrates extremely well the dangers of the dictatorship?

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: How do you choose keywords for the keyword attack?.

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 in 2019 for example, even though it only affected a measly million.

2.8.4. Why did Ciro Santilli start his keyword attack?

The last straw that led Ciro Santilli 三西猴 to start the What is a screen name 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 法輪大法. He posted about this at:

I then continued because I hate political censorship, and because I love China.

2.8.4.1. 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 三西猴.

Ciro Santilli with his mother in law during his wedding in 2017
Figure 10. Ciro Santilli 三西猴 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"?
2.8.4.1.1. 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 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 when something like that happens to your own family, and there is nothing you can do about it?

2.8.4.1.2. Jail post zh

Translation by 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？

2.8.4.1.3. 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?

2.8.4.2. 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.

2.9. 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:

2.9.1. I like my Dictatorship 我喜欢我的独裁统治

Ciro Santilli can understand that.

It must feel good to have absolute truth in the Cult of Xi, and let the black police 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: Most Chinese people don’t care about the minorities.

And when your son betrays you or sacrifices himself for the Dictator, will you just smile and accept it?

2.9.1.1. Seventeen Moments of Spring (1973)

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

As a fun note, it seems that Putin Путин 普京 (1999-2008, 2012-∞) 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 我喜欢我的独裁统治.

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, 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.

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

2.9.1.2. 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 due to Inciting subversion of state power 煽动颠覆国家政权罪 or Picking quarrels and provoking trouble 寻衅滋事罪.

One is reminded of the game "We Happy Few" (2018), which which people are forced to be happy. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (AKA "1984") 一九八四 (1949) also comes to mind of course.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zndzntIDLFE IGN review of the "We Happy Few" (2018) game.
1589352986 5ebb9a1ad0a98
Figure 11. 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 will make us disappear". Source

2.10. 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:

My SO username and protest time are not infinite.

2.10.1. 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 just believes that they are way better than a Why does Ciro Santilli say that China is a dictatorship? 中国不是独裁！ like China.

As Churchill once brilliantly 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.

This "Western censorship string" was posted automatically by a bot during 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

Some quick replies to the idiotic things wumaos like to post:

See also:

cg599721e743615
Figure 12. Signe Wilkinson 2017 Free Speech "Can you just move it so it doesn’t cover them?" umbrella cartoon. Ciro once saw a 50 Cent Party 五毛党 (Wumao Dang) post this. It made him smile. If the cartoon were about dictatorships, Uncle Sam would be instead decapitating and raping the people on one half of the umbrella. Of course humans are shit in democracies as well, but at least that system makes it harder for them to oppress each other. Source.
2.10.1.1. Western democracies have invaded other countries and crushed separatism

Yes, Western democracies are not perfect.

What matters is that citizens can disagree with those actions, publicly say it, vote accordingly, and not go to jail, so that policy will be changed if the majority so wants.

In China, the minority controls the majority, and the majority cannot say anything even if they disagree.

If the majority wants to do evil however, evil will get done, it is impossible to prevent that.

See also:

2.10.1.2. Western democracies also censor subjects such as child porn and hate speech

First, if you don’t think child porn should be banned, I don’t think there is much point in arguing with you anymore.

But of course, there is censorship in Western democracies, and there is a gray area between what should be censored or not.

The only thing that matters is that political speech must never be censored. This way, the majority can always discuss and vote to change what can be censored or not.

In China, trying to discuss of changes laws puts you in jail, so bad laws cannot be changed.

2.10.1.3. Snowden 斯诺登

Censoring anyone who says "my president is shit", which is what China does, is much, much more serious than censoring intelligence leaks.

The problem with dictatorships, is that they make every information that makes them look bad a "state secret". Including any information that hundreds of thousands of people have witnessed, or economic performance metrics! See also: Internal censorship is necessary to prevent fake USA accounts from creating harmful propaganda.

The level of unknown surveillance that Snowden uncovered is a bad thing about the US.

Snowden’s prosecution was inevitable. Countries need secret services. Secret services need laws that prevent leaking classified information that was produced by government officials.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 has never and will never criticize China or any other country for spying or prosecuting spies.

If Snowden were Chinese, the Chinese government would ban talking about him or anything he uncovered. A keyword attack with "Snowden" in the West has no effect.

It is obvious that the level of surveillance in any dictatorship will be infinitely higher, since the Government has much more power and no-one can criticize.

On the West however, the debate Snowden sparked cannot be censored, and has helped to control excessive and secret state power.

Ultimately, Ciro thinks camera surveillance is somewhat inevitable, because people will always want to fight crime and terrorism and surveillance technology keeps getting cheaper and cheaper.

He is however strictly against the ban of cryptography.

He also believes that a good solution to balance out government power is the second amendment. It is better to have more school shootings and less full-blown dictatorship led genocides / mass human rights violations.

In 2019 China amusingly censored passages Snowden’s "Permanent Record" autobiography book, which Snowden then published on Twitter:

I don’t think they understand that what Snowden stands for is completely the opposite of what the Chinese gov is lol

Snowden then later released the entire Chinese version of the book for free online with the censored parts underlined: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/02/10/snowden_china_censorship (archive), link to the book: https://a.temporaryrecord.com/Permanent_Record_-_CN_edition_with_underlined_redactions.pdf (archive). One wonders why he didn’t just do that in the first place for all versions, maybe he needed to pay the writer that helped him?

Edward Snowden 2
Figure 13. Snowden highlighted defects on abuses of power in a Western democracy, and the discussion he sparked helped to control such abuses. Source.
2.10.1.4. Fake news

When a government controls all information to make it look good, and no one can challenge it, you cannot trust any of the news produced by that country, as anything could be fake.

It is much better to have some fake news, but also few sources that are likely telling the truth.

2.10.1.5. Bad things have been done in the name of freedom

Bad things have been done in the name of anything.

It’s just that much, worse things are done without freedom than with it.

Democracies cannot necessarily protect weak countries from powerful ones either. No political system can do that, because humans are trash essentially.

What democracy do is to protect its own people against its own government. Because when the government turns against part of the population in a dictatorship, that part of the population gets crushed entirely, without any chance to fight, because they don’t have an army or ally countries like other countries do.

Here are some images that 50 Cent Party 五毛党 (Wumao Dang)'s like to post:

2.10.2. Russia 俄罗斯

Russia is clearly the number 2 Why does Ciro Santilli say that China is a dictatorship? 中国不是独裁！ in the world by population / GDP and the #1 nuclear arsenal, so here we go.

Ciro has always been curious about how Russia can be both oppressive and a appear democratic, unlike China which doesn’t even try to pretend. This is what he gathers:

  • the government controls all major media. If any media says bad things against them, the government finds pretexts to create lawsuits or increase taxes against such companies. Therefore all people end up thinking that the government is good.

  • just like China, they emphasize the threat of the foreign countries, especially the US, as a justification for having an oppressive power.

  • the government puts pressure on any significant opposition candidate. One technique is to find some reason to put them in jail for two months, which by Russian law forbids them from participating in further elections. Only candidates that don’t really stand a chance are left as a fake opposition. But if you reach some prominence, you start taking the same risks as politicians, although you are more likely to face more brutal illegal gangster violence threats as you are less visible

While we are at it, some interesting news:

Poisonings: Russia apparently has a long list of poisoning political enemies: https://nypost.com/2018/06/23/inside-russias-long-history-of-poisoning-political-enemies/

The Russians have very different style to the Chinese, who are much more subtle, and just put people in jail or handicap them in several ways without killing them.

Other political murders or attempts:

Some other interesting political suppression lists:

Other random stuff:

2.10.2.1. Putin Путин 普京 (1999-2008, 2012-∞)

Coverage:

2.10.2.1.1. Superputin

Meme partially supported by Putin himself, showing how physically strong and manly the president is.

Similar to Chuck Norris facts.

"Putin does manly things" photo galleries:

Vladimir Putin 1472816c
Figure 14. Putin swims Butterfly stroke in a Siberian lake around August 2009. The Telegraph correctly interpreted this as a sign that he would be re-elected in 2012. For reference Lake Baikal in Siberia has a maximum temperature of 14 °C in summer. Other dictators have used similar swim tactics before, the most notable possibly being Mao swim across the Yangtze river 毛主席畅游长江 (1966-07-16). Source.
original
Figure 15. Putin riding a horse shirtless near Lake Seliger in August 2009. Source.
076805e00f6ad771818d36ccef62cfd3
Figure 16. Putin riding a bear. Source.
tumblr kuxr34jtOb1qzeu38o1 400
Figure 17. Putin riding a shark. Source.
main qimg 71e8b8cddfce751d8e0a8ed45b316731
Figure 18. Putin riding a giant eagle. Source.
main qimg ae21d615c5a8738a7321478bc1b686c5
Figure 19. Putin riding a meteor. Source.
2.10.2.1.2. Gay Putin (2017)

Coverage:

Homosexuality is not super popular in Russia in general:

0a2ae706 1a94 11e7 b4ed ac719e54b474 1280x720 145124
Figure 20. The possibly Gay Putin clown image banned in 2017. Source.
Putin Trump kiss 800x450
Figure 21. Possibly Gay Putin kissing possibly Gay Trump mural entitled Make Everything Great Again painted in Lithuania in 2016 by by artists Dominykas Čečkauskas and Mindaugas Bonanu. It references the Russian interference in the 2016 United States elections. It was later vandalized. Now we just need a Putin Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) kiss. Trump Xi kiss can be found here. Source.
2.10.2.1.3. The poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal Серге́й Ви́кторович Скрипáль (2018-03-04)

In 4 March 2018, the Russian double agent and his daughter were poisoned with Novichok agent (Новичо́к), a Soviet-era nerve agent, which was likely put on their front door knob in Salisbury, UK, exact address Christie Miller Road! Straight out of a spy novel.

On 30 June 2018, the man of an unlucky drug addict couple found the counterfeit expensive looking Nina Ricci Premier Jour perfume bottle containing the poison, and gave it to the woman who died. How unlucky can you fucking be, as if heavy drug addiction weren’t enough, you still have to deal with fucking Russian Novichok!

1114
Figure 22. The assassination suspects Alexander Mishkin (Алекса́ндр Евге́ньевич Ми́шкин, alias Alexander Petrov) and Anatoliy Chepiga (Анатолий Владимирович Чепига, alias Ruslan Boshirov) in a CCTV still at Salisbury Station on 3rd March 2018 the day before the assassination. Both GRU and Alexander being a doctor, which is consistent with a poisoning assassination attempt. They later explained on an RT interview that they were visiting the world renowned Salisbury Cathedral in their 3 day trip to the UK, and that they were not gay. Some Western sources interpreted this as an intentional suggestion that they are gay, which for many Russians would imply that they cannot be FSB agents. Source.
skripal perfume wide 8e5147ab76a27976e4bde6adffce910f4f297d25 s1100 c15
Figure 23. Counterfeit Nina Ricci Premier Jour packet that contained the Novichok. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ku8OQNyI2i0 "Full Skripal case interview with the UK’s suspects (EXCLUSIVE)" by RT with Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov. Not gay moment at: 461s.
2.10.2.1.4. Electoral fraud in Russian elections

Besides barring opposition from participating such as Alexei Navalny Алексе́й Анато́льевич Нава́льный, electoral fraud was off the charts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KQlCRLCw_I 2019-09-12 CCTV footage of Vasily Dyachenko (Василий Дьяченко), who had reported electoral fraud concerns regional 2019 elections, getting surprise punched in the stomach at the St. Petersburg polling station 1619, while the police who is right in front of it do nothing about it. English coverage: https://www.rferl.org/a/russian-police-stand-idly-by-as-election-observer-sucker-punched/30160427.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3oSeRyaFllY 2018-03-18 alleged ballot stuffing electoral fraud caught on CCTV in Lyubertsy, Moscow Oblast

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMEqv-NNLW4 Мусора избили ребёнка и наблюдателей на выборах TODO find English version

Related:

2.10.2.1.5. The murder of Alexander Litvinenko Литвиненко, Александр Вальтерович (2006)

Poisoned with polonium-210:

  • 2006-10-29

    • meets with two former FSB agents Dmitry Kovtun and Andrey Lugovoy at Millenium Hotel London TODO exact address

    • eats with Mario Scaramella at an Itsu in London TODO exact address. Ciro Santilli 三西猴 believes the Itsu food to be the real cause of death.

  • 2006-11-01 falls ill

  • 2006-11-03 admitted into hospital

  • 2006-11-23 dies

  • 2007-01-26 UK police says they had found a teapot at Millenium Hotel containing extremely high Poloninum-210 traces

  • 2010-12 US leaked cables show that Dmitry Kovtun left "positive traces" of radioactive polonium-210 in Germany before departing for Britain https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/dec/11/wilileaks-cables-litvinenko-murder

Former Russian Agent Pois 006
Figure 24. Litvinenko in his death bed.
2.10.2.1.6. Mandatory registration of bloggers (2014)

Bloggers with more than 3000 daily readers must register and cannot be anonymous.

The following Chinese policies come to mind:

2.10.2.2. Putin opposition
2.10.2.2.1. Alexei Navalny Алексе́й Анато́льевич Нава́льный

Casually barred from the 2018 presidential campaign:

His Wiki page does say one thing of interest though, he has right wing tendencies which scared off liberals:

The BBC noted in a profile of Navalny that his endorsement of a political campaign called "Stop feeding the Caucasus" and his willingness to speak at ultra-nationalist events "have caused concern among liberals".

Related:

2.10.2.3. Censorship of images in the Soviet Union
image placeholder title
Figure 25. Before/after comparison of picture of Stalin with Nikolai Yezhov at the Moscow Canal. Nikolai was edited out form the second picture. (Credit: Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images & AFP/GettyImages) Source.
640px Union de Lucha
Figure 26. A meeting of the St. Petersburg chapter of the Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class in February 1897, including Lenin and Alexander Malchenko. Source.
640px Union de Lucha
Figure 27. Same as above, but with Alexander Malchenko edited out. Source.
2.10.2.4. Stalin 斯大林 (1922-1952)
55cb6c5de9cde6ebe7e9d1704c7f83e6d344e8154b44299fec9b9a029aa82c34 1
Figure 28. Light Yagami from Death Note: "I can kill anyone by simply writing his name here". Stalin: "Bitch please". Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZT2z0nrsQ8o "Rasputin vs Stalin." Epic Rap Battles of History YouTube video. This is fire. Explanations.

2.11. Is the Chinese government evil? 中国共产党是邪恶吗？

Obviously not, just inefficient and dangerous.

It is just another non-democratic empire like the Qing Dynasty, we might as well cal it:

共产朝
The Communist Dynasty

Like any other organization and individual everywhere in the entire world, they are just doing everything that they can to maintain their own power.

It just happens that China’s the current is political system allows the CCP to do really bad things.

And it should also be noted that it is in part the West’s fault that China currently has this shitty system.

Falun Gong 法輪大法 thinks otherwise of course, they think the CCP is actually made up of devils in some dimension: Does Ciro Santilli believe in or practice Falun Gong? 三西猴相信法轮功吗？.

2.11.1. Chinese politicians really care about the Chinese citizens

Sometimes people say Ciro Santilli is naive.

Politicians are the same all over the world.

Some are good, some are evil.

China’s problem is not its politicians.

It’s the current shitty political organization, which allows/convinces those politicians to do really bad things: Why would democracy and freedom of speech make China richer? 言论自由让中国比较富有, Why would democracy and freedom of speech make China less likely to start a war?.

2.11.2. Is Chinese politician X evil?

The term evil does not make sense unless you are religious.

The best definition of evil is a psychopath with zero empathy for anyone: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychopathy although this can be better characterized as a disease or extreme personality trait.

The huge majority of those politicians are just regular dudes with a knack for politics but brought up in a fucked up political situation.

Just like you, Ciro Santilli and other politicians in any country.

2.12. Comparisons between the CCP and Nazi Germany 纳粹德国

Keywords:

  • Xitler (习特勒). 习 "xi2" is very close in sound to the Chinese name of Hitler: 希特勒 (xi1 te4 le4)

  • Chinazi (赤纳粹). TODO why 赤. Means Red, but where else is it used?

  • Reductio ad Hitlerum

Articles:

c9q6vdybr7i31
Figure 29. Photoshopped Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) with raised fist with Nazi uniform and flag on the background. Source.
18f2dcae 19f4 459a be06 016dd13c5a1d
Figure 30. Likely original or similar image of Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) with raised fist as he took oath when coming into or renewing office. Source.
320px War Ensign of Germany %281938%E2%80%931945%29.svg
Figure 31. German’s 1938-1945 war flag called the "War Ensign of Germany" in English or "Reichskriegsflagge" in German. Source.
mouth open
Figure 32. Hitler has of course a few raised fists on Google Images, but they tend to be more aggressive, and less compatible with Xi’s apathic poker face. Source.
6a00d834523d5069e201b7c90b8e9c970b pi
Figure 33. Photoshopped cover of Mein Kampf with Xi’s face on top of Hitler’s and other modifications such as Mian instead of Mein, likely the same 面 (mian4, face) as the Chinese character at the bottom right. Source.
page1 423px Adolf Hitler Mein Kampf %28855. Auflage%2C 1943%29.pdf
Figure 34. Original cover of Mein Kampf. Source.
DGlPeEmXcAAaeQa
Figure 35. Photoshopped photo of Hitler giving the Nazi salute from a car with Himmler on the background with Xi’s face on top of Hitler’s. Source.
640px Hitler car
Figure 36. Original photo of Hitler giving the Nazi salute from a car with Himmler on the background. Source.
c0d340rtswp31
Figure 37. Chinazi flag by Hong Kong protesters. Seen on streets. Source.
XxjwshE007055 20190601 CBMFN1A006 11n
Figure 38. Xi Jinping basically Nazi saluting kids from Young Pioneers of China 中国少年先锋队 in Beijing, June 1, 2015. Source (biased).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wD53MEbLDIE laowhy86 video "Can We Compare China to Nazi Germany?" published on 2020-04-29. Good side-by-side video comparisons. Says that China is mor like Nazi than Russia 俄罗斯, but Ciro disagrees, all three are <is-chinese-politician-x-evil,evil dictatorships>>.

2.13. Personal questions about Ciro Santilli

2.13.1. Can I contact you in Chinese?

If you don’t know English well enough, that’s fine though, go for Chinese.

But if you do, use English.

I am not going to learn Chinese because of your message.

It is more productive for you to write in English, so that the rest of the West can also learn something new.

Especially since it seems that most Chinese already know what you are talking about.

2.13.1.1. I am going to use a bunch of Chinese slangs because it makes me feel smart 我知道网络语言，我很聪明

Obviously, if you want to be understood, use simple and standard Chinese.

Avoid slangs, otherwise Ciro might not have patience to Google your useless slangs down Zhihu questions.

Of course, if you have to read this, you likely are not going to say anything useful in the first place, so not reading your post is likely fine.

Using slangs makes some people feel smart due their advanced knowledge of a specific subculture, or makes them feel part of that subculture to gather allies, or they just want to waste Ciro’s time.

They sometimes also like to mix in some emojis for similar reasons.

A Chinese insult tip 101, avoid similar sound euphemisms. If you are going to say shit at least grow some balls or tits and use the proper characters, Ciro will respect you more for it:

Places to try and decript Internet slang when you feel like wasting your time:

Rugae vaginales with black hole
Figure 39. A Vagina (阴道) also known as cunt (屄), is the female reproductive organ, including the naturally occurring black hole that appears in front of it whenever a picture is taken to prevent [github] from taking down this page. Even though you’ve never seen one, there’s no need to be afraid of it, and refer to it in euphemisms like "SB". Background source and black hole source.
2.13.1.2. I want to take my chances and make a shitpost in cirosantilli/china-dictatorship

So, have you reached the conclusion that your shitpost is worth the risk of getting blocked?

Remember that shitposts can also be creative: if you are going to insult Ciro Santilli, at least do it in a creative way, or else you look like an even bigger idiot than you really are.

A collection of shitposts for you to take inspiration from can be found at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues?q=label%3Ashitpost+

Also, when opening a shitpost you may mark it clearly such with the shitpost issue template which automatically assigns the shitpost label. Doing so will make you look like less of an idiot.

While we require polite replies to polite posts, no matter what which side they are defending, if a post is marked as a shitpost, things are much more relaxed and fun, and you can generally get away with telling the OP to fuck themselves without getting blocked.

517px Human Feces %28cropped%29
Figure 40. Real shit photos may be posted in reply to shitposts. Source.
450px Kin no unko
Figure 41. Amazing shitposts may recieve a Golden Shit award. The image is from a Japanese Kin no unko (金のうんこ), which is likely inspired by golden Sycees. Source.
rA0K90g
Figure 42. To censor or not to censor good shitposts: that is not the question, Ciro Santilli 三西猴 will never censor them! Source.
alca
Figure 43. The legendary Grass Mud Horse 草泥马 (caonima) is also said to appear in shitposts from time to time.
2.13.1.3. I am going to write a huge text to prove my point

Feel free to do that, but no one will ever read most of it.

If you want your comment to be read, choose your key point well, and deliver it.

It is a shame that most people who are ever able to do that are shitposters, but credit where credit is due.

2.13.2. Has Ciro Santilli you ever lived in China?

Not as of 2019, he has only visited once in 2012, and it was amazingly beautiful.

Ciro Santilli with a stone carved Budai in the Feilai Feng caves near the Lingyin Temple in Hangzhou in 2012
Figure 44. Ciro Santilli with a stone carved Budai (布袋和尚) in the Feilai Feng caves (飞来峰) near the Lingyin Temple (灵隐寺) in Hangzhou taken during his legendary 2012 touristic trip to China. Will he ever be able to go to China again to re-experience such marvelous locations? If the CCP falls before he dies, and if the statue hasn’t been destroyed by the commies, Ciro will return to that exact spot and take a second picture. How will he look like?

But he doesn’t think it is a good idea for him to do that now, in case his Visa got accepted, because he is not interested in learning about the Chinese jail system! :-)

He knows that if you don’t mind contributing to making WW3 deadlier and shut up and obey the CCP, China is already a fine place to live as much as any other developing country.

2.13.2.1. Would you like to live in China?

If the dictatorship ends, I would like to migrate to China if given a decent job to help you develop and become awesomer.

2.13.2.2. Would Ciro Santilli be able to visit China before the CCP ends?

It would be interesting to apply for a VISA to find out.

But Ciro won’t do it because it is too risky that it would be a waste of Ciro’s precious time and money.

Firstly, Jamal Khashoggi taught us that walking into enemy into consulates of enemy countries is a bad idea.

Then, even if the VISA were accepted, Ciro could still be turned back on entering the country, thus wasting the flight time and money. This could either be a genius plot to waste the money of enemies of the state, or due to a crappy divided IT system between the border control and the VISA people.

Finally, even after the border, there is still the possibility that Ciro could be stopped in the country half-way through the visit and sent back, or be interrogated for a few days, or less likely murdered with poison.

Therefore, if you think that living in China is fundamental to understand it, please just explain what you think one can learn from the experience instead. Do you really need to live there to see its censorship machine working? It would arguably be harder to see it from the inside.

2.13.4. Does Ciro Santilli speak Chinese? 三西猴会说中文吗？

As of 2019, oral enough for daily things, but not understand most natural casual dinner conversation or watch TV series, because they go too quickly into vocabulary subject areas that I don’t know.

When it matters, and with some patience, Can can make himself understood though with some analogies (archive) and a dictionary.

From the HSK vocabulary list, he estimates that ihe is definitely HSK 3, but not quite HSK 4. This would likely equate A2 / B1 in the European system.

Phonetics wise, Ciro can’t distinguish or produce a few sounds, notably -ing vs -in and my off-tone rate is high, but it tends to not matter at all compared to the lack of vocabulary.

Ciro reads with Perapera, write with a mixture of Pleco, Google translate and Googling to see if Chinese actually say the sentences that way.

He hasn’t tried to learn characters because too much effort, but he did learn the most common ones without trying.

Ciro really wishes he could learn more, but he has other more important endeavors at the moment :-(

He initially learnt from book that come with audio recordings in the first 6-months to 1 year in 2010, but that got impossibly boring afterward, so he later moved to just basically talking as much as possible non-important things to his wife in Chinese, and whenever he reaches one that I don’t know that seems useful, he Plecos it up or just 怎么说 and then Pleco.

Spoken Chinese is in Ciro’s opinion a relatively easy language to learn from scratch, because word formation is so often logical:, e.g.:

  • volcano = fire + mountain: 火山(huo shan)

  • train = fire + car: 火车 (huo che), a reference to old steam locomotives

and there is no useless crap like verb conjugation, Grammatical gender, plural variants, capitalization, etc.

Ciro loves this language.

Please just get rid of the Chinese characters and move to pinyin like the Korean and Vietnamese did, this will make your culture much easier to export.

Yes Chinese characters are beautiful, yes, maybe you can read faster, and yes, vertical text (纵排) is awesome (but is it more efficient? Zhihu, Quora).

But they just take too much time for any sane adult to learn, it’s harder than C++!

2.13.4.1. Chinese characters are insane

Maybe the commies for once did something good by introducing simplified Chinese characters (简化字)?

They should have gone further and reduced it to pinyin like the Viets did though.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 smirked when he came across "蒄" in Pleco, and the translation was: "meaning unknown (herb mentioned in old books)". Yes, at the word level, the same like exists in phonetic systems, but that it takes up a modern dictionary and Unicode slot is still funny.

Chinese character extreme
Figure 45. The "fictional" Chinese character "Dou" from Uncyclopedia is roughly translated as "Impossibly complex pictogram-based writing system that takes a person a thousand thousand years to learn." and illustrates well why pictograms are a bad idea. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_cbW5JK9WM "The most complex Chinese character" by Vladimir Skultety does a reasonable analysis of which Chinese character is the most complex

2.13.5. Are you a radical?

Why am I a radical?

Do you consider me a radical because it is unthinkable that China is not perfect?

Or just because I’m trying to take down, some more websites that your dictatorship still does not dislike enough to block: [china-is-fine-as-it-is-stop-making-it-worse]?

Why am I a radical when I speak my point of view, while you are not when you speak yours?

I don’t think either China or West is perfect: [western-media-has-exaggerated-reports-on-flg-for-propaganda-reasons].

I don’t consider myself a radical because of:

I never get mad. Only a slightly sad or annoyed sometimes.

But maybe no radical ever considers himself radical? Hmmm…​

2.13.6. 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 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

2.13.7. Does Ciro Santilli hate China? 三西猴讨厌中国吗？

On the contrary. China has his favorite:

And because of that: [would-you-like-to-live-in-china].

As Bjarne said:

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

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

持华反党
爱国恨党

683px Shanghai YuYuan Gardens and Old Town %28584867794%29
Figure 46. Round gate at Yu Garden 豫园 in Shanghai. Source.
2.13.7.2. Why does Ciro Santilli love China so much?

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 does not believe in reincarnation, but sometimes he’s tempted to.

It is interesting how different people get different impressions!

Of course, the fact that his wife is Chinese and does Falun Gong may or may not have played a role in it :-)

It was like this: Ciro started getting interested in Chinese culture, then he started hanging out with Chinese people, and then he started hanging out with his wife!

So yes, it is a chicken and egg type of thing. The fact that she is one of the most intelligent, morally upright, cute, and "never give up" person I know may have helped me choose too.

2.13.8. Ciro Santilli’s China freedom campaign is selfish

See also:

2.13.8.1. Ciro Santilli is doing his China freedom campaign to become famous

No, he am a selfless human being, only concerned with the greater well being of humankind.

More serious answer:

  • he believes in this. As evidence, it has limiting effects on his technological career: [does-your-employer-support-this], and he doesn’t think he can/wants to become a politician in China if the CCP ever falls

  • the more famous Ciro is, the more impact he will have in the future

  • the more famous Ciro is, the more feedback he have that what he’s been doing has been working

Keyword: attention whore.

Duplicate pool:

2.13.8.4. Is Ciro Santilli’s china-dictatorship campaign funded or otherwise supported by some organization?

Sure, the CIA sends Ciro 10 thousand USD checks from time to time, but that doesn’t change at all what he would be doing.

Just kidding.

A shady supporting organization might require that he does not disclose their support, so maybe the best answer is that you will never know for sure.

Of course, a hidden support would represent a reputation hit for both such organizations and for me, which makes it less likely that I would have accepted or had such an offer.

Also consider Ciro’s motivation. If your mother in law were put into jail unfairly for 15 days, for following the same religion that your wife follows, and if you had a social media presence, wouldn’t you be tempted to do the same?

What about you, are you funded by the CCP?

2.13.9. Would Ciro Santilli be doing his China freedom campaign if he was in China?

Not with his real name attached to it, see also:

2.13.9.1. 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 curious 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. It likely wouldn’t be a good idea for me to go to China :-)

But my employer believes that inclusion and non-discrimination are 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.

2.13.10. Doesn’t Ciro Santilli have anything better to do than pissing off China?

In 1989, besides Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 六四事件 and Ciro Santilli 三西猴's birth, a beautiful thing called the World Wide Web was invented!

The Internet gives everyone the magic power of writing something, and having million people read it for free!

This is how much time Ciro spends on this project to give you an idea:

Then Ciro just contributes to programming websites exactly as he would if he weren’t making this campaign, and voila.

Edit: to be fair, the end of 2019 and start of 2020 was such as hot year with [2019-hong-kong-anti-extradition-bill-protests] and Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查 that Ciro might have spent a tiny little bit more.

But Ciro did it only when his brain was too tired of technical stuff and unable to do more, or as a brain warm up routine in the morning.

Telling the CCP to fuck off is surprisingly relaxing, you should try it some time too. It uses a different part of your brain other than the programming one. It is, one could say, an art form.

2.14. Were you influenced by the Cute cat theory of digital activism?

Nope, someone told me about it after a while, but it is basically what I’m doing.

You can never invent anything new anymore nowadays.

2.15. People in China have already considered democracy, and rejected it

OK, shall we put that to an anonymous vote just to make sure?

Dear sir or madam: do you want more control over your government? y/n

Oops, I forgot that proposing such a vote would put in you jail, nevermind.

2.16. Would it be right to use violence to overthrow the CCP?

In an ideal world, Ciro Santilli is of course "against violence".

But what if you could prevent a lot of future violence with some violence today?

Baby Hitler vs 5 million Jews trolley problem
Figure 48. One baby Hitler or 5 Million Jews trolley problem.

Ah, the eternal question which only God can answer:

Do you really think that the communists will step down if you ask them nicely enough?

A quote from V for Vendetta (2005):

Q: If they do, what do you think will happen [the people protest against their Government]?

A: What usually happens when people without guns stand up to people with guns.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=TcoBv6ibh8M V for Vendetta (2005) "What you think will happen" scene.

How do you think the CCP or any other party got into power and maintained that power in the first place? Violence.

The question of if violence is right or wrong makes no sense. All that matters is: what is the most efficient form of government and who has the power to do what.

For "violence is illegal" arguments, see also: FLG is illegal in China, we must follow the law.

2.17. Why does Ciro Santilli say that China is a dictatorship? 中国不是独裁！

Ciro is using the word in an slightly extended/joking sense.

Maybe "authoritarian" is a more precise term, but it is just too much of a mouthful.

In particular, dictatorships are harder to sustain than authoritarianism, since it generally implies even less freedom, and a single leader whose death can destabilize everything.

The CCP is more like a social class with a large number of members and various sub-layers, and it is therefore much harder to take down on the other hand.

Dictatorship is becoming more and more precise under Xi however.

Even Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1954–1976) admits it and put it into the constitution: People’s democratic dictatorship 人民民主专政, so funny.

Well known Evil Western media that also call China a dictatorship:

Further discussions about this useless terminology question:

2.18. What is a screen name keyword attack?

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 ;-)

Chrysanthemum Xi Jinping with black red liusi added by Ciro Santilli
Figure 49. Chrysanthemium Xi Jinping 菊花习近平 (2015) has been used by Ciro Santilli as a profile picture censored image attack

2.18.1. What are the best sources of anti-CCP news?

Catches all the important news

A large part of the posts has controversial material.

Has some noise of course as well, but less than other media I find.

Highly worth your feed.

2.18.2. Where can I find good words for a keyword attack?

See also:

2.18.3. How do you choose keywords for the keyword attack?

I haven’t counted, but the limit for Stack Overflow is quite low, and I’m always almost at the maximum, which is about "Ciro Santilli" + 3 3-4 Chinese character events with a separator.

These are some of my prioritization guidelines:

  • recent cases receive a large prime over the raw death toll, because older cases can always be attributed to other people.

    E.g., I’ve heard there is even some opening towards acknowledging the Great Famine, thus 烏坎事件 (and others from my previous profile names)

  • words must refer to a precise event, and must be clearly summarizable in very few chars, for increased impact, and profile name length limitations.

    E.g. "High corruption rates, high pollution", although very serious, feel too generic.

  • events that relate directly to freedom of speech receive a prime, since they can only happen in China and very few other countries.

    Non e.g.: corruption and pollution. Those are hard to quantify, and there is always an immediate reply: china GDP per capita is low, same happens in India, Brazil, etc.

    Freedom of speech however, is immediately verifiable (e.g. "my Weibo was taken down"), and undeniably caused by the current central government.

  • the more people affected, and the more deeply they have been affected, the more important obviously

I am currently trying to maintain in my Stack Overflow Location a ranking of events in a single string, so that it can be easily copy pasted around. The location appears on every page if you hover over my account name, so it is likely in the HTML at least.

If you think that this list can be improved, please open an issue explaining how and why.

2.18.4. Are there other openly dissident users on Stack Overflow?

Notable ones only here (high rep or innovative criticism):

Users who had GFW references but removed it:

Misc interesting stuff:

Anti-dissident users:

2.18.5. Other notable keyword attacks

2.18.5.1. Notepad++

It might be a newbie text editors for newbie Windows users, but at least they use it to good use by doing keyword attacks:

The creator appears to be a Vietnamese immigrant or descendant living in France. There are many such immigrants due to Vietnam being an ex-colony: https://github.com/donho Also he must have good reason to dislike the commies due to similar commit bullshit in Vietnam. He was at Paris Diderot in 2000: https://donho.github.io/#education (archive).

2.19. Separatism 分离主义

If a large number of people in a given region want to leave an country strongly or have greater autonomy, I believe that they should be allowed to do so.

Rationale:

  • if they don’t feel they are getting a good deal out of your country, it is unfair to keep them in

  • keeping them in the country forcibly implies large scale violation of human rights: mass incarceration and removing freedom of speech.

    Which in turn implies terrorist backslash.

    All of which are against my principles.

What makes me the most mad is the censorship. If you are going to put people in jail, write a clear law about it, and let international reporters come to see the situation.

But why do you do something and then hide it? Maybe because you are not doing the right thing?

2.19.1. Taiwan 台湾 Republic of China 中華民國

If you are interested in Taiwan, one important programmer forum is: PTT Bulletin Board System 批踢踢實業坊.

Some interesting links:

  • https://youtube.com/watch?v=6aZkM_ZLvjE?t=50 (zh) "【這就是科學｜柯文哲】EP3／從癌症治療看政治！除惡務盡→除惡「勿」盡？「與敵共存」才是生存之道！", 柯文哲, 2019-06-26. Ko Wen-je, the mayor of Taipei 台北 and a professor in medicine, applies the concept of isolation and mutation in evolution to Taiwan and China

2.19.1.1. One China policy 一个中国

Taiwan is not a case of Separatism 分离主义.

Taiwan is a completely separate country split due to civil war, long ago.

Almost every country, and all reasonably powerful countries, have diplomatic relations with Taiwan. They just don’t call them diplomatic relations to not piss off China so they can keep doing business.

The fact that most countries in the world does officially recognize Taiwan as a country is a joke, considering that the only thing keeping it afloat is the West’s military threat.

The West must not let China advance and take more territories. The more they take, the more they will want.

The West must protect China’s neighboring countries with military support and assurance.

The West must recognize Taiwan for what it is: a separate country, under threat of invasion, and in need of support.

If China’s claim to Taiwan is valid, then Taiwan also has an equally valid claim on China.

If China’s claim to Taiwan is valid, then so will its claim to any other country.

China, if you want to claim that Taiwan is a part of you, just grow some balls and invade them already. Or just stop this stupid joke.

Taiwan’s Status Is a Geopolitical Absurdity

polite fiction

A well educated Mainlander who lived outside of China once told Ciro:

Taiwan should not be considered a country by China, because then it would not join back to China when China becomes a democracy, and would be used by the USA to do evil things as they did in the Middle East

Ciro was shocked. He considered that person highly intelligent and not fully brainwashed! Reply:

China claiming that Taiwan is a part of them only drives Taiwan closer to the West! Who wants to be part of a dictatorship unless you have been brainwashed by one?

The US first caved in in 1972 with the Shanghai Communiqué.

News:

Flag of the Republic of China
Figure 50. The flag of Taiwan. Like most modern countries, Taiwan has one. Source.
800px TaipeiROCPresidentialOfficeBuilding
Figure 51. Presidential Office Building of Taiwan (總統府_(臺灣) | 总统府 (台湾)). What is that flag we see on top of the central government building of Taiwan? It appears to have a blue rectangle on the top left! Source.
Two Chinas
Figure 52. It is fun to see that some small random Latin American countries like Paraguay recognize only Taiwan and not Mainland China. Brave warriors!!! Source.
Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Office in the United States from VOA %281%29
Figure 53. Washington DC TECRO. Instead of "embassies", Taiwan has "Taipei Economic and Cultural Representative Offices" (TECROs) (台北经济文化代表处|臺北經濟文化代表處) The just happen to issue VISAs and passports like embassies, but remember, they are not embassies. No flag you see? This is because idiotic countries don’t allow TECROs to have the Taiwan flag. In 2019 Senator Ted Cruz planned on passing a law to allow that though: https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3825086. Source.
xb5qr3asfns41
Figure 54. 2014 cartoon by D Nguyen summarizing the Taiwan China relationship in history. Featuring: fatter and fatter Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1954–1976) on first three cartoons to the left, likely Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1982-1987) to left on the last, and Chiang Kai-shiek (蔣中正) to the right. TODO middle figure on last cartoon. TODO find proper attribution source, originally seen at: https://i.redd.it/xb5qr3asfns41.jpg.
2.19.1.2. Taiwan #1 (2915)

2015 meme started by H1Z1 streamer AngryPug, in which he repeatedly taunts the Chinese streamer Em0 by pretending to be Taiwanese.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=vTqZ9xrxhHk ANGRYPUG’s official YouTube upload of the clip "Taiwan #1" meme.

2.19.2. Xinjiang 新疆

In 2017-2018, details of Uyghur internment camps are emerging.

The keyword is Rule of law 法治: because of a few terrorists, every single Muslim was fucked even if they did not commit any crime.

mQFKa
Figure 55. Rebel Pepper 2017-04 cartoon showing that Xinjiang is like a prison inside a greater prison, which is China itself. Chinese characters read: 新疆(Xinjiang) and 中国(China). TODO source.

Older events:

Terrorist attacks done by Xinjiang separatists:

Notable ones:

2.19.3. Hong Kong 香港

News source: https://www.reddit.com/r/HongKong/ Became larger than r/china during the [2019-hong-kong-anti-extradition-bill-protests].

The solution to Hong Kong’s problem is: give those people easy VISAs to leave China, with priority to the rich/educated ones. Give them free language courses on the country of arrival, and help them find jobs.

News without sections:

2.19.3.1. Hong Kong 97 SNES video game

1995 video game realistically depicts the fight of Hong Kong against the Communist Party predicted to happen at the handover, featuring Bruce Lee (often represented as Jackie Chan) who returned from the grave to join the fight and kick Jiang Zemin’s ass.

The dead body from the game over screen was taken from a still from a video of the 1992 Bosnian War: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WCDWyzZyNdw

The track is a sample of the "I Love Beijing Tiananmen" (我爱北京天安门) Cultural Revolution song that was popular before Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 六四事件 and later became an ironic protest song:

我爱北京天安门
天安门上太阳升

which means:

I love Beijing Tiananmen Square
The sun rises over the Tiananmen

Hong Kong 97 cover
Figure 59. Cover of the Hong Kong 97. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M_aXcH1zDEE The venerable Angry Video Game Nerd made a review of Hong Kong 97.
2.19.3.2. 2019 Hong Kong anti-extradition bill protests
https://youtube.com/watch?v=YhN6jipSHFI Hong Kong Yoga - Sammy J S2 (ep31) published by ABC Comedy on 2019-09-19. Very good.
2.19.3.2.1. Daryl Morey Tweet

2019-10 Daryl Morey, NBA’s Houston Rockets manager sent tweet supporting the Hong Kong protests.

But then he was a coward, removed this tweet, and apologized: https://twitter.com/dmorey/status/1181000808399114240 (archive).

NBA is huge in China.

2.20. What should all pro-democracy people do about China?

To obey is to betray.
To disobey is to serve.

Obéir c’est trahir.
Désobéir c’est servir.

1314227 Obéir cest trahir Désobéir cest servir
Figure 61. "Obéir c’est trahir. Désobéir c’est servir." flyer featuring the cross of Lorraine Source.

2.20.1. Photobombing-like attacks

In online video games:

Explicitly forbidden in China by the law: Real username law (2015).

2.20.1.1. Appropriation attack

An appropriation attack is one where the attackers attempt to associate an existing symbol to their cause.

For example during the [2019-hong-kong-anti-extradition-bill-protests] attackers attempted to use this technique to associate a generic Chinese Chun-Li-like character Mei from Blizzard’s Overwatch game to try and get it blocked in China after the gaming company punished a pro gamer for defending the Hong Kong protests. Coverage https://www.businessinsider.com/blizzard-fans-overwatch-mei-hong-kong-protests-memes-2019-10 (archive).

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Figure 62. Mei from Blizzard’s Overwatch was used in an attempted [appropriation-attack] during the [2019-hong-kong-anti-extradition-bill-protests]. Source.
2.20.1.2. Sport event live broadcast image attacks

NBA in particular is super popular in China, and people sitting at the front row can easily bomb emissions due to the small court size:

Started in particular due to the [daryl-morey-tweet]

2.20.2. What should Western countries do about China?

Companies only care about money and have no long term view, the following must be imposed by governments on Western companies.

First of all, serious sanctions must be pot on companies that sell sensitive things to dictatorships:

The most obvious thing is to go tit for tat on Censorship and completely ban all Chinese-sponsored social media accounts:

Some websites have started marking such accounts, which is a great start, but a straight ban would be better:

But then those websites would lose ad revenue, right? :-)

News about Chinese state media using Western social media:

Accounts that are not labelled as being from the Chinese government, but which support the CCP, must be investigated to determine if they are actually funded by the Chinese government.

Their websites should also be blocked, see: Chinese government media 中国政府媒体. This does have the downsides that:

  • it would be harder to monitor what crazy shit the commies are doing

  • those censorship mechanisms could be reused to block good websites by Western governments that are becoming Evil

But anything that pisses off the CCP is worth it, like there’s much we can learn from their bullshit.

Whenever China kicks out a western journalist who is in China and reports there, the Western country must do the same and kick out a Chinese journalists for a Chinese media.

Another upside is that this would also hugely bolster Censorship circumvention 翻墙 technologies, as every Chinese expat would need to buy a VPN.

And the same must be done for cultural centers that report directly to the CCP such as Confucius institute 孔子学院 and CSSAs.

Western governments must identify raw material dependencies on China, and reduce them, while at the same time forbidding technology transfer to China. China has been trading cheap resources for technology, and we must stop that now.

Unfair Chinese commercial practices must be reciprocated. Chinese companies should be forced to open joint ventures to operate outside of China, which is a trick China uses to control profits and more easily steal IP from Western companies:

Do not underestimate the CCP and its control over every Chinese companies and people. Every Chinese company and person is a potential spy.

This is true for all countries however, and we do not reproach China for its secret service, e.g. Snowden 斯诺登 used Dell as an NSA front-end.

The point is that the West should not underestimate this menace that comes from a Why does Ciro Santilli say that China is a dictatorship? 中国不是独裁！.

Some Chinese spy stories:

image
Figure 63. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2016-09-07 cartoon entitled "宽衣撒币" depicting Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) as a pole dancer and throwing money at other world leaders during the 2016 G20 Hangzhou summit is a reference to how China buys political influence in other countries by promising profitable trade deals with those countries. Source.
2.20.2.1. The West must ban the Chinese telecommunications software and hardware

They are an entry point to spying, censorship and fake news.

2.20.2.1.1. Zoom

American company, with Chinese-born now American Citizen CEO Eric Yuan (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/袁征(袁征), migrated to the US around 1997), and development teams largely China-based to reduce costs.

News:

skynews zoom cabinet coronavirus 4955732
Figure 64. 2020-03-27 photo showing UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson using Zoom on a Cabinet meeting (a high level Government meeting) during Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查. If you don’t properly ban risky dictatorship-linked software, it will get used at the highest levels of Government by clueless people. Source.
2.20.2.1.2. Huawei 华为

Just look at the Chinese name of the company:

  • 华 (China)

  • 为 (to do something for)

How can the West not see this?

No proof is needed. They belong to a Why does Ciro Santilli say that China is a dictatorship? 中国不是独裁！, and therefore must not be trusted. Doing so is always a risk which we should not take.

At any point the Chinese government could make a request that they cannot deny.

Some news:

nodgcqmwtcg31
Figure 65. "When you send a good joke from your Huawei phone", Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) is also listening and laughing with you, girls. Source.
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Figure 66. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2018-12-10 "Why does the whole world hate me" Huawei cartoon, where Huawei’s shadow shows the hammer and sickle to suggest that Huawei is controlled by the CCP. Source.
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Figure 67. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2019-03-08 showing Huawei slapping the Statue of Liberty with "The Constitution of the United States" when Huawei sued the US Government for violating the Constitution when it banned government agencies from buying Huawei equipment. This illustrates the usual dilemma where China uses Western freedom of speech as a weapon against the West itself. Source.
6507703 1
Figure 68. Cartoon showing a huge China flag branded USB sucking up Western personal and military information like a vacuum cleaner in 2019-04-29 article entitled "Britain will regret doing business with Huawei". TODO cartoon author. Source.
ERYQHj XYAEQsfN
Figure 69. Cartoon suggesting that Huawei is a like a Trojan Horse being gifted to Europe. TODO: source of original non-China generic Trojan Horse background image that was edited and repurposed. Source.
D0XHAnBWkAIP8nj?format=jpg&name=small
Figure 70. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2019-06-22 cartoon depicting Germany, Hungary and the United Kingdom as Gollums from The Lord of The Rings and China as Sauron offering a ring which reads "5G to rule them" and "Huawei" to the Gollums who are eager to obtain it. This is a reference to The Lord of the Rings backstory in which Sauron bribed and controlled the rulers of the world by giving them rings of power. Now that Ciro thinks about it, maybe this was actually Tolkien making a reference to the political situation of his time. Source.
2.20.2.1.3. TikTok 抖音 (Douyin)

News:

2.20.2.2. What should Western media do about China?

When you report something about a person, for fuck’s sake include the person’s name in the title of the article, at the very least the pinyin.

Then, in the body, also add the corresponding Chinese characters on the first mention. This is how you do it: "San Xihou (三西猴)"

Yes, Chinese people also have names. And yes, pinyin has infinitely more homonyms than characters.

In the body of the article, notably in photos, include the exact location of the event if applicable.

City at the very least, but if recognizable, where withing the city.

Yes, China is big! There are many different places in China.

2.20.3. Western companies that comply with Chinese censorship requests

Western governments should prevent companies from complying to Chinese censorship requests, or at least impose fines and sanctions on them.

Citizens should boycott such companies and require them to be punished.

Some hell known companies and events:

EGmvMb6XUAQgYq9?format=jpg&name=900x900
Figure 72. 2019 summary of companies that kowtow to China. Source.
EGikEkFXkAE A8m?format=jpg&name=4096x4096
Figure 73. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2019-10 carton showing several brands kowtowing to Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞), while South Park alone gives the middle finger. Source.
170731Apple 700
Figure 74. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2017-07 showing Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) eating an Apple Inc. logo referring to the many events where Apple gave in to Chinese demands to have access to the Chinese market. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4WBsahU3X4 Stephen Colbert comments in 2015 on how American films make a good image of China to be allowed in China by censors to increase sales.
2.20.3.1. bandinchina GitHub repository

Contains a "List of companies who have apologized to the Chinese government and implemented censorship requests".

It only lists companies that implemented censorship outside of China however (with Hong Kong, Taiwan and Macau defined as outside of China), therefore it is basically a Taiwan flag takedown + Hong Kong / Taiwan censorship list:

Other interesting GitHub repositories: [github-repositories-with-censored-information].

2.21. What should pro-democracy Chinese living in China do about the dictatorship?

First of all, hide and stay safe, unless you can deal the final blow. From World at war, 1973, ep. 16:

A dictatorship is like a snake. If you put your foot on its tail as you do it, it will just bite you and nobody will be helped. You have to strike the head.

Once that is taken care of, a few good options are:

  • hide your thoughts, manipulate your enemies, infiltrate the corporate, political and military power circles, and go up the ladder

  • if you are an technological innovator, leave China and come work for the West. Don’t strengthen commie power.

If you don’t manage to do either of the above, don’t do any technological work. Go work on the fields or washing dishes. Working well for Chinese companies makes the Chinese Dictatorship stronger and more deadly. See also: Embargoes make dictatorships stronger 禁运使独裁更强大.

And regardless: remember your kids that the commies are bastards every day.

2.22. Ciro Santilli’s reply policy 三西猴的回答政策

People get kind of passionate sometimes about politics. And some of them might also be just malicious wumaos, although it is generally not possible to distinguish between them.

If you are not a wumao, consider this:

In order to not waste too much time on those, Ciro Santilli uses the following strategy.

If the original thread post is not very interesting, try to parse it quickly and reply once, always linking to the FAQ, and then unfollow the thread. This shows that you’re still alive, and takes little effort.

Then do your best never to read the inevitable reply again, and above all, never ever reply. An interesting reply never follows from a non-interesting original post. It is hard at first, but you will eventually get the hang of it.

If the user keeps generating notifications, block them as per CONTRIBUTING.md, replying to a single person multiple times is useless.

Never block users for an initial shitposts, just reply with a stupid joke instead. This approach creates more uncertainty and makes you look cooler. Only block if the user is generating multiple notifications.

If a shitpost is made on most other social media except GitHub issues in this repository, e.g. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, immediately block the user on that website if you have the permission to do that, with a canned reply:

Hi <idiot’s name>, if you want a reply, please open an issue at: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues

Note however that this is not possible on idiotic websites like [quora] where such comments may be deleted, possibly automatically, who the fuck knows, e.g. as done at: https://www.quora.com/What-would-happen-if-I-walked-around-Beijing-with-a-t-shirt-that-said-freedom-of-speech-is-pretty-great/answer/Ciro-Santilli/comment/143227962 In that case just link to sections of the FAQ, or mute people, or maybe just block all comments on the post to not waste time with new useless notifications.

This is because it is not worth answering anywhere else where the information will be scattered and impossible to find later on, and especially on websites that are already blocked in China. Shitposts on Stack Overflow and other non-blocked websites are encouraged however, as they further help to get the website blocked in China.

For outbursts of activity from Chinese websites, usually programming (v2ex, hacpai, pingcong), only post the following canned answer and nothing else, because cowards/people who don’t know English from the website might delete your posts, so you shouldn’t waste time there with that shit:

大家你好

在我的GitHub中国FAQ repository我已经回答了好几个关于我常见的问题。

你们要是在那儿找不到一个回答，请在那个repository开一个issue，我马上就回答。

我不要再在这个网页评论。

Finally, don’t forget the golden rule from Proverbs 26:4:

Don’t answer the foolish arguments of fools, or you will become as foolish as they are.

which is now usually seen in the form of unclear attribution:

Never argue with an idiot. They will only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience.

Where basically idiot == someone who creates posts that obviously aren’t teaching you any new useful thing, or that not praising you :-)

Alternatively, there is also the Chinese chengyu version:

对牛弹琴

which means:

Playing the qin to a cow.

which means to talk to someone who does not have intellectual conditions of understanding what you are trying to say, bibliography:

More wumao focused strategies at: How to deal with wumaos 如何应对五毛.

resize,m lfit,w 600,h 800,limit 1
Figure 75. Cartoon depiction of the chengyu "Playing the qin to a cow" 《对牛弹琴》. Source.
duty calls
Figure 76. XKCD 386 "Duty Calls" and the famous "Someone is wrong on the Internet" quote. It is a waste of time to be like that. Source.

2.23. Who is behind this amazing FAQ?

2.23.1. Ciro Santilli 三西猴

2.23.1.1. Ciro Santilli’s wife 三西猴的老婆

Born and raised in China: [why-does-ciro-santilli-love-china-so-much].

Believes to be descendant of the brother of a recent Qing emperor, see also: Ciro Santilli’s claim to the Qing Dynasty throne 三西猴清朝皇帝觊觎.

For this same reason, her father, who Ciro’s wife worships, spent around 10 years in the 50’s for being branded a counter revolutionary rightist (右派) during one of Mao’s purges, possibly:

It is also for this reason that many Manchu changed their names to hide their Manchu origins, which makes reconstructing their family tree much harder, as mentioned at: https://www.scmp.com/article/982136/proud-manchu-reclaims-his-rich-heritage for the purposes of Ciro Santilli’s claim to the Qing Dynasty throne 三西猴清朝皇帝觊觎.

2.24. How do different websites view Ciro Santilli’s profile?

2.24.1. Stack Overflow

The current consensus says that keyword attacks are allowed:

The Chinese law doesn’t I’m afraid: Real username law (2015)

2.24.2. GitHub

GitHub’s site policy can be seen at: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy

If you believe this page violates those policies, you can click the report abuse button on Ciro’s profile, which links to: https://github.com/contact/report-abuse?report=cirosantilli+%28user%29 or you can just contacat support@github.com

If you do so, please feel free to also open an issue on this repository saying why you believe the site policy has been violated.

It will be fun to watch you try, and fail.

This is because you do not understand how important the concept of freedom of speech is in the West, and how amazing it feels when you are right, and it protects you.

The only thing that would work is if the Chinese government makes a gov-takedown on this repo: [github-gov-takedowns], in which case: [strategy-if-this-repo-gets-added-to-github-gov-takedowns].

China’s GitHub censorship history is documented at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub#China

2.24.2.1. GitHub gov-takedowns

GitHub has absolute transparency on Government takedowns, which is awesome: https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns/tree/master/China

This makes that repo into a list of fun things.

As of 2019-05 there had only been only two takedowns by China however, compared to dozens by Russia 俄罗斯. The Chinese commies are not big fans of transparency it seems.

As of 2020-03, besides the Zhao takedown, all other takedowns happened in 2019, and most seem to be Falun Gong/Epoch Times sponsored ways to climb the wall.

The message GitHub shows on the blocked countries is:

Repository unavailable in your location

This repository is currently disabled in your location. For more details please see the takedown notice.

Here are some examples of people reacting to the blocking of https://github.com/programthink/zhao/issues/38 as per https://github.com/github/gov-takedowns/blob/78775b09e64d85f08547287cab204b48b2491192/China/2016/2016-06-08-programthink-zhao.md from China (and likely on the entire repository, which appears to be the block granularity implemented):

To check China only takedowns such as this, we cannot use Great Fire Analyzer, which reports the page as accessible: the only tool I could find so far to capture a page from China a bit like Web Archive was: https://www.geoscreenshot.com which takes screenshots of the websites, but the free trial is very limited, and you can’t share the screenshots. See also: [censorship-monitoring].

2.24.2.1.1. Strategy if this repo gets added to GitHub gov-takedowns

If this happens, we well proceed to create alternative repos china-dictatorship-2, china-dictatorship-3, etc. and it would be fun to see how that gets handled.

Can they add an entire user to gov-takedowns?

But remember that we also have: Mirrors of this page 这个网页的镜像, and that this can be easily rendered as a single HTML page and uploaded to any static website host.

2.24.2.2. GitHub repositories with censored information

For lists of censored information outside of GitHub see: [lists-of-material-censored-in-china].

Content outside of GitHub: [lists-of-material-censored-in-china].

Mentioned in other sections:

Interesting users:

Non-information but also interesting:

2.24.2.2.1. Terminus2049 端点星计划

Jekyl 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.

The "Terminus" in the repo name seems to be a reference to Isaac Asimov’s fictional Terminus planet which is called 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 "World War Terminus" from the 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 自由微博: 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 (岳昕), some other topics include:

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 Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查:

People:

In 2020-06-12 their families received calls saying that they had been charged with Picking quarrels and provoking trouble 寻衅滋事罪:

TODO what are their GitHub accounts? Contributions appear to be anonymized behind: https://github.com/TerminusBot That appears to be just a shared account though, not an actual bot. So how did the police find their true identities? https://github.com/Terminus2049/Terminus2049.github.io/issues/598

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Figure 77. Side-by-side photos of Chen Mei (陈玫) and Cai Wei (蔡伟). Source.

2.24.3. Zhihu 知乎

Some interesting questions not related to Ciro Santilli 三西猴. Ciro related questions at: [zhihu-questions-related-to-ciro-santilli].

liukanshan wire.e7247fbf
Figure 78. The Zhihu 404 page image. When they take the posts down as of 2020, it shows the 404 page which reads "你似乎来到了没有知识存在的荒原" (you seem to have come to a wasteland about which does does not exist any knowledge), and shows this symbol. Source.
2.24.3.1. Ciro Santilli’s Zhihu purge 2019-11-03

Ciro received an email from account@mail.zhihu.com:

您好，Ciro Santilli，很抱歉您的回答受到了牵连，您回答过的问题「github.com@cirosantilli 是谁维护的，为什么会收集邮箱地址？」因「违反互联网相关法律法规」已被删除。

followed by Ciro’s answer to github.com@cirosantilli 是谁维护的，为什么会收集邮箱地址？. Ciro could not login anymore, the login screen showed:

帐号已停用，请联系：user@zhihu.com

So likely someone must have used the fact that this was an edgy personally information release subject issue, and then someone from Zhihu decided to purge Ciro and anyone posts that ever talked about him.

Note that not only the posts made by Ciro himself were deleted: he had never asked any questions or made any Zhuanlan posts himself, only replied to those. But that content made by other users was still removed. Therefore, this is not just a simple user ban, but active censorship.

Ciro’s blocked account:

Furthermore, all questions related to Ciro, including the posts criticizing him such as https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/25600138 (archive), were taken down. This made Ciro laugh: in China, you can’t even criticize that which is censored, or your post also gets taken down.

Ciro then created an anonymous Zhihu account after this event.

2.24.3.1.1. Ciro Santilli’s Zhihu ban 2018-06-25

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 was banned from Zhihu on 2018-06-25 for "politically sensitive" content.

As a result, since that time I will be answering Zhihu questions as issues in this repo with the zhihu label: https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship/issues?q=label%3Azhihu+

I have however never posted anything politically sensitive on Zhihu, unless my name and profile picture have reached that distinction, and therefore the ban is clearly an unfair per-person ban.

But of course, all is fair in love and war, and politics.

Posting any sensitive content on Chinese websites is a waste of time, since it only means that they will be removed and you will waste time creating a new account, I will never do that.

The only significant content I ever posted on Zhihu is the answer to: https://www.zhihu.com/question/46957710/answer/122827944 which is purely technical, and trivial replies on threads that other people have started about me. Have those people been blocked like me?

My posts are still up and it does not appear to be possible for people to see that I have been banned, but whenever I try to take any action on the website a popup appears saying:

由于严重违反 知乎社区管理规定 ，该帐号已被永久禁言

This includes liking, commenting, answering, asking or trying to update my profile to say that I have been blocked.

This message also shows on my public page for everyone to see: https://www.zhihu.com/people/cirosantilli/activities but they use some JavaScript scheme complicated enough that archive.is cannot capture it.

I still get notifications however, but I am unable to reply to them, especially given that all Chinese accounts, unlike mine, have no personal identifiable information due to the understandable fear Chinese citizens have of their own government, even though such accounts might be illegal in theory: Anonymous accounts ban (2017).

The only action that I can take now is to report abusive comments people make to me.

Obviously, the only effect of such ban is that I will create an anonymous account under Tor with a second cell phone if I wish to contribute in the future, and China will have less information about my political interests than before.

The private messages the website sends while banning you are:

知乎管理员 ：您好，根据用户举报，您的帐号发布了「政治敏感」内容，帐号已根据知乎社区规范被永久禁言。处理详情可查看社区服务中心。具体规范请查看知乎社区管理规定。 6月25日 16:37 回复 | 删除

知乎管理员 ：您好，根据用户举报，您的部分个人信息由于不符合知乎用户信息管理规范已被重置。用户名可以在设置页面中修改，修改后会自动进入审核等待通过；其他个人信息可以在个人主页中编辑。感谢您对知乎社区的理解和支持。 6月25日 16:37 回复 | 删除

The ban came soon after I posted a link to my GitHub repo as a comment at: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/21/ice-employee-list-github-linkedin/ maybe they are related.

2.24.3.1.2. Who reported Ciro Santilli on Zhihu

At the same time the ban happened I received a public comment from user "Eureka" https://www.zhihu.com/people/crb912/activities | https://archive.is/1F3t6 on this thread: https://www.zhihu.com/question/46957710 | https://archive.is/PVOLd saying:

你滥用了github， 也滥用了Stackover。这个一个纯粹计算机、编程和知识分享的地方，请不要带入政治性的色彩。请不要这么做， 维护社区的非政治性、中立和技术性纯粹，是每个热爱cs的人应尽的义务。

I am unable to get a URL that shows the comment on archive.is, so I have no proof of this claim. If you trust me, then here is a screenshot: https://imgur.com/a/YCiEEax

Since I expect the ban lists to be private, I find it extremely likely that this was the user who reported me, unless both were simultaneously triggered by a third event which I have not seen. So correct me if I’m wrong here.

Users with the same user id crb912, related "Eureka" username or same profile picture, can be found at:

By Googling the email found on the GitHub repos, we find: http://www.360doc.com/content/15/0809/11/25724933_490492490.shtml | https://archive.is/2UnGL which might, at last, contain a photo of my nemesis.

My public message to the reporter whomever he may be:

While you have also raised issues that were raised a thousand times before, and clearly answered in the FAQ, at least you were able to take some actual action leading to an actual ban, and I respect you for that.

I hope that one day you will redirect that cunning and initiative towards taking down the root cause of the problem, which are the Chinese communist Party and their Firewall themselves.

2.24.3.2. Zhihu questions related to Ciro Santilli

All Zhihu posts related to Ciro Santilli were deleted following Ciro Santilli’s Zhihu purge 2019-11-03. Some had been deleted before.

A random control question that shows that archive.org 404’s are actually deleted questions: https://www.zhihu.com/question/316700165 (archive).

Mentions not yet deleted as of writing:

2.24.3.2.1. github.com@cirosantilli 是谁维护的，为什么会收集邮箱地址？

Asked in 2016-09 after Ciro published: https://github.com/cirosantilli/all-github-commit-emails

Deleted after Ciro Santilli’s Zhihu purge 2019-11-03. Ciro’s answer before deletion:

你用的git config user.email当然是公开的：谁都会git clone就知道了。

问题就是git repository很大，我们不会都clone.

但是github有一个API，收集很多信息，包括邮件。

然后，Google用了那个API给他们的https://cloud.google.com/bigquery/…​信息。

BigQuery对程序员很容易提取信息，是我用的。

我发表邮件以后，两个东西变化了：

  1. Google 把邮件从BigQuery删除

  2. GitHub 更新他们的隐私声明GitHub Privacy Statement

这就是我的木比：保护人们的隐私权

我的README.md更详细地解释。

2.24.4. Quora

Quora is a generally shitty website, with mechanisms that allow wumaos to quench freedom of speech.

Ironically, is it also blocked in China:

Examples of activity related to Ciro Santilli:

Quora is also shitty because wumaos can downvote your answer privately regardless of reputation and make it become collapsed as "Answer may need improvement", which means it goes to the bottom and readers have to click an "expand collapsed answers" button to see it, so that very few people will ever see it.

Then have to appeal and wait for moderators to evaluate it.

Ciro appealed in 2020-03-10 and the answer was reinstated on day later, but by then the question was already not being suggested as much to readers, and the other wumao answers (which criticize the USA rather than answering the question about China).

While there is some probability that the answers themselves are not wumaos, their upvoters almost certainly are and must be investigated.

Other shitty aspects of Quora include:

  • automatically add random topics that you don’t care about to your suggestions, with no easy way to prevent that.

  • questions cannot have more than one sentence. There used to be a question body, but it was replaced with a "link for context". Ridiculous.

As a result, on the few occasions that Ciro posts on Quora, all content will also be mirrored here. Ciro’s China Quora answers include:

2.24.5. PTT Bulletin Board System 批踢踢實業坊

Popular Taiwanese forum system and server from 1995, pre HTML, works from telnet terminal, so likely very programmer heavy, and obviously anti-CCP, as of 2020 often shows Falun Gong 法輪大法 ads.

Ciro Santilli’s appearances on PTT:

Archaic, fucking impossible to learn how to use. Ciro Santilli hasn’t managed yet, so if you want a reply from him, open an issue on this repo instead.

TODO: can anyone comment, without having a Taiwanese university address? This suggests no: https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/1etbvb/anyone_on_pttcc_advice_suggestions/ Also asked at:

Maybe the email requirement is the only way to prevent wumaos from flooding the website.

Normal people see it on a web viewer hosted on: https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/index.html

However it is fucking impossible to web archive that web interface because there is a cookie I’m 18-years-old confirmation before the first connection.

This shows how to connect for the first time: https://www.ptt.cc/index.firstbbs.html

One attempt is:

luit -encoding big5 telnet ptt.cc

But the main page says:

"本站目前暫停開放新帳號註冊。" "This site is currently suspended for new account registration."

And you try new it says: "目前無法註冊帳號![按任意鍵繼續]" "Account cannot be registered at this time."

OK, ptt2 went further:

luit -encoding big5 telnet ptt2.cc

Then there is a registration process that seem to require you to prove that you work at Taiwanese university, but not sure it is mandatory to post.

But I couldn’t find Gossiping there either, which is the only board that matters, so not sure it is on this server.

2.25. Christianity 基督教

The commies are not a fan. But as someone once told me: the commies are not a fan of a bunch of things!

As mentioned at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christianity_in_China there are only a few state approved churches under total CCP control, and the others are forbidden. For example one of them is called the Chinese Patriotic Catholic Association! God and CCP on the same sentence. Pope Pius XII excommunicated people from that organization who were appointing new Bishops!

ac0553ed a46d 43f6 98d8 288ce76901af
Figure 81. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2018-09 cartoon showing Jesus and the Apostles in the Last Supper being arrested by CCP guards. Source.
meal
Figure 82. Zhang Hongtu cartoon showing Mao Zedong and other communist officials at the Last Supper instead of Jesus and the Apostles. Source.
https://youtu.be/wthHB3iTC7M?t=556 Nazi Jew deleted scene from Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979). This movie was almost banned in Britain at the time due to lobbying by Christian groups. If you want to stop Christianity 基督教, don’t put them in jail like the dictators. Do it the same way you stop dictators: with comedy. Otherwise, the dictators remain in power, and next person in jail, will be you.

2.26. Gay rights LGBT权利

Yes, gay people are also discriminated to different degrees in Western countries, and even legally prohibited notably in the Islamic world.

But like all minorities, they are generally more fucked in dictatorships, since they can be easily crushed by majorities.

Therefore, all gay people must be against the CCP:

See also:

tiananmen.kiss 1
Figure 84. Lesbian couple kissing in Tiananmen Square with Mao’s painting and confused/disgusted guards in the background who are likely about to call their superiors to ask what they should do. The photo likely surfaced in 2006 as mentioned in salon.com which said it came form Boing Boing. It was not however picked up by any major website. Ciro actually thought this could have been ripped from some television series due to the amazing expression on the guards' faces. TODO: find the original Chinese source, translate the watermarks, and see if their identity is known. Source.
Love play in China
Figure 85. Qing dynasty (18th–19th c.) panel from a scroll showing two men engaging in foreplay, apparently located in the Kinsey Institute as of 2005. For an ancient depiction of heterosexual sexual activity, see this image. Source.

2.27. Falun Gong 法輪大法

Religion created in the '80s by a Chinese dude called Li Hongzhi.

With the support of the Communist Party to Qigong movements, it reached 70 million believers in 1999, at which point the commies decided they had to be shut down and banned the religion.

Li fled to the USA and lives near New York, where he continues to run the religion as of 2020.

TAM Arrest4
Figure 86. Falun Gong believer arrested by police in Beijing Tiananmen Square in 15 August 2001. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClvX7ED8UUI Tim and Eric’s Zone Theory. If you want to stop Falun Gong 法輪大法, don’t put them in jail like the dictators. Do it the same way you stop dictators: with comedy. Otherwise, the dictators remain in power, and next person in jail, will be you.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=IAQ14AnAsmU YouTubber under pseudonym "Aarvoll" (TODO full real name, face shown in channel all the time) tells about his experience playing trumpet for Shen Yun in 2013 as a non-believer and Falun Gong in general. Reading the sacred books and doing Falun Gong exercises were mandatory. He also talks about FLG downplays the fact that it is highly organized. Ciro agrees/finds what he says convincing. In one interesting anecdote, he tells how although Li Hongzhi claims to be a God, he looked like an average slightly overweight dude, and had a trumpet since he used to play it, but couldn’t really play it because he hadn’t practiced in so long. He also comments on the obvious fact that Li does not speak English very well, e.g. on the Shen Yun tour bus he was there one day answering questions, and a translator was needed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwoO7Nekmpw&t=445 Christine Marie, founder of Voices for Dignity which takes care of FLDS leaves, was interviewed in VICE documentary "Polygamist Mafia: Escaping The Kingston Clan". While Ciro does not believe Falun Gong is as extreme as FLDS, he does really like the things Christine says. E.g., she calls "cult leaders" with the neutral religious form prophet, just like Ciro, and mentions the important fact that "And the another thing that the public doesn’t realise, is that there are also beautiful thing within those communities". This is the mindset of tolerance that the world needs.

2.27.1. Why is it important to talk about Falun Gong?

The main reason Ciro Santilli 三西猴 emphasizes FLG is that it shows how the CCP can mercilessly crush a 70M strong group (according to CCPs own statistics) out of a population of 1.3B in 2000, i.e. 5% of the population, and of course not because of Does Ciro Santilli support FLG just because his wife and mother-in-law do it?, since Ciro is completely and totally unbiased.

If that number is correct, Ciro wonders curious what you would consider an important movement? :-)

Anything much larger would take down the government and change China’s history forever.

OK, maybe the fact that 69M of those were likely old ladies didn’t help much either. Tip to next prophet: make something that appeals to aspiring military officers.

Let’s try to gather some well sourced footage showing huge numbers of believers on the streets:

GuangzhouPractice big 700x420
Figure 87. Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in Guangzhou, China, 1998. Source.
1a1744bca5595d8dc0c0aa3ca1280f04
Figure 88. Thousands of Falun Gong practitioners in Liaoning Industrial Exhibition, China, likely 1998. Source.
chengdu
Figure 89. Hundreds of Falun Gong believers in Chengdu, China, 1998. Source.

2.27.2. Does Ciro Santilli believe in or practice Falun Gong? 三西猴相信法轮功吗？

No, Ciro is agnostic (不可知论) and therefore believes that all the metaphysics that FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志 says is bullshit.

Here are some things that he doesn’t like about Falun Gong for example: [things-ciro-santilli-dislikes-about-falun-gong].

Ciro believes Falun Gong can be split into two parts, like any other religion:

Ciro thinks that FLG’s self-help part could potentially be good for you, just like many other meditative practices such as Yoga, Buddhist meditation, Tai chi, deep Catholic prayer, etc. As far as he has heard, all of it sounded good standard religious self-help: be peaceful, be good to others, etc. Like any other well managed religion, FLG does have good things to offer, see also: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GwoO7Nekmpw&t=445 Christine Marie, founder of Voices for Dignity which takes care of FLDS leaves, was interviewed in VICE documentary "Polygamist Mafia: Escaping The Kingston Clan". While Ciro does not believe Falun Gong is as extreme as FLDS, he does really like the things Christine says. E.g., she calls "cult leaders" with the neutral religious form prophet, just like Ciro, and mentions the important fact that "And the another thing that the public doesn’t realise, is that there are also beautiful thing within those communities". This is the mindset of tolerance that the world needs..

However Ciro believes that the metaphysics is all complete and utter bullshit, child stories made up by Li Hongzhi, and just as real as Father Christmas or the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Also the "obligation to reach Salvation" is boring like for many other prophetic religion.

From a purely strategic point of view, the metaphysics is a trade-off:

  • some people will believe you are a freaking living God

  • others will laugh at you and say you are a charlatan

It may be argued however that Li played this card beautifully: since all Chinese power is concentrated in the CCP, any non-CCP movement dies out, so he was better off long run playing the metaphysics game. The only other choice would have been joining the CCP.

To Ciro it is obvious that Falun Gong is just one of the many very similar movements that came out of the Qi Gong Boom, such as: Zhong Gong 中华养生益智功 (中功). It just happens to be the one that survived due to better luck and strategy.

The absolute truth is already known by the prophet, although he does not want to give clear evidence for reasons: FLG never makes any predictions that can be reasonably verified by non-believers, and Ciro finds that utterly boring. There’s no fun in living in a world where the absolute truth has been found.

For these reasons, Ciro cannot bother to read even into the self-help part: how can you read that when there is so much bullshit every other page?

Ciro would really like to know if LHZ really believes in FLG himself, or is just a complete manipulating charlatan, but unfortunately we will never know that. Just imagine if before he died he published a video saying: "it was a joke, gotcha!". Now that would be epic!

Since Ciro is good-natured, it’s hard for him to believe that he doesn’t believe in anything, how can anyone be that evil? Maybe he believes in part of it, but made up some stuff to sell it better, maybe with good intentions that selling the fake part would also lead more people to see the good part?

Like any other prophetic religion, FLG gives tiny evidence that you can directly feel through meditation. The energies, which Ciro believe are real feelings. And then using that entry point asks you to believe a whole lot more, that you can’t feel: FLG never makes any predictions that can be reasonably verified by non-believers.

This becomes especially strong when a critical mass of believers is reached, and then they start interpreting all sorts of events as miracles, and you start to believe other believers without questioning them, and a circle is formed.

This post by a former believer gives what Ciro feels is a realistic account that matches Ciro’s observations: Me and Li by Ben Hurley (2017).

And yet, all those who love freedom, must oppose FLG ban, or be themselves enslaved by tyrants themselves: Why does Ciro Santilli say that democracy is a religion just like Falun Gong?.

In any case, at least FLG got one thing right: the commies are evil, and we have to get rid of them.

2.27.3. Is Falun Gong a religion? 法轮功是一个宗教吗？

If asked if they follow a religion, most FLG believers will say "no".

E.g. they call themselves "practitioners" or "students" (学员) instead of "believers", and their peers "practitioner colleagues" (同修). And if you say you don’t believe in their FLG metaphysics bullshit, they will often reply "he does not understand". To them, it is not about belief, the truth is clear, and you just don’t see it yet. To this you should reply: "and you don’t understand that Li Hongzhi is a master manipulator dude who deceived you and millions of others".

But Ciro Santilli 三西猴 strongly believes that this is just a language barrier/FLG propaganda question (see also "Different levels of truth" from [orange-papers]), and that 99.99% of people in the West would classify FLG as a religion just like Christianity 基督教 if they are told about FLG’s beliefs:

  • absolute truth comes from an enlightened prophet, who is perfect and has superhuman abilities

  • weekly meetings (学法 "study the law (of the universe (of FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志))"）where they read from a sacred book, either written by the prophet, or transcribed from his presentations to disciples, including the disciples questions, much like traditional Chinese texts like The Analects of Confucius, just like Christians read from the Bible over and over again.

    In both cases, some believers claim that sometimes even reading the same text again gives them new insight.

  • prescribed daily meditation exercise hours, somewhat like Muslim Salah prayers which they call 发正念 (fa1 zheng4 nian4), which means "send righteous thoughts". They seem to believe that this meditation helps external good magic things happen, so it is half meditation half prayer.

  • longer "less mandatory" Qigong-like (气功) exercises followed by a meditation (打坐) and which they collectively call 修炼 "practice austerities". note that this term is borrowed from Taoism but possibly with different precise meaning. There are exactly 5 exercises (meditation being the fifth) some with a fun supernatural name:

    • Buddha Stretching a Thousand Arms

    • Falun Standing Stance

    • Penetrating the Cosmic Extremes

    • Falun Cosmic Orbit

  • higher intelligent beings

  • other dimensions, which some select people with vision superpowers can see

  • aliens that look like humans are amongst us, they gave us part of our modern technology, some are evil, others not so evil

  • meetings in which people tell their religious testimonies ("experience sharing" TODO Chinese name, possibly just "分享修炼的美好", e.g. source): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Testimony#Religion

    As Jesus put it in Matthew 18:20:

    For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them

    which highlights the critical believer mass effect of reinforced beliefs.

  • an impending final judgment-like event, which will happen "very soon" (unspecified date), and in which the just will be rewarded

    Ciro predict that when FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志 dies, the claim will be that he went to another dimension so save us all, therefore putting this final judgment on hold, a bit like Jesus.

  • street preaching (讲真相 "truth-telling") with stands and leaflets on the streets exactly like Jehovah’s Witnesses.

    The Falun Gong organization also specifies guidelines on how to preach, although these might not be canon, even though if they are not, it is extremely likely that LHZ is directly involved in their specification

    Falun Gong has also used phone call preaching.

    All of this is part of their effort to "save people (救人)", i.e. convert them to Falun Gong.

  • non-believers are fundamentally different from believers. Although non-followers who do good things are actually doing FLG without knowing it.

    FLG has a specific terminology for non-believers, which is translated in English as "ordinary people" (常人), as opposed to Falun Gong Believers, which Li calls Falun Gong disciples (大法弟子).

    Non-FLG people should therefore logically call Falun Gong believers abnormal people (异常人) in return, much like Ciro likes to call the Chinese who call him 老外 as "老内".

    Like other aspects of FLG however, this appears in other religions, e.g. my mother mentioned the funny term used by her Protestant’s group term but Ciro forgot it, and you can see it in Harry Potter as well: The Muggles.

  • You can support FLG by doing X and Y, it is not mandatory, but why wouldn’t you since you are saving other people?

  • alternate dimensions

  • pre-civilization: civilization is actually much older than what we believe, and was supe radvanced, but societal collapse events led us to forget about it, a bit like atlantis.

  • Maybe FLG will make you healthier, but no promises, but it will make you a better person, and that’s why you should do it, but if you really really believe, you get healthier. But people who seemed to be believers also die, because deep within their hearts, there was a belief problem.

  • the CCP is evil, not figuratively, but literally as in they are representatives of, or evil supernatural beings themselves. E.g. Jiang Zemin 江泽民 (1989-2002) is actually an evil frog in some alternate dimension, literally, not just memecally. The Chinese Government is literally responsible for creating Covid-19. They give the CCP too much credit. The CCP are just a bunch of lazy and greedy people like you and me.

From this, it is obvious that Falun Gong is just a New Age (ttps://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/新纪元运动[新纪元运动]) syncretic religion combining Qigong, Buddhism, some aspects of Christianity 基督教, and whatever other crazy things FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志 believes in.

Or you could call Falun Gong a cult, which is nothing but a new/small religion with negative connotation, and thus meaningless.

FLG is very similar to Scientology in Ciro’s view: a new religion that mixes elements of both old and new. And just like any other religion, their practice must be allowed.

But consider this: how to classify what a religion is?

Some would answer: science is what every one 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?

And aren’t pro-democracy believers also taking actions based solely on a shared belief, possibly organized by a pro-democracy leader?

From a purely strategic point of view, the "religion" denomination would be:

  • good to FLG because the concept of freedom of religion carries considerable weight in the West

  • bad for FLG because people who already have a religion would be less likely to try it out and start believing

    Falun Gong’s recruitment strategy is to focus on the exercises first, and in particular its health benefits and then as some people start to feel things, they start introducing the metaphysics.

See also: "Different levels of truth" from [orange-papers].

2.27.3.1. Is Falun Gong a cult? 法轮功是邪教吗？

Falun Gong does share many many many characteristics with what many people classify as a "cult", see e.g.: [orange-papers], so "yes" could be a reasonably answer.

However, Ciro Santilli 三西猴 strongly believes that so does any other existing religion e.g. Christianity 基督教, and that Falun Gong is not any worse or better than those other well known religions.

Ciro therefore believes that the only reasonable stances are to either:

  • be against all religions (including Christianity and Falun Gong), and classify all of them as Cults

  • allow both Christianity and Falun Gong to exist, and support religious freedom

but not "oppose Falun Gong" and support Christianity.

Some people will say: Falun Gong is a cult because it is too new and therefore obviously fake!

So, if I tell a lie today, will it become true in a thousand years? Or a truth today become a lie? The Romans called Christianity 基督教 the "Cult of Jesus"!

Try sending an email to LHZ asking him to prove his powers to you :-)

Others will say: Falun Gong is a cult because its prophet is still alive!

But then, worry not, because Li Hongzhi was born in 1951, and therefore will almost certainly die by 2040, unless he truly is a living God as he claims.

Now, for the really important question of weather Falun Gong is a "good" or "bad" religion, Ciro Santilli 三西猴 has seen absolutely nothing in it that is worse than any other major religion say, e.g., Christianity 基督教.

Some possibly neutral Cult analysts analyzing if FLG is good or bad:

Against:

In the end however, since there is nothing obviously completely creepy about FLG, all such discussions are basically equivalent to "is the Left better than the Right", and cannot be answered.

One interesting linguistic aspect is that "cult" normally translates in Chinese as "邪教" which means "Evil religion".

As mentioned before, Ciro does not believe that FLG is an "Evil Cult", just another "Acceptable Cult", and therefore would not use "邪教" to describe it.

Amusingly, Li calls the communists Communist Evil Party (中共邪党) in cannon, well played: https://gb.falundafa.org/chigb/jiangfa5_2.htm

The word "Cult" is much more ambiguous in the West however, and does not necessarily imply "Evil" in certain contexts, just "worship".

For example, People from Ciro Santilli 三西猴's mother’s Protestant Church in Brazil, all say that they are going "to the cult" when referring to when they are going to church to pray, sing and read the Bible together.

And of obviously, the origin of the word "cult" is exactly the same as that of "cultivate" as in "cultivate the crops" (which is also how Falun Gong believers refer to practicing Falun Gong: "cultivation practice"). All of those come from the Latin "colō", which means simply "to protect".

2.27.3.2. Orange Papers

Down as of 2020-04, 2016-02-05 archive

This is an amazing website talking about Cults and many other things! TODO who is the author? Copyright says by "A. Orange". Is it the real name, or just a pun for "I ate an orange"?

And the website also has a Free Tibet flag at the bottom.

Many of the points highlighted at are very very interesting and Ciro feels that they apply strongly to Falun Gong 法輪大法:

There are also however some points which Ciro feels don’t apply, and Ciro praises Falun Gong for those:

  • "Dual Purposes": not much of that, most of their propaganda is "we are persecuted unfairly by China", not "let’s help the poor"

  • "The End Justifies The Means": Li has made it clear that believers must follow the laws of their countries. Cults that violate this tend to not last as long, this is the smart move for cult leaders.

And some points which Ciro feels apply which were mentioned in some other article, (or maybe in Orange Papers but he couldn’t find them, TODO find reference?)

  • "No time for fun": how could you possibly spend leisure time watching television, etc. when you could be saving the world instead?

  • "Focus on the persecution of the Cult": while obviously people who have been persecuted have the right, and almost an obligation, to look for help and share their stories, it is also clear that this is a selling point for the Cult.

    Why would a nation state attack a Cult? This could give the impression that it is because there is something powerful and true in the Cult, and actually menaces this nation state.

    For example, Falun Gong puts huge emphasis on its persecution in China, much like the Martyrdom of the Catholic Saints is highly emphasised.

  • "Careful control of your imsage": the cult leader is a master at controlling how people view him.

    One aspect of that, is to limit your public appearances to situations in which you have the most control, and notably being surrounded by your believers.

    Li does not announce where he is going, even though he is followed by millions: he just shows up, and local believers whisper to one another and come to see him.

    This reminded Ciro of the following 2012 video he watched, in which VICE was allowed to visit and interview Siberian prophet Vissarion (real name Sergey Anatolyevitch Torop Серге́й Анато́льевич То́роп, AKA "The Russian Jesus"), and they note how well he controlled his appearance.

This is especially interesting, because the website does not mention Falun Gong at all it seems: it really seems that all those cults are very similar.

It should also be mentioned though that these points extend to any type of human organization, e.g. other religions, political parties, job associations, etc.

2.27.4. What are the canonical Falun Gong texts?

It appears that Falun Gong cannon is present at: https://falundafa.org/

It contains LHZ's approved texts/speech transcriptions, which are sacred.

The only sacred version is Chinese which is a sacred language, and of which there is only one perfect revision. Islam also appears to place great importance on the sacredness of Arabic in which Mohamed first spoke, perhaps even more: https://nationalinterest.org/feature/plight-uyghurs-why-muslims-wont-speak-their-brethren-112466 Protestants and later the Catholic church, have moved away from such really bad strategy however, the accessibility of Christianity is seen on the entrance of many many churches which have a sign "ALL are welcome". Well played.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 heard LHZ claims the specifically chose to reincarnate in China this last time.

The English translation is made by followers, and gets new revisions to reduce translation imperfections.

However, the Chinese language seems to be fundamentally sacred, and there might never be a sacred English version approved by LHZ.

LHZ is of course a de-facto God with superpowers, and can of course speak all languages, but for reasons he didn’t just write an English translation himself.

This is a reasonable command to download the English cannon for grepping:

wget -r -l inf --no-remove-listing --no-clobber --no-parent -w 2 https://en.falundafa.org/falun-dafa-books.html

TODO: need to find a way to wrap lines, otherwise grep might fail on sentences.

But funnily the Canon books appear to all be copyrighted, likely "to avoid other people from modifying his sacred text", which is funny since the dude’s the voice of absolute truth of the universe, but you still gotta copyright that I guess.

Nothing else is canonical. LHZ seems to have said that there are enlightened followers, but has not specified who, so we can’t derive canon from anyone else.

Notably, FLG media such as https://www.minghui.org/ is believer led and thus not canonical, even though believers have very high confidence in it, and LHZ directly supports it.

2.27.5. Does Ciro Santilli support FLG, or just use it because it is censored?

Ciro Santilli doesn’t support FLG specifically, only freedom of religion. See of course: Does Ciro Santilli support FLG just because his wife and mother-in-law do it?.

Ciro uses it in his usernames simply because it is the most banned and censored one in China today.

He considers FLG a religion like any other, and he is against its ban, as that of all other religions.

He also believes that freedom of speech and democracy imply that FLG and other religions will exist. If you want freedom, you have to accept other people’s choices.

2.27.6. How is it like to live with Falun Gong believers?

This will obviously vary from believer to believer, but here is my experience.

Like any other religion that is taken seriously, they spend several hours per week doing their standard religious activities: Is Falun Gong a religion? 法轮功是一个宗教吗？.

I never seen them, or anyone we know from FLG say or do something that I consider morally incorrect because of FLG.

This does not prevent my wife from working normally.

My mother-in-law, who is retired, dedicates all her time to Falun Gong when she is not taking care of the house.

My mother is also religious (Protestant), and I get a very similar feeling about both groups.

Like other religions, Falun Gong gives them meaning in life, and I admire that they pursue their belief energetically.

I much prefer that my mother-in-law does Falun Gong, which is a noble meaningful goal, rather than watch stupid crap on television.

Also, although I am agnostic, I also live in a similar way.

My religion is that of science and technology, and I pursue it fervently by trying to learn and teach it and spend several hours a week doing that, even when it does not give me money immediately.

If I pursue my meaning, why should I prevent anyone from pursuing theirs?

Previously, my wife and mother-in-law would sometimes try to persuade me to learn FLG, which was annoying.

But every time I told them very clearly that I know where to download the books if I want to, and that I may never want to read them, and that my wife must either accept this fact or leave me.

And they have accepted that: they think I’m a good person, and they can accept that you can also be a good person even without doing FLG.

I do feel Falun Gong makes my mother-in-law more reluctant to use or actively search for medication or treatment. But I think it is also linked to the fact that she didn’t have a very good education or a good health system around. However, if we give her something, she will take it. My wife does not have any resistance to medication.

One thing that does worry me is that my mother in law sleeps too little every night, doing one of the Falun Gong meditations late in the evening, and then waking up very early to a long series of reading and exercise sessions.

Bibliography:

2.27.7. In the Tweet about his mother in law, Ciro Santilli says "correctional facility", but reeducation through labour has been abolished

He was not very precise here, the precise term is "jail". He was not talking about: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Re-education_through_labor Unfortunately it is not possible to edit a Tweet.

2.27.8. Falun Gong is completely different in the West than it was in China

I believe that it has changed.

But isn’t that the case of every cultural religious movement that migrates to a completely new culture?

Main points which may have changed:

  • It has become more organized.

    But why shouldn’t they organize to defend themselves now that they have the chance without being put into prison?

    The CCP is highly organized and has way more resources.

  • Less emphasis is given to the religious/mystical aspect, and more to the corporal exercises, and health aspect.

    This may be because people in the "West" are:

    • are "scientific-educated" atheists who wouldn’t go for a "religion"

    • already have other religions, which would view FLG as a taboo

Also maybe only the richest and most educated believers managed to escape China, and thus the movement carried that bias outside China.

If you know more ways in which it may have changed, let me know.

But 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 if it has changed, now that it has changed, maybe China should unban it?

See also:

2.27.9. FLG has been funded by the US government at least once, therefore it is evil

1.5M USD in 2010 for a FLG controlled internet freedom group https://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/8678760.stm

But well, if you are going to do something anyway, and someone offers you money, why wouldn’t you take it?

Taking the money does of course give a "bad impression" that someone is trying to buy influence, but does it in itself imply that you are doing something bad?

But do you really think that the US government paid that to buy influence in FLG? What would they force upon that FLG group that they didn’t already want to do? Isn’t it more likely that the US government wanted them to continue doing exactly what they were doing?

Every government funds groups it supports, it is an all out war I suppose. Compare that to the propaganda funds of the CCP.

What about the funding of political campaigns, which vastly outnumbers 1.5M USD every year?

2.27.10. FLG is illegal in China, we must follow the law

This might be a bad law that should be changed.

It was perfectly legal for Nazis to kill Jews. Does it make that right?

But many times, the commies don’t even bother passing a law, they just fuck people anyways without one: Rule of law 法治.

2.27.11. FLG is fake 法轮功是假的

The same can be argued about any other religion or political belief of type: it is better if we organize society in this or that way.

How can you disprove their belief, when as in any other religion, every affirmation made hinges on "miracles only happen around when true believers are around" or "only true believers can perceive evidence in their hearts / minds directly". He died of cancer or Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查? Not a true believer, deep withing his heart, something was wrong.

Conversely, do you understand the full sequence of experiments that imply quantum field theory? Have you seen videos of those experiments? Have you attended live demonstrations? Do you understand the construction of the experimentation apparatus? Yet, why do you believe it?

More importantly: what do you propose that should be done about it? Should we kill followers? Or is jail enough?

Also do let me know when you have achieved irrefutable proof that democracy/freedom of speech are the optimal ways to organize the government: Why does Ciro Santilli say that democracy is a religion just like Falun Gong?.

2.27.11.1. FLG never makes any predictions that can be reasonably verified by non-believers

Exactly, just like any other Is Falun Gong a religion? 法轮功是一个宗教吗？, this is why Ciro Santilli is agnostic and things Falun Gong metaphysics is bullshit.

The closest claims to observable Ciro has heard are:

  • when pictures are taken in sacred events, notably Shen Yun Performing Arts 神韵艺术团, sometimes you can see magic Falun energy wheels in the pictures

  • in the homes of some followers, small magic good plants-like fungi-like things have grown

    e9c2b07e224d28984998a094deb53f85
    Figure 90. Image of the magic good small plants that grew on a believer’s home. They took a photo and it published on Minghui as a 2018 Chinese New Year good wish page to FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志. If any biologist reads this, for the love of God send me a Wikipedia page with the possible species. TODO transcribe the Chinese. Source.

  • the sacred books of some believers had a closed lotus flower when they were bought, and after several years, the flower opened

but Ciro suspects they are not even canon, just believer oral culture.

Of course, like every other religion, reality happens to be is constructed in a way that prevents non-believers to verify anything with their eyes in a reproducible way.

Or a Jesus put it in Luke 4:

Then the devil took him to the holy city and had him stand on the highest point of the temple.

"If you are the Son of God," he said, "throw yourself down. For it is written:

“'He will command his angels concerning you,

and they will lift you up in their hands,

so that you will not strike your foot against a stone.'"

Jesus answered him, "It is also written: 'Do not put the Lord your God to the test.'"

Ah good old prophets, their tricks haven’t changed a bit in 2 thousand years! This is why Ciro Santilli 三西猴 follows instead the religion of science and freedom of speech, because those religions instead say:

Test your God. Test your God a billion times. And if your God proves wrong just once, disbelieve it.

The Pontius Pilate Scene from The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) comes to mind, quotes:

Pontius: It’s also said that you do miracles? Is this good magic or bad magic? Can we have some sort of demonstration?

Jesus: No, I’m not a trained animal, I’m not a magician.

Pontius: Well, that’s disappointing. This means that you are just another Jewish politician.

and:

Pontius: It’s one way to change the way that people live, but you want to change the way that they think and that they feel.

Jesus: All I’m saying is the change will happen with love. Not with killing.

Pontius: Either way it’s dangerous. It’s against Rome. It’s against the way the world is. In killing or loving, it’s all the same. It simply doesn’t matter how you want to change things, we don’t want them changed.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pXGsio9H1xs The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) - Pontius Pilate Scene (5/10) | Movieclips.

2.27.12. Many people both are against censorship and FLG

Ciro know that, and that supporting FLG is "bad" for his public image with most Chinese, including those that are against censorship.

But without censorship, there will be democracy, and with democracy FLG followers will have voting rights, and FLG will become legal.

Ciro thinks that the situation is very similar to Scientology in the USA today: most people dislike it, but believe that you can believe whatever you want.

Isn’t it convenient when a dictatorship gets rid of those weirdos for you? But not so much when suddenly you or your family is the weirdo…​

If you are not ready to accept the beliefs of others, dictatorship is the only choice for you.

It is also interesting to note how Falun Gong is a good source of Censorship circumvention 翻墙 material.

2.27.12.1. Why does Ciro Santilli say that democracy is a religion just like Falun Gong?

Because it also specifies irrational and fundamental aspects of how one should live, notably voting and freedom of speech.

Like the Cult of CCP has one fundamental belief: the Party is always right, or as mentioned in [orange-papers] section "The Guru is always right." (highlight by Ciro):

The Guru, his church, and his teachings are always right, and above criticism, and beyond reproach.

In some cults, the guru is dead, but the principle is the same. I use the word "guru" loosely here; in many cults the charismatic leader has the title of minister, priest, yogi, swami, prophet, or all-knowing wise man. Or even, "Chairman Mao." In any case, the leader is always right.

And they also claim that Alcoholics Anonymous could be characterized as a cult. Very cool. What else could be powerful enough to get you off a physical addiction, than a mental addiction, right?

Ban FLG, and you have banned democracy.

Accept democracy, and you will have FLG.

There is no in-between.

2.27.12.2. Falun Gong had to be banned because it was a threat to the stability of the country

Then they link to the Taping Rebellion:

Of course FLG was a threat to the stability of the country.

It is, as Ciro Santilli 三西猴 has said, a highly organized political power: People from movement X are only in it for political power.

However, democracy is a threat to the stability country in the exact same way:

Anything that goes against a dictatorship is a threat to the stability of the country.

2.27.13. Many people say they do FLG only to get VISAs to the USA

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 heard this a few times, and I believe it has happened.

But I don’t see how this is relevant at all to this discussion:

  • if they are not really FLG believers, they should be prosecuted, but this says nothing about the real FLG believers,

  • if they are, then why wouldn’t they seek a VISA, since they are in constant threat of going to jail or worse in China, and the USA law gives them that right?

Sample news:

2.27.14. I have personally seen people do bad things because of Falun Gong

Either direct suicide or dying because of not taking medication.

First, I’m not saying I don’t believe you, and I’m sorry about what happened.

But your testimony is worthless unless you give the following:

  • clear unique personal identification

    This is because the CCP has thousands of wumaos who could make fake reports.

    There are basically two ways to do that:

    1. your testimony is done in video form on YouTube clearly showing your face as you make it

    2. links between a notable social media presence that is hard to achieve, e.g. Twitter with many followers, Stack overflow with a lot of rep, and the account

      Either of those must contain / link to information that uniquely identifies you. Generally, full name, city and date of birth is enough.

  • a precise testimony that states exactly what you saw happen with your own eyes, or heard from people that are very close to you.

    The testimony must include:

    • when the events happened

    • where they happened, in which city at the very least

    • the full names of who did what

    This is to:

    • make it easier to verify the truth of the event

    • uniquely identify the event so we don’t count a single event multiple times

If you do provide all of the above, I add your report to a list of reports that I will maintain. This list does not exist yet because there were no valid reports yet.

Next consider this:

  • are you sure that Falun Gong made the person do the bad thing, and that the person wouldn’t have done it anyway?

    Did someone from Falun Gong told the person to do it?

    I bet that if you look into patients of psychiatrists, you will find more suicides than average. So should we ban psychiatry?

  • are you sure that the order came from LHZ, and that it was not just some disgruntled local leader using Falun Gong for his personal madness and doing things he did not approve?

    Branch Davidians were inspired by Christianity 基督教. So should we ban Christianity? What about the majority of Christians who have never done anything bad?

  • only statistics have any meaning, and it would require a very large number of reports to make up statistics, so you will likely be wasting your time. I will do my part and maintain a list however.

  • if we ask for FLG believers to compile a list of horrors they have suffered, which they have already been doing since the start of the persecution, I bet that their list will be much longer than yours, because they are so well organized

2.27.15. FLG does not have proof of their persecution claims

How much proof do you think they would be able to get when there is no freedom of the press?

Do you think that forbidding a 70 million person religion could have gone smoothly?

Do you think the thousands of personal accounts of human rights violations that exist are all fake, and don’t indicate that many, many more have taken place but fallen under censorship?

Conversely, there is no reliable proof that FLG is bad as claimed by CCP that has been verified by international media.

2.27.16. Someone from movement X did something bad, therefore the movement should be banned

By this logic, everyone should go to jail. The law should only punish individuals.

The communist party, which has had continuous power since 1949, killed millions during the Cultural Revolution 文化大革命 (1966-1976). Surely they must be banned, no?

But the CCP has changed so much since those days, I hear you say.

I agree. And so has FLG.

Or if you like shitty movies: Minority Report (2002).

2.27.16.1. Movement X tells people to do something bad, therefore the movement should be banned

E.g. kill.

Yes, convincing someone to do something bad is as bad as doing it yourself of course, and must be forbidden.

Now proceed to prove that FLG made and will continue making people do bad things, going through:

2.27.17. People from movement X are only in it for political power

For every desire of the masses, there will be amoral representatives that will step to use that power.

Still, those representatives cannot gain power if there is no backing desire from society.

The only advantage of democracy, is that those representatives have to pretend harder to do things for that group to retain their power.

Ciro does not like that Falun Gong tends to not call itself a political force, when it clearly is. But full disclosure is not a legal obligation, and many many media outlets don’t really disclose their obvious political connections. See also: FLG downplays the fact that it is highly organized.

https://youtu.be/ArfGyo6HQ_E?t=1175 Ciro really liked what Doctor Matthew N. Schmalz said on this VICE documentary about Hyung Jin Moon's and his Unification movement ("the Moonies" split-off religion. "I think that any new religion needs a constituency. And especially for a group that is new, that is relatively small, making connections with other groups that might have similar commitments is something that can be quite productive if you are a leader of a new religion". As long as everyone plays the democracy game through democracy rules, peace tends to be maintained, and it is easier for multiple different beliefs to coexist. Falun Gong has obviously gone in this political direction, and that is a positive sign about the religion.
2.27.17.1. FLG supports Donald Trump 法轮功支持特朗普

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 believes he has heard praises to Trump directly in Li Hongzhi's speeches, but could not find a source.

But of course, so long as those respect the laws of the country, they are free to do it and must not be interfered. As if other major American media didn’t have political agendas.

It is therefore extremely likely that 99.999% of Falun Gong believers also support Trump.

This is exactly the same, in fact, as Christian groups which always gather behind "the right".

In the case of the Falun Gong however, Trump has been vocal about China’s threat, and therefore is a much needed ally of the movement.

Trump’s immigration policies have turned Asian Americans towards the democrat opposition however as of 2019: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/5/13/18308137/asian-american-voters-immigration-democrats-donald-trump

One saving point of the republicans for Asians is the opposition to university quotas instance, which many Asians feel blocks their high performing kids from top schools for less deserving Black students. This also plays into possible cross Asian-Black racism tensions.

2.27.18. Western media has exaggerated reports on FLG for propaganda reasons

Possibly true, but which reports are you talking about specifically?

All that I care about is:

  • it is censored today

  • if you do it you go to jail

  • there were tens of millions of followers at the time of the ban

which I think are undeniable.

The only question that matters is: should it be banned or not?

2.27.19. Does Ciro Santilli believe in the allegations of human rights violations done to Falun Gong believers?

Besides the obvious prohibition of their most fundamental belief, so e.g. being tortured.

Let’s just focus on the evidence:

  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CedVnJOgwg4 "Undercover video reveals brutal treatment of Falun Gong prisoners inside Chinese labor camps" by "FOX 11 Los Angeles" published May 21, 2019. Names mentioned: Fuquan Yin,

2.27.19.1. Does Ciro Santilli believe in the allegations of organ harvesting made by Falun Gong believers?

In short: Ciro believes that it has happened to many people.

Long version follows.

It is obviously very hard to prove and quantify it definitely, much like it was hard to prove the Holocaust: bodies were cremated, and bribes were paid.

Even if we had a video showing the whole process, showing the whole money flow from the donor to the prison guard, it would still be hard to quantify it, so I do have some room for doubt in this opinion.

But consider the following, which is based on what Ciro has heard.

Even Chinese officials have admitted that in the past, if the body of the executed person is not claimed by family, then the organs can be extracted even without the consent of the prisoner:

Perhaps now that they claim that there is a large voluntary organ donor database, then this has stopped or been reduced, but let’s focus on that period when the extractions were widely done.

From this, even though China does not publish execution statistics, we can imagine that a large part of the organs come from prisoners sentenced to death.

Then, consider that a 70 million person religion was banned, leading to a huge influx of prisoners from that religion.

FLG followers are just de-facto criminals like any other, and so extracting their organs is also de-facto legal.

Also, people from that religion don’t drink alcohol, smoke or take drugs, and their organs are of good quality.

Furthermore, FLG prisoners continue to not bow down to the government even in prison, e.g. by doing their Falun Gong meditation, which makes them clearly identifiable and dangerous to the system.

Finally, add to that mix the huge level of corruption found in dictatorships.

Don’t you think, then, that it is extremely likely that it has happened many times that such people have been selected to be executed earlier than others on average, due to the monetary value of their organs?

Bibliography:

2.27.19.1.1. 2018 China Tribunal

This is a mock tribunal, i.e. one without any power of law, and was of course initially lobbied/organized brought up by FLG: https://endtransplantabuse.org/

However, Ciro Santilli believes that none of the lawyers / jury members are FLG believers, and that they are trying to honestly decide if there is enough evidence or not for organ harvesting in China.

They also have non-FLG witnesses.

Whether you believe in their partiality or not, I highly recommend watching some of what the witnesses, which I find very convincing and informative:

A notable precursor to mock tribunals is the Russel Tribunal.

Bibliography:

2.27.20. Things Ciro Santilli dislikes about Falun Gong

But also as explaining why I don’t think it justifies the ban.

This section also gives me more credibility as a balanced critic >:-)

2.27.20.1. FLG downplays the fact that it is highly organized

Many FLG practitioners claim that they are not at all organized, or that they have no political interest, and I truly believe that they mean it.

But it is obvious from the size of the Falun Gong media 法轮功媒体, namely:

that in practice they do have are a highly organized hierarchical structure, and very likely with LHZ at the very top, e.g.:

  • Shen Yun’s 2018 libretto says that their Artistic Director and founder is "D.F." (likely an abbreviation for Da Fa, which is an abbreviation for Falun Gong Dafa, which is a full name of Falun Gong), with a picture of LHZ on top. It also amusingly says that D.F. is a "Distinguished Professor of Music and Dance at Fei Tian College in New York", which is likely where many of Shen Yun’s dancers are trained, and therefore controlled by himself to a large extent

  • LHZ mentions NDTV, Epoch Times and Shen Yun extensively on his What are the canonical Falun Gong texts?. TODO link to source, this based on unintentionally overhearing to my family members reading it.

Furthermore, Falun Gong practitioners directly lobby foreign governments to take action against human rights abuses in China, e.g.:

Like any other religion, they have all the right to take those actions, and it is definitely in their best interest, and perhaps in the best interest of the whole world, that they do so.

The only thing that annoys me is their lack of self perception on this matter: the large majority of Western people would definitely classify them as an organized political force after having observed their activities. When they say otherwise, they are hurting their own credibility.

2.27.20.1.1. FLG media is not transparent about its affiliation

Agreed, and it is a point that hurts more than helps their cause.

But the media is not legally obliged to state their affiliation.

And if that were the case, then we should force all newspapers to start taking polls of how many employees follow which religion and support which political party, and then put that in their print.

2.27.20.2. FLG dislikes several other groups like homosexuals and some other religions

Like most old religions.

Democracy dislikes dictators.

You and I dislike certain personality traits without any logical reason.

What matters is that we treat everyone with respect and without bias at work, even if we don’t like them.

But the law can’t force you to like everyone.

If one specific FLG member breaks a law by discriminating against someone, they should be punished just like anyone else.

See also:

2.27.20.3. FLG believers are less likely to take necessary medication

Due to their beliefs in the healing power of FLG, which seems to have a certain level of support on canonical texts TODO precise quotes.

Based on what Ciro saw and heard, he does believe that it has happened in many cases, some Falun Gong believers really do believe that they can be cured without modern medicine.

But consider the following:

  • what matters are statistics. Maybe FLG people live longer than non FLG in average. But we will never have statistics because of censorship: https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/27529/have-many-falun-gong-practitioners-forgone-medical-treatment-and-died-of-treatab

  • 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 Christianity 基督教 have miraculous cure claims. My impression is that claims were mostly notable in the old times apparently, likely because people noticed that Christians were still dying of all kinds of diseases like everyone else, no matter how devout!

  • 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? See also Rule of law 法治.

  • maybe many of those people would also have died soon even 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 anyway. Who can agree and follow all the innumerable prescriptions of any religious or legal system? See also: Someone from movement X did something bad, therefore the movement should be banned.

  • all the following also reduce people’s lifespan:

    • riding motorcycles vs. cars/buses

    • smoking

    • moving to a poor country to do charity there

    • eating fast food

    Forbidding them also has huge humanitarian costs (more expensive vehicles, creation of a black market, …​). So why not forbid them as well?

See also: [orange-papers] "Promised Powers or Knowledge".

It is also interesting to note how the Chinese government itself supported Falun Gong and other Qi Gong practices for their health benefits, which is why they grew so large in the first place. FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志 was even awarded prizes and recognized as a Qi Gong master by state backed organizations in 1992 and 1993. And the CCP still has a tendency to support certain non-scientific traditional practices: [support-for-non-scientific-traditional-practices].

https://youtu.be/kIpaDW3RwtY?t=244 one random thing ex-KGB spy undercover in the USA Jack Barsky mentioned in this BuzzFeed Multiplayer interview stuck to his mind: "The one thing that you have here, that I believe cannot be found anywhere else in the world is called Freedom, with a capital F".
2.27.20.4. FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志

Li Hongzhi (LHZ, 李洪志) is the creator of FLG: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li_Hongzhi.

Falun Gong people call him "master" (师父), which is a common traditional term used to respectfully address experienced teachers in a disciple (弟子)/teacher relation, e.g. Kung Fu or other crafts.

The term "master" is also used for example in the fictional film The Master (2012), which is likely inspired in Scientology.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 prefers to call him prophet, since he feels LHZ is indistinguishable from any other religion.

Ciro agrees that there is danger in every religion, and especially new religions.

However the same point can be made about political parties and in particular the CCP and its 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 who 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.

Finally, LHZ was born in 1951, so he will die in 20 years, unless FLG is true and a miracle happens, and then this argument will become invalid.

From what Ciro hears, LHZ has always maintained that he is the only source of truth on FLG (see also "The Guru is always right"), and therefore, so his death will very likely remove any danger once and for all.

Furthermore, it also seems to Ciro that FLG is clearly anti-violence and self-harm, so Ciro wonder how many would follow a contradictory order such as killing or suicide? We have had no hint of any incitation to violence so far.

It is also interesting to look into the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonestown case. When the suicide order came, most people wanted out! Without physically controlling the followers, I don’t think you can make them do much.

It’s funny that even though those events happened only 30 years ago, we know about Li just about as much as we know about Jesus! The only things which we can really picture in detail how they are are the well known locations themselves.

Li Hongzhi footage:

Li Hongzhi 1
Figure 91. Li Hongzhi is Falun Gong’s prophet/cult leader/living God. He’s a cute north-Western 东北人 like Ciro’s wife. Source.
Li Hongzhi Falun Gong
Figure 92. Li Hongzhi practicing one of his exercises with one of his cute prophet outfits in an extremely nice Chinese stone garden. TODO exact location and date. Source.
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Figure 93. Li going Super Saiyan while casually sitting on a giant Lotus flower with a halo on his head. Source.
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Figure 94. Dubstep Li can liangong at dubstep speed. Source.
2.27.20.4.1. Let’s make a mini series about Li Hongzhi’s life

Ciro can’t help but to imagine how Falun Gong came about in detail.

Someone should write a "The Last Temptation of Christ".

This deserves an American miniseries like Chernobyl.

It would manage to piss off both FLG and the CCP, which would be amazing. It is a shame that it is so difficult to find good historical information between the infinite barrages of CCP and FLG propaganda.

It could show how:

  • Li was an ordinary dude who could liked to play the trumpet, which partially explains his focus on Shen Yun and Falun Gong musical street parades

  • Li first heard about Qi Gong, and went to practice it under some dude. Then how he saw other people were so into it, and decided to take this opportunity to make a career out of it during the 80’s

  • how he met his wife and had a daughter

  • how he started to notice how people were feeling things during the exercise classes, and started suggesting more and more metaphysics to these first disciples

  • Li could also have some metaphysical moment, like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PW20LbwAmng but at the same time, he must tell his followers some lies which he does not believe

  • how followers started telling others things and "experience sharing" where the cycle of belief stats to take off

  • a clear demonstration of how "A group of early adopters in Changchun became disenchanted after Li forbade his followers from charging fees for the practice at the end of 1994" showing dissent within the cult

  • and finally, the immigration and crackdown, and how he put his fingers on those things, and the creation of media, this could be the last episode

Episodes could be split along:

  • Episode 1: pre Qi Gong, shows Childhood, workplaces, early motivations. Ends with first contact with a Qi Gong lesson

  • Episode 2: early Falun Gong. Opens an academy. Starts without metaphysics, but grows into it. Show him knowingly lying, but also seething magic things. The first followers, and top lieutenants. Makes some management mistake, but escapes. Could end in a metaphysical scene, or 13 May 1992 initial public lesson. Maybe a scene of Li’s visit to Thailand in 1983 (photo from CCP media found on Google).

  • Episode 3: later Falun Gong in China. It grows, show in Chinese news. Power struggles, problems with early lieutenants, and new lieutenants come up. Many people practice on streets. Battle against Zhong Gong 中华养生益智功 (中功). Near 1996, something tips Li off to the fact that the CCP is going to crack down on them, and so he announces that he will be spreading abroad full time. Check out if this was before or after the first Anti FLG newspaper article in 1996-06-17.

  • Episode 4: preaching outside of China and emigration. American permanent residence in 1998. Watches crackdown on television. International Falun Gong media. Show him at Falun Gong New York "Dragon Springs" complex

Parts of the series could be filmed in Taiwan 台湾 Republic of China 中華民國 maybe?

2.27.20.4.2. Li Hongzhi’s family 李洪志的家庭

At least Jesus appeared to value chastity. He was even born from a virgin right? No sex around him at all.

But Li doesn’t need that. He’s a God right, he can both be an Enlightened God part time and still have a normal family part time.

Once thing Ciro approves about Li’s approach to his family is that he seems to have stated (TODO source) that none of them are Gods like him.

Wife’s name: Li Rui (李瑞 according to CCP). Report saying that a follower bought a house and registered it on Li Rui’s name as a gift, but Li later returned the gift back: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB94140245836194819 TODO house address.

The Religion of Falun Gong by Benjamin Penny (2012) gives further family members (some of them are based only on CCP sources however):

There are also claims that Li’s birth name was Li Lai (李來).

This claims to contain the biography of Li Hongzhi’s family (likely all according to CCP sources), including several good pictures: https://kknews.cc/zh-hk/news/bbmz49.html The photo given there for Li Jun appears on this apparently FLG source without mention of the name: https://www.epochweekly.com/b5/103/5805.htm

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Figure 95. Li Hongzhi with his wife Lirue and daughter Limeige presumably in the late 80’s with fishing ships in a shipyard in the background. TODO location. Likely from CCP sources, in many places with kaiwnd watermarks. Pro-CCP source.
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Figure 96. Photo of Christina Li from Shen Yun, which the CCP claims to be Li Meige, daughter of Li Hongzhi. That page also claims that she was awarded Bronze in the 2009 and 2010 NDT Chinese Dance Competition. Source.
2.27.20.4.3. Dragon Springs

Li Hongzhi’s Falun Gong complex in New York state countryside.

Started in the 2000’s in New York State with money donated by believers.

2.27.20.5. Some Falun Gong people make phone telemarketing

Ciro Santilli has seen Falun Gong people making phone calls to people in China with to explain why FLG is with his own eyes, and therefore is sure it has happened on some scale.

Particularly during Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查, Falun Gong ramped up the telemarketing calls and some voluntary believers were making calls all day nonstop.

Ciro does not know how the called numbers were obtained and if callees voluntarily signed up for it, but that feels extremely unlikely.

Interestingly however, many of the callees seemed interesting in what they had to say, and they often had long chats, Ciro was surprised by that. Maybe they were just bored senseless due to the Corona lockdown. Or maybe many Chinese People actually don’t like their Government and the CCP is fucked.

Also, of course, the callers received call scripts and guidelines to makes those calls, because obviously FLG downplays the fact that it is highly organized.

It also seems that this telemarketing had FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志's direct approval, although Ciro does not have proof of that.

Ciro strongly disapproves of this, Just like for any product, visual ads on the street are impossible to prevent, but any kind of advertising that generates notifications on feeds, or takes people’s time, is unacceptable.

Ciro has not however seen them talking about making automated phone calls.

https://www.scmp.com/comment/insight-opinion/article/1940394/how-rampant-phone-scams-highlight-chinas-need-tighter also mentions that Falun Gong makes telemarketing in passing without any reference.

2.27.21. Zhong Gong 中华养生益智功 (中功)

A very similar religion to Falun Gong 法輪大法, that also emerged during the Qigong fever (气功热) of the '80s and '90s.

The similarity of their imagery as seen from propaganda videos is striking. To Ciro Santilli 三西猴, this makes Zhong Gong a perfect example of why FLG metaphysics is bullshit: it is obvious that both Zhong Gong and Falun Gong and many others were just random dudes who took advantage of the Qigong fever to create their religions.

Their prophet is Zhang Hongbao (张宏堡).

Interestingly, like FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志, Hongbao is also from the Northeast of China (Heilongjiang), there must be a reason why those Qi Gong movements come from that region.

Unlike Falun Gong however, Zhong Gong failed to branch the franchise out of China, and basically died out. He also died in a car crash in 2006 which didn’t help. Li Hongzhi however played smarter, and started branching abroad full force in 1996, he might have predicted that the crackdown was inevitale.

Wikipedia says it reached 34 million followers in China.

Hongbao also has a more spicy history it seems, with sexual allegations and open political goals unlike Li Hongzhi, who hid his goals better. Well played, Li, well played.

FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志 maintains in canon that Falun Gong is of course extremely different from all of those other extremely similar Qi Gong religions (not sure if Zhong Gong is mentioned, but is it definitely one of the main targets).

The embassy spokesman says Chinese officials have ample evidence of sect leader Zhang Hongbao’s involvement in crimes such as rape and murder.

tianhuaren2011021802234
Figure 97. Zhang Honbao on a giant flying lotus reaching Enlightenment with a halo. It looks exactly like Falun Gong imagery. But of course, Zhong Gong is just a "completely unrelated and inferior sect" according to Li Hongzhi. Source.
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Figure 98. The blue background, the halos, the praying hands, the master Zhang Hongbao flying above. It is just exactly like Falun Gong imagery. Source (biased)
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Figure 99. Hungarian Falun Gong propaganda image with woman meditating in with blue sky background for comparison with similar Zhong Gong imagery. Source.
2.27.21.1. Qigong fever Boom 气功热 (1980’s)

AKA Qigong Boom.

2.27.22. Falun Gong bibliography

2.27.22.1. Me and Li by Ben Hurley (2017)

https://medium.com/@Ben_D_Hurley/-10677166298b "Me and Li" by Ben Hurley published on October 23, 2017.

This post by a former believer gives what Ciro Santilli 三西猴 feels is a realistic account that matches Ciro’s observations.

2.27.22.2. History of Falun Gong 法轮功历史

A few non-religious non-CCP resources can be found at:

Some key events:

  • 1989: initial private beta courses. TODO key interesting moment.

  • 1992-05-13: initial public lecture at the 1992 International Health Exposition in Beijing, and opening main academy on No. 5 MIddle School in Changchun, Jilin Province (capital.

    TODO what did he talk about on that Beijing day. This day still celebrated in 2020 as "Falun Dafa Day", in which the major international "Experience Sharing Conference" happens in New York.

    He apparently also taught at Chaoyang Park in Changchun: https://goo.gl/maps/BFwKs2xr48AMUAbx8

3. Chinese politicians 中国政治家

3.1. Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞)

3.1.1. Xi abolishes term limits 2018-03 习近平取消席连任不得超过两届的限制规则

180227RFA XiJinping Eternity
Figure 100. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 cartoon showing Xi Jinping preparing to sleep in Mao Zedong’s tomb, meaning that Xi also wants to reach Mao’s "eternal ruler" status when he abolished term limits in 2018. Source.
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Figure 101. 1977 photo showing Mao’s actual glass tomb during his funeral, with famous politicians in the background. It is interesting to see that Mao features on the "Fandom Mummipedia Wiki". Source.
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Figure 102. The Economist "Let’s party like it’s 1793" cover from May 4th – 10th 2013 depicting a painting of Xi Jinping dressed as emperor of China. The famous Qianlong Emperor was in power at that time. The title is likely a joke based on the more well known "Let’s party like it’s 1969" due to the legendary Woodstock festival. Party is also a play on words between the Communist Party and a night party. TODO why 1793 specifically. Source.

3.1.3. Xi Jinping memes 习近平模因

  • 習包子: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29230 says:

    Xi Jinping got his nickname as "Xí bāozi 習包子" ("steamed stuffed bun Xi") due to the much publicized visit he made to the famous Qìngfēng bāozi pù 庆丰包子铺 ("Qingfeng baozi shop") in Beijing. During and after his visit to the shop, media swarmed over the place and were eager to portray an image of Xi as being down to earth and close to the people. Those who dislike Xi use this nickname sarcastically against him for being a hick and for hypocritically "putting on a show" (zuòxiù 作秀).

  • 大撒币: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=29230 says:

    It can be translated as "big spender," a play on the literal translation of the words sā bì 撒币 "throw money" and "stupid cunt" (shǎ bī 傻逼). The nickname takes aim at the economic aid Xi has promised to foreign countries; the moniker is so widely used on Chinese social media that the censors' repressive measures only draw more attention to it, and to the criticism embedded within it.

3.1.3.1. Xi Jinping Lookalikes 习近平撞脸
TnR8Voo
Figure 103. 2019-05-21 Sadomasochist BDSM (SM) Xi Jinping lookalike or photoshop in bondage suit (gimp suit, fetish gear) at a cosplay fair. TODO: is this a Photoshop and if yes what’s the original pic, publish dates, location/event. Earliest post found so far: 2019-05-21 08:49:20 GMT+1 (Imgur timestamp) going wild on PTT Bulletin Board System 批踢踢實業坊: https://www.ptt.cc/bbs/Gossiping/M.1558424992.A.33B.html entitled "這位coser是誰啊？好眼熟。" (Who is this Cosplayer? He looks familiar.) by user "a15568". Watermark reads "I am Dasen 郭"
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Figure 104. 2020-01-01 Pan-fried dumpling Xi Jinping lookalike 生煎包习近平撞脸. Furthermore, this reminded people of 習包子. A Taiwanese report from 2020-01-01: https://news.tvbs.com.tw/world/1257030 TODO name, location. One of the many videos of him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hTt8Sjer6cc
EXz fgoU8AA2EHx e1589305621493
Figure 105. 2020-05-12 Liu Keqing (刘克清) is an opera singer who had his personal videos on [tiktok] taken down from time to time because he looks too much like The One. China Digital Times report. One of his personal vlogs reuploaded to YouTube where he shared singing techniques and thoughts: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPFKUhJdqzk. A video of him performing professionally in a chamber concert: 2018-11-02 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z98-Mqci4ag.

Less good ones:

3.1.3.2. Comparisons between Xi Jinping and Winnie-the-Pooh 小熊維尼 (2017)

Got censored due to comparisons between Xi Jinping and Winnie in 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winnie-the-Pooh#Censorship_in_China

Some good photoshops:

TIGGER 2590531b
Figure 106. Comparison image between Xi Jinping waking with then USA president Barack Obama with a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon still of Winnie walking with Tigger, the tiger. The original photo is from Xi’s 2013 visit to the Annenberg Retreat at Sunnylands, California. Source.
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Figure 107. Comparison image between Xi Jinping shaking hands with the Japanese prime minister Shinzo Abe and a Winnie-the-Pooh cartoon still of Winnie shaking hands with the Eeyore, the donkey. The original photo is from Abe’s lacklustre 2014 visit to Beijing. Source.
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Figure 108. Comparison image between Xi Jinping on a car in a 2015 military parade and a toy Winnie-the-Pooh on a car. Source.
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Figure 109. Real photo of Xi Jinping edited to look like Winnie the Pooh. Source.
3.1.3.3. Chrysanthemium Xi Jinping 菊花习近平 (2015)

Got creator Dai Jianyong (戴建勇) arrested in 2015:

Chrysanthemum Xi Jinping with black red liusi added by Ciro Santilli
Figure 110. Chrysanthemum Xi Jinping with 六四 spice added by Ciro Santilli
daijianyong
Figure 111. Original Chrysanthemum Xi Jinping by Dai Jianyong published in 2015. Source.
t100 xi alt
Figure 112. Possible original Xi Jinping photo used for Chrysanthemum Xi, possibly from 2012. The light blue gradient background was used for the official photos of many Communist officials of the era. Source.

3.2. Jiang Zemin 江泽民 (1989-2002)

Dictator from 1989 to 2002.

Jiang is often compared to a toad in a meme what is referred to as toad worship (膜蛤), further keywords: 蛤蟆

The Chinese also love Jiang’s quote in English during an interview with Hong Kong press:

Too young, too simple, sometimes naive.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=y-JPLzj2poY Jiang Zemin saying "Too simple, sometimes naive."

Jiang also has an amazing array of meme-ready funny expressions.

140801124717 toad jiang zemin split horizontal large gallery
Figure 113. Comparison between Jiang Zemin and a 72-feet-tall inflatable toad in a Beijing park seen in 2014 made the rounds on Weibo and led to some censorship. Source.
jiang zemin former president china
Figure 114. Jiang picking his nose. Source.
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Figure 115. Jiang reading through comically large magnifying glass during the opening ceremony of the 19th Party Congress in 2017. Source.
Jiang as emoticons often used in chats
Figure 116. More Jiang funny expressions and Photoshops from a Research Gate page! Source.

3.4. Mao Zedong 毛泽东 (1954–1976)

What could be a better reminder that dictatorships are dangerous than the catastrophes that Mao created such as the Great Leap Forward 大跃进 (1958-1960) and Cultural Revolution 文化大革命 (1966-1976)?

Mao Zedong in Yan%27an
Figure 117. Mao Zedong in Yan’an in the 1930’s thinking deeply. This funny looking picture is meme ready and much loved by Uncyclopedia. Source.

3.4.1. Great Leap Forward 大跃进 (1958-1960)

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Figure 118. A high tower of winter gourds "冬瓜上高楼" propaganda poster for the Great Leap Forward by Jin Meisheng published in 1959. Even in democracies, politicians promise the fat gourds. But when there is no free media to control their lies, things can get really out of hand. Source.

3.4.2. Cultural Revolution 文化大革命 (1966-1976)

https://youtube.com/watch?v=kXByOrRrO7c Vox 6 minute explanation with some good footage for impatient Millennials, published on Feb 14, 2020.
3.4.2.1. Mao swim across the Yangtze river 毛主席畅游长江 (1966-07-16)

Mao claimed to have set a swimming record by swimming 15km in 65 minutes at the age of 72 at the Yangtze in Wuhan, or an average of 13.8 km/h.

As a comparison, the Olympic swimmers of 2016 covered the lesser distance of 10 km in 113 minutes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swimming_at_the_2016_Summer_Olympics_–_Men%27s_marathon_10_kilometre for an average of 5.3 km/h.

According to this article, the maximum current speed of the Yantze is 128.5 cm/s or 4.62 km/h so even if he were swimming with the current, Mao was faster.

Dictatorships would never lie about obviously verifiable facts, would they?

And idiots today still celebrate this event that preceded the Cultural Revolution 文化大革命 (1966-1976) which put China’s economy in shambles.

Superputin learnt from this and also showed off his swimming skills in 2009.

1966 10 1966年毛泽东游长江2
Figure 119. Source.

4. News 新闻

Trying to keep only "neutral" sources here, let me know if you spot something too biased: Biased media 偏见媒体.

4.1. News 2020

4.2. News 2019

4.2.1. 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 naked official (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:

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?

4.2.2. 996.ICU

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

The name refers to:

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 (archive)!!!

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

Coverage:

Other interesting GitHub repositories: [github-repositories-with-censored-information].

48942249
Figure 120. 996.ICU logo. Source.

4.3. News 2018

4.4. News 2017

4.5. News 2016

4.6. News 2015

4.7. News pre-2015

4.7.1. Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 六四事件

Good photo selections:

AP footage is pretty good, just do a search on the archive:

Soldiers who spoke up:

Other interesting links:

tiananmen massacre gty 04 jpo 180531 hpEmbed 3x2 992
Figure 122. Sea of protesters in Tiananmen Square on 2019-05-04. No, not even that many people can influence dictatorships if they don’t have weapons. Source.
pu zhiqiang protest
Figure 123. Pu Zhiqiang (浦志强) was student demonstrator during the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989. His shirt reads: "Freedom of the press, freedom of association, support the 'World Economic Herald (世界经济导报)', and support just journalists." (辦報自由 結社自由 聲援世经导报 支持正义记者, fully quoted here) Date: 1989-05-10. Pu remained in China as a human rights layer, and was arrested in 2014 for attending a private meeting commemorating the 25th anniversary of Tiananmen. Source.
main 1200
Figure 124. Students from Beijing University stage a huge demonstration in Tiananmen Square as they start an unlimited hunger strike as the part of mass pro-democracy protest against the Chinese government. Photo taken on 1989-05-18 by Catherine Henriette/AFP/Getty Images. Source.
original
Figure 125. Who said there weren’t some cute girls amongst the protesters? Photo taken on 1989-05-19 by AP Photo/Sadayuki Mikami. Source.
20190601tiananmen9
Figure 126. Happy protesters surround army convoy of 4,000 not so happy soldiers on 1989-05-20. Ciro can’t help but to think the politically incorrect idea that the military look considerably younger and poorer/less uneducated than the Beijing masses. Source.
main 1200
Figure 127. A young woman is caught between civilians and Chinese soldiers, who were trying to remove her from an assembly near the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, on 1989-06-03. AP Photo/Jeff Widener. Source.
original
Figure 128. A student from an art institute plasters the neck of the "Goddess of Democracy" (中国国际广播电台) statue on 1989-05-30. Replicas have of course been erected elsewhere, and when the CCP falls one day, this will be rebuilt, obviously. Source.
original
Figure 129. An old lady tells those rowdy overpriviledged students that they were complaining for no reason, and that in the good old Mao days you would be lucky to get any food at all, and that they should just go the fuck home on 1989-05-31 (Ciro might or might not have made up the exact content of the conversation). Source.
original
Figure 130. A dissident student asks masses of sitting soldiers to go back home on 1989-06-03. Great shot composition by AP Photo/Jeff Widener. Source.
Li at Tiananmen Eyebeams
Figure 131. Godzilla Li Peng (李鹏) crushing the Tiananmen Square protests with his green eye laser beams. Source.
20190601tiananmen5
Figure 132. Protester covered in blood while holding an army helmet on 1989-06-04. Source.
Tiananmen 7 715x1024
Figure 133. Bodies run over by tanks by the road in after the Tiananmen Square Protests were crushed in the morning of 1989-06-05. The source website is by French journalist Ursula Gauthier, who explains how those photos were taken by one of the students of the group, who later asked her to take the photos abroad to publish them. The students were some of the last to leave after the crackdown, and they were trying to scape through a small street that leads into Chang’an Avenue (长安街) when the tanks came at high speed near Liubukou crossroads (TODO Chinese name) half mile West of Tiananmen square, and not all students were able evade the tanks. https://www.theguardian.com/world/1999/jun/01/china.johngittings2 mentions that some bodies had to be scrapped-off the street. Ursula was later kicked out of China in 2015 after commenting that the CCP had ulterior motives for giving their condolences to the November 2015 Paris attacks. Interesting fact: Ciro was actually less than 1km away from one of the Paris attacks on that night, at his home, and first learnt about what had happened when people started calling to see if he was fine. Source.
00tiananmen images 15 superJumbo
Figure 134. Bodies with gun wounds at the mortuary at Shuili Hospital (水利医院, Hospital of the Ministry of Water Resources of China, Google maps, Baidu, New York Times Chinese report), about 8km West of Tiananmen Square. Source.
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Figure 135. A Chinese couple on a bicycle take cover beneath an underpass as tanks deploy overhead in eastern Beijing on 1989-06-05 by AP Photo/Liu Heung Shing. This photo one is almost poetic. Source.
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Figure 136. Family members try to comfort a mother who has just learned of her son’s death after he was killed by soldiers at Tiananmen Square, June 4. Source.
sub buzz 11644 1559664808 1
Figure 137. The morning after the military crackdown of the pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, workers clean their posters from bulletin boards. Resume Censorship 审查 as usual. Source.
4.7.1.1. Tiananmen Square Protests songs 六四事件歌曲

English:

Chinese:

Cantonese

Other good lists:

For non-Tiananmen songs see: Anti-dictatorship songs 反对独裁的首歌.

4.7.1.2. Tank Man 坦克人

A list of Tank Man parodies can be found at: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/tank-man

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YeFzeNAHEhU CNN video of Tank Man: but not showing removal, ridiculous, is there a full raw footage somewhere?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vSbx352cn8A Several quick cuts by CBS news that give a good overview of the incident, including him being pushed away by other protesters at the end.

The Tank Man song is really good:

我是坦克人
站在天安门

I am tank man
I stand at Tiananmen

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8A623aImt8 Tank Man song (坦克人歌曲) by Xu Lin (徐琳).
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Figure 138. Arthur Tsang’s photo of Tank Man. Source.
Tankman new longshot StuartFranklin
Figure 139. Stuart Franklin’s wider view photo of Tank Man. Source.
BN CZ712 TAM G 20140529081150
Figure 140. Terril Jones photo taken at ground level with Tank Man on background and men running away on the foreground. The photo was only published in 2009. Source.
duckytankman
Figure 141. Photoshop of Arthur Tsang’s photo of Tank Man with huge rubber ducks replacing the tanks. Inspired by a huge inflatable rubber duck sculpture floating in Hong Kong in 2013. Source.
29f
Figure 142. Rough Lego model of the Tank Man scene. Source.
tumblr m66n5i3smc1qbw2q1o1 1280
Figure 143. it8Bit Final Fantasy 6 battle screen style depiction of tank man by Cody Walton. Source.
4.7.1.3. Tiananmen Square Protests keywords

Words:

Lists:

5. Dissidents 持不同政见者

5.1. Chinese dissidents

Other sections:

Other lists:

5.1.1. Xu Xiaodong "Mad Dog" 徐晓冬

MMA fighter who beat up some kung-fu masters to prove that MMA is more effective than their traditional styles.

As of 2019, he had 14 Weibo accounts blocked (created one, got blocked, created another, got blocked, etc.). Source: https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/chinas-mma-fighter-xu-xiaodong-fight-survival/article/3047417

Profiles and news:

e13 891
Figure 144. Uphold science, eradicate superstition "崇尚科学 破除迷信" 1999 poster by the CCP created as an anti-Falun Gong propaganda likely based on a more widely widespread slogan (archive). So why is Xiaodong not being supported by the CCP now that he is beating superstition back into its place? Once again, [censorship-makes-countries-poorer]. The poster features images related to the Chinese space program 中华人民共和国航天, which is a major undertaking of the CCP and widely used propaganda point. Source.
e15 824
Figure 145. 1962 propaganda poster for the Chinese Space program. "Uphold science, eradicate superstition"? Nah, the moon is obviously populated by Chang’e (嫦娥), the Chinese Goddess of the moon, which is one of the names for the Chinese Lunar Exploration Program (中国探月工程,嫦娥工程). Other good Chinese space program posters. Also note the emphasis on making babies, the One-child policy 一孩政策 (1979–2015) comes to mind. Source.
01
Figure 146. 2017 Xu Xiaodong (MMA) Vs. Wei Lei (Tai Chi) summary GIF. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0XwXaCbfIGw 2017 Xu Xiaodong (MMA) Vs. Wei Lei (Tai Chi) full fight.

5.1.2. Programthink 编程随想

Very popular Chinese language anonymous blogger that publishes software programming tutorials and political content since 2009, often negative about the CCP, in particular anti-censorship and anti-CCP-brainwashing.

4027957?s=400&v=4
Figure 147. Programthink uses Rodin’s The Thinker sculpture as its avatar, to encourage people to think for themselves rather than blindly believe the Party. Source.

5.1.3. Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波 1955-2017

He was abroad in the 80' as a scholar, and then he came back to china in 1989 to support Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 六四事件, then he was in and out of jail until he died in 2017.

2020-06 https://baike.baidu.com/item/刘晓波/14900221 (https://web.archive.org/web/20200627130112/https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%88%98%E6%99%93%E6%B3%A2/14900221) casually forgot to mention that he might have won the fucking 2010 Nobel Peace Prize, but he seems to be too big to delete the entire page?

It is interesting how Hao Haidong 郝海东 (2020) was fully deleted, the page was only locked. It also does not mention all the times he was in jail, notably after Tiananmen, only some of them.

2017-11 Baidu did mention the Nobel prize however: https://web.archive.org/web/20171114165644/https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E5%88%98%E6%99%93%E6%B3%A2/14900221 it was edited out later.

The article also makes it very clear that his 2009 sentence was "a fair one", and that the organization he worked for in the 90', Federation fora Democratic China (民主中国阵线) was funded by the CIA. Wikipedia does not mention that however, and of course, Baidu content does not need citations.

5.1.4. Guo Wengui 郭文贵

Social media:

Profiles:

5.1.4.1. Hao Haidong 郝海东 (2020)

Hao is widely considered one of the best Chinese soccer players of all time, and he was the top scorer for the Chinese national team of all time as of 2020, and one of the only two Chinese to show on IFFHS Legends page which as of 2020 contains only 52 players including the likes of Pelé and Maradona.

He participated in the 1994, 1998, 2002 and 2006 FIFA World Cup (世界杯) qualifiers, and therefore also at the 2002 FIFA World Cup proper held in South Korea and Japan, which is the only World Cup China classified for as of 2020, and in which it failed to score a single goal.

On 2020-06-03, one day before Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 六四事件 anniversary, Hao appeared with his wife Ye Zhaoying (叶钊颖, married 2019), who was also a badmington star, on Guo Wengui 郭文贵's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4aN5h0RqD8&t=4496, and spoke up against the CCP:

As a result, his son Hao Runze (郝润泽, from a previous marriage) who is also a soccer player and had nothing to do with it was also sacked from the Serbian club Radnicki Nis in which he played one week later due to pressure from China: https://www.scmp.com/sport/football/article/3088385/hao-haidongs-son-sacked-serbian-club-radnicki-nis-after-pressure The wiki page says that https://www.b92.net/sport/fudbal/vesti.php?yyyy=2020&mm=06&dd=09&nav_id=1693254 says the team says it was just a coincidence and that his contract had ended.

The most interesting thing about all of this, is how Hao’s name was completely nuked form the Chinese Internet, making this a fantastic opportunity to unambiguously document a censorship event. One is reminded of:

Some examples:

Online reactions:

Listings of the 2002 squad:

sbraK
Figure 148. Hao Haidong (in white) playing for the China national team against the Hong Kong’s national team in a World Cup Asian zone qualifying match at Siu Sai Wan Sports Ground in 2004. Photo: South China Morning Post 南华早报. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgSwRwFBNFA Hao Haidong’s top 10 goals, all with CCTV 5 watermark :-)
5.1.4.1.1. Zhihu censorship of Hao Haidong

Zhihu 知乎 (and the rest of the Chinese Internet) basically nuked a gazillion articles that mentioned him, including old ones that had nothing to do with his political views.

Ciro estimates that very likely thousands of Zhihu posts have been removed, as of 2020-06-14 the Google query "郝海东 site:zhihu.com" had 3,970 results, and every single on Ciro clicked had been taken down.

Not nuked yet as of 2020-06, but nuked after, with before-after archives:

Older archives that were nuked before Ciro managed to archive them on 2020-06-06:

Nuked as per Ciro’s eyewitness on 2020-06-06 without web archive, but could be found either on Google search or Zhihu search before those engines had properly cleared, taking Google caches and web archiving them + web archiving 404’s as of 2020-06-14:

Nuked answers:

Ye also nuked:

5.1.4.1.2. Baidu Baike censorship of Hao Haidong

Article about the Chinese national soccer team https://baike.baidu.com/item/中国国家男子足球队:

The article used to mention Hao extensively. He was:

  • second on the 知名人物 (famous people)

  • was the 进球最多者 (top scorer), a category which as completely removed

  • the list 射手榜 (top scorers?) is still there but casually starts at 宿茂臻 with 27 goals, and skips Hao which has 41

  • an entire section about Hao was removed entitled "永远的9号——郝海东" and saying how amazing he was, including a picture

Ye won the BWF World Championships (世界羽毛球锦标赛), a biannual tournament that is likely the most prestigious in the world twice in 1995 and 1997, and her name had to be removed from the list of winners in Baidu https://baike.baidu.com/item/世界羽毛球锦标赛:

The fact that badminton is a single player sport is great in this case, as it just puts more emphasis on her name as opposed to Hao’s multiplayer soccer game:

  • still up 2020-06-14 but locked: https://web.archive.org/web/20200614105842/https://baike.baidu.com/item/郝润泽

  • and casually forgets to mention that he is the fucking son of Haidong, which was likely edited out recently, but there is no edit history in Baidu Baike. Google Cache was already from 2020-06-08 and missed the pre-edit. What a shame

  • The last entry says "2020年5月31日，郝润泽在塞尔维亚超级联赛第27轮尼什工人客场挑战纳普里达克的比赛中，首秀替补出场打入一球，帮助尼什工人实现绝平。" and also casually forgets to mention that he was fired two weeks later.

5.1.5. Zhou Fengsuo 周锋锁

After Ciro Santilli 三西猴 started his campaign for freedom of speech in china in 2015, Zhou Fengsuo published on Twitter in 2015-05-30 when he had 36K followers at the time: https://twitter.com/ZhouFengSuo/status/604461488716144640 (archive) linking to Ciro Santilli’s Stack Overflow account:

The commies have messed with the wrong guy’s mother-in-law."

一个程序员在专业网站上发布六四和法轮功的消息，目的是触怒中共，封杀网站，从而激起程序员的反抗。因为岳母被抓半个月。

5.2. Western dissidents

5.2.1. Winston Sterzel (SerpentZA) and Matthew Tye (laowhy86)

The biggest China expat YouTube channels, and the also collaborated together a lot.

As of 2019, they seem to have moved to the USA because they can’t stand harassment by the Chinese government.

Due to their balanced opinions, fluent Chinese, not being Falun Gong 法輪大法, and having lived in China for such a long time, the offer what is arguably the one of best CCP criticisms.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kDV4s9c9sfQ "#65 China Is Getting Worse | Laowhy86 and SerpentZA" published on 2020-04-05. SerpentZA and laowhy86 interview on "China Unscripted", a sister channel of [china-uncensored-youtube-channel]. This marks them clearly on the side of "openly criticizing the Chinese government".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b6PI91n2f9o "China Expels Foreign Press to Protect Its Lies" published on 2020-03-23 during/just after Censorship of the 2019 Corona Virus 2019冠状病毒病早期迹象审查.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NXpPpFzLcZg "China’s Winnie The Pooh BAN Explained" published on 2019-10-28 discusses Comparisons between Xi Jinping and Winnie-the-Pooh 小熊維尼 (2017).

6. Media 媒体

Sources of information pertinent to this repository.

6.1. Commentary media

The following offer interesting commentary, but not to be used as primary sources:

6.2. Biased media 偏见媒体

I consider the media in this section biased, and never cite it for fact-checking.

6.2.1. Chinese government media 中国政府媒体

6.2.1.1. People’s Daily

The website has per-language and per province subdomains, e.g.:

As of 2020, some deleted articles show the home page instead of the article, without redirection. Some examples can be seen at: Hao Haidong 郝海东 (2020).

But older pages just show 404.

6.2.1.2. Pro-Chinese government media

These might be independent, but they are clearly pro CCP and thus cannot be trusted:

6.2.1.3. Confucius institute 孔子学院

News and reports:

Related about university interference:

6.2.1.3.1. University espionage

Lists:

People:

6.2.2. Falun Gong media 法轮功媒体

A great example of how Falun Gong 法輪大法 is highly organized.

Highly controlled by FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志, and extremely lacking clear full disclosure of their affiliation, see also: "Front groups" at [orange-papers].

It could be argued that those media are not "directly" controlled by Li Hongzhi, and possibly were created independently of him initially, but without doubt they are controlled by his devout followers, and if Li Hongzhi ever gave directions, which Ciro has no proof he has ever done, then those media would follow.

Furthermore, Li appears to directly cite some of the main media in Canon or talk at their conferences as Canon.

6.2.2.2. New Tang Dynasty Television (NTD, NTDTV) 新唐人電視台

Falun Gong’s newspaper with news for "general public consumption" an no clear affiliation indication.

Li speaking to New Tang conference in canon: https://big5.falundafa.org/chibig5/jiangfa9_3.htm 在新唐人電視討論會上的講法

Related shows:

6.2.2.2.1. China Uncensored YouTube channel

Hosted by Chris Chappell.

Syster interview podcast channel: China Unscripted: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_o1sZefER0E The three makers of China Uncesored appear on the videos.

Older shows had an "ndt.tv" water mark on top right, e.g. a 2013 video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmMvS3lgJBs

The video description also links to http://e.ntd.tv/NTDChinaUncensored which is now down, but has archives such as https://web.archive.org/web/20130321071835/http://e.ntd.tv/NTDChinaUncensored which suggest a redirect back to the YouTube channel:

TODO why did newer videos remove the water mark and clear link? Did they break links, or just to hide Falun Gong influence?

Home page gives extremely unusual importance to Falun Gong resources, e.g.:

Website credits as of 2020:

Related:

6.2.2.3. Minghui 明慧网

Falun Gong’s primary "social network"/"Falun Gong"-only news/propaganda website. More Falun Gong specific than The Epoch Times 明慧网.

Literally: clear (明) wisdom (慧) network (网)

Li speaking to Minghui conference in canon: https://big5.falundafa.org/chibig5/jiangfa10_1.htm

TODO how https://www.clearwisdom.net/ compares?

6.2.2.4. Shen Yun Performing Arts 神韵艺术团

A good testimony from an ordinary employee from 2013: Aarvoll’s account.

Openly directly controlled by FLG is dangerous because Li Hongzhi has too much power over followers 李洪志. He features as director on librettos, e.g. the 2013 one (credited "D. F." (Da Fa) and with his photo).

Shen Yun’s headquarters are also located in/near [dragon-springs].

6.2.2.6. bannedbook.org 禁闻网

The main Chinese name is 禁闻网 which stands for "banned news network", and is more accurate than the domain name "bannedbook" since the majority of material published appears to be recent banned articles.

Classifying this as Falun Gong media because most or possibly all of the sidebar recommended websites 推荐网站 are also Falun Gong media e.g. as of 2020-04: https://web.archive.org/web/20200427221744/https://www.bannedbook.org/ includes Epoch times and https://hongzhi.li/, so yeah, not much doubt.

From this we deduce that the "banned book" in the domain name originally likely referred more specifically to the banned Falun Gong sacred books: What are the canonical Falun Gong texts?.

TODO who is behind this website? They store full text copies of banned articles, e.g. https://www.bannedbook.org/bnews/baitai/20190816/1175647.html is a full text copy of http://yashalong.blog.caixin.com/archives/188877 which is mentioned at: Comparisons between the CCP and Nazi Germany 纳粹德国.

6.3. Media that we are not sure is biased or not

6.3.1. Caixin 财新传媒

Beijing based, but does publish stuff that seems to be very sensitive:

6.3.2. South China Morning Post 南华早报

Hong Kong 香港 based, but bought by Alibaba in 2016, but it still continued to publish censored stuff widely, e.g.:

7. Videos 视频

Ciro Santilli 三西猴's "China Politics" playlist is a collection of all sensitive videos I have ever found on YouTube: Ping him if you find any he hasn’t included.

Interesting videos that were deleted/made private since he added them:

8. Funny 搞笑

Humour is the greatest weapon against dictators:

See also:

eKPmYyz
Figure 149. Weibo logo vs Sauron’s eye 微博标志vs索倫魔眼 by Ciro Santilli.

8.1. Cartoonists 漫画家

Reasonable lists:

Other cartoonists/illustrators:

8.1.1. Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒

Real name: Wang Liming (王立铭)

Personal media:

Without a doubt, the greatest anti-Communist joke cartoonist of the 2010s.

As of 2019 he does work for Radio Free Asia (RFA) 自由亚洲电台, so a possible list of all cartoons of this era can be found at: https://www.rfa.org/english/cartoons/story_archive

His best work can be found scattered throughout this document in the relevant sections.

latest?cb=20161211033427&path prefix=zh
Figure 150. Rebel Pepper’s self portrait as a perverted pepper (the literal translation of his Chinese name "变态辣椒") used in his Sina and Tencent accounts before those got deleted according to the BBC. Source.

8.1.2. Paresh Nath

Not China only like Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒, but does have some good China ones.

8.2. Falun, Sweden 法轮，瑞典

A Swedish University town called "Falun", with the same "Falun" Chinese characters as those in Falun Gong 法輪大法, which got the town blocked by the GFW on some websites, mentioned at:

Known primarily for its mine, which was one of the oldest operating companies in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falun_Mine

9. Art 艺术

10. Books 书籍

Either banned, or relevant.

For other censored material types, see: [lists-of-material-censored-in-china].

10.1. Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (AKA "1984") 一九八四 (1949)

Read for free from Project Gutenberg: http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks01/0100021.txt (archive)

This book is very fun to read, and it is not very long.

1984 has coined some amazing terms which perfectly describe aspects of dictatorships:

Chapter 3, O’Brien explains the system to Winston:

In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy—​everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always—​do not forget this, Winston—​always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—​for ever.'

On Chapter 5, Winston explains the erasing of the past to Julia:

Do you realize that the past, starting from yesterday, has been actually abolished? If it survives anywhere, it’s in a few solid objects with no words attached to them, like that lump of glass there. Already we know almost literally nothing about the Revolution and the years before the Revolution. Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book has been rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street and building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And that process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right. I know, of course, that the past is falsified, but it would never be possible for me to prove it, even when I did the falsification myself. After the thing is done, no evidence ever remains. The only evidence is inside my own mind, and I don’t know with any certainty that any other human being shares my memories.

See also:

With the advent of the Internet and Wayback Machine 网站时光机, this has become a bit harder though :-)

There is also a decent movie made released in the year, you guessed, 1984: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nineteen_Eighty-Four_(1984_film) starring John Hurt.

On Chapter 4, The Law of Gravity quote perfectly illustrates the CCPs approach to lying:

Anything could be true. The so-called laws of Nature were nonsense. The law of gravity was nonsense. 'If I wished,' O’Brien had said, 'I could float off this floor like a soap bubble.' Winston worked it out. 'If he THINKS he floats off the floor, and if I simultaneously THINK I see him do it, then the thing happens.' Suddenly, like a lump of submerged wreckage breaking the surface of water, the thought burst into his mind: 'It doesn’t really happen. We imagine it. It is hallucination.' He pushed the thought under instantly. The fallacy was obvious. It presupposed that somewhere or other, outside oneself, there was a 'real' world where 'real' things happened. But how could there be such a world? What knowledge have we of anything, save through our own minds? All happenings are in the mind. Whatever happens in all minds, truly happens.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=flhggnpCeHw Gravity scene from the 1984 movie.

10.2. Brave New World 美丽新世界 (1932)

This is basically a less good Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (AKA "1984") 一九八四 (1949), but the following passage from Chapter 17 rocks:

The Controller, meanwhile, had crossed to the other side of the room and was unlocking a large safe set into the wall between the book- shelves. The heavy door swung open. Rummaging in the darkness within, "It’s a subject," he said, "that has always had a great interest for me." He pulled out a thick black volume. "You’ve never read this, for example."

The Savage took it. "The Holy Bible, containing the Old and New Testaments" he read aloud from the title-page.

"Nor this." It was a small book and had lost its cover.

"The Imitation of Christ"

"Nor this." He handed out another volume.

"The Varieties of Religious Experience. By William James."

"And I’ve got plenty more," Mustapha Mond continued, resuming his seat. "A whole collection of pornographic old books. God in the safe and Ford on the shelves." He pointed with a laugh to his avowed library to the shelves of books, the rack full of reading-machine bobbins and soundtrack rolls.

"But if you know about God, why don’t you tell them?"

11. Policies 政策

11.1. Censorship 审查

censorship
Figure 151. Eric Drooker's "Censorship" (TODO year) has become one of the most recognizable censorship symbols as of 2020. Source.

11.1.1. Internal censorship is necessary to prevent fake USA accounts from creating harmful propaganda

The USA cannot create enough fake accounts to overwhelm real 1.5 billion Chinese accounts, especially considering things like forcing mobile number account verification.

Chinese politicians are just using this fear as an excuse to stay in power: The commies exaggerate the threat of the West to keep in power.

What if a Chinese person who really loves China and wants to improve the country disagrees with the Government?

What if this person is right, and wants to express this publicly to get support and make change happen?

Should this person just be put into jail as is done currently? Do you really think that the CCP can never do anything seriously wrong? [chinese-politicians-really-care-about-the-chinese-citizens]?

When citizens stop trying to contribute due to fear, this is known as the chilling effect (寒蝉效应).

What if a politician does something bad, and suppresses the news to protect themselves?

Without freedom of speech, who will watch over the actions of those in power? Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

I hear always the admonishment of my friends:

"Bolt her in, constrain her!"

But who will guard the guardians? The wife plans ahead and begins with them.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SymuEg6NRp0 Scene from The Man in the High Castle S04E06 in which the devoted young Thomas Smith hands himself in to be killed by the Nazis whom he worships after discovering that he has a disease, which is not acceptable in Nazi America.

The famous Heinrich Heine (German but from the 19th century, before the Nazis) saying also comes to mind:

Where they have burned books, they will end in burning human beings.

Do you not think that this translates well to the modern version:

Where they have deleted online posts, they will end in deleting human beings.

It is actually easier for the USA to manipulate a dictatorship than a democracy, because then all you have to do is buy/blackmail a few key corrupt politicians instead of manipulating millions of people’s feeds.

82a29858 e5b4 4ae1 88ae fa54737588e1
Figure 152. Internal censorship is so strong, that many Chinese people who leave China to live abroad continue to believe that the CCP is always right, despite having access evidence that suggests otherwise. This Rebel Pepper 变态辣椒 2019-08 cartoon shows frogs coming out of a big well still remain inside their own small wells made up of Chinese media such as Zhihu and CCTV. It is a reference to the Chinese proverb 井底之蛙 which means that a frog in the bottom of the well can only see a very limited portion of the sky. Source.
603px 1933 may 10 berlin book burning
Figure 153. Nazis burning books in Berlin in 1933. Source.
Destruction d'ouvrages du Falun Gong lors de la répression de 1999 en Chine
Figure 154. Falun Gong 法輪大法 books being destroyed with a road roller in 1999 in China in an extremely low quality early Internet still of a video TODO Ciro saw a 3s sequence in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7cz4Tkbwy8, find timestamp again. How far do you think mass jailings and torture would be? One wonders why they didn’t burn the books though. Source.

11.1.2. China has more freedom of speech than the USA!

When you hear that online, it really makes you wonder if those people believe it or are paid to say it.

Luckily, this is easy to verify: just create an online account on a Chinese website, and start posting about censored political subjects, and wait for your account to get banned.

Then create an account on an American website, and start posting about censored political subjects. The first good question is: what will you post about since no political subject is censored?

Here is one concrete and well documented example: Ciro Santilli’s Zhihu purge 2019-11-03.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1HdCIW2Xtk 2016-10-18 BBC stopped from visiting China independent candidate for local elections, Liu Huizhen (刘惠珍). They returned a few days later when the thugs weren’t there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eroTCMRn2yQ.
11.1.2.1. What happens if you wear a T-shirt with censored words in China?

Some cases where that didn’t end well for them:

Related:

  • 2000 https://en.minghui.org/emh/articles/2000/11/8/6250.html Autralian Zhang Cuiying (张翠英) went to China to protest against Falun Gong oppression and was kept 8 months in jail there. When she returned to Australia on 2000-11-04, she wore a t-shirt saying:

    为了一句公道话，
    法轮大法是正法，
    为此坐牢八个月，
    历经艰险讨公道，
    头可断，血可流，
    浩气丹心留狱中，
    中国镇压法轮功，
    将成为千古罪人。

    translated as:

    Because of the truth I said
    Falun Dafa is righteous
    I was imprisoned for 8 months
    I went through the hardship just to attain the justice
    I am not afraid of bleeding or other sacrifice
    My righteous mind was shown in the prison
    China suppresses Falun Gong
    Which is unforgivable

image
Figure 155. In 2016 activist Quan Ping (Kwon Pyong,权平,https://twitter.com/kwonpyong[BraveJohnny]) was sent to jail for wearing a Xitler/習包子/大撒币 t-shirt in public and posting selfies online. This photo is in front of a Government building (TODO exact location, reports say he is from Jilin City 吉林 transcription of the sign on top of building: 诚信立市 工业强市 依法治…​) New York Times coverage. He was later sentenced and served 18 months in prison because of this: Front Line Defenders profile. Source.
090521%20china%20I.preview
Figure 156. In 2009 activist Liu Shihui (刘士辉) was arrested for wearing a "One-party rule is a disaster" (一党独裁，遍地是灾) in 2009 in Guangzhou. This is a quote from a Xinhua News editorial from the 1940s. On the back was another quote by former president Liu Shaoqi (刘少奇) "The CP [Communist Party] opposes the Kuomintang’s one-party dictatorship, but the CP will not establish a one-party dictatorship". This interesting Zhihu 知乎 page has many other similar quotes BTW: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/59503784 (archive). He was later assaulted, spent 108 days in jail without a trial, and was forcefully sent back to his home town in Inner Mongolia: Front Line Defenders profile. Source.

11.1.3. Great Firewall (GFW) 防火长城

Golden Shield Project:

And so, the spirit of Internet freedom that the Chinese themselves had at the start, was crushed :

越过长城 走向世界

Across the Great Wall, we can reach every corner in the world.

Source: the first International email sent from China in 1987 by Wang Yunfeng (王运丰) in the Beijing-based Institute for Computer Application (ICA) of the China Ordnance Industry Corporation under the Ministry of Machinery and Electronics of the People’s Republic of China (中华人民共和国机械电子工业部) to Werner Zorn from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_in_China.

11.1.3.1. Would ending the Great Firewall truly end the dictatorship?

Not 100% sure.

In Russia 俄罗斯, for example, the Internet is relatively free, but the government controls most professional media, which is what most people end up seeing, by suing dissidents media out of business.

But on the other hand Russia is already much freer than China.

Although I don’t like them, I can’t deny one thing: the commies are smart, and when they do something (e.g. censorship), it tends to keep them in power.

11.1.3.2. The Great Firewall is necessary to protect China from harmful USA propaganda and data collection

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 doesn’t think this is below the USA, but:

  • without censorship, you would be much richer and stronger, and more able to defend yourselves

  • why does China also censor its own people in addition to foreign propaganda?

  • maybe this fear is greatly emphasized by the Chinese government beyond truth just to help them keep control of the country by fear and maintain their own power. Can the Americans really have that much influence in your country? The commies exaggerate the threat of the West to keep in power

  • maybe the regions that want to split from China feel like China is not giving them anything back, and they are themselves looking for allies outside of China to help them split. With democracy, people are more likely to get what they want, and there will be split parties and votes.

  • the same argument can be used to justify any action, no matter how bad. E.g.: we must put all who criticize the government in jail, or else they will make China less united and weaker against the USA!

Deng Xiaoping 邓小平 (1982-1987) notably had this ideology, even though he explicitly recognizes that there are also benefits to not having online censorship:

打开窗户，新鲜空气和苍蝇就会一起进来。

which translates as:

If you open the window, both fresh air and flies will enter.

11.1.3.2.1. Google China 谷歌中国
google china flowers baidu
Figure 157. Faithful Google China users/employees made a funeral-like flower tribute on the company’s entry sign in Beijing Tsinghua Science Park when the company was kicked/hacked out of China in the 2010 Operation Aurora. This was one example of the unfair joint venture technique imposed on foreign companies by China. Source.
11.1.3.3. Jingjing and Chacha 警警察察

Friendly looking mascots of Internet Censorship in China created by the Shenzhen Government in 2006.

https://youtu.be/ZB8ODpw_om8?t=583 "Roger Dingledine - The Tor Censorship Arms Race The Next Chapter - DEF CON 27 Conference" mentions that choosing friendly looking mascots for internet censorship is a comon practice in several dictatorships, so to suggest that they are just protecting citizens, These show the cute UAE censorship page for example:

The images were removed from Wikipedia presumably due to fair use concerns, so Ciro asked how to check that at: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/137977/how-to-check-why-a-fair-use-image-was-removed-from-wikipedia After understanding the case, Ciro reuploaded the images, hopefully for good.

20060102092326277
Figure 158. Jinjing (警警) is the male cop. Source.
20060102092327204
Figure 159. Chacha (警警) is the female cop. Source.
jingjing and chacha 1413461637268
Figure 160. Jingjing and Chacha picture shown on the street, presumably in China. Source.
ns9jhaeel4m01
Figure 161. Image with Jingjing and Chacha together and explanations (深圳网络警察,Shenzhen Network Police), good for copy pasting. TODO a bit small. Source..
bej10508281134.grid 6x2
Figure 162. Beijing version of the Shenzhen-created Jingjing and Chacha. TODO what does it say on the images? On car "XX网络110" (XX Internet 110) so it must be the phone number of the Internet police department. At bottom right something like (联合新作, joint XX), so likely means it is a joint action between two departments. Source.
Jingjing Chacha angry
Figure 163. Angry Chinese cop cartoons extracted from Encyclopedia Dramatica with the racist subtitles removed. It is hard to be sure what is the original image that they were Photoshopped from, but they are very similar to the Beijing Jingjing and Chacha although this is not a direct copy paste of the above since several details differ. The image was uploaded in 2011 to ED. Source.
Qatar filtering message. Qtel network
Figure 164. The Qatar friendly censorship page likely from around 2011. China is not alone in this "cute censorship" technique. Source.
11.1.3.4. Western companies that sell censorship technology to dictatorships

To China:

To other dictatorships:

In 2019, the European Union was considering making stricter laws about cyber surveillance exports, to include more technologies that can be used either for Censorship or other non-evil applications (dual-use), kudos to them:

564727cb219a210145a0dd6a1b7561
Figure 165. Cartoon showing how Amesys systems are used to suppress citizens in Egypt. Do you want the logo of your company to figure there instead? Source.
11.1.3.5. Censorship monitoring

Projects that attempt to understand how the Great Firewall works and what it blocks:

It is also worth noting 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.

11.1.3.5.1. GreatFire 自由微博

A group that produces tools and websites against censorship in China, central website: https://greatfire.org/

Backed by Radio Free Asia (RFA) 自由亚洲电台 and therefore USA Government.

The GreatFire Analyzer is their most important tool, it checks if websites are blocked or not in China:

It also keeps a calendar of previous checks so you can see when a website started getting blocked.

One of the highlighted collections is the Alexa Top 1000 domain block analysis: https://en.greatfire.org/search/alexa-top-1000-domains

Quite a few amazingly named porn ones, how could you live without them? Pornography ban 色情禁令

And some interesting random stuff that is hard to understand why its blocked, some of them appear to be pure protectionism:

Other tools:

11.1.3.5.2. Wayback Machine 网站时光机

Their Wayback Machine tool archive snapshots of webpages and allows youto browse the history of all archives:

By the Internet Archive organization:

But remember that if you archive too many in a very quick succession before the previous ones have been archived, even if manually through that plugin, your account/IP might get blocked, so just give a few seconds for the current archive to terminate before starting new ones.

This happed to Ciro in 2020-06-14, but then he emailed the admins as mentioned at: https://help.archive.org/hc/en-us/articles/360016379432-Accounts-Tips-Troubleshooting- and they re-enabled it.

11.1.3.5.3. archive.today

Like Wayback Machine 网站时光机 by uknown shady individuals, so less trustworthy.

But it does not care about robots.txt, so it sometimes works where Wayback Machine fails, so its better than nothing when it does.

And no, you can’t Wayback Machine archive an archive.is, they blocked the domain.

11.1.3.5.4. Google Cache

Google caches every indexed page that shows up on the search, you just have to click on the arrow and select "Cache" to see it.

The advantage over Wayback Machine 网站时光机 is that Google crawls many more pages than the Wayback Machine.

It is not possible however to see old caches, therefore you have to archive the Google caches with Wayback Machine 网站时光机 if you find anything interesting in them to not lose it:

The Google cache also has a text-only mode which is great for more complex webpages like those on Zhihu 知乎, which due to JavaScript madness keep showing and disappearing.

11.1.3.7. gfwlist

Chinese people widely use this website list with browser extensions, so as to only use more expensive and risky Censorship circumvention 翻墙 traffic when accessing certain webpages.

The result is a well maintained list of interesting websites. About half of which is porn.

Get the full list with:

base64 -d gfwlist.txt

See also:

11.1.3.8. Censorship circumvention 翻墙

It is interesting to note how Falun Gong 法輪大法 is a good source of censorship-circumvention material, see e.g.: [github-gov-takedowns].

11.1.3.9. ICP license 非经营性网站备案 (2000)

Part of the Internet censorship machine, although it predates the GFW proper.

It can be seen at the bottom of many many many websites, it is likely mandatory to display it.

If you see one of those, you already know hat it cannot be trusted for politics.

For example, as of April 2020, the Zhihu 知乎 sidebar shows:

京 ICP 备 13052560 号 - 1

where "京" indicates that the certificate was issued by the Beijing Provincial level city.

In 2014, almost 15 years later, Russia 俄罗斯 finally caught up, what a relief: Mandatory registration of bloggers (2014).

11.1.3.11. Pornography ban 色情禁令

This will be the fall of China:

And yet, every single Chinese teenager knows very well the meaning of "AV": Adult Video, the term originating notably from Japan (the Chinese really), which is one of the most common ways of referring to vide pornography.

Curious, right?

The Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel (AKA "1984") 一九八四 (1949) quote "The sex instinct will be eradicated." comes to mind, see that section for fuller context.

Some news coverage:

Coitus with bees
Figure 166. Human penis (陰莖) penetrating a human vagina while wearing a condom during human sexual intercourse (性交), showing the naturally occuring bees that automatically appear during the event to obscure the view and prevent [github] from taking down this page. This is also basically what all porn looks like (sometimes without the bees), and it is very, very boring to watch. background Source and bee source.
金瓶梅格子门插图2
Figure 167. Ming-era dynasty illustration of a scene from the novel Jin Ping Mei (金瓶梅) where Qing Ximen (西門) and Golden Lotus (潘金蓮) are engaging in foreplay in a beautiful ancient Chinese house. For an old depiction of homosexual male sexual activity, see: this image. Source.

11.1.4. 50 Cent Party 五毛党 (Wumao Dang)

They can be classified as a form of information warfare (信息战).

A wise person once said:

It is impossible to distinguish wumaos, idiots and brain washed people. So we just call all of them wumaos.

It has been pointed out however that there is a funny slang name for brainwashed CCP supporters who are not necessarily paid professional wumaos: "小粉紅" (little pinks)

To a large extent, wumao’s goals are to dilute useful conversation with shit, normally The commies exaggerate the threat of the West to keep in power and Western democracies are not perfect 西方的民主有很多缺点.

This leads to endless idiotic conversions of type:

You: Chinese friend, your house is on fire, let’s try to put the fire out!

Wumao: I don’t care, your house is also on fire!

You: that’s true, that fire is also very serious, and I’m trying to put it out!

Wumao: look everyone, his house is on fire! Mine isn’t!

Therefore, it is crucial to have a working algorithmic policy to handle them: How to deal with wumaos 如何应对五毛.

If it is determined that they are knowingly funded by China, they should be put into jail as foreign agents.

There is a tradeoff between privacy rights and snuffing out wumaos, and it is hard to decide where to set the line. But snuffing out wumaos is important, and must be done.

If we were to give up on privacy completely, one possible rule would be: block anyone that lives in China and whose revenue therefore cannot be investigated properly by your government to determine if they are funded by the CCP.

Here are some people completely against blocking wumaos. Those silly Democrats never prepare well enough for war:

Wumaos are particularly easy to spot on Western websites banned in China and when written in English, since there is no way that strong pro-CCP opinions would get any support in such circumstances:

  • [quora] is completely infested by wumaos as of 2020, see more information on that section

Bibliography:

毛 (mao2) is a colloquial form of 角 (jiao3) both meaning "one-tenth". Coins actually use 角. See also:

5 chinese jiao coin national emblem obverse 1
Figure 168. 50-cent coin (五角) from the fourth series of renminbi (第四套人民币, 1987-1997). This image is going to be very useful. Note the beautiful plum blossom drawings reminiscent of Chinese traditional painting 中国传统绘画 which Ciro Santilli 三西猴 loves. Note how it uses 角 (jiao3) instead of 毛 (mao2). Source.
11.1.4.1. How to deal with wumaos 如何应对五毛

Above all, never reply intelligently to wumaos. Ignore all their notifications, and ignore their profile wherever possible. And if they start generating too many notifications, block them.

11.1.4.2. CCP apologists 中共辩护士

If it is ever proven that those people are directly supported by the Chinese government, their nationalities should be revoked.

11.1.4.2.1. Nathan Rich 火锅大王

His vlogging career is inexplicably successful. He has 385,000 subscribers on his channel, a huge amount for someone with so little time and so few videos on the platform.".

https://www.reddit.com/r/China/comments/au8az3/exscientologist_nathan_rich_is_a_convicted_felon/ mentions another interesting very strong circumstantial evidence:

His videos feature perfect Chinese in the subtitles along with Chinese video titles, meaning that he is almost certainly having these videos produced by someone else/and or a group of people. I can guarantee that based on his pronunciation of the few Chinese words he says in the video, his Chinese ability should not be anywhere close to fluent.

It does feel possible that his content is prepared by the Government and that most of his followers are bots.

And at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRqcA04FtmM he says SerpentZA is a fraud "because he criticizes China".

Reception:

11.1.5. Real username law (2015)

And guess which idiotic Western website requires real usernames and no privacy? [quora], of course: https://techcrunch.com/2011/02/14/quora-to-oddly-named-users-papers-please/

11.2. Social Credit System 社会信用体系

Coverage:

  • 2019-06-04 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0cGB8dCDf3c "A Look Inside China’s Social Credit System | NBC News Now" by "NBC News"

  • 2018-12-12 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dkw15LkZ_Kw "China’s "Social Credit System" Has Caused More Than Just Public Shaming (HBO)" by "VICE News". 328s shows how you can donate money to the party to increase your score. This is not a hidden practice, they were filmed and everyone is showing their faces. What a brilliant idea that could never ever lead to corruption! Ciro’s jaw just dropped. How can the commies not hide this kind of shit from the West, but hide other stuff the West couldn’t care less about?

11.4. Communist Youth League of China 中国共产主义青年团

Had a membership of 109 million (by the 17th National Congress).

Such state sponsored youth organizations are a hallmark of dictatorships, and serve both as an indoctrination device, and as a selection tool for future politicians:

One may argue that the scouts are a similar organization in the West, but one notable difference is the scale of such dictatorship-led youth organizations.

Related news:

11.4.1. Young Pioneers of China 中国少年先锋队

XxjwshE007055 20190601 CBMFN1A006 11n
Figure 169. Xi Jinping basically Nazi saluting representatives attending the 7th National Congress of the Chinese Young Pioneers in Beijing, June 1, 2015. Source (biased).

11.6. Rule of law 法治

The commies keep saying over and over that rule of law is always observed.

Of course, some times shitty laws are passed, and we must fight those as well: FLG is illegal in China, we must follow the law. But many times, the commies don’t even bother setting up a bad law, they just fuck a million people and that’s it.

But in reality they punish anyone who poses a political threat, even if they did nothing wrong themselves, some cases that come to mind:

11.7. Support for non-scientific traditional practices

This is especially interesting given that one of the main propaganda reasons for banning Falun Gong 法輪大法 was FLG believers are less likely to take necessary medication:

12. Mirrors of this page 这个网页的镜像

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

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.

You can also view the GitHub pages version locally with:

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

or built it yourself:

gem install asciidoctor
make
xdg-open README.html

We also have a NPM Node.js package https://www.npmjs.com/package/china-dictatorship. After installing NPM, you can be use it as:

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

This would force China to also block/curate package managers to block this repo. The package is already available in this Chinese Taobao mirror: https://registry.npm.taobao.org/china-dictatorship (archive).

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

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 (archive). This is why packaging is a good idea.

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

Update all mirrors in one go with: push-mirrors:

./push-mirrors

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

13. Backlinks to this page 连接到这个网页的网页

Or to Ciro’s other online presences, due to China activity.

For Zhihu backlinks, see: [zhihu-questions-related-to-ciro-santilli].

13.1. V2EX

Anything goes forum, but largely programmer dominated. Had ICP license 非经营性网站备案 (2000) in 2016, but lost it in 2019 to move servers back to USA, so shady. Blocked in China as of 2020-06 according to GreatFire 自由微博.

13.2. Pincong 品葱

Uses a virtual currency system (游戏币): https://pincong.rocks/currency/rule/ Posting articles costs 20 points, and doing stuff like replying gives you a few points.

TODO is is blocked by Great Firewall (GFW) 防火长城 or not? GreatFire 自由微博 just hangs forever on it, e.g.:

13.2.1. Mohu 膜乎

Website openly anti-CCP, e.g. the signup page has Xi Jinping 习近平 (2012-∞) jokes. Very similar appearance to Pincong 品葱, likely same engine. https://pincong.rocks/question/24489 asks what is their relationship "请问一下品葱和膜乎之间是什么关系？"

Backlinks to this page:

  • 2020-06-03 https://www.mohu.rocks/article/2227 (archive) "专门开一个帖子，以后会把从各处搜刮来的六四学潮的视频、历史、文章之类放在这" (I’m creating this post to collect all the videos, history, articles, etc. that can be found anywhere about the Tiananmen Square protests)

    • Then one of the replies by "习羊羊与灰战狼" was "https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship "提供一个很全的链接，几乎可以算是反共手册。里面的4.7是谈六四的" (Here is one very complete link, it could almost be considered an anti-CCP manual. Section 4.7 of that page is about Tiananmen.) Ciro liked the sound of that very much :-)

https://github.com/cirosantilli/china-dictatorship 提供一个很全的链接，几乎可以算是反共手册。里面的4.7是谈六四的。

15. Anti-dictatorship songs 反对独裁的首歌

Not necessarily in Chinese or about China specifically.

Brazil had a dictatorship from 1964 to 1985, and some amazing songs were made in Portuguese in that era. Ciro Santilli 三西猴, who is Brazillian, just cannot stop thinking about some of them in relation to China.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33-bMTOlvx0 Apesar de Você (In spite of you [the Dictatorship])] by Chico Buarque published in 1970. Lyrics with translation. Top quotes: "You [the dictatorship] who invented this State, who invented sin, forgot to invent forgiveness." and "Where will you hide, from the enormous euphoria [of a revolution]? How will you prohibit it when the rooster insists in singing?"

16. The best Chinese traditional instrumental music albums 中国传统器乐音乐

Much like real Chinese food, your mind will be blown.

The best approach is to start with the largest multi-artist anthologies available to get a general overview of what is there.

Then, you can start Googling by instrument. The main four instruments are undoubtedly:

but there is also amazing content on others including:

and there is of course the infinite Wikipedia instrument list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_musical_instruments

Quality indicators:

  • bad:

    • Western instruments or modern digital effects

    • on YouTube: "relax" videos with boring generic music.

      They usually have some cute landscape scenes or overly produced good looking women as the thumbnail.

      Good video covers will show the musicians with their instruments, or Chinese traditional painting.

  • good: single instrument solo. There are some good multi-instrument and songs as well though, but harder to find.

Due to the language and political barrier, Chinese traditional music distribution is unfortunately atrocious, so learn what an ISRC is and don’t use BitTorrent which the Chinese call "BT".

If you find album cover pictures on Google images, the ISRC should be somewhere on the back.

Other good lists:

16.1. Free music 免费音乐

Here are the few best I’ve seen. Not enough to replace the non-free, but pretty good.

16.2. Non-free music

16.2.1. Master of Chinese Traditional Music 中国民族音乐大师系列

20-CD anthology.

ISRC of CD 1: CN-E01-04-450-00 / A.J6

A search on Amazon leads many of their albums in loose form: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=master+of+chinese+traditional+music&i=digital-music and you can patch together most of them by looking at the following two cover art styles:

TODO golden cover vs gray cover: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B000QZUFQI (archive), TODO find the precise list.

16.2.2. Masters of Chinese Traditional Music Solo Appreciation 中国民乐大师纯独奏鉴赏

14-CD anthology.

ISRC: CN-A50-06-389-00 / A.J6 (seems to be for the whole anthology)

Chinese name: 中国民乐大师纯独奏鉴赏

Publisher: Chinese Musicians' Association | https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/中国音乐家协会

16.3. Music publishers

16.3.1. China Record Corporation 中国唱片总公司

The most important publisher, AKA "CRC Jianian".

Government-owned unfortunately, their website takes forever to load: http://www.china-crc.com.cn/, and features mostly Communist shit, and I can’t find the decent traditional music listed there.

17. The best Chinese supermarket food products 中国超市食物

For more daily needs, when you don’t want to spend more money and time at a restaurant, here are a few nice things you can get from your local Chinese supermarket and quickly make something good to eat.

17.1. Dumplings 饺子 (jiao3 zi)

A staple food of North-east China.

You can buy them frozen on bags with about 20 for about 4 dollars.

Just boil 10-15 for 10 minutes and you have a decent ready-made meal!

The perfect cooking technique includes:

  • at first, before they float, stir often with chopsticks so that they won’t stick to the hot bottom of the pan, which will cause the peel to break

  • don’t ever ever ever overcook. Cook the minimum possible so that it is not raw. This also means taking the jiaozi out of the hot water as soon as they are done.

  • after the dumplings rise to the surface after a few minutes, let it boil, and then put some cold water on top of the hot water. Repeat this two, three or four times until they are fully cooked. This helps the jiazi keep a strong peel.

The best way to eat them is to pour some vinegar and ready-to-eat spicy preparations like Lao Gan Ma crispy chilly oil 老干妈 (lao3 gan1 ma1) or Ciro’s favorite, Fansaoguang Wild Brake Pickles 饭扫光野蕨菜 in the bowl, and then dip them one by one.

You can also drink the soup, or for cold days, actually eat the jiaozi with their soup. Ciro likes to add soy sauce and more of the above mentioned spices.

Can also be made by hand if you have the patience.

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 could basically eat those every 3-4 days and not get tired.

1523115362 020452000
Figure 170. Fresh Asia Brand (香源) product line "hand crafted water dumplings" (手工水餃) is a good brand to buy if you can get it. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YQkXA1xglU8 How to Cook Frozen Dumplings (Boil) by "Yongle Kitchen" shows the cool water pouring process.

17.2. Chinese buns 包子 (bao1 zi)

You can buy them frozen on bags with about 4 for about 4 dollars.

The best way to heat them up by far is to steam.

If you don’t have a steaming pot, you can also put them on a bowl inside a regular pot with some water at the bottom, and close the lid.

See also: 習包子.

17.3. Zongzi 粽子 (zong4 zi)

Buy frozen. Pick the ones with meat and eggs!!! Boil.

Cost about 4 dollars for 2.

You can’t eat them every day because too heavy, but they are so amazingly tasty!!!

17.4. Sunflower seeds 瓜子 (gua1 zi)

They are roasted and prepared with some flavoring, often green tea.

They are different from most Western ones you can find, because they tend to be harder, the seeds are not open.

This is good because it makes you feel the flavour that was added to the skin.

You have to learn how to open them with your front teeth.

Once you do that, you start eating them nonstop like a machine until the bag is empty.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zh0TiEd63k Chinese dude eating sunflower seeds for 9 hours non-stop. That’s a good brand to get BTW: Chacha Food (洽洽食品).

17.5. Dried broad bean snack 干蚕豆 (gan1 can2 dou4)

The name of broad bean in Chinese is interesting: it literally means "silkworm bean", because the shape of the bean looks a bit like that of a silkworm cocoon.

Six Fortune Prepared Broad Bean 170G
Figure 171. Six Fortune (六福) is a good brand. Source.

17.6. Lao Gan Ma crispy chilly oil 老干妈 (lao3 gan1 ma1)

You can basically add it to any stir fried dish ever if it is too bland.

The one with peanuts or black beans is also good.

Just stay away from the Chicken flavoured one. Eww.

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Figure 172. You can even buy Laoganma on Amazon! Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkTQTS2RSCU "What is Lao Gan Ma, and can you make it at home?" by "Chinese Cooking Demystified" published on Nov 19, 2019. Explains how it comes from Guizhou province cuisine (neighbours Sichuan).

17.7. Fansaoguang Wild Brake Pickles 饭扫光野蕨菜

This is the best thing to eat with Dumplings 饺子 (jiao3 zi) ever!!!

Some other flavours of the same brand are also very much worth trying, e.g. the Enokitake (金针菇) one. Others are a bit boring.

Oily, spicy and sour.

WeChat Image 20180912222515 1024x1024@2x
Figure 173. Photo of the Fansaoguang Wild Brake Pickles jar. Source.

17.8. Hot pot 火锅 (huo3 guo1)

You just have to buy:

  • a hot pot base soup

  • various kinds of frozen fish/meat balls

  • thin sliced frozen beef/lamb meat sold specifically for hot pot

  • leafy vegetables like Chinese cabbage or fresh Chinese mushrooms

  • you can also add some dry stuff like dried mushrooms or dry tofu products

  • sauces to put into a bowl and dip the cooked things in before putting them into your mouth. Could be either dedicated hot pot sauces, but sesame paste, soy sauce, vinegar and Lao Gan Ma crispy chilly oil 老干妈 (lao3 gan1 ma1) will already be good enough

Put the electric rice cooker or a regular pot with a portable electric heater on the dining table.

Boil the water with the soup, start with the harder to cook meaty things, and eat/add more as they become ready!

Great fun to do in winter with family and friends!

There are also dedicated hot pot restaurants, but Ciro Santilli 三西猴 is not a fun, since it feels much better to do it in the privacy of your home.

YouTube explains it pretty well, no need for their fancy ying yang pans though, a rice cooker will do just fine:

17.9. Congee 粥 (zhou1)

A thick rice/cereal/bean porridge. Amazing for breakfast.

You can buy them as dry air tight uncooked cereal/bean mixtures, and there are different types.

You can also buy the ingredients separately of course, but it requires more effort.

If you get the air-tight bag, you can also buy some extra missing ingredients to taste, notably jujubes (枣).

Then you just boil them in a rice cooker for a few hours.

It is also possible to buy them ready-to-eat in cans, but those are nowhere near as good.

One particular type which is very good is: Laba congee (eight treasure congee, 八宝粥).

Then, to eat it, you will want to add salty side dishes, all of which can be bought from the Chinese supermarket, since the congee itself is just mildly sweet and not salty at all:

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Figure 174. The HONOR brand (康樂, full name: Honor Products, 康樂產品) Eight treasure congee (八寶粥) is a good brand to buy if you can find it. Source.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIxbJxNRpX0 Video showing how to make eight treasure congee from scratch by "Asian garden 2 table" published on Feb 2, 2020.

18. The best Chinese restaurants outside of China 中国以外最好的中国饭店

18.1. Introduction

Most Western people do not know what real Chinese food is.

When you first see it, your mind is completely blown: there it was, one of the best foods in the world by far, and you had never tried it: only a completely watered down boring version that you get when you are not guided by Chinese people.

We must put a stop to this madness.

After you see the light and eat the real version of a dish, then when you go to a not-real restaurant you start to think: "hey, I know what dish this was supposed to be. But it could be so much more awesome!" This makes non-real restaurants twice as bad. So beware, there is no turning back.

Maybe we should institute a Foodie Dictatorship (美食家独裁) that prevents such fake restaurants from hiding real Chinese food???

18.1.1. Rating system

  • tier 1: amazing, worth a trip

  • tier 2: worth it, but not exciting, so not worth a trip just for it

  • tier 3: I wouldn’t go there

18.1.2. How to find good restaurants

  • go with Chinese food-loving friends to Chinese restaurants

  • read up Chinese restaurant recommendation websites written in Chinese by Chinese for Chinese

  • read up small shady Chinese food recommendation websites by sinophiles like me

Big Western sites like Google Maps reviews and TripAdvisor are completely and utterly useless for this and will recommend places in which poor non-Chinese which don’t know what real Chinese food is like.

If you go out on the street by yourself, you are very unlikely to find really good Chinese food since the enormous majority of Chinese restaurants are not real Chinese food.

If there are only Chinese clients inside the restaurant, it is a good indicator that it might be good. If all clients people are Western, run away.

Western people don’t know what good Chinese food is, so if you are not in a place that has a very large Chinese population, real Chinese food restaurants cannot survive, and won’t exist. This usually implies being in large cities of rich countries.

Beware of restaurant owner changes: if the menu looks a bit different, it has likely happened.

This is politically incorrect, but here goes: if the place looks as if it is maintained by more recent immigrants, and looks more modern, it is more likely to be good. There are however some venerable older uncles who have cooked well their entire lives and are still fine. Things tend to water down across generations, and there was likely not enough real Chinese clientele for them to serve real Chinese food and survive in the past.

If a restaurant advertises itself as "Asian", it is less likely to be very good.

Conversely, restaurants that specialize in a single region of China are more likely to be good (bot not certainly good).

It is already difficult to do the cuisine for one part of China well, imagine for multiple countries.

Just beware of "Sichuan" restaurants: their cuisine is so well known even in the West that I’ve seen many not so good restaurants that describe themselves like that, even if the owners are from another region. But there are many good ones which really are from there as well.

18.1.4. How to order

For all restaurants, ask the waiter for suggestions. Tell him that you:

  • want the most typical dishes, not what the foreign locals eat, but what the Chinese eat

  • can eat spicy food, way more than any foreign local person can.

    The spice level you generally want is "zhong1 la2" (medium spicy)

    If you can’t eat spicy, either learn or stop reading now and accept the fact that you will never eat good Chinese food.

  • if the restaurant is from some region, ask for dishes from the region, and which are different from other regions.

    I was once Dumplings 饺子 (jiao3 zi) (super popular dish everywhere in China which I buy frozen and eat every 3 days) in a Tibetan restaurant…​ Yes, I do believe Tibetans also eat jiaozi! :-)

  • Speaking a little Chinese goes a long way towards convincing the owners that you can handle the real thing.

Only order dishes with meat. Those without are not worth the money/time. Aubergine is the exception.

18.2. France 法国

Traiteurs are simpler restaurants that let you see pre-made foods in a glass showcase for you to choose how big your portions will be.

They are the best way to eat a cheap and balanced meal in Paris, but I have never found one that serves exceptional Chinese food, so beware.

18.2.1. Paris 巴黎

Paris has one of the largest Chinese communities outside of China in the whole world centered in the 14eme arrondissement, plus a lot of Chinese students with money around.

As a result, you can find some of the best Chinese food in the world outside of China!

Bibliography:

  • https://carnetdecroute.blogspot.fr

  • http://cnkick.net/2013/09/10/les-meilleurs-restaurants-chinois-de-paris-le-guide-cn-kick/

  • https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-Chinese-restaurants-in-Paris

  • https://www.newsavour.com/restaurants/ Chinese only, Paris, website subsidiary of some larger Chinese group.

  • Restaurant Sichuan (川里川外)

    17 Rue le Peletier, 75009 Paris

    Xianglaxie.

    Last checked: 2017/06

  • Chez Yong (Ding Ding Xiang, 鼎鼎香)

    42, rue de la Colonie, 75013 Paris

    • shui zhu niu rou

    • dishes with intestines

  • La Chine sur la langue (舌尖美味)

    163 rue Saint-Denis, 75002 Paris

    • Spicy soup with Chinese charcuteries. Ma la tang.

    • Large dry and thin bread. Jing dong da bing. 京东大饼. Picture.

  • Quatre Amis (那家小馆)

    29 rue de Charenton, 75012 Paris

    • Fried octopus

    • Shui zhu niu rou

    • Anything with intestines

  • Le Céleste Gourmand (福来居, fu lai ju)

    8 Rue de la Tacherie, 75004 Paris

  • L’Orient d’Or (福源丰)

    22, Rue de trévise, 75009 Paris

    • Galettes croustillantes au canard (xiang su ya dai bing, 香酥鸭带饼)

    • Poisson pimentee (suan tang yu, 酸汤鱼)

    • Soupe aux cartilages de porc avec algues (hai dai pau gu tang, 海带排骨汤)

    Hunan style.

    25 euros / person.

  • Carnet de Route

    57 Rue du Faubourg Montmartre, 75009 Paris

    Last checked: 2016/04

  • 0 d’Attente (锅先生不等位)

    55 Boulevard Saint-Marcel, 75013 Paris

    +33 9 81 49 68 06

    Like style of chairs and cutlery.

    Ironically, the service was not particularly fast as the name indicates. Normal, but not ultra-fast as I imagined :-)

    lotus with rice (Nuo mi tang ou) and boeuf sechee (guo xian sheng …​) not very good, but baked fish and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meigan_cai kaorou were great.

    Last checked: 2016/02

  • Autour du Yangtse (食尚煮意)

    12 Rue du Helder, 75009 Paris

    • Marmite de poisson et de tofu (豆花鱼)

    • Saliva chicken (口水鸡)

    • Aubergines farcies sur plaqua chauffante (铁板脆皮茄)

  • Deux Fois Plus De Piment (绝代双椒)

    Address: 33 Rue Saint-Sébastien, 75011 Paris

    Sichuan style.

  • Délices de Shandong (山东小馆)

    88 Boulevard de l’Hôpital, 75013 Paris

  • Hakka Home

    3 Rue Voltaire, 75011 Paris

    Food from the Hakka people https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hakka_people

    Most dishes are like other good Chinese restaurants in Paris, but there were a few different ones.

  • Maison Dong (东馆)

    36 Rue Vivienne, 75002 Paris

    Last checked: 2017/04

  • Royal Tching Tao (青岛人家)

    8 Rue du Bel-Air, 75012 Paris

    • Galettes croustillantes au canard. Shi zi tou.

    • Sweet fish （Song shu gui yu 松鼠桂鱼)

  • Le Pont de Yunnan (滋味云南)

    15 Rue Notre Dame de Lorette, 75009

    Great food, but we had a bad service experience: got kicked out too early, even with a reservation.

  • Tien Hiang (天香)

    14, rue Bichat, 75010 Paris

    Vegetarian food: most dishes are an imitation of a dish with meat.

    Not as good as the original meat for me, but very interesting and good for a change.

    Chinese vegetarians are rare. In theory, the origin of the food in this restaurant is Hong Kong Buddhism (Buddhist monks cannot eat meat, while other believers can.)

  • Likafo (利口福酒家)

    39 Avenue de Choisy, 75013 Paris

  • Restaurant Sichuan (四川人家)

    31-33 Rue Descartes, 75005 Paris

    Perfect Fuqi feipian.

    Huiguorou is good not my style, I prefer with leek.

    Last checked: 2017/04

18.2.1.1. Paris tier 2

Cheaper / simpler restaurants that are really worth it if you want not to be hungry, but not worth it if you want eat exceptional food:

  • Ace Boucherie

    58 Rue Sainte-Anne, 75002 Paris

    Korean takeaway traiteur. Very good. Try calamar.

    Last checked: 2017/06

  • Ji Bai He

    108 Rue Olivier de Serres, 75015 Paris

    Jiaozi and accompanying small dishes are great.

    Last checked: 2016/03

  • SUCREPICE

    5 Rue d’Arras, 75005 Paris

    M10: Cardinal Lemoine

    Liang ban mian, but do ask "wei la, they are strong.

  • Noodle No 1

    54 rue Sainte Anne, 75002 Paris

    • Soupe aux nouilles pimentées

  • Noodle bar

    31 Rue nationale, 75013 Paris, France

  • Chez Shen

    39 Rue au Maire, 75003 Paris, France

  • Dosanko Larmen

    40 Rue Sainte-Anne, 75002 Paris

    Order the big portion at your own risk. :-)

    Last checked: 2017/04

  • Chez Mamie (外婆家)

    18 Rue du Grenier-Saint-Lazare, 75003 Paris,

    Last checked: 2017/06

18.2.2. Marseille 马赛

  • Shanghai kitchen

    14 Cours Jean Ballard, 13001 Marseille, France

18.3. United Kingdom 英国

Bibilography:

18.3.1. London 伦敦

18.3.1.1. Little Wooden Hut 小木屋

Address:

Little Newport Street
WC2H 7JJ

Last checked: 2016/08

Not yet on Google maps so I don’t know the number, but the street is very small so should be easy to find.

18.3.1.2. Murger Han

Address:

8A Sackville St
Mayfair, London
W1S 3EZ

Last checked: 2019/01

Cuisine: Xi’an

Biangbiang noodles with all extras zhongla are amazing!!! Niuroupaomo OK, but not exciting. Roujiamo not very interesting, too bland for my taste.

18.3.1.3. London tier 2
18.3.1.3.1. Chinese Tapas House

Address:

Little Newport Street
WC2H 7JJ

Not yet on Google maps so I don’t know the number, but the street is very small so should be easy to find.

Jianbing guozi, interesting spicy fast food.

18.3.1.3.2. Rice Coming Restaurant 米齐临

Rice noodles are good, and small dishes authentic.

Address: 10A Coptic St, Holborn, London WC1A 1NH

Last checked: 2019-04

18.3.2. Cambridge 剑桥

18.3.2.1. Spring Restaurant 春天

Address:

66 Mill Rd
CB1 2AS

Last checked: 2017/08

Spicy chicken with pasta and potatoes.

18.3.2.2. Seven Days 天天美食剑桥

Address:

66 Regent St
CB2 1DP
18.3.2.3. @72 China

Address:

72 Regent St
CB2 1DP

Douhuaniurou 豆花牛肉, kaoyu.

18.3.2.4. Golden House

Address:

12 Lensfield Rd
CB2 1EG

Meicaikourou, luobo bing.

18.3.2.5. 1 + 1 Rougamo

Tier: 2

Address:

84 Regent St
CB2 1DP

Last checked: 2019/05

Roujiamo very good. Also good: broad noodles, 凉皮.

18.3.3. Oxford 牛津

18.3.3.1. A Taste Of China 三秦百味

Tier: 2

Last checked: 2019/03

Redamian good, Biangbiangmian not as interesting. Nice people working there. Two two seat tables only, mostly takeaway. Fair price.

18.3.3.2. Xi’an

Tier: 3

Last checked: 2019/03

Not real Chinese food I’m afraid. Songshuyu was not cut correctly into stripes and too much liquid sauce. Sijidou beans not dry enough, maybe need more frying. Early immigration (1968, mentioned on menu), almost no Chinese clients. Nice decoration and environment.

18.3.4. Sheffield 谢菲尔德

  • China Red Restaurant

    3 Rockingham Gate, Sheffield S1 4JD, United Kingdom

    Last checked: 2016/06, shuizhuyu.

18.4. Brazil 巴西

18.4.1. Sao Paulo 圣保罗

  • Chuanxiangyuan Restaurante (川香园餐馆 )

    \R. Barão de Iguape, 47 - Liberdade, São Paulo - SP

    Eat the big fish dishes, they are worth it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuqi_feipian was not very good.

    Free tea was good.

    Rice could be better.

    Owners are actually from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tianjin , not Sichuan, as implied by the 川 in the name of the restaurant. GF told me that those big fish dishes are typical from there.

    Last checked: 2016/01/09

18.5. Canada 加拿大

18.5.1. Montreal 加拿大蒙特利尔，

Last checked: 2016/01

  • Cuisine Szechuan

    2350 Rue Guy, Montréal, QC H3H 2M2, Canada

  • Kanbai

    1110 Rue Clark, Montréal, QC H2Z 1K3, Canada Good

  • Délice oriental

    1858 Rue Ste-Catherine O, Montréal, QC H3H 1M1

Not worth it:

  • Chez Chili

    1050B rue Clark

19. The best East Asian museums outside of China 中国以外最好的东亚博物馆

Ciro Santilli 三西猴 liked these in order of best first. Keep in mind that he is especially interested in Chinese traditional painting 中国传统绘画:

20. Chinese television series 中国电视剧

Modern themed television series are generally crap due to Censorship 审查, but this leads to a big focus on ancient stuff, and some of it is amazing.

A good place to start are the canonical TV adaptations of the Four Great Classic Novels (四大名著)

There must be other good adaptations for other classics mentioned at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_literature, gotta find them.

21. Tips to learn Chinese 学习中文方法建议

To overhear people and learn characters/new words Pleco: https://www.pleco.com/

It really hurts that there is no online Pleco, you have to go back and forth from cell phone to computer, is there anything as good online?

Maybe some day something will be extracted from: https://github.com/skishore/makemeahanzi which jas a huge JSON of character data.

When you want to learn "how to say something in Chinese", the only valid routes are:

  • does it have a Wikipedia page? Go on the English one then change language

  • put an English sentence on Google Translate, then Google for it.

    If it is a common word, it will give useless dictionary results, so search instead with site:bbc.com or site:zhihu.com.

    Then find a sentence that contains the word written by a native Chinese, and understand the full sentence to confirm that it means what you want it to mean in a similar context.

    Just using the Google translate directly will lead 70% to a weird/wrong/incomprehensible translation that no Chinese person would ever say.

Good Chinese content to consume to learn:

  • 几分钟看完: illegal 10 minute summaries of movies with clips from the movies and a narrator speaking quickly instead of movie sounds.

    Some have Chinese subtitles, e.g.: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFSMvtS6SYQ and it is great content to learn from, because it is someone telling a not too boring story in a natural and clear way, with supporting images to help with context.

21.1. Chinese character sentence component mnemonic systems

Associate one word to each character/character component.

One good way to find mnemonics is to just Google for whatever random words you want to fit into a sentence. You end up learning fun things this way, and those make the best mnemonics.

Then to learn a new character, break it down into components, and create a sentence or short story that includes all the component words.

Japanese Kanji:

21.2. Lists of the most common characters and words

This is a good approach to tick off high frequency stuff you don’t know you don’t know:

22. Chinese cheat

Single author open source Pleco + "Remembering Simplified Hanzi" in a single .adoc file? Let’s go.

We’d use https://rtega.be/chmn/ as basis if it weren’t for the NO in CC-BY-NO-SA? But that NO is evil, what the heck does it even mean to gain money from something? Too restrictive.

Format will be very constant, database like. Would therefore be cool to parse it from the Asciidoctor into a proper database as a way to verify and allow third party usage.

Base mnemonic components can come more or less directly from the 214 Kangxi radicals: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kangxi_radical

One key principle is that characters and words often don’t have a well translatable meaning: the minimal always translatable unit is a sentence: [chinese-sentences]!

You can’t fully learn a language by learning words and characters alone, you must learn sentences.

22.1. Characters

Format:

[[<character>]]
=== <character> (<pinyin>, <mnemonic name>)

Short forms: <<short-form>>, <<short-form>>

Mnemonic: <<mnemonic-story>>.

Words:

* <chinese-word-containing>
* <chinese-word-containing>

Characters:

* <character-containing>
* <character-containing>

Translations:

* <<english-word>>
** <<chinese-sentence-containing>>

Sentences:

* <<chinese-sentence-containing>>

Notes: <<random-text>>

Notes:

* <<random-text>>
* <<random-text>>

Notes:

  • Translations is only used when it is a single character word, if it goes inside a word, only the word will contain the sentence

22.1.1. Top part of 每 (, pistol)

Mnemonic: Can’t find the freaking Unicode. It looks like a pistol.

Characters:

  • 每 TODO each

22.1.2. Top part of 存 (, market stall)

Mnemonic: looks like one.

Characters:

22.1.3. 龶 (-, crown)

Mnemonic: the dot indicates something that stays on top of the head of a king (王 (wang2, king))

Characters:

Notes: there is no "proper" Chinese name for this, it is just known as "the top part of 青 (qing1, blue)" (青字頭) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/龶

22.1.6. 白 (bai2, white)

Mnemonic: the sun (日 (ri4, sun)) is so bright on that one (一 (yi1, one)) day, that it was almost white

Characters:

22.1.7. 勹 (bao1, plastic wrap)

Mnemonic: Kangxi 20 is "wrap". So we choose plastic wrap as a specific type of wrapping that will give good mnemonics.

Characters:

22.1.8. 本 (ben3, potato)

Mnemonic: one (一 (yi1, one)) thing is always beloow a tree (本 (ben3, potato)): potato roots

Characters:

22.1.9. 匕 (bi3, spoon)

Mnemonic: an ancient spoon, looks like this: https://read01.com/aAEn50x.html#.XnfZDN_niV4 "古人吃饭最早不用筷子，用的是“匕”，那“匕”是什么？

22.1.10. 表 (biao3, watch [device])

Mnemonic: imagine a soldier wearing green (龶 (-, crown)) camouflage clothes (衣 (yi1, clothes)), and checking his watch to know if it is time to attack

Words:

22.1.11. 卜 (bu3, magic wand)

Mnemonic: the kangxi description is "divination". Since this is completely unrelated to common contexts of modern people, we select a wand use a magic-related object that can be easily put into fun stories: a magic wand.

Characters:

22.1.12. 不 (bu4, not)

Mnemonic: unclear, possibly magic wand 卜 (bu3, magic wand)

Words:

22.1.13. 查 (cha2, check)

Mnemonic: every dawn 旦 (dan4, dawn), men have to check if their penises are hard as wood 木 (mu4, wood, tree), and if so they have to stay in bed for a while longer because it is too embarrassing to walk out like that, see also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_wood

Words:

22.1.16. 彳 (chi4, step)

Mnemonic: Kangxi 60.

Characters:

22.1.17. 辵 (chuo4, walk)

Short forms: ⻌,⻍,⻎

Characters:

22.1.18. 存 (cun2, survive)

Mnemonic: the Jewish child (子 (zi, child)) survived from the Nazis by hiding under a market stall (Top part of 存 (, market stall))

Words:

22.1.21. 歹 (dai3, supervillain)

Mnemonic: that evening (夕 (xi1, evening)), one (一 (yi1, one)) supervillain attacked us!

Characters:

Words:

22.1.22. 单 (dan1, bill)

Mnemonic: that lunch bill cost as much as buying eighty (十 (shi2, ten) 八 (ba1, eight)) rice fields (田 (tian1, field))!

Words:

  • TODO 买单

22.1.23. 旦 (dan4, dawn)

Mnemonic: dawn is when the sun (日 (ri4, sun)) is raising over the horizon (一 (yi1, one))

Characters:

Words:

22.1.24. 但 (dan4, but)

Mnemonic: I saw a person (人 (ren2, person)) walking at dawn (旦 (dan4, dawn)). It was beautiful, but why wouldn’t they be sleeping instead?

22.1.26. 的 (de, my)

Mnemonic: my penis looks like a white (白 (bai2, white)) wrap sandwitch (勺 (shao2, wrap sandwitch))

22.1.28. 动 (dong4, move)

Mnemonic: his superpower (力 (li4, superpower)) is to move fart clouds (云 (yun2, cloud)) with his mind

Words:

22.1.29. 对 (dui4, correct)

Mnemonic: to progress slowly, adding inch (寸 (cun4, inch)) by inch, again (又 (you4, again)) and again, is the correct way to progress

Characters:

22.1.30. 多 (duo1, many)

Mnemonic: one wrap sandwitch (勺 (shao2, wrap sandwitch)) is fine for lunch, but two on too many

22.1.32. 尔 (er3, you)

Mnemonic: I’ll stab you with a small (小 (xiao3, small)) knife (刀 (dao1, knife))

Characters:

22.1.33. 二 (er4, two)

Characters:

  • 元

22.1.34. 肺 (fei4, lungs)

Mnemonic: he didn’t have two lungs, but rather one moon (月 (yue4, moon)) and one lung (巿 (fu2, lung))

Words:

22.1.35. 巿 (fu2, lung)

Mnemonic: due to an infection, doctors had to dry up one (一 (yi1, one)) of his lung with a towel (巾 (jin1, towel))

Characters:

22.1.38. 根 (gen1, roots)

Mnemonic: roots one root (艮 (gen4, root)) plus one root and lots of wood (木 (mu4, wood, tree))

22.1.39. 艮 (gen4, root)

Mnemonic: radical of roots (根 (gen1, roots))

Notes: this is a Kangxi radical, but its English name "stopping" is just too close to the more important "stop" 止 (zhi3, stop) and would cause confusion. So we just use the common phonetic compound roots (根 (gen1, roots)) as the mnemonic. It was tempting to leave "root" for 本 (ben3, potato), which looks perfectly like a root, but we did character first, and "potato" makes for even better mnemonics.

Characters:

22.1.40. 冠 (guan1, corona)

Mnemonic: when Queen Elizabeth was crowned, the first (元 (yuan2, first)) thing they put a one inch (寸 (cun4, inch)) hajib 冖 (mi4, hajib [Muslim female head scarf]) on her head, and then the corona of a Christian saint saint appeared on her head

22.1.41. 禾 (he2, grain)

Mnemonic: imagine one 一 (yi1, one) grain of rice coming out of wood (木 (mu4, wood, tree))

Characters:

22.1.42. 和 (he2, harmonious)

Mnemonic: nothing is more harmonious than putting some grains 禾 (he2, grain) in your mouth 口 (kou3, mouth)

Characters:

22.1.43. 很 (hen3, very)

Mnemonic: stepping (彳 (chi4, step)) on a tree root (艮 (gen4, root)) is a very bad idea, it might be a tree spirit that gets angry and eats you!

22.1.46. 交 (jiao1, exchange student)

Mnemonic: we measured six 六 (liu4, six) American exchange students 交 (jiao1, exchange student) on a balance 乂 (yi4, balance) to see which one was heaviest. Idea comes from 交流 (exchange student).

Words:

  • <<性交>.

22.1.47. 巾 (jin1, towel)

Mnemonic: person carrying bath towel over shoulders.

Characters:

22.1.50. 里 (li3, mile)

Mnemonic: his field (田 (tian1, field)) streched over one mile (里 (li3, mile)), but it consisted of barren soil (土 (tu3, soil)) without any plants

Characters:

22.1.51. 理 (li3, science)

Mnemonic: the king (王 (wang2, king)) Louis XIV was a big patron of the mectric system, which intends to improve science by removing useless units like the mile (里 (li3, mile))

Words:

22.1.53. 列 (lie4, list)

Mnemonic: there must exist a list of supervillains (歹 (dai3, supervillain)) with knives (刀 (dao1, knife)) on the web? A knife-yielding supervillain list! https://techland.time.com/2010/09/03/top-ten-heroes-and-villians-with-big-knives/

Words:

22.1.54. 林 (lin2, woods)

Mnemonic: there are lots of trees 木 (mu4, wood, tree) in the woods 林 (lin2, woods)

Characters:

22.1.55. 临 (lin2, temporary)

Mnemonic: the simplified character was completely mutilated into a bunch of senseless traces unmemorizable traces. The traditional 臨 can be broken into: the Prime minister (臣 (chen2, minister)) temporarily decided to increase production of an important product (品 (pin3, product)): pistols (Top part of 每 (, pistol)), until the zombie apocalypse would be over.

Words:

22.1.56. 仑 (lun2, logic)

Mnemonic: spoon theory is very logical and explains how using spoons (匕 (bi3, spoon)) is a good metaphor for a person's (人 (ren2, person)) energy consumption

Characters:

22.1.57. 论 (lun4, rationale)

Mnemonic: "rationale" the fancy way that engineers say (言 (yan2, speak, say)) "logic" (仑 (lun2, logic))

Words:

22.1.58. 轮 (lun4, wheel)

Mnemonic: it is pretty logical (仑 (lun2, logic)) that a car (车 (che1, car)) needs wheels

Words:

22.1.59. 没 (mei2, not have)

Mnemonic: if you do not have any water (水 (shui3, water)) for your coffee (殳 (shu1, coffee)), it won’t be very good

22.1.60. 冖 (mi4, hajib [Muslim female head scarf])

Notes: the Wikipedia Kangxi is "cloth cover". Ciro guesses this was originally something to do with food covering. But let’s just go with hajib which will allow for easy politically incorrect mnemonics. "Crown" from 冠 (guan1, corona) would also be another good one, but we had already used crown for 龶 (-, crown).

Characters:

22.1.63. 疒 (ne4, sick)

Mnemonic: Kangxi 104.

Characters:

22.1.65. 牛 (niu2, cow)

Short forms: 牜,⺧

Characters:

22.1.66. 爬 (pa2, climb)

Mnemonic: you need claws (爪 (zhao3, claws)) to climb (爬) Brazil's (巴 (ba1, Brazil)) tallest mountain: Pico da Neblina

Words:

22.1.67. 品 (pin3, product)

Mnemonic: you need a lot of food products to feed the three mouths (口 (kou3, mouth)) of three children!

Words:

  • 食品 TODO

Characters:

22.1.68. 攴 (pu1, to tap)

Short forms: 攵

Mnemonic: to transform a frog into a princess, you have to tap your magic wand (卜 (bu3, magic wand)) again and again (又 (you4, again)) on it

Characters:

22.1.69. 千 (qian2, thousand)

Mnemonic: a super powerful 十 (shi2, ten) with an extra trace

Notes: careful to not confuse with 干 (gan1, dry) which has a straight top.

Characters:

22.1.71. 青 (qing1, blue)

Mnemonic: the crown (龶 (-, crown)) of the king was blue and moon-shaped (月 (yue4, moon))

Notes: it is more like green-blue/Cyan, see also https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/青色 but let’s call it blue because it will be used in many constructs.

Characters:

Words:

22.1.72. 清 (qing1, clear)

Mnemonic: imagine a Caribbean sea water (水 (shui3, water)) was is blue (青 (qing1, blue)) and clear

Notes: clear in the sense of "not dirty" and "a clear explanation". "Clear colors" use TODO 浅 as in 浅蓝.

Words:

22.1.73. 情 (qing2, lust)

Mnemonic: in his heart (心 (xin1, heart)), the greatest lust was that of blue (青 (qing1, blue)) underwear

Words:

22.1.74. 犬 (quan3, dog)

Mnemonic: imagine one big (大 (da4, big)) dog wagging its tail, the extra dot is the tail

Short forms: 犭

Characters:

22.1.78. 勺 (shao2, wrap sandwitch)

Mnemonic: it is something that you would put inside plastic wrap (勹 (bao1, plastic wrap))

Notes: this is one of the main words for spoon, but that mnemonic is already taken by the Kangxi 匕 (bi3, spoon), so we had to go for something else.

Characters:

22.1.81. 审 (shen3, inspect)

Mnemonic: if you are going to inspect what’s making those noises on the roof (宀 (mian2, roof)), you will certainly find that it was God (申 (shen1, God))

22.1.82. 生 (sheng1, be born, birth)

Mnemonic: as soon as the prince was born 生 (sheng1, be born, birth), only one (一 (yi1, one)) crown 龶 (-, crown) was put on his head, not two as expected since he was the child of the rulers of kingdoms

Words:

22.1.84. 时 (shi2, time)

Mnemonic: if the sun (日 (ri4, sun)) moves an inch (寸 (cun4, inch)) in the sky, then that means that 1 minute of time has passed

Words:

22.1.85. 使 (shi3, TODO)

Mnemonic: TODO 人 (ren2, person) 吏

Translations:

22.1.86. 示 (shi4, spirit)

Short forms: 礻

Mnemonic: imagine two 二 (er4, two) small 小 (xiao3, small) child spirits playing with one another, maybe they died during a nuclear explosion and never noticed what happened

Characters:

22.1.87. 水 (shui3, water)

Short forms: 氵,氺

Chars:

22.1.89. 私 (si1, privacy)

Mnemonic: privacy is all about storing your precious grain (禾 (he2, grain)) in a private (厶 (si1, private)) location

22.1.90. 殳 (shu1, coffee)

Mnemonic: his coffee keeps falling from the side table (几 (ji3, side table)) on the floor again (又 (you4, again)) and again

Characters:

Note: this shows what a 殳 weapon actually was: http://wenzhengwenhua.com/article-2023-1.html

Sentences:

22.1.91. 树 (shu4, trees)

Mnemonic: it is correct (对 (dui4, correct)) to say that trees (树) are made out of of wood (木 (mu4, wood, tree))

22.1.92. 讨 (tao3, discuss)

Mnemonic: in their discussions (讨论 (tao3 luan4, discuss)), they always talked (言 (yan2, speak, say)) about how his penis was only one inch 寸 (cun4, inch) long

Words:

22.1.93. 台 (tai2, platform)

Mnemonic: he was doing something private (厶 (si1, private)) to her with his mouth (口 (kou3, mouth)) on the train platform

Characters:

Words:

22.1.95. 体 (ti3, body)

Mnemonic: the Irish people 人 (ren2, person) eat so much potato (本 (ben3, potato)) that 90% of their bodies are made out of potato molecules

Words:

22.1.96. 土 (tu3, soil)

Notes: the normal Kangxi translation is "earth", but we are afraid that this could be ambiguous with the "Planet Earth", so choosing soil instead

Characters:

22.1.99. 勿 (wu4, atom)

Mnemonic: atoms are part of matter 物 (wu4, matter [Physics])

22.1.100. 物 (wu4, matter [Physics])

Mnemonic: cows (牛 (niu2, cow)) are made of atoms (勿 (wu4, atom)), both of which are made of matter

Words:

22.1.103. 心 (xin1, heart)

Short forms: 忄,⺗

Mnemonic: Kangxi 42.

Characters:

22.1.105. 性 (xing4, sex)

Mnemonic: to give birth 生 (sheng1, be born, birth) to a person 人 (ren2, person) you must first have sex 性 (xing4, sex)

Words:

Translations:

22.1.106. 言 (yan2, speak, say)

Short forms: 讠

Mnemonic: imagine two (二 (er4, two)) flying mouths (口 (kou3, mouth)) trying to speak, but they can’t because a plastic lid (亠 (tou2, pan lid)) has been placed on them

22.1.107. 炎 (yan2, inflammation)

Mnemonic: getting burnt by two fires (火 (huo3, fire)) tends to cause skin inflammation

Words:

22.1.110. 乂 (yi4, balance)

Mnemonic: balance. Looks like a balance, and it is the symbol of justice 义 (yi4, justice)

Characters:

22.1.111. 义 (yi4, justice)

Mnemonic: a balance 乂 (yi4, balance) is the symbol of justice 义 (yi4, justice)

22.1.112. 疫 (yi4, epidemic)

Mnemonic: the world’s greatest epidemic which is making people sick (疒 (ne4, sick)) is coffee (殳 (shu1, coffee)) drinking

Words:

22.1.114. 元 (yuan2, first)

Mnemonic: my first son (儿 (er2, son)) had two (二 (er4, two)) legs, but the second one had three!

22.1.116. 云 (yun2, cloud)

Mnemonic: she made two (二 (er4, two)) private (厶 (si1, private)) farts in her home, but that produced a fart cloud that surrounded her for the rest of the week

Characters:

22.1.117. 运 (yun4, sports)

Notes: the most watched sport in heaven is that cloud (云 (yun2, cloud)) speed walking (辵 (chuo4, walk))

Words:

22.1.118. 爪 (zhao3, claws)

Short forms: 爫

Characters:

22.1.119. 政 (zheng4, politics)

Mnemonic: to do politics in China, you have to tap (攴 (pu1, to tap)) those Uyghurs on the shoulder and tell them to straighten (正 (zheng4, straighten)) their backs

Words:

22.1.120. 正 (zheng4, straighten)

Mnemonic: one (一 (yi1, one)) stop (止 (zhi3, stop)) at the bone doctor is all it takes to straighten up your hurting back

Characters:

22.1.121. 之 (zhi1)

Translations:

22.1.123. 治 (zhi4, cure)

Mnemonic: she cured him from his heat stroke with water water (水 (shui3, water)) right on the train platform (台 (tai2, platform))

Words:

22.1.124. 重 (zhong4, dumbbell)

Mnemonic: the best exercise to get fit is to carry one thousand (千 (qian2, thousand)) dumbells over one thousand miles (里 (li3, mile))

Words:

22.1.126. 子 (zi, child)

Mnemonic: Kangxi 39.

Characters:

22.2. English words

Format:

[[<<english-word>>]]
==== <<english-word>> (<<chinese-translation>>, <<chinese-translation>>)

* <<chinese-translation>>: <<explanation of this usage>>
* <<chinese-translation>>: <<explanation of this usage>>

This section exists mostly to disambiguate the multiple possible Chinese translations of a given English word.

22.2.1. Close (关, 合)

  • 关 TODO

  • 合 TODO close a book

22.2.2. List (清单, 列表)

22.3. Chinese words

Format:

[[<word>]]
=== <word> (<pinyin>, <main-translation>)

Characters:

* <character-contained>
* <character-contained>

Words:

* <word-containing>
* <word-containing>

Subwords:

* <word-contained>
* <word-contained>

Translations:

* <<english-word>>
** <<chinese-sentence-containing>>
*** <<note-on-this-sentence>>

Sentences:

* <<chinese-sentence-containing>>
** <<note-on-this-sentence>>

Notes:

* <<random text>>

Notes:

  • translations is useful if there are multiple possible English translations, and examples if it is more one-to-one with the main-translation

  • "Sentences" is like "Translations", but for when the header translation is enough and there are not multiple meanings, so no need to repeat the English word again

  • mnemonics are mostly useful for proper nouns, for common nouns, it is usually obvious from the composing characters. This is why Chinese is amazing.

22.3.15. 六 (liu4, six)

Mnemonic: we had eight 八 (ba1, eight) pan lids 亠 (tou2, pan lid), but two broke, so we have six 六 (liu4, six) left

Characters:

22.4. Chinese sentences

Format:

[[<chinese-sentence>]]
==== <chinese-sentence> (<<translation>>)

Source: <<source-url>> (<<source-url-archive>>)

Context: <<context>>

Words: <<sentence-with-linked-breakdown>>

Sentences: <<example>>

Translations:

* <<english-translation-1>>
* <<english-translation-2>>

Notes

  • Sentences: is mostly for when you have a smaller colloquial phrase that feels too generic for a "word", but which can also go inside a larger "super-sentence"

22.4.1. 测量体重 (Measure body weight, to weight oneself)

Words:

Sentences:

22.4.5. 海外生存之惑 (hai3 wai4, The puzzle of surviving abroad (of China))

Words: 海外生存之 (zhi1)惑

Notes: this is the name of a 2013 series of lifestyle articles by BBC Chinese for Chinese living abroad (in the UK)