I don’t think this is a good idea, there is a reason why it was established in the first place. I don’t think you know how pervasive US propaganda is, there are several news (propaganda) outlets that are specifically targeted toward mainland Chinese people on the western internet, they are directly run or funded by governments or Falun Gong. (Examples: Voice of America China, Epoch Times and many more)
The firewall doesnt only exist as a misinformation countermeasure, another big reason is countersurveillance.
American online right wing propaganda is way too strong, to a point where its just a self-sustaining plague on the internet. The way it turns apolitical people into right wing nut jobs is quite scary. I would bet most people in China are apolitical and that would be ripe picking for the propaganda.
I’ve been on xiao Hong Shu. That’s exactly what happened. I was devastated.
Yeah so many get suckered in by people like Joe Rogan/Jordan Peterson/Asmengold/Tim Pool etc. All of them of have this certain playbook of intentionally hiding their power level and slowly nudging apolitical people towards the dark side.
I don’t think that’s actually what happened.
I think people like Joe Rogan et al are, themselves, slowly nudged towards the far right by their sponsors and endorsements and partnerships and guest appearances etc etc. Those idiots didn’t play some kind of long con to trick normal people into becoming rightists, they themselves changed and dragged their audiences with them. They don’t have a playbook, they’re being played.
Joe Rogan is the ultimate example of social being determining your conscious. As he got richer and more popular he became more right wing.
I also agree and don’t think it was a deliberate long con by any of them (well maybe Tim Pool?). They are all just products of their environments. The right also understands how important it is to control the cultural hegemony. Theyre not just talking to people about politics, but all sorts of different niches.
Both are probably true tbh. It’s clear those people were artificially propped up and put into the spotlight by sponsors behind the scenes. On the other hand, all of them made/make numerous efforts to downplay themselves as “neutral” when they were already clearly entrenched onto the right and clearly knew what they were doing to at least some extent. They may be idiots but I don’t think a simple act of manipulation like that necessarily requires being a genius.
I am aware of a Chinese guy who genuinely believed in soy boy crap and cut tofu and soy sauce from his diet. Yes that’s how deeply it cuts
It is difficult to “brainwash” people against their perceived material interests. People are “apolitical” because they benefit from the status quo. There are plenty of Chinese liberals within the mainland who are allowed to benefit from the current system as they interact with it in a way that is overall beneficial to the dictatorship of the proleteriat but if there are narratives that they feel will benefit them further which they can act on that causes malevolence, then they will potentially be a greater cost to the system than a benefit; a burden the country could do without.
Western propaganda works because of perceived material benefits of going along with it and the costs of going against it exceed the benefits in a capitalist world; not because it injects ideas into human beings scifi/horror-movie-style like a poltergiest taking over them against their will.
I don’t think censorship is the way. I feel it’s a fear driven approach and paternalistic.
It’s easy to see with your own eyes the decay of western society, because the supposed material gain is rooted in elitism and barely hidden exploitation.
The only way to convert the liberals is to show them what is really going on in the material world of western society. Keeping it censored will allow liberalism to fester and grow unchecked in china as these people will have their ideas reinforced by not being in contact with what liberalism really cause.
“Marketplace of ideas” means the idea with dominant capital will be dominant; it is not the “merit” of the argument that wins a person over. In a dictatorship of the proleteriat by seizing the means of production the socialist enterprise controls the capital and therefore “wins” the argument for the proleteriat. The perception whether an idea is good or not is always affected by bias; the point is for whom the bias should be in favor of.
That does not mean there is no objective reality or concrete solutions to real-world problems. Science is the method of figuring this out and marxism is a science. The problem is where and when people choose science in the day to day world. There are classes of people with sufficient privilege that perceive not to be affected by this ignorance, and therefore ignore the science when it suits them.
It is not a question of whether “censorship” is good or not; de facto censorship will always exist with every community and society - the question who gets to decide which censorship, what gets censored and which media it should take form in.
If one imagines a space with no formal censorship that does not mean it does not take place; a lack of a formal structure and hierarchy just means an informal one takes place instead, and in a capitalist world this means capital will dictate what those will end up being.
In early stages of socialism by definition it will have capital mechanisms such as markets; this is not maintained in a “neutral” environment, it will inevitably come with the culture of liberalism.
We should aim to have a scientific approach and understand of how things works and try to step away from the liberal frameworks we are brought up in which often conceptualises problems it does not really want to solve in absractions, rather than ground them in the concrete of the real.
My argument isn’t for or against censorship; it is just a tool and to understand how and whether we use this tool we should understand the science of how ideas “win” people over.
One can think of a socialist country as where the standards enforced on an educator is enforced on every aspect of society and this includes what gets amplified and de-amplified for the progression of society. No individual has the correct answer, our collective knowledge and trials of how to apply this scientifically in a continually shifting landscape is the way forward.
The only thing you said I think is wrong is that de facto censorship always exist.
Censorship is created by a social entity hidding or faking data. Any advanced mind can take these incomplete or faked conclusions and from there find out that the data has been messed with.
Any “trust me bro” arguments can be rejected from the get go. Any information without it’s reproduction steps has no meaning, only an agenda.
People are pretty bright animals on the individual level, but where they fail is that they are social animals which will take cue from other social animals and social entitiesml.
What you see as de facto censorship is only a natural consequence of this mechanism.
But this can be countered with proper education of both the social animals and the social entities.
Fatalism is not needed here because we know that we can build social constructs that can change both how the social animal and the social entity comport themselves.
All in all , a censorship attempt, for a social animal that reject social cues from it’s peers, is at best an attack on it’s agency and intelligence, as worst a proof that the social entity has a hidden agenda and whishes a bad outcome to the censored.
And this attempt will by itself, because the social animal has an advanced mind, create an interest in what the other entity is trying to hide.
We can see this in action with antivaxxer, flat-earthers and so on, in which de facto censorship does not exist.
These examples are not the best, because they also get influenced by bad messaging -a sort of propaganda created by bad actors be it animal or entities - but they examplify the mechanism I am talking about.
Sorry, my English is quite poor this morning as I am very tired from bullshit events in my life.
So if im not very clear, I’m sorry again.
Every community has censorship to filter out its perception of noise or topics they feel are dangerous/ destablising/ upsets decorum/creates havoc with internal structures etc etc. We do it here for example with bad-faith liberal slop. It could be de facto or de jure.
In capitalist society it would be those that fit with their narratives and perspectives. For example, we live in a world of (crumbling) Western Hegemony so there will be self-censorship on the genocide or pro-Russian perspectives of the Ukraine war; from schools to newspapers to entertainment media - there does not need to be someone at the top pulling the strings, the associated communities (formal and informal) will do that themselves.
Education will not in itself lead to “enlightenment”. One of the first organisations to discover climate change were oil companies but their class perspective did not take them down the path of environmentalism.
We have to a degree accept the fact the people intelligently seek narratives that they feel benefit their perceived material perspectives - including us - and it behooves us as MLs to understand this and allows us to better understand which class our audience is and focus our energies where it is productive.
Anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers could look up the same information we do but choose not to believe them. It comes from a level of privilege where they feel the consequences of their ignorance does not affect them. They create spaces for themselves to talk about the issues that are important to them and filter out the “noise” in those spaces.
In the wider community the above two groups fester as they are not a threat to capital. In a spcialist society such nonsense is stomped out for the greater good.
There are for example stories where “traditional” communities with overbearing patriarchal structures who were forced at gunpoint for their women to be literate and educated. There is a “generational trauma” but the outcome of good is exponential as a result for all the following generations. (This is not a specific example of socialist history, this was actually Kemalist Turkey. Socialists usually use more tactful approaches)
We have to understand freedom not from an idealistic conception but a scientific understanding of social sciences, and it ia from that true freedom is acheived.
The west has at its disposal significant access to vast volumes of knowledge through the internet but people voluntarily choose wilful ignorance for their perceived material benefits.
The above is not a nihilistic perspective, it is encouraging to know there is a scientific approach to liberation of the world despite what it seems like an unsurmountable obstacle of bad-faith ignorance. It just means we have to direct our energies towards the revolutionary classes.
(English was not initially my first language either; hope life at your end gives you a break!)
Good answer, comrade 🫡
It is always important to remember to think current situations in a materialistic way, and not fall for the idealistic lie that propaganda alone is able to “brainwash” or “control” people.
Thank you - dialectical materialism really helps in understanding the science of the political economy and the articles on redsails.org really helps accelerate this understanding by breaking it down; I am still learning!
I don’t really agree. US propaganda is absurdly effective and for some reason no other country has been capable of replicating it. I think the problem is socialist countries tend to be too honest. Their propaganda against western countries is often to just tell it like it is. A lot of people in the USSR doubted it and genuinely believed the USA was a utopia and the Soviet propaganda was just all lies, and so that’s why many supported Yeltsin. You see the same with China today, if you ask Chinese opinion on the USA you will be surprised that most don’t see the USA a dystopia but as a utopia. Many Chinese people have frequently told me they thought in the USA people only work four days a week and health care is free.
US propaganda is much more effective because they just make absurdly extreme lies, claiming that socialist countries are all literally hell on earth. The reason this is so effective because most reasonable people who recognize their state is probably going to lie to them for their own benefit are also afraid of becoming dogmatic in the opposite direction, and so they falsely assume that “the truth must be somewhere in the middle.” In other words, if the state says a country like the former USSR was literally hell on earth where everyone starved, the “reasonable” person isn’t just going to assume that the USSR wasn’t literally hell on earth, because they have a cognitive bias that makes them not want to come across as too dogmatic in the opposite direction, so they will instead conclude that he USSR was slightly hell on earth.
You see this tactic used all the time in liberal media. They always exaggerate things to the most ridiculous degree, like in the DPRK they publicly execute you with artillery for having the wrong haircut or feed you to dogs. This propaganda is so effective because even people who recognize this propaganda is indeed propaganda will still buy into it somewhat, and so the lie still works on them. An obvious example is the “100 million dead” claim which we all know is just a completely fabricated number, but even more “reasonable” people who recognize it is fabricated just assumes the number is less but still in the tens of millions, so they still have bought into the propagandistic framing that it even makes sense to blame socialism/communism for these kinds of deaths at all. They already buy into a framework which is biased against socialism/communism because they’ll never apply this same kind of arbitrary body count analysis to capitalism, and so they’re already successfully propagandized by assuming their is some truth to it even if they admit the 100 million number is exaggerated propaganda.
This tactic was first introduced by Adolf Hitler when had talked about what he called the “Big Lie” in Mein Kampf, explaining it as a propaganda tool the Nazis would use where they would make lies so extraordinarily exaggerated that most people assume there must be at least some truth to them, even if they don’t buy into it completely. But if you buy into it at all, you have already fallen for the lie, and so you are already successfully propagandized.
Western countries really have their propaganda down to a science and no one can compete. Chinese people do not have some sort of magical mental barrier that can block out all western propaganda, they are human beings just like all of us and are susceptible to the same kind of propaganda, and I fear it would have far more negative impact than positive to let a flood of western propaganda into China. I mean, this was already kind of attempted at a small scale in Hong Kong and we saw how that turned out.
Maybe they think healthcare is free because most full time jobs offer health insurance as a benefit, but the thing is companies will fire you the moment they find out you are sick so they don’t have to pay, and they are 100% allowed to. Exactly what happened to one guy at a job I was at, got cancer and was immediately terminated for being a liability to the company. And that’s before even getting into the shadiness of the insurance companies themselves.
The Chinese internet spaces I’ve frequented are so staunchly anti-west(for right and wrong reasons) that anybody who’d willingly get indoctrinated would have to have already been laughed out of every mainstream social media platform. So, honestly, I think this wouldn’t be too bad of an idea, especially given that for most Chinese people the west is this vague concept that has little to no impact on their daily lives.
I don’t want to taint our comrades minds with the Neo fascist liberal ideology of the West! Although it would be quite funny to see the interactions like what happened on red note earlier this year. where only the most hardened westoid would have any hatred left in their heart for them.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that. I’ve talked with some netizens that argue Ayn Rand style talking points and it’s a little annoying
Shanghai isn’t ready for opening the valve yet.
And of course, new wave of Mainland Chinese Wikipedians will be ready to contribute.
I’m praying for this for years.
It’s literally the most satisfying thing that could happen on the internet, after all these years of westoid cancer at every single corner: China bad, disgusting nazis, racism, whining about communism at every turn, looking at everything from westoid perspective, justifying genocides and colonialism and all of that happens even when nothing about politics is mentioned whatsoever. It’s so tiring to watch based people 1vs10 against idiots in comments when they try to push back against this.
Just imagine the backup as they literally bury these idiots with facts and internet finally stops being western dominated hellhole.
why would you let chinese people access to the depraved western internet? bully communities, discords of travestite nazis who hate lgbt people, imageboard culture, NFTs and reactionary caves?
the firewall is not to protect the cnetizens, its to protect western netizens.
Vietnam has no such firewall, as such, our people are accustomed to fighting Internet reactionaries. There are 2 types of reactionaries:
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The loud, in-your-face ones. They will openly express their hate towards our government, the Chinese government, and Communism. They will openly spread misinformation (either deliberately or because because they believe in it) to smear their ideological opponents. The Vietnamese people laugh at their face. We do not respect them and we do not heed them. As a result, they are mere annoyances, not that dangerous (ideologically speaking).
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The subtle West-loving liberals/“arachists”/“leftists”/whatever-you-call. This type do not openly oppose government policies. Instead, they will hide behind the mask of politeness and subtly mix facts and lies in order to twist our understanding. They walk the thin line between truth and misinformation, legality and illegality. The Vietnamese people generally don’t guard against this type, because they aren’t obvious enough to notice. This type requires actual actions from our establishment (such as police investigations) to counter.
Also, type 1 usually loves Trump and type 2 usually stands with Biden.
Anyway, white reactionaries aren’t really interested in our online space. There are a few times the Vietnamese netizens and American netizens interact is when an English YouTube channel made videos about Vietnam (the topics are usually either the Vietnamese economic miracle or the Vietnam War). Fights usually happen between American rightwingers and Vietnamese in the comments, the results is usually the American comment being ratio’d. And that was Vietnam whose population is but a small fraction of China.
As for China, instead of suddenly open the gate for YouTube, Facebook, and the likes to flock in, I think it is safer for them to expand their already existing social media (Bilibili, Weibo, etc) to the English language. To be more precise: They should add foreign languages to the platform the Chinese themselves use (like how YouTube and Facebook do), not creating an “English fork” to separate Chinese from the rest of the world (which is what they already did).
Any good sites you would recommend? I read www.vietnamplus.vn and I quite like it.
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china should take down the great firewall so i can hang out with cool chinese people and they can piss off chuds in online games again
Don’t see much benefit from it at this stage of things. Introducing chaos seems more beneficial to the opportunistic west, who is used to a culture of jumping on new opportunities with no long-term planning and doing con artistry to the max. Pilot programs in small doses that can be carefully planned and/or studied, sure, but some mass thing? I don’t see it. China has gotten where it is by being thorough, no? And it would be difficult to be thorough if people are going down any and every western net rabbit hole en masse.
I’m sure there will be a time it makes sense, but with care. Don’t think there’s any rush. And let’s not forget that one of the primary problems with the western internet is how tightly controlled it is by western rightist platforms and their algorithms. Like with western media more generally, it puts on a face of supporting “independent journalism” and “free speech”, but in practice, you end up in niche places like here to have any peace if you go against the grain too hard.
