What's happening in China now looks like a return to Mao-era ideological campaigns, with all their oddness and specificity. The guy at the top decides "the music kids listen to these days is just noise" and a thousand memos flow.
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The new ingredient here is the Internet, which creates opportunities both for unprecedented surveillance and bureaucratic subversion. A good question is whether the cultural memory of weathering these weird campaigns got passed down to the generation that doesn't remember them
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If you're not familiar with these campaigns, here's my favorite. "The Polish embassy in Beijing denied the Chinese request of entering the premises of the embassy to scare away the sparrows, as a result the embassy was surrounded by people with drums."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Pests_campaign …
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Now we'll get all this with "everyone is online" thrown in as a wildcard. The Chinese people are endlessly inventive and I can't wait to see what Chinese teens in particular—left with hours of empty idle time by these recent reforms—come up with by way of subversion
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"Is the internet a tool for freedom or oppression?" felt like it had an obvious answer in the 90's, and then the opposite obvious answer more recently, but now it's kind of an open question again. Every year I know less than the year before.
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It's heartening to see Xi making the strong case against Chinese communism, which is that it is an elaborate apparatus for wasting a billion people's time. It survives best under cynical leaders; taking its tenets seriously was always a recipe for trouble.
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the kids will learn to appreciate Paradox games. A generation of map gamers.
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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He is actually descended from a very distinguished communist, and entered Tsinghua (Harvard of China) probably partially on his connections, to study engineering But one does not have the impression that he has a very strongly intellectual or academic bent
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all that time he spent in Muscatine apparently was water off a duck's back
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Do you think when people talk about “regulating tech” this is what they envision or want? Not asking maliciously just curious
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