Kind of amazing watching China deploy its sophisticated apparatus of state surveillance to serve the worldview of a guy who spent his teen years in a cave.https://twitter.com/JChengWSJ/status/1432507356823257094 …
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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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