alt Hacker NewsIt's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.
This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.
Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.
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> And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions
...you've almost achieved enlightenment on the nature of the majority of HN comments: vibes-based, off the cuff braindumps, where an idea is examined as it is being typed. It's great for tech and software discussions where many commenters have good knowledge or even mastery, but on "exotic" topics, an incorrect take can be voted to the top because it sounds right by affirming the biases of the majority. If you're a practitioner in a non-tech field and a topic in your field comes up for discussion on HN, be ready to be disappointed - and be ready to question all the other correct-sounding comments in areas unfamiliar to you.
I had the most ironic rollercoaster ride thanks to your comment.
I copied it into DeepSeek because I figured who's better to teach me about greatness of Chinese government policies if not the most popular Chinese LLM?
Anyhow, it must have detected _something_ in your comment because Chinese censorship policy kicked in and DeepSeek refused to talk about it. Funny because I would wager the overall sentiment about China's abilities to govern in your comment was positive but okay.
I literally asked it "expand on it so I can learn more about Chinese policies" and that was enough to get censored!
Anyhow, after saying few times "huh? but I want to learn what's great about Chinese policies!" it finally gave me response in... Mandarin. So I asked it to provide me that information in English and... it refused. Talk about difficulty of finding any materials in English ;-)
After starting a new chat and using plenty of positive adjectives to make sure I don't want to learn a single bad thing about China, I finally got a list. Looks like China is 100% successful in everything they do! How neat!
So I said "That's cool. Does this set of policies have one name? Can you recommend any books about it? In English of course" and...
...request denied again.
I mean, maybe it says more about how horrible DeepSeek is for this kind of research but boy, it was so ironic I now have stack of iron at home.
Aspiration for the masses and policy reality are different things. They will say monopolies are bad, but what they mean is only if the state doesn't control them. The CCP has huge state run monopolies and there's nothing you can do about it. You can't understand their policy without understanding Marxism-Leninism. When pesky reality gets in the way of policy, it's called corruption.
In communist or post-communist countries like China and Russia, the percentage of government workers is extreme. To them, all social action is political action, and that includes economic. Since there is only one party allowed, any economic action (and thus political action) which threatens the CCP is unacceptable. They leave other private companies alone.
The CCP is bad and this conclusion is justified not only in theory as a distant observation of ideological concepts, but from their behaviors around the world which echo some of the causes of World War 2. That doesn't mean Chinese AI companies are bad, but the CCP will certainly find ways of using it for its purposes. For now, they're quite far behind on AI, but they deserve credit for optimizing for some use cases which masks poorer generalization.
I 100% agree with you and want to add something.
If you simply take what the Chinese government says at face value, you will be correct way more often than 95% of Western policy wonks, media talking heads, "analysts" and so forth. Because, like you say, they tell you everything they're doing.
In the recent US-China summit, Xi Jinping just came out and used the Thucydides Trap metaphor, which tells you everything about where China thinks it is and where it sees the US going, which is to become increasingly belligerent as their power declines. Now whether or not you agree with that assessment (I do agree), it still tells you China wants to avoid open hostilities, it sees itself as continuing to rise and it fears what a declining US might do.
Extremely interesting comment, thank you. Got some links where I can download this source material? I don't read or speak the language, but will try interrogating it with an LLM