damn where are all the convoy people with the patriotic canadian flags when you need them
[#]canada
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I sat down and wrote a (maybe too long) explanation of why I made this meme, and how the idea of Orientalism applies to the recent discourse around Americans joining Xiaohongshu en masse.
There are a few major elements that comprise Orientalism:
In particular, with regards to the recent movement of Americans to Xiaohongshu and the narrative that has emerged in Western communities around the "cultural exchange" that is occurring, I think all of the above elements are present. It may not seem this way at first glance; you might say "well, how can China be Unknown, Mysterious, and Alien if we are actively learning about the lives of everyday Chinese people on XHS, and if they are learning about us too?" However, I would argue that the way this is occurring, and the type of fascination that Americans are experiencing, is inherently othering.
The narrative that I am seeing in many places is that we are in a "once in a lifetime moment for cultural exchange and understanding". But consider: why is this moment initiated by Americans moving en masse to a Chinese social media network? Why is this moment mainly depicted as a series of videos and screenshots showing Americans "discovering" things about China for the first time? Why is the moment mediated through American (and not American Chinese, or any other Chinese diaspora) voices?
Americans are learning all of these new things about China and life in China, that they never really bothered to learn before - it's new and exciting and mindblowing. The Americans then think "well, I'm learning all of these amazing things about China and having all these revelations, therefore the Chinese must be having similarly mind-blowing revelations about me and my culture. It's a cultural exchange, right?" But I think this is a kind of naive mirroring, where Americans centre their own experience that they are having, and project it onto everyone else. But there is a big asymmetry in Americans knowing about Chinese, vs. Chinese knowing about Americans.
Just one example: There are hundreds of thousands of Chinese international students studying at American colleges right now. Many students stay in the United States after graduation. An example of just one path that Chinese students use to stay in the US: Chinese students are the second-largest category of recipients of the OPT post-graduation work visa by nationality, with >300 000 students from China receiving this visa between 2004-2016. Many students go back to China after graduation as well, so many that there is a Chinese term, 海龟 / haigui ("sea turtle"), for people who do this. There is no comparable phenomenon of hundreds of thousands of American university students in China - it is not even close. Why is the mass movement of Chinese people back and forth to and from America, for decades, not considered a similar moment of cultural exchange and revelation?
Many of the people that I see using this narrative of cultural exchange are quite tuned into American social issues about worker exploitation, the distorting effects of big tech, the lack of access to affordable healthcare, the lack of access to affordable housing, the rights of migrants, and general structural class inequality. Many people are very aware of how the way America advertises itself, the idea of the "American Dream", the "shining city on the hill" (and I'm very deliberately using a phrase from Reagan here), is a mirage - some people may have achieved it, but it is increasingly out of reach of the majority.
However, the same people fail to consider how those same types of societal problems manifest in China. All of these same problems exist in China, to an even more brutal degree than America, because the PRC is a deeply capitalist authoritarian society with severe levels of inequality. People may say "well, I'm just trying to see positive things about China because American propaganda about China is so negative". But negative American messaging about China hardly ever talks about Chinese social problems affecting common people. It's very much focused on espionage, intellectual property theft, military threats, and so on. The American government and the American media talks about Huawei; it does not talk about hukou. When viewing content on XHS about Chinese people living happily with their nice lives, people just aren't applying the same level of skepticism that they would to a video touting the American Dream. The "Chinese Dream" / 中国梦 is its own term and ideology as well. It's one of the main ideas of Xi Jinping's rule, and it's imbued with even more propaganda, irony, and dark implications than the American Dream is.
This is the manifestation of the third point on orientalism I mentioned above. This is the treatment of Chinese people and society as an inert, homogenous mass, where everyone is as happy as the people with nice lives that you see on XHS, and where the entire messy history and current reality of Chinese social struggle is erased. In addition to that, it's a fundamentally escapist mode of thinking. Americans want to view an idealist, sanitized society where people can afford nice things, where workers are treated well, and where everyone has health insurance, just to name a few of the misconceptions I've seen Americans have about Chinese society in the past few days. (None of those things are true in China; they are so untrue that the fact that Americans are thinking this is kind of insulting.)
To conclude, a really great quote from @discatte:
[#]orientalism #xiaohongshu #rednote #china
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In response to current events
Thanks to Emma Alyx and @Random832 for a great graphic design session last night, which produced this beautiful Art 😎
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F in the chat to all fellow chinese diaspora who have to deal with people suddenly becoming Very Interested In China and having Very Informed And Normal Opinions On China
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With the news that people are moving to Xiaohongshu due to uncertainty about the future of TikTok and the changes to Meta's content policies, and that people are now really interested in learning Mandarin: I would encourage you to check out the active Chinese-language communities right here on the fediverse as well, such as the public forum at https://ovo.st/club/board (@ board @ ovo.st ), and the instance https://m.cmx.im/about. Or, perhaps, you can follow my recent favourite fediverse account, @labor, which collects news about modern Chinese labour issues that you will never find on Chinese social media platforms.
In general I think there is a huge lack of understanding among western users about how much Chinese social media and Chinese tech companies are intertwined with the government, a lack of understanding or engagement with Chinese social issues which are heavily censored on all Chinese social media platforms, and a mistake belief that "well, Chinese social media can't be much worse than the American ones". I had to mute the discourse around TikTok for my own sanity because there was so much complete misunderstanding around privacy, censorship, and the nature of these companies. It's like seeing people say "we don't want to use apps run by (american) fascists, so we will flock to an app that shares all its data with a fascist government, and actively censors all topics unfavourable to that government". It makes no sense.
Of course, I think it is good that people are engaging with Chinese people, finally, as people, and not as just abstractions. I think it is also good that people have an incentive to learn my native language. I just wish people would use that to engage with and listen to the Chinese people who have been posting here, all along.
[#]china #tiktok #xiaohongshu #rednote #socialmedia #fediverse
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Amazon Labour Union-IBT Strike Fund for the NY warehouse is at $29,889/$50,000 right now - I chipped some money in, consider doing so too, to put them over 30k!
https://www.amazonlaborunion.org/strike-fundraising
[#]amazon #AmazonLaborUnion #teamsters #unionstrong
https://wetdry.world/@cybertailor/113674818562556267
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I don't work here but just wanted to boost for macOS ppl in my network: The second role, for AppSec Engineer, is a macOS-focused role.
[#]macos #infosec #appsec
https://infosec.exchange/@securingdev/113651631448743730
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If you haven't seen the video, watch it now for some holiday cheer 🥰
[#]korea #southkorea
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https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/13/world/asia/south-korea-protest-feliz-navidad.html?unlocked_article_code=1.hU4.cAwI.u9--cxn510Ma&smid=url-share
[#]korea #southkorea
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Some context for last boost (https://bird.makeup/users/whyyoutouzhele/statuses/1863983048867586453), which says
The Korean film "Seoul Spring" has risen to the number one spot in Weibo's Entertainment Trending Topics.
All of this happened within living memory for many South Koreans. People in their 50s and 60s now were students at the time of the Gwangju Massacre. These events are covered extensively in South Korean popular culture as well, such as the "Seoul Spring" / "12.12: The Day" film, which is one of the most popular films in South Korean film history. The director Kim Sung Soo himself was a student at that time, too:
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/korea-oscars-12-12-the-day-director-interview-1236208671/
There are of course many sensitive political events that happened in China in the 1980s as well, the most significant of which is the June 4, 1989 Massacre at Tiananmen Square. That is part of why it is significant that a film about military repression of pro-democracy movements is trending on Weibo, and why Teacher Li is posting about it.
[#]korea #southkorea #rok #china #prc #history
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I think, also, this is some good context about South Korean civil society, protest / activism culture, and their ability to remove corrupt leaders from power:
https://thediplomat.com/2024/04/how-the-sewol-sinking-changed-south-korea/
[#]korea #southkorea #rok #sewol #SewolFerryDisaster #mvsewol
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I think it's good to watch what happens here and learn from it, because South Korea has a strong history of ppl turning out en masse for protests, a strong civil society, and a military dictatorship within very recent living memory.
I hope that things are resolved peacefully, I wish the best for Koreans 😔
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/12/03/world/south-korea-martial-law?unlocked_article_code=1.ek4.S2VF.ldFMQyAoNLcR
[#]korea #southkorea #rok
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Coming back online to post this video series by historian Timothy Snyder. It is an adaptation of his work "On Tyranny: 20 Lessons from the 20th Century", expanded with additional commentary after Jan 6, 2021. It is 20 lessons on resisting authoritarianism. I found the videos clear and instructive.
https://youtu.be/9tocssf3w80?feature=shared
Lesson 1 is: Do not obey in advance.
[#]notgoingback
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Going offline again for a while ✌️ It's time to engage a lot more organizing and acting IRL.
[#]notgoingback
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I've been offline for a while due to IRL stuff and due to avoiding news about the US election. Now that the results are in though, I wanted to share this:
https://wagingnonviolence.org/2024/11/10-things-to-do-if-trump-wins/
Many people in my industry / field of work / network are "institutional insiders". I think this is a really relevant quote from the article:
"By themselves, rulers cannot collect taxes, enforce repressive laws and regulations, keep trains running on time, prepare national budgets, direct traffic, manage ports, print money, repair roads, keep markets supplied with food, make steel, build rockets, train the police and army, issue postage stamps or even milk a cow. People provide these services to the ruler though a variety of organizations and institutions. If people would stop providing these skills, the ruler could not rule."
Finally, what I like about the article is that the author talked to people living or who lived under authoritarianism for a practical idea of what it's like and how to survive it.
[#]notgoingback
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https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/08/politics/bob-woodward-book-war-joe-biden-putin-netanyahu-trump/index.html
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I have made an update to this thread about Rust panic location metadata in binaries, as well as to the associated blog post! I made a correction to my description of how developers can strip the panic location metadata from their binaries.
The attached screenshot shows a binary that was built using the Rust compiler's unstable location-detail feature, which excludes panic location metadata from the final binary.
Even using this feature isn't enough to strip all the location metadata, though; by default, Rust binaries statically link in a precompiled version of the standard library, which still contains the location metadata. Therefore, this binary was also built using Cargo's unstable build-std feature, which builds the Rust standard library from source, now with the location-detail flag specified during the compilation.
See the updated Rust binaries without panic metadata section of my blog post, for more details!
[#]rust #rustlang #ReverseEngineering #MalwareAnalysis
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