You are being way too charitable. The five demands materialized out of one demand ("don't rush the bill") after Carrie Lam made a concession to suspend the bill. Middle-of-the-road concessions are not what the protestors are looking for now, if they ever were. Indeed they have indicated a strategy to use this moment to extract the maximal concession. That's a fairly extremist position that is probably unwise, and leads to all sorts of problems like having to buttress their own weak power position with borrowed foreign leverage.
The PRC leadership is not stupid, either. They see the suspension of the bill as test of whether this whole thing was about the bill or something else. As suspected, it was about something else. Given that, no concession the PRC is willing to make will be enough. This is bigger than HK now and frankly out of HK'ers hands as to how it evolves next.
Suspending the bill with the implication of rushing it through when the protests have ended is not a concession, merely a move achieve PRC goals more quietly. Protesters have recognized and called it out as such. The fact that you don't seem to know that makes your statements suspect.
Either the protestors don't know any history, or have learned such a skewed version of history that they internalize the perspective of the 19th century British victors in an ultimately self-defeating way, or;
They know very well the potency of the symbolism and are deliberately declaring themselves aligned with the Western camp out of political expediency, and elevating the conflict to the level of a battle of spheres of influence.
Neither possibility will be looked upon kindly by mainland Chinese firmly rooted in their own historical and political understanding, because it is against their interest.
I wouldn't take the parent's statement as one of moral equivalency. I see it as a reminder to notice similar trends within and not rely so much on exceptionalism or the existing milieu to carry you through without effort, forever. Even Chinese society was at one point perfectly free, even if you have to go back two thousand years.
To the best of my knowledge, not having been alive at the time, credit cards in the US and Canada mostly started as department store cards, from the days when companies like Sears, Montgomery Ward, etc were dominant. You couldn't even get a card unless you were a man, women could get a card under their husband's name. The system evolved out of single-store charge cards to general purpose cards.
The difference here is how it's used: If you have a "bad" social credit score in China you can't participate in some activities, right up to buying a domestic train or airline ticket. Possibly because your online writings have angered somebody working for their Internet Police. Or you have expressed an unpopular political opinion. Or you're a Uyghur.
If you have a "bad" US credit score you can't get an apartment, a job, a post-paid mobile plan, or any number of things nowadays that ask for your SSN. That's why identity theft can trash a person's life. Same with ad profiles built around your activities and movements. You think that's not being sold around commercially and the intelligence community hasn't obtained a copy? The scaffolding is all there.
Oh, it's absolutely there, and your life is definitely crippled with a bad credit score in the US. But that's strictly financial. You can have an amazing FICO score and spend 24 hours a day shitposting bernie sanders memes on message boards, and trolling the hell of of every staff member of every trump appointee (within legal limits of not threatening anybody). Try the equivalent in China.
It's a social credit score which gauges your compliance with societal and police-state defined norms.
I understand the impulse to distinguish the two but there simply isn't as much distinction as you perhaps would like to believe. An apartment or a job aren't strictly financial, and while credit bureaus construct your scores out of mainly financial transactions at the moment, they have started out as much more, as I've mentioned, and they've always been looking for other non-financial but correlating variables from your life activities; can't find the link right now, but there was recently an internal whitepaper on such an algorithm using non-financial data.
And again, the US government does care about dissent and goes to great lengths to build files on what it considers potentially subversive forces that are essentially political dissidents. The same controlling impulses are there. And since the scaffolding is all there, the only things safeguarding against a dystopia are, firstly, the clear-headed and astute attention against various soft forms of social control, secondly the maintenance of decentralization as a virtue, and lastly the robust exercise of checks and balances that are nominally provided institutionally, and not, as your answer seems to imply, the intricacies of how certain scores are constructed.
>and spend 24 hours a day shitposting bernie sanders memes on message boards, and trolling the hell of of every staff member of every trump appointee
and how relevant is that to the life of the average American citizen?
In a sense, the American apparatus is significantly more advanced. You don't even need a scary government and a social credit or a staunch party line. You simply dangle the carrot of free political speech around, let people run around with their signs on the street on occasion and they're perfectly content with their lot.
Correct. In the US, subway stations and buses, elevators, convenience stores etc. have video cameras. Electronic tolling gantries have been used to track vehicles. Red light cameras are everywhere. I haven't seen a backlash.
It's always interesting to see a reference to a different society as a pedagogical tool to learn about something you might not like. The key step though is to see your own life from an outside perspective, i.e. introspection, which is a very lacking skill indeed.
" elevators, convenience stores etc. Red light cameras are everywhere. I haven't seen a backlash."
Because those cameras are not used to track you, nor are you identified in those videos, nor is that data generally shared with anyone, and in most cases not the government.
In some areas, i.e. highways in LA, they do track license plates, and there is backlash and at least concern.
A 'timed security camera' is barely related to the idea of 'ubiquitous cameras that identify you and track your movements in a government DB and input into a social credit score' a system I might add citizens have no recourse to alter.
> Because those cameras are not used to track you, nor are you identified in those videos, nor is that data generally shared with anyone, and in most cases not the government.
>>> " elevators, convenience stores etc. Red light cameras are everywhere. I haven't seen a backlash."
>> Because those cameras are not used to track you, nor are you identified in those videos, nor is that data generally shared with anyone, and in most cases not the government.
> Not yet.
That an ominous-sounding, yet totally empty and meaningless response. Most of those cameras are privately owned and operated, and would be incredibly difficult integrate into a centralized state surveillance system. We're mostly talking systems you can buy yourself at Costco:
The vast majority of cameras in the US aren't feeding centralized recording/storage/analysis/monitoring centers. The $90 1080p cameras in your local 7-11 are probably feeding a box with a few 3TB HDDs in it on a shelf in the back room. Quite the opposite in China.
I have attended meetings discussing IoT and at one, the observation was made many of the cameras are deployed by private individuals, not the state. Private individuals want to surveil their own surroundings.
I can't explain why, I don't live in China. But I do notice many buildings in the cities I visit have thick strong window bars even up above the 5th floor. Maybe there is a strong concern about local petty crime?
I certainly don't disagree there is state surveillance, but I think you should be wary of assuming all devices sold in China as IoT web connected cameras are state cameras.
I suppose that strong bar on 5th floor may be a means to keep people inside, not prevent invasion from outside.
That is, it might be a safety measure preventing falling from a window. E.g. windows in my apartment used to have state-mandated bars because my daughter was small, and had to be prevented from falling from a window.
I am amused that such statement is even possible, as if, someone just lost their common sense and start to reason China in a way that is exactly opposite of what they believed to be common sense.
To be fair, I spent first 24 years of my life in China. Your idea were never appeared in any form of discussion when I was there. I did not even fancied about such explanation.
All in all, I assume you want to have a reasonable discussion.
To your point, no, those bars are not for preventing staff falling.
I'm not assuming that - there are undoubtedly a huge number of privately owned cameras in China, as there are just about anywhere else in the world that people can afford to put 802.3af/PoE cameras stuck somewhere on a wall, fed from one cat5e cable, that cost $65 to $120 a piece. But as for cameras in major public locations with pedestrian traffic, I would bet that a much higher percentage of cameras in China are actually owned/controlled by a government entity than in the US.
Not being able to say in the US right now, I read that in the UK, private cameras are installed for profit and sell a feed to the police.
There are three levels of police in most jurisdictions worldwide: federal state and local. the US is no different, and putting devices on street poles typically demands compliance with planning law, and I suspect in any economy with cameras on light poles or sign posts by roads, its state actors.
The UK is either the most, or the second-most surveilled economy in the world. Not western world, worldwide. Cameras per head of population are increadibly high.
Your faith in 'old glory' is touching. I suspect, its misplaced.
I lack the criminal mind. I've been wondering about this, in HK, Beijing, Jakarta, KL, Sau Paulo, Buenos Aires, unable to work out what he threat risk was that high.
Now I know: the intersection of thief, and rock-climber.
It should be pointed out that, with or without AI, the cultural impulses are the same. This is an issue of authoritarianism, not of AI. If it should be feared more universally then the fear should be the authoritarian streak within all of us.
You're absolutely correct. Things are just as bad in the US as China, and so we should ignore what is happening in China and instead turn all our attentions inward.
The PRC leadership is not stupid, either. They see the suspension of the bill as test of whether this whole thing was about the bill or something else. As suspected, it was about something else. Given that, no concession the PRC is willing to make will be enough. This is bigger than HK now and frankly out of HK'ers hands as to how it evolves next.