Reads like propaganda

How so? I'm a bloodhound for PRC propaganda but it passed the smell test for me.

Because they don’t add any concession statements around how CCP has no social power or respect in Hong Kong. The article was so sterile it understated the need for autonomy in Hong Kong. The questions it answered were loaded and the answers were Xi Pooh approved.

Not to mention paroting the red herring regarding the motivation for the legislation.

Four paragraphs are dedicated to explaining that it is being proposed in order to ensure a murderer faces justice in Taiwan, when in fact the Taiwan government has stated explicitly that they will not request his extradition under this arrangement[1]. Furthermore they claim that they attempted to liaise with the Hong Kong government for assistance regarding the murder three times prior to the bill being proposed and were met with silence.

[1] https://www.hkba.org/sites/default/files/A%20Brief%20Guide%2...

They accurately report what the claimed reason for the bill is. The next section contrasts it with the views of those opposed to the bill. That's not parroting, it's just an attempt to give an overview of different stakeholder's opinions on the issue.

If a Beijing-controlled propaganda outlet writes stuff like

In practice, however, given the political nature of mainland China’s legal system, the protesters took to the street in part because they simply did not trust the Hong Kong government or Beijing.

People in support of the law exist, but they’re in the minority. According to a recent survey by Hong Kong University, 17% of the 1,002 respondents were supportive of extraditing Hong Kong people to mainland China for trials. (66% of them were opposed.)

On the Chinese internet, messages about the demonstrations were heavily censored. Mostly posts by state-run media outlets were allowed.

then they're playing a very long game.

Writer of the articles, and an editor of Inkstone here. Thank you so much for the comment. You're describing exactly what that piece sought to do: a quick look at the views of the main stakeholders. You may also be interested in a thread I tweeted yesterday that goes a little deeper into the tensions behind the extradition bill: https://twitter.com/alanwongw/status/1138670655480639490

Thanks for sharing those. (I wrote them.)

Please don't break the site guidelines by going on about downvoting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"And I am being downvoted for that. Interesting."

I downvoted you because you talked about your downvotes.

Please don't interrupt the discussion to meta-discuss the scoring system.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. Your statement is entirely accurate and the Inkstone piece is far from balanced. The SCMP is famously biased:

SCMP:

"Man who killed girlfriend in Taiwan could be free by October, setting effective deadline for Hong Kong government’s extradition plan...“There is no time to lose. We must strive to pass the law by the 2018-2019 session of the Legislative Council meetings – that is, by this summer,” Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor said. “The Taiwan murder case has set the clock ticking. We don’t want the suspect to escape.”"

HKFP:

"Taiwan won’t ask for murder suspect if Hong Kong passes ‘politically motivated’ extradition law"[2]

[1] https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/law-and-crime/article/30...

[2] https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/05/10/taiwan-wont-ask-murder...

I work for Inkstone, part of SCMP but of a different division from the China and Hong Kong news desks.

You're citing an SCMP article dated April 29, before Taiwan made those remarks, and comparing it with an AFP story published by HKFP on May 10.

How about comparing apples to apples, starting from this May 9 piece by SCMP titled "Taipei will not agree to transfer of Hong Kong murder suspect if Taiwanese citizens risk being sent to mainland China"? https://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/politics/article/3009506...

> “Without the removal of threats to the personal safety of [Taiwan] nationals going to or living in Hong Kong caused by being extradited to mainland China, we will not agree to the case-by-case transfer proposed by the Hong Kong authorities,” the council’s deputy minister Chiu Chui-cheng said.

> “We want the relevant suspect to face justice but our government cannot ignore damages to the human rights of our nationals.”

> “We have to ask whether the amendment proposed by the Hong Kong government is politically motivated, as some have speculated,” he said.

The Taiwan government had already mentioned back in March that they would not accept the bill, would potentially issue a travel alert on HK if it were passed, and that their requests to the Kong Kong government for assistance in the murder had been ignored three times.

The article selections put forwrad may not be ideal, but the point regarding the SCMP remains. I appreciate that as a writer you likely strive to present the truth in a balanced way, but the reality of the ownership structure of the SCMP cannot be ignored.

Let's not forget the Zhao Wei interview, the Gui Minhai interview, and the various SCMP staff/contributor resignations over exactly this issue. To quote one:

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-...

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/11/13/i-will-no-longer-write...

Totally not ignoring the ownership structure of the SCMP. As I said earlier in another comment in this thread, following the money is almost always a good idea. But I invite readers to decide for themselves by examining the goods, not just the money behind it. This applies to every publication that has an owner or a leader.

I appreciate that you acknowledged the comparison wasn't ideal.

Zhao Wei, Gui Minhai, and staff resignations are all issues people have raised over and over again, and I think the scrutiny is justified. I wasn't around when those things happened, though, so I don't know more than you do.

Thank you for taking the time to explain your reasoning.

An Inkstone editor here. It's almost always a good idea to follow the money, but I'd argue that there's no better way to determine our impartiality by examining our work. Alibaba owns Inkstone but we've received absolutely no editorial direction from them and/or from any of their executives, including Jack Ma. This editorial independence matters to readers and matters to those of us who work here.

Also, I'm not sure people are getting the right idea about what being a CCP member means in China these days. I find this NYT (my former employer) article informative: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/27/business/jack-ma-communis...

Tinfoil hat time: on HN posts critical of world powers (not just nation states, but incl. tech giants) seem to get brigaided.

But then again, social media brigaiding in the interest of shaping public opinion is very widespread, even lucrative business.

If you think you see evidence of abuse, bring it to our attention so we can look into it: [email protected]. It's against the site guidelines to go on about this in in the threads without evidence, so please don't.

From years of looking at this data, I can tell you that beliefs about "brigading", "astroturfing", and so on almost always turn out to be imaginary. What's really happening is simply that the community is divided on divisive topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I'd be really interested in hearing of HN moderators have observed that kind of thing. It definitely feels like it from time to time, but it could also just be that the topics are inherently polarizing, so only the loudest voices on each side come out.

It's against the site guidelines to make insinuations of astroturfing without evidence.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This is very important -- Chinese people and CCP are separate. Yet years of very successful propaganda have resulted in even fairly well educated Chinese (overseas nevertheless) to treat any criticisms on the party as an attack on all Chinese people.

Although to be fair, criticisms and journalism also rarely make the distinction between "China" and "CCP".