> That's also why this thread has been knocked off the frontpage despite having 155 points and being only 3 hours old.
This post is outright government propaganda.
"The Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) is a non-partisan defence and strategic policy think tank based in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, founded by the Australian government and partly funded by the Australian Department of Defence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Strategic_Policy_In...
You seem to keen on pointing out chinese propaganda yet you seem blind to australian propaganda. Why?
Heck, it could be one guy who has 1-50 high karma accounts that do all the downvoting and flagging. He can then monitor https://news.ycombinator.com/newcomments for threads/comments containing certain keywords to get a notification.
There's no denying that the downvoting and flagging is taking place because you can see the same pattern in all threads that are negative towards China. Dang himself also have a history of knocking threads critical of China off the frontpage.
There's no reason to suppose that a majority of people participating in China-related threads and voting (in either direction) on comments is Chinese. It's likely that they have some strong opinions on the topic, but ethnicity is neither necessary nor sufficient to develop such opinions.