(Edit: I didn't mean that they should be treated better because they live in the West. Obviously they should be treated better regardless of where they live. I mentioned HN's Chinese users who live in the West because they're an important part of China-related threads, which is not widely understood. Routinely they get accused of being communist shills, etc., when what they're actually doing is trying to bridge the gap between two worlds—an unenviable position as the gap grows. No one is required to agree with their views, but they absolutely should not be abused for this, and the HN users who do abuse them are behaving shamefully.)
However hard we try, it seems impossible to get a large segment of the community to behave any better, and the slurs are getting worse as the geopolitical trend (and associated things like media coverage) continues.
No, I'm not a secret communist supporter or any of the other silly things people come up with about this. Nor do I agree with the GP commenter; I've barely skimmed their posts. I simply want HN users to follow the site guidelines, give each other the benefit of the doubt, and not form xenophobic mobs.
People have literally been hounded off this site by comments like these. Is that the kind of community you all want to be part of? I can't believe it is. It's the default collective outcome, though—not that any of you want that outcome, but it's the group ugliness that posts like this add up to.
Denouncing people who provide that other half as "suspect" is itself an attempt to ensure only one half of the picture is heard/accepted.
Freedom of speech affects freedom of thought. If you can't say something then nobody else will hear it. And if you can't hear a certain viewpoint then you are less likely to consider it.
So you have to imagine the missing comments from China, firstly the person who wanted to criticise the government but was too afraid to say it, and secondly the person who never had a chance to consider criticising the government because they live in a place where that criticism is taboo.
Only with enough publicity. For now, in order to summon something which can threaten your real life, you have to at least post the criticism on Twitter, and have several people "reporting" it by making it go viral. Posting on HN is far more below than that bar, yet people imagine this is what's happening in a "reversed FUD" way.
> And if you can't hear a certain viewpoint then you are less likely to consider it.
True, but mind you HN is blocked by GFW. So if a Chinese citizen appears here, it means he can read whatever he want, sans the language barrier. Surely he can't have high profile public debate with his peers, but I've seen really healthy talks about these topics on "underground" communities, usually on blocked messenger services e.g. Telegram.
> So you have to imagine the missing comments from China
There are real reasons why people may not prioritize freedom (not saying that I agree with this) and are happy to accept an alternative narrative about China. OP talked about his own observations of whats happening on their state-owned media, and the general reception of these contents, then made his prediction on what would happen if the U.S. ban TikTok, which sounds perfectly reasonable to me and pointed out a potential weakness of the CCP narrative. It is usually a mistake to dismiss these words and fill the blanks with your imagination.