This not true! Everyone loves China anyway, and nothing bad ever happens here, so why would the government ever need to pay people to do this? Silly nonsense!
It looks like the People's Republic is moving to a more sophisticated model closer to the one used by "the U.S. Government" in which dissenting voices are not silenced with police force but rather must compete with and are spun by professional non-dissenting voices.
For my comment to make sense, "the U.S. Government" has to be defined in a nonstandard way to include for example Time Magazine, the New York Times, Harvard University, the misleadingly-named "non-governmental organizations", and as of the last few years professional bloggers like the ones at Daily Kos -- but I advocate such a nonstandard definition. Added: thanks to non-professional blogger Mencius Moldbug for teaching me the nonstandard definition.
There's already a name for the thing your nonstandard definition refers to: "The Establishment." Also the more informal "The Man." Both terms now seem somewhat laughable, for reasons they deserve. Mainly, I think, that the underlying thesis was false.
- the US has a government funded k-16 education system
- almost all political journalists rely on government press credentials to do their reporting
- most journalists rely on cultivating strong relationships with the permanent civil service in order to get the inside dirt on politicians.
Now consider these three outrageous claims:
- the New Deal was among the worst things to happen to America in the last 100 years
- forcing universal suffrage democracy on Zimbabwe was a tragic mistake
- the American revolution was accompanied by an incredible amount of mob violence on innocent colonists. It would have been better for everyone if the instigators had been caught and hung. Instead, they won and set up our current government, so we remember them as heroes.
No respectable person believes these last three claims. Indeed, the fact that I even posted such claims indicates that I may be a barbarian from Digg who somehow found his way onto Hacker News. There are two possible reasons why these claims seem so repellent: 1) these views really are crazy and wrong, or 2) believing these three things would undermine the legitimacy of our entire government, including its education system. Thus, via self-selection and overt-selection, no one in the education system or mainstream media defends these claims. We spend our entire life only hearing one side of the story. Americans views of FDR end up being as inaccurate as the Chinese view of Mao.
If you are willing to entertain the idea that #2 may be a possibility, Sydney George Fisher is a fine place to start. Take a look at Chapter 8 of his history of the American Revolution: http://books.google.com/books?id=YmFMcvSIwOEC&printsec=f...
I have an objection to the OP (the page at bbc.co.uk) and I would like you to acknowledge that my objection is valid. "China is using an increasing number of paid 'internet commentators' in a sophisticated attempt to control public opinion," begins the BBC page. Not a word on the page suggests that this goes on in any other country except China. But the U.S. and the U.K. also have "an increasing number of paid 'internet commentators'" -- including the writer of the BBC page, who works for the U.K. government!
And I humbly suggest that the reason references to "the Establishment" and "the Man" sound laughable to you is that the faction making those references has since the 1960s completely trounced the referent and are in control of the New York Times, the universities, etc, which I suggest are the central organs of power in the U.S. because of their influence on public opinion and public discourse, which in the U.S. and the U.K comes not from police powers but from gravitas, credibility and the ability hold attention -- and that gravitas, credibility and attention-holding are maintained by whole occupational groups of highly skilled "paid 'internet commentators'".
Sure, even in the US, a superstructure of mutually-reinforcing interests, in the government, media, and education establishments, works to make certain true and good ideas almost unthinkable. (See also: PG's 'What You Can't Say'.)
Still, we should prefer such 'soft censorship' to the hard, real censorship where dissenting voices wind up in 'Re-education Through Labor' detention camps, or are 'disappeared' entirely. If China moves more to the subtle control we know and love in the West, everyone wins.
"Comments, rumours and opinions can be quickly spread between internet groups in a way that makes it hard for the government to censor.
"So instead of just trying to prevent people from having their say, the government is also attempting to change they way they think.
"To do this, they use specially trained - and ideologically sound - internet commentators.
"They have been dubbed the "50-cent party" because of how much they are reputed to be paid for each positive posting (50 Chinese cents; $0.07; £0.05)."
Even today that can be decent money in China. I think this phenomenon has been going on on Usenet since the 1990s. Certainly Usenet was a critical communication resource for students in North America in the China democracy movement that flowered in 1989.
> "They have been dubbed the "50-cent party" because of how much they are reputed to be paid for each positive posting (50 Chinese cents; $0.07; £0.05)."
This is not true. 50-cent party is a word from the times of Beiyang Army. in 1917 they argued whether China should participate the WWI, Duan Qi Rui hired a bunch of ppl to 'protest' in the parliament and urge China to declare ware against Germen. They pay each ppl 50 cents. It's historical.
Now the word '50 cents' means goverment payed voiced. No matter how much they got payed.
Sorry my English is bad but that's the true origin of '50 cents'.
Now 'Internet Commenters' gain more than 50 cents, in universities, students participate this could get 200 Yuan a month, that's about $28 USD.
I stands to reason that in the information economy there will be its own commanding hights, and that different groups of people will strive for control. I would call this opinion warfare and there is certanly a lot of combatants involved.
Most of the combatants are governments but really everyone with a budget and a profit motive (monetary or otherwise) is participating.
An interesting front is open right now between Russian government and its opponents. The coverage of Khodorkovski's fate was seriously slanted on both sides of the border. Well, unsurprisingly as a lot of money and power was at stake on both sides. Later the coverage of Russian-Georgian conflict suffered the same fate and just now there is a row over natural gas supplies to Europe which gets some odd coverage.
The most interesting battles to watch are the ones where usually rational discourse turns into a foaming-at-the-mouth fight with a lot of stretches. There are plenty of nuts online, but I can't help but suspect that money is involved when a normally rational and thought-out source starts really reaching for conclusions.
I don't really see a huge problem with government hiring people to sell its side of a story in itself. For better or worse, there are highly-paid lobbyists on both sides of every policy issue these days.
I think the issue is that the Chinese government does more than "spin." It is acceptable for one party to advocate for a policy by putting it in the best possible light. Its unacceptable to change facts, control information etc. Admittedly, this is a murky line in many cases...
Perhaps what more scary is that most Chinese students I've met know that they don't get the "full truth" in China and don't really care. They seem to be more concerned with China becoming an economic superpower than whether China creates a "good" society.
Every government has some form of a propaganda team behind it. Some directly in the government, many behind the parties/companies in power. Really anyone who benefits from the way the government operates has a reason to push propaganda at some level.
However, suppressing the opposing view is the problem. If the viewpoints are both expressed, one can expect some level of truthiness(tm) to come out. And frankly, someone's got to defend what the government's doing, b/c sometimes their actions aren't completely corrupt or nefarious.
As for the US, I'm hoping the Net will eventually dissolve the b.s. legitimacy of the old press core, who've got too much to lose to rock the boat very much.
"Extract from internal document produced by Nanning city authority, Guangxi province"
This is one of the most common mistakes made by foreign press. The quote is possibly correct. The article extrapolates from this to assume that there is some great puppet-master in Beijing.
China is run at the local level for most things. There may well be paid commenters but having them organized from the top-down is next to impossible.
