I once interpreted for a crew recording "man on the street" interviews. I had no experience working in TV, I was a last minute replacement.
At the beginning of the day, the producer listed the opinions he wanted to get. "Ok, we'll get a middle aged guy who says this, a younger couple saying something along these lines". He knew exactly what he wanted at the start of the day.
There were three camera crews working most of the day getting interviews. I get the feeling that with a bit of editing you could have make "the public" have pretty much any view on a topic that you want.
I was at an election briefing at a large media organisation a few years ago, one of the chief editors told the journalists "We can't stop you using vox pops, but please don't use them much" and that (paraphrasing) "they are usually awful, we know they add color but they detract from the story and become the story"
Of course "Person confirming stereotype" attracts clicks and shares, is easy to do, and that's good for career progression. Actually finding out what's happening, explaining what it means, the who, what, where, when, why of the story, that's hard.
Much easier to say
"Mr X thinks this is terrible"
Than say
"This is terrible because...., but it's good because...."
Man-on-the-street interviews should record the entire footage for transparency, without any cuts, for transparency, so that the audience can know which opinions were kept and which were removed.
Reminds me of a movie I saw as a kid. Can't remember the exact situation. But some celebrity, super-hero or whatever got asked by a journalist something ala "why did you say you hate this city?" and they answered "I have never said 'I hate this city'". Then what was aired was the last of that sentence, only the 'I hate this city' part.
Should, but nobody will watch that unless they themselves are investigative journalists. It adds a lot of noise to something that's already low on signal.
Eventually they'll figure out at what street corner to stand to find people with the leanings they want to film, if they're intent on coloring the reporting. At some point you'll also have to let go and trust the reporter or the outlet they work for, which admittedly is an increasingly challenging decision, these days.
They don't need to do that. Interviewing people on the street already selects for the kind of people who wander around shopping malls in the middle of a weekday, ie those who don't work 9-5, very much not a cross-section of society. The sooner vox pops disappear altogether the better.
I got interviewed for one of these man in the street things for a local newspaper. I had just completed jury duty and was about to grab an early lunch and head into work. The reporter paraphrased my words very slightly when it went to print but the intent and meaning was the same so no complaints from me.
so that the audience can know which opinions were kept and which were removed.
Let's be honest, you already know that just from the context of the question and which show is doing the interview. If the audience is deceived it's only because they want to be.
Most people answering a 2014 poll (hopefully uniformly sampled) could not locate Ukraine on a map of the world, with many placing it in Africa, East Asia, Greenland or even the US; but the more interesting part was that the farther from its actual location was people's guess, the more they were supportive of US military intervention in Ukraine.
In my less pessimistic moments I like to think that many are not quite that uninformed and the interviewers find enough by sheer numbers interviewed.
What gets me is how easily inexperienced people are led to saying exactly what the interviewer wants. And it is blatant: they don't even pretend that isn't what they are doing on live news anymore.
It's not needed for everybody to watch this footage, summary video can be presented. It just should be linked somewhere for those who want to see the results and verify summary themselves.
It might be enough. Like open source - not everybody needs to read the source code, it is enough when one knowledgeable person does that and makes a stink when they find something fishy.
Very much this. "The average person won't ..." is a huge fallacy. This also applies to repair (that knowledgeable people are able to do it is enough because they can sell it as a service at economically viable prices).
The footage is for verification only. No one will watch the whole thing, but people can scan through it and notice if the conclusion most people are giving different from the edited shorter final production video.
Yes indeed. During the 1990s I first became aware of this as a comedy trope.
Loads of TV shows were using these techniques to make the public say all kinds of crazy shit as if they were widely held opinions.
It was funny because back in the 90s it seemed like, well at least to me, that we still trusted journalists and we didn't have social media. So seeing interviews obviously manipulated was funny.
I can also remember Charlie Brooker, the Black Mirror guy, showing the same footage from a set up reality TV show[1].
By just using editing he could show the same event but with very different interpretations.
Instinctively I think we all know that but seeing it done as demonstration is shocking and fascinating.
I only really noticed this when I watched Making a Murderer on Netflix. After each episode my opinion switched between "They were definitely set up by the police" and "They're definitely guilty." If the show had ended after one or the other episode I would have probably firmly held either view. Definitely impacted the trust I put in any media. Or rather the trust in myself to not be manipulated.
I'm also there with you, that was quite the roller coaster and impacted my trust fairly deeply. Although the totality of the evidence made that one pretty clear to me after researching further than the show; I felt like there was some bad faith cherry-picking going on, which is extremely effective on me but only while it lasts.
A similar series with all the levers cranked to the maximum is "Killer Ratings" on Netflix - just an unbelievable story out of Brazil that left me questioning everything. And that one I couldn't resolve in my head; it still bothers me today.
Another bad Netflix one is “ Under Suspicion: Uncovering the Wesphael Case”. It’s packed full of armchair psychologists and very little factual analysis (and way too long).
In the past one could look at just about every Michael Moore documentary ever.
It seems if you want to push a fringe or poorly supported narrative on something then there is little better format than pop documentaries.
I was once interviewed for a national TV channel about the security of open and proprietary systems. Since I wanted to present a balanced view, I started with a disclaimer, saying that open source can not be equated with a higher level of security by itself, but then I proceeded to present a couple of arguments about the advantages of open systems, and I specifically stressed the need for crucial communications components (like SSH) to be open.
Guess what, it turned out they made a program on "how Linux is less secure than Windows" and cut out my whole interview leaving just the initial disclaimer that, taken out of context, seemed to justify their agenda. From that time on, I refused any kinds of interviews for TV.
I mean the sad thing about this one is that of all the vox pop content producers, Asian Boss doesn't do nearly the worst manipulation or selective editing. (The worst ones make people sound like idiots, which is unfortunately pretty easy.) Some of their content is genuinely powerful for it and frankly this video on the whole is pretty amazing by the thoughtfulness of the people they interview. It's too bad that they had to arrange something to get a pro-unification viewpoint on camera, but it would've been ok if they'd just owned up to it with a brief caption introducing that person as who they are. The real problem is they didn't do that and I do agree with TFA that it's a bad ethical lapse.
Fairly widespread is undercutting it. It's universal practice.
People hold journalists to crazy high standards of integrity and soothsaying, and the older I get the more it boggles the mind that grown adults still cling on to this.
Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.
Indeed - that's the drift of Manufacturing Consensus.
To add to that: TV journalism is a form of entertainment, especially sofa-chat news-lite and vox-pop. Vox-pop, especially, is always manipulative. Interviewees always seem to be idiots, because audiences don't want to feel more stupid than the "man on the street". The information content of a vox-pop segment is zero.
It's not just about money for the journalists themselves. Visit a journalism school and you'll find very few students there looking to maximize their earnings.
It's a lot like other fields such as science or arts. People entering these careers knowlingly accept low pay and/or difficult working conditions in exchange for other kinds of satisfaction. For some it's intellectual curiosity; for others its artistic ambition or applause.
For journalists, it's the psychological satisfication of using political influence to spread their beliefs to others.
The actions of journalists cannot be understood according to a simple profit model. (The actions of their bosses can - they hire journos who will accept low pay, with the implicit exchange that those journos can use the position to satisfy their activist impulses. Fanatics work for cheap.)
> Journalists work for private corporations who write things for a target audience to make money. That's all there is to it.
Not universally true. There's some big corporations like News Corp that from a top level are in it to make money and push a right-wing narrative, but lower down there's a lot of journalists that do things for the public good. Think about the journalists that handled Snowden and Manning's revelations, think Wikileaks, think the journalists that got footage from Gitmo proving the US is committing war crimes, think those that reported on the Panama and Paradise Papers, on Epstein and 'the elite's pedophile rings, the list goes on.
These people have risked and sometimes lost their freedoms and their lives. Would you do that if it was just about money? Or are you just projecting your own motivators in life?
The extremely budget modern version is the "Public Reacts" article that's a few paragraphs of bare editorial followed by 6-12 tweets with about 6-12 likes each.
Like articles with embedded twitter/reddit posts in them. Sure it gives a primary source for whatever topic/view you want to support - but aside from "one person might think this" is pretty irrelevant.
I live in Taiwan. Very, very few people here are pro-PRC. Tons of Taiwanese people love China and culturally consider themselves Chinese (to be clear, not Chinese citizens.)
The vast majority of people disagree on if they should either give up and surrender to the PRC because they may launch missiles or invade once they have a non-laughing stock navy, avoid a bloody war, or if China wouldn’t dare to do that because it would trigger WW3 so they are safe to declare and protect their country (Taiwan.)
Everyone out here agrees that the PRC is basically evil.
Edit: Just want to add that a lot of you probably have no idea that Chinese people and Taiwanese people also get along with each other just fine. They are unfortunately a geopolitical chess piece on the table between the PRC and Deep State US.
I find it deliciously ironic that when Taiwanese people travel or work in China that they use their ROC (Taiwanese) passport and there is no issue with that. A lot of the conflict is also theatre for your American news cycle.
My wife is Taiwanese, so I can confirm Taiwanese and Chinese get along fine. Many marriages, friendships and business partnerships cross the Taiwan Strait.
However Taiwanese people don't use their passport to travel to China. China doesn't recognise it. They are issued a travel permit by the PRC, similar to citizens of Hong Kong and Macau.
Not only that. You can’t just travel from China to Taiwan. It’s a bit difficult. Most people must travel as part of a tour group. Unless it’s business or you have family to sponsor you or something like that. Basically you can’t just jump on a plane and have a holiday in Taiwan from China.
When president President Tsai Ing-wen was elected it became difficult. In both 2016 and again in 2019. China banned solo travel from certain cities in China to Taiwan.
I was just talking to someone who came back from working in Shanghai and that’s not what she told me but it’s very possible she misunderstood my question.
ROC and PROC don't recognize each others' passports, since both states hold the official position that the other state does not exist (and that travelling between the mainland and Taiwan does not, therefore, count as "international travel").
Besides some outlier ultra nationalists, most regular citizens of the mainland are also not huge fans of the CCP either and would happily get along with Taiwanese. And I have met some Taiwanese who even ironically have an overly romanticized view of the mainland --- seeing it as having made huge strides economically compared to the somewhat stagnant local economy.
At the end of the day, Taiwan culturally has more in common with the mainland than, say, Hong Kong does, because more of its history was spent together. Anything beyond is often a lot of "the grass is greener on the other side" mentality happening. People on both sides envy some aspects of what the other side has, but also would not trade what they have themselves to get it.
> Besides some outlier ultra nationalists, most regular citizens of the mainland are also not huge fans of the CCP either
What? China has among the highest satisfaction with their government in the world. For example: "95.5 percent of respondents were either 'relatively satisfied' or 'highly satisfied' with Beijing."
I imagine North Korea has a similar percentage of their population that would report either ‘relatively satisfied’ or ‘highly satisfied’ with Pyongyang too.
> Taiwan and Hong Kong refer to PRC China as ‘mainlander’
It's a general thing in the broad Sinosphere. Even the Japanese refer to (PRC) Chinese as "mainlanders" (大陸人/だいりくじん †) despite, you know, it being a completely different country for much of history!
†: You'll notice this sometimes in Anime. For example, in Sayonara Zetsubou-sensei's first episode the students respond to the teacher's unusual name with "must be from the mainland (=China)".
In modern usage, the "mainland" modifier is often used to get around the sensitive Taiwan issue. Different people may disagree on who is included in "China", but "mainland China" unambiguously excludes Taiwan even in the PRC.
Another fun fact is that English is woefully inexpressive when it comes to the cultural complexities of the broader Chinese cultural sphere. For example, a Taiwanese (or immigrant Chinese) person might identify as "culturally" Chinese (华人) but not "nationally" Chinese (中国人). A lot of this stuff gets lost in translation and ends up offending people inadvertently, because there aren't different English words!
> As a western for some reason I thought this would be the opposite.
Hong Kong split from the mainland in the 1840s and has been largely culturally (not necessarily politically) independent since. Modern Taiwan is the result of the KMT retreat during the civil war a _century_ later, in the 1940s.
A mainlander visiting Hong Kong will feel like an American going to, say, the UK -- it will feel familiar but distinctly foreign. A mainlander visiting Taiwan will feel like an American going to, say, Canada --- it will feel quirky but kind of like home. The mainlander might struggle to chat with a Hong Kong local as many won't speak Mandarin, whereas in Taiwan, they will have no trouble engaging in a conversation, with maybe only occasionally realizing that the other person refers to what they would call a "microwave" as an "electronic range" (this is not a real example. A real example would be something like a mainlander referring to "topping up (a transit card)" as "recharging" the card while a Taiwanese might call it "adding value" to the card).
We do get alone quite well at least in my circle. In my opinion people from Taiwan are actually more tolerate and warm than us. But increasingly young people from mainland are catching up and becoming more international.
I can't imagine how anyone from taiwan could naturally be 'Pro' chinese gov (given the media portrait and long history of rivalry), they would more likely support either 'green' or 'blue' camp, who will act on behave of people to interface with mainland policies.
The difference is some of my close Taiwanese friends are very weary of the political shows as they believe it is highly industrialised consumable entertainment while in the mainland people are quite innocent and audience are not mature enough and easily stirred up emotionally.
??? The teachings of Confucius, the food, even those big red door decorations with the symbols on them, and so on... are these not things that are still endemic across the mainland? It is simply absurd to claim Chinese culture only survived in "a few small places" in the mainland.
Some aspects of Chinese culture remained through the cultural revolution, but some previously important cultural features, like those related to music or Buddhism for example, were nearly wiped out. Maybe as a result, to this day some of the biggest hitting Mandarin singers are Taiwanese. In the movie space, HK used to produce lots of great movies, but many of them couldn't be made anymore given the HK takeover and how mainland movie production is now driven by propaganda goals. I hope to see Taiwan pick it up.
Very true. North and South have different food cultures, and dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other, just off the top of my head.
> dialects between different regions can be borderline incomprehensible to each other
That's because they aren't dialects. They are different languages. The CCP has pushed this lie that all Chinese languages are "dialects" instead of separate languages because it aligns with their narrative of a single Chinese people. You can be a single ethnicity and still have differences and different languages, but to the mainland government differences undermine cohesion.
The differences between these so called "dialects" are larger than between the Romance languages to each other. Thus, there is more mutual intelligibility between Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian than between Taiwanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese. To call them "dialects" is linguistically incorrect. They are separate languages. Someone will always respond that they are mutually intelligible through writing, and that's true. But that's bc the writing system isn't actually portraying the verbal language. It is a pictographic script.
> The Chinese (or 'Sinitic') languages are typically divided into seven major language groups, and their study is a distinct academic discipline. They differ as much from each other morphologically and phonetically as do English, German and Danish, but meanwhile share the same writing system (Hanzi) and are mutually intelligible in written form. There are in addition approximately 300 minority languages spoken by the remaining 8% of the population of China. The ones with greatest state support are Mongolian, Tibetan, Uyghur and Zhuang.
If you want to nitpick, it's not just different dialects but different languages. Mutual intelligibility is a common line used to split things into separate languages and most of the Sinitic language group "languages" are true languages as they aren't mutually intelligible. It's a bunch of different languages with a shared writing system and more mutual intelligibility in writing than in spoken words.
Where is confucianism taught in modern day China? Don't be tricked by the Communist Party's claim that they endorse his teachings, everything happening in the Mainland today goes completely against confucianist ideas. (Chinese) legalism is much closer to what is taught in China today and the teachings of Carl Schmitt have recently become very popular among party members. Of course it wouldn't look good to the world if they said they endorse and stand for fascism, so they don't say this part out loud.
It's not hard to see some unsettling parallels between the idea of the party and the people being one and the "ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Führer" slogan.
I'm not siding with GP, and I've little to no knowledge of either China or Taiwan, but to say that culture is Confucius, food and decorations doesn't sound right. That's just tradition, culture is more fundamental, in my mind.
If anything tradition is what the CCP succeeded in suppressing during the cultural revolution, not culture. As you said, culture is deeply fundamental and cannot be eliminated in a top-down manner nor in a period of only 10 years.
CCP did everything it could to wipe out old traditions, and replace them with communism and cult of leaders. Latter they realized it is not enough to keep coherent national identity, and started promoting a few symbols they liked from past. The "big red door decorations" is not Chinese culture, it is a small fragment of it.
> It is simply absurd to claim Chinese culture only survived in "a few small places" in the mainland.
I do not claim that. It did not survived at all on mainland. "A few small places" are outside of mainland: Taiwan, Honk Kong, Macau and perhaps Singapore.
Not to take sides here, but China is big and saying "Chinese culture" is a bit like "European culture". Didn't the ROC displace the native culture and languages of Tawian when they fled?
Also I would think the abolisment of imperal rule and a lot of imperial culture is one of the very few things KMT and CCP can agree on.
Taiwan has it even stranger as they were ruled by Japan for 50 years (long before WW2) so much of their culture had started to become Japanese culture or a Japanese-Taiwanese hybrid culture. Japan massively modernized the country to the point that when Taiwan has handed back to China, Taiwan was more advanced than China. I read one description that described it as being re-invaded by a bunch of uncultured ruffians that went looting and pillaging everywhere.
- Traditional Chinese characters used more often in Taiwan than Mainland China.
- Yayue (3,000 years old Chinese court music).
- Taiwanese recreation of Tang Dynasty dances.
- In Taiwan poems are composed/written/recited in Hokkien, on the mainland it is done in Mandarin.
- The preservation of uninterrupted institutional religion (eg Daoist priests) that was largely shutdown in China.
- Taiwan's leader attending ceremonies at temples to mark the birthday of Confucius, something you wouldn't see Xi Jinping do.
- Taiwan's ROC governmental organization was based on the Qing dynasty, so it has the traditional Inspection Ministry that accords with the old censorate.
Edit: These are not hard and fast. One will always find examples on both sides of the ditch. They do though play into the narrative of Taiwan being a capsule for culture modified post cultural revolution. Let’s also remember that Taiwan is also heavily influenced from outside via democracy, Japan, and its own aboriginal culture.
Traditional Chinese characters are still used on the Mainland for stylistic reasons, e.g. 為人民服務 "serve the people" in Mao Zedong's handwriting is popular as decoration: http://image.hnol.net/c/2014-02/28/16/201402281653233461-227... (And Simplified Characters get used in Taiwan for convenience, compare 台湾 vs. 台灣 vs. 臺灣 "Taiwan")
But those are the exceptions. The general situation is that traditional characters are official in Taiwan and taught as the standard in schools, and simplified characters in the Mainland.
Simplification was a good thing. Plenty of factions in the early 20th century wanted simplification, or even full romanization. It's just that the CCP happened to win the civil war, so they're the ones who actually implemented it and now it's a cultural flash point. Honestly, it's not a big deal, unless you somehow think Hangul and Hiragana are abominations too.
>Honestly, it's not a big deal, unless you somehow think Hangul and Hiragana are abominations too.
Not sure where you are going there and what the process of Chinese character simplification has to do with Hangul and Hiragana. That's more akin to the drive to romanise Chinese than simplification.
Simplified Chinese isn't an abomination, but some parts of it is done poorly. If you take a look at how Japan did simplification with Shinjitai, you can see that in general the simplification process is more precise with a smaller number of characters affected, and those that are simplified were done in a way that is more linguistically and aesthetically sympathetic. For example, 個／个 and 廣/広/广.
This is interesting. It's a shame the grandparent is so binary, as if Chinese culture is a bacteria that can be purged and survive in pockets instead of something that ebbs and flows, as all cultures do.
- Character simplification: This was a part of a wider progressive movement in the Sinosphere in general. Traditional characters were seen back then as a hinderance to raising literacy rates. In fact, the mainland's stance here follows that of Korea (which completely got rid of Hanja) and Japan (which tried, and failed, to completely remove Kanji). This was not done because the traditional characters are "old-fashioned" but rather to get the vast rural population to be able to read.
- Hokkien: This is a regional dialect imported from southern mainland China to Taiwan long before the civil war that split the two apart. After the war, regional dialects were suppressed _both_ in the mainland _and_ in Taiwan in favor of Mandarin (which is a northern dialect that was imported into Taiwan during the KMT retreat and rule). The suppression worked quite well in both places, where Mandarin has since displaced regional dialects for most matters of life. In recent years, Taiwan has made lots of efforts to bring back Hokkien to distinguish itself from the mainland, but this is actually a fairly recent development...
- Ceremonies at temples: This fell out of favor mostly because Communist parties everywhere have been progressive for the most part of history and like most progressive parties everywhere tended to de-emphasize religion. While most past leaders of the CCP stuck with this, Xi has actually moved the CCP to become much more _conservative_ (reinstating a lot of religious/traditional holidays in place of western ones) so I actually wouldn't be surprised at all if at some point Xi did start to re-introduce Confucian ceremonies as a part of a revival of a more conservative form of nationalism.
- Much of the cultural damage came from the abolition of the "four olds", specifically a lot of old books, paintings, and art in general.
- Additionally, many religious artifacts (statues, murals, temples) were affected (vandalized to completely destroyed). Most of these being classified as backwards superstition artifacts.
- This also extended to banning of religious customs (holidays, festivals, practices) and modifying aspects of language (e.g. honorifics and Confucian terms were largely removed from the language, with many only living on today in Cantonese or other languages like Japanese or Korean).
The actual impacts were a mixed bag though. A lot of the movement centered around destroying core parts of Chinese cultural heritage in favor of adopting progressive western ideas. Many irreplaceable historic artifacts and buildings were forever destroyed, leading to, ironically, a lot of the preserved stuff being what was plundered by the British or moved to Taiwan as part of the Nationalist retreat. On the other hand, the wholesale denouncing of traditional values in favor of progressivism also had positive aspects, like furthering gender equality (the abolition of many traditional sexist practices) and breaking down the traditional rigid structures of power in the family, giving more agency to younger generations (e.g. freedom of choosing marriage partners).
Finally, one must also not forget that Taiwan also does not capture a particularly "pure" lineage of Chinese culture either. The long Japanese occupation (that only ended after WWII) also came with a concerted effort by the Japanese to assimilate Taiwan (such as forbidding education of the Chinese language). Compared to the occupation of the mainland which focused more on feeding the war effort, Taiwan was treated as a permanent possession which meant the assimilation efforts were much more thoroughly executed.
Almost everything, including the writing system. They even thought about romanisation, but instead just settled on butchering many of the complex characters without fully considering the historical, linguistic or aesthetic concerns.
> butchering many of the complex characters without fully considering the historical, linguistic or aesthetic concerns.
There were committees of linguistic scholars that spent a ton of time on trying to reconcile the historical, linguistic and aesthetic concerns during the simplification effort.
Is it perfect? No. But it was also not an impulse move either.
Also one needs to consider the context of simplification --- the idea of simplification was quite a popular and progressive idea around that time in the entire area. It was widely believed that the complex Han characters were a big hurdle in improving literacy rates and bringing more opportunity to rural areas.
Both Japan and Korea engaged in similar simplification or de-ideogram efforts to varying degrees of success.
Even if you are a staunch traditionalist, "almost everything" is a massive exaggeration. The entire country still effectively shuts down for two weeks during the lunar new year. Sure this would be among the first things to go in an authoritarian state hell-bent on industrialization and yet it has persisted.
During which time the family gets together to watch propaganda on CCTV. I wish I was joking but that's literally what almost every single family does. It's Chinese tradition in the name only.
And that isn't to say that tradition doesn't still exist here and there. But it may not be as much as someone not familiar with Chinese history may assume.
Btw even authoritarian subjects need days off or they would revolt sooner or later. So the assumption that this proofs Chinese tradition is alive doesn't follow. When the Christians completely annihilated European traditions they also kept the dates and a few of the customs of some of the pagan holidays. Like Easter eggs and Christmas trees. It actually helps destroy a culture faster, else there may be too much resistance.
There's a difference between days off and "half the country is boarding trains to some remote village so I guess the economy is just going to halt for a couple of weeks." And oh no, lots of people just sit around watching TV when they have to spend time with their folks. We must retvrn to tradition because family relations were 100% super functional and healthy back before modernity/communism/capitalism/your-favorite-boogieman ruined everything.
> It actually helps destroy a culture faster, else there may be too much resistance.
Ah, the classic "evidence against my point is actually evidence for my point."
With regards to the lunar new year break, Communist regimes actually have lots of public holidays. That's straight from their ideology, so not sure why you think that authoritarianism must equal to oppressing worker rights or the labour movement. That's why there is a distinction between the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right.
Taiwan is the leftover of the fascist faction, is it not? Not exactly a paragon of Chinese cultural history. We're just looking at a very, very slow civil war.
The KMT ("blues"; historical ruling party of Taiwan, and main opposition to the CCP during the civil war) was indeed an authoritarian party; Taiwan was a dictatorship until 1996, under the guise of "martial law to prepare for invading the mainland". However, they are not officially "fascists", but "republicans".
Since then, they have been a democratic country mostly governed by the DPP ("greens"; formerly an anti-authoritarian dissident movement), which also leads the Taiwan independence movement, which aims at creating a "Republic of Taiwan" rather than a "Republic of China".
I mean if you must compare, the Nationalists that modern Taiwan derives from is more similar to a _conservative_ party in the west while the CCP is a more _progressive_ (and fascist if you view it that way) party.
That being said, the modern day CCP under Xi's rule has started becoming more conservative, while Taiwan's relatively free political climate has given rise to their own versions of progressive political parties.
I think there's a degree of straight cultural influence from european fascism (the nationalist's elite units were trained by german officers in the interwar years), plus having the same basic project (the nationalists were trying to create a nation for the Han[0]), and the same methods (extrajudicial violence, state terror[1]).
I agree that it's hard to use european political categories in east asia, but I think the KMT is a neater fit for fascism than a lot of european fascists (e.g. Spain's nationalsts). I think the problem is less an east-west thing and more just that fascism is a really vague category.
[0]: dunno if that counts as an ethnicity, but dunno if that matters.
it's more of a state ideology than a style of government - I don't think fascism has any defining economic positions, for instance, except opposition to socialism.
> often capitalized : a political philosophy, movement, or regime (such as that of the Fascisti) that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
the first part of that is the defining part of fascism - the state ideology. There's also common co-features like authoritarianism, a cult of personality and anti-democratic tendencies but neither are especially universal (for instance with Pinochet and Franco).
It is pretty commonly used to describe just authoritarianism in general though.
That definition is deficient. Fascism also includes state involvement in private industry.
I dislike the usage of "fascism" to mean "authoritarianism I disapprove of" (I used to use the word that way). It's an unhelpful word, because people use it in so many ways. Now, I only use it to refer to the Italian state under Mussolini. For other uses, I try to say what I mean.
Pinochet was a free market fascist, so state intervention is not really inherent to fascism, and of course all states intervene in the economy in various ways. If there's an essence of fascism that makes it unique, it's the narrative element. "we" are under threat, we need a national rebirth to purify our culture, that sort of thing.
0) This surprisingly has nothing to do with chess engines or the US Democratic Party.
1) Documentary programs are almost always faked, in the sense that they present false continuity and false spontaneity. People often don't notice the manufactured aspect unless a subject they're intimately involved with is featured, and then it's immediately apparent.
I had some training on video news production, from a guy that does editing for major channels. You simply can't make engaging video without lots of cutting and splicing. You have to re-order segments to make a coherent storyline. All "live" video news is processed this way, otherwise nobody would watch it.
The scales fell from my eyes; that was the beginning of my awakening to the true nature of video news.
I used to see these Vox Pop YouTube videos occasionally. Like the line up videos, street interviews and what not. The issue I realized people are never going to give their open and unbiased opinion about something. Because they are moderated, edited and these people are always subjected to some form peer pressure from the group or the producers surrounding them.
Moreover the questions are drafted in a "so you are saying" kind of way. Now that is assuming the production is random and fair and they are not hiring actors or screening people based on their political belief systems, which is obviously not the case.
Being outside of US, I thought there are geopolitical and socially ambiguous questions which were drafted in a pattern that subtly were politically biased.
Now, subtle political biasness would make people think I am a little bit out there. But what I realized I don't inherently have any strong political feelings at all. There are some objectively true facts that are often being manipulated to fit narratives. So it is best just to ignore these shows all together.
These Vox Pop crap is nothing better than day time reality shows like 90 Days Fiancé, but atleast these reality shows are transparently stupid and does not want toy with an agenda.
I don't take this vox pop crap for more than what it is either, but this is about as honest as some China-based channel arranging an interview with Alex Jones in a random park and passing it off as the voice of a random American man of the street
For those who like me didn't understand the title. From paragraph 9:
> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.
Search for KMT leads to Wikipedia article that says it is the same as Guomindang, the party was exciled from mainland China to Taiwan in 1949. I don't know how it evolved to "eventual unification" from "Taiwan is the only China", so I prefer to skip the article entirely as non-comprehensible.
To somewhat relief your confusion (but not nearly entirely; the KMT switching to pro-unification is in itself extremely incomprehensible that even Taiwanese don’t understand), the KMT never held the view “Taiwan is the only China”. Their original view was more like “we rule the only China from Taiwan” (and that China is even bigger than the PROC’s current territories).
The title sounds very cryptic. It should actually be somewhere along the lines of "Asian Boss a YouTube channel interviewed a popular Pro-CCP Youtuber and pretended he was just an ordinary man on the street"
He's not a pro-CCP Youtuber, but a pro-KMT one, the KMT being the CCP's opponents in the Chinese civil war. Their party flag is blue with a white sun (found in the upper-left corner of the Taiwanese flag), hence "deep blue".
I think this only exemplifies that the title can be hard to decipher if you're not deeply familiar with the context. If I understood this exchange correctly, the commenter above received the exact opposite of what the title was supposed to convey. The fact that I'm not sure either furthers the point.
The KMT party has shifted over the years to being far more pro-CCP than the other parties. Saying being deep blue and being pro-CCP is not disingenuous at all.
Green is the color of the Democratic Progressive Party (currently in power, and the historical anti-KMT (read: anti-authoritarian) party)[0]. Green has thus become the color of the Taiwanese independence movement (i.e. not "Republic of China", but "Republic of Taiwan")
Blue is the color of the KMT (former dictator party)[1], whose logo is still the top-left quadrant of the flag of Taiwan[2]. Historically, this party has claimed to be the politically legitimate government of all of China (as the "Republic of China" rather than the "People's Republic of China"), but lately is effectively an arm of the Communist Party of China.
It's a long and fascinating story that involves China firing missiles to affect the outcome of Taiwan's first democratic election, as well as the largest American military action in Asia since the Vietnam War.
In summary, the KMT upholds a "One-China Policy", which makes them a natural ally of the CCP against any Taiwan independence movements.
I wonder how many accounts the chinese state maintains on hackernews to upvote/downvote post and comments. It's an easy way to influence the public opinion and hard to expose.
I am not pro-Chinese, I am French with no ties to China. But I have downvoted/flagged anti-China posts and comments a few times.
There is an anti-China sentiment in the US that just feels wrong, and it shows on HN. Every time something good is said about the Chinese state, or even if it is "not that bad", it is Chinese propaganda. Every time someone says that China is evil, it is the truth, as if US propaganda couldn't exist. I am not saying that China is good, just that it is one-sided enough to raise a few red flags (pun not intended).
So, I downvote, most of it isn't interesting from a tech perspective anyways. It what I think of that submission. In fact, I am only here because I was curious about what "deep blue" meant (for me it meant IBM).
You are free to disagree with me, here I am just telling you that there is at least one person who has nothing to do with the Chinese state and dislike anti-China content.
You could even argue that whenever China does something positive that's note-worthy then it has a much higher chance to be promoted multiple times (e.g. 3/5 are about the Mars rover, all within a month) and less chance that it will be flagged (or at least remain flagged).
I think it's safe to assume the majority of HN support democracy, privacy, freedom of speech & press, and similar civil liberties that China have cracked heavily down upon and not just within their own borders. When you look at what they have done in the past few years with Xinjiang, Hong Kong, SARS2, Taiwan, etc. then it's only natural that there will be a lot of negative coverage, and this negative coverage is understandably and deservedly greater than the positive coverage. If USA or any other country banned under-18s from playing games for more than three hours/week then it would receive the same amount of coverage. Same thing goes for for Swiss Ph.D student’s dismissal, Steam being banned, cryptocurrency deals becoming illegal, blocking Wikimedia from entering World Intellectual Property Organization and every other story you might consider "anti-China". My submission doesn't even mention China so people are not blindly upvoting it because it's "anti-China", but more likely because it's interesting to see proof that one of the largest Asian YouTube channels (which cover a lot more than just China) is planting interviewees to push a certain agenda (keep in mind the channel put a lot of emphasis towards presenting themselves as being 'authentic' and sharing views of random and regular people they meet on the streets).
Not many, I think. I usually look at the new section of HN and check what has been flagged unreasonably. Anti-chinese post are rarely flagged multiple times.
My opinion is that there are honest pro-chinese people on HN, most likely chinese working in the US who don't plan to stay for life and feel patriotic enough to protect the fatherland on internet forums.
Agree, just I'm lacking the evidence. Plus, we might overrate the importance of HN for the CCP. Most of their thought control is for internal use. The external influence is usually based on money and access to the chinese market, not by thrall farms. Exceptions apply to social media, but I think that they concentrate on the large platforms like FB, Twitter and Youtube.
This is almost certainly it. HN is first and foremost a technology website and its userbase is tiny in the grand scheme of things. I get that we like to think we're the center of the universe, but is it so inconceivable that even if the CCP knew we existed, it wouldn't care?
And also non-Chinese people that support the PRC, like myself. Many of us are communists, but not all.
The trend on HN is indeed quite clearly anti-China and anti-communist, so Chinese propaganda is definitely less successful than that of the US and Western Europe.
I'm not a communist (I'm not an ML(M), to be specific) but I do have a self-destructive compulsion to put up tepid contextual defenses of western adversary states like China, Russia, and Iran. I don't think they're universally wonderful places with perfect benevolent rulers, but the way most people here are completely delusional about these countries, from history to present conditions and motivations, can be frustrating. It's a soft (and sometimes hard) chauvinism which is a little sad coming from a group that likes to think of itself as fair and critical thinkers.
Also the implicit dehumanization ("they have no culture") of the people who live in these places can be really disgusting.
You are one public forum. People can disagree with your messages just as you can disagree with others. If you don't want pushback write a blog and disable comments.
There is a difference between "nobody should be allowed to disagree with me" and "it's regrettable that most people hold what I consider to be very regressive positions on this topic." I don't think anyone is expressing the former.
Surely I can critique the collective behaviour of a particular public forum without excluding myself from it? Different fora differ drastically in behaviour, after all.
I am pro Chinese myself, I’m not getting paid by anybody, and I can assure you that posting pro Chinese comments here gets them flagged pretty quickly. But I’m not sure if it is because people don’t like those opinions or because they think it’s unlikely anybody can be pro Chinese so they automatically think you are a propaganda account. It could very well be either, based on my past experiences posting comments that go against the “allowed” politics of the site.
Which videos/topics are affected by that, in your opinion? Just curious what you have seen, since they have videos from multiple countries by multiple authors.
My memory recalls an interview from a guy who escaped from Korea. There were other warning signs as well but much more subtle and I don't recall them exactly. Like some people are being a bit too positive or some people seem to be oddly specific in their answers.
I'm sure they have legit videos as well, but I can't be bothered by such channels.
This is an instance of something true-by-default about media, journalism & such. What you see, read or hear is a story. A story told by a journalist or producer.
It might be plants. It might be selective editing, with certain interviews making the cut... possibly a minority from a wide selection. The choice of question. The choice of location. Etc. It's just generally true that these are stories contrived by someone.
We know this intellectually, but seeing and hearing still tends to beat our skepticism. Reality TV is, to me, the perfect example of this. Even though everyone knows reality TV is fake, we usually "forget" that a conversation between 2 people is taking place in front of a cameraman. That is, we don't really forget, but we also don't interpret the conversation as we would if we actually saw the cameraman.
People love micro-trottoire, you can find thousand of youtube channel doing them for country X, a lot with millions of views.
They are one of the form of journalism that are the most easy to manipulate (show mostly one opinion, show "crazy" people for one opinion and only "classy" people for the other, ...) and their value is therefore very questionable (plus, who care what the guy down the street thinks about complex subject he has no education to have a opinion about). Sadly, a lot of people take them at face value.
I know this blog post is niche but title could be edited to simplify what "deep blue YouTuber" means here. For HN readers I mean.
"...planted pro-China advocate for 'man on the street' opinions on Taiwan"
> For those who don't know, "deep blue" means very pro-KMT, generally favoring Chinese identity, closer ties with China and eventual unification with China.
That's so sad ... I used to follow the channel from its beginnings, especially when they used to cover exclusively Korea and Japan (with Kei), but since then I dropped off.
I'm very saddened to see it has reached this state.
Yep. Me too. Followed after their first few videos which were interesting, but then stopped after they started making it an entertainment channel and could see through their lies.
At least now I can tie a name to these shitty channel style: "vox pop".
For those who are wondering why the title is unclear or misleading: this blog is extremely niche, written for people living in or interested in Taiwan. Bet you the writer behind it, who is well-known in her niche and a permanent resident of Taiwan, never thought this post would make it to this site. There have been some updates since clarifying blue/green in the Taiwan context, so presumably she’s noticed.
For those who are wondering why the title is unclear or misleading: this blog is extremely niche, written for people living in or interested in Taiwan. Bet you the writer behind it, who is well-known in her niche and a permanent resident of Taiwan, never thought this post would make it to this site.
Serious contender for top accidentally-misleading title for a HN story...
* Asian Boss - Not a boss; actually a YouTube channel.
* deep blue - not the chess engine, not the emotional state, not related to the US democratic party; nor to any of the films of this name; nor the songs of that name.
Not sure why they felt the need to go with a plant. The views this guy expressed are enshrined in the constitution and were the dominant ideaology until ~2000. Plenty of the older generation still think this way.
i am chinese, i followed asian boss.
just for click and ads and money , politicized emotion is also for money.
they need money like every company else.
> state plainly that you’ve gathered representatives from all segments of the Taiwanese political spectrum
Hang on. Why do you have to do that? When did Youtube become a place to escape from bias, propaganda and misinformation?
There's jargon in this article that suggests it's not meant for the likes of me. I clicked the "deep blue" link at the top, hoping to find out what the term meant (nope!) before I realised it was explained below. But KMT? Isn't that Kuomintang? Is ROC Republic of China, or Russian Olympic Committee?
The article states that the guy was incredibly pro-KMT, which is about as anti-CCP as you can get. His perspective was interesting, but it is disappointing to find out he's a plant.
> pro-KMT, which is about as anti-CCP as you can get
This isn't a binary issue. Historically, the KMT was the main opposition to the CCP, but both of these factions claim control over the mainland of China.
The DPP (the greens) are both anti-CCP and anti-KMT, since the DPP is pro-independence; China is China, while Taiwan is Taiwan, and neither is a part of the other.
It would help if you can list the good facts, especially when it comes to free access of information by citizens, or their desire to swallow up the independence of Hong Kong and Taiwan.
Well, things like the normalization of everyday life (nothing like under Maoism where everybody was paranoid and millions died, people live regular lives, even with the authoritative rule of the party), opening up to businesses, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, big health and education access, huge infrastructure updates and development, great technical and scientific progress, becoming the world's number two economy up from being outside even the top 10 30 years ago, and so on.
And Hong Kong is also not exactly a noble history of a population determined to live free, but the result of a 100-year imposed lease of a whole area (as if it was some property) by a colonial power who deemed it a valuable port. Now, in 2022 most/many HKers want to be indepedent of RPC, but if it wasn't for that shady colonial past, Hong Kong would be part of China today, no?
>Well, things like the normalization of everyday life (nothing like under Maoism where everybody was paranoid and millions died, people live regular lives, even with the authoritative rule of the party), opening up to businesses, lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty, big health and education access, huge infrastructure updates and development, great technical and scientific progress, becoming the world's number two economy up from being outside even the top 10 30 years ago, and so on.
This is more-or-less how Germany looked like in the 1930s. Really scary that some people don't realise the parallels.
>This is more-or-less how Germany looked like in the 1930s.
And if it stayed at that, it wouldn't be much different that most other countries at the time - perhaps even less lethal (due to not having colonies) and more progressive than some (the early program was New Deal style, and the talk against Jews was toned-down until later in the 30s).
And China itself looked much worse (and worse much more repressive for its citizens) in the 60s up to the 90s, so there's that. Whereas Germany went the other way: more repressive, more bloody, less wellbeing for the people (as resources started going to millitary preparations), and finally war and devastation.
>Really scary that some people don't realise the parallels.
> And if it stayed at that, it wouldn't be much different that most other countries at the time
If you are talking about the rise of both the authoritarian left and right, then you have a point. Germany (and Italy) were the large nations that were swept up in this populist wave, and that is what is being reflected in the political zeitgist in China today.
>Godwin's law much?
It's kinda of a meme to invoke it. But AFAIK, it doesn't apply to serious (i.e. no lighthearted) political discussion.
I wouldn't draw the parallels between China today and Germany in the 1930s, but I do see similarities to Germany before WWI.
Like China Germany just went through a break-neck pace industrialization to the point where it became a major competitor to the other great powers. It even had its own 'century of humiliation' in the 17th century starting with the Thirty Years' War. There was a lot of nationalism and ressentiment in Germany towards France and UK at the time and I do feel similar things are going on in China today.
This is a much more reasonable comparison, but I think the big difference is that the mad imperial dash already happened. (Also, nuclear weapons, but let's leave that aside for now.) Some like to call initiatives like Belt and Road "soft colonialism" but doing so completely undersells the massive brutality and enormous wealth extraction of what these people would presumably call "hard colonialism." In other words, I don't think there's enough to fight over for major powers to go to war.
>Germans were starving in the 20s too due to the outcome of WWI. The Nazi 'fixed' that.
Yeah, so? Many countries "fixed that" - the New Deal fixed that for the starving Americans for example. Post-war German government "fixed that" for starving post-WWII Germans.
Especially since China went to more open from the 60s to 2020, not less, so the opposite direction.
>And since we're talking about people starving, why don't we talk about the Great Leap forward and the massive famines caused by CCP policy?
They're somewhat like the famines caused by the British imperial policy in India, but in this case due to bad policy, not intentional colonial profiteering.
And, Chinese policy and results went to the other direction, not just eliminating those famines, but raising a population 2 times the US into middle class, and raising more from proverty.
> Germans were starving in the 20s too due to the outcome of WWI. The Nazi 'fixed' that.
It sure seems like a reach to say that China in the 2020s is like Germany in the 1930s because Chinese were starving in the 1960s (and, to lesser extents, the 1970s and 1980s) and Germans were starving in the 1920s. Wouldn't it follow that China in the 1970s (or 1980s or 1990s) is analogous to Germany in 1930s? Oh wait, of course not, because it's an absurd analogy in the first place.
> And since we're talking about people starving, why don't we talk about the Great Leap forward and the massive famines caused by CCP policy?
Sure, but I'm not sure what there is to say about it as I don't think anyone is going to argue that the Great Leap Forward was sensible policy or that famine is a good thing...
It's an absurd analogy only if you're in denial about the horrors of extreme nationalism or ideologies coupled with authoritarianism.
You even seem to deny that today's CCP is the same CCP as the one that cause the Great Leap Forward. In many ways, the CCP of today is more like the CCP of the 50s than the 90s.
I agree that the CCP is, on balance, worse (e.g. more socially repressive) today than in the 90s but I don't think it's about to return to the bad old days of Red Guards and struggle sessions, or the really bad old days of farm collectivization and mass famine. I also don't think comparisons to Weimar or Nazi Germany are remotely appropriate. The state nutures nationalism, but so do most others. (B2 bombers flying over sports games? Subtle!) The major difference is many Chinese have experienced a sharp increase in standard of living within their lifetimes, so they are more likely to be nationalistic true believers.
Ordinarily, this would subside in later generations, but my fear is that western jingoism and igorance about China is delaying or even reversing this process. There is a recent research paper which presents data showing Chinese international students were less likely to adopt liberal positions when confronted with anti-China attitudes. This matches my anecdotal experiences where people proselytizing the superiority of western systems of government (and/or the evils of the Chinese one) get basic facts wrong and completely alienate their targets.
Just for context, GP’s original comment suggested that people who say they want to be rational or neutral about China are only interested in the bad facts about China, an attitude that leads to more misunderstanding. Sibling comments here have taken a generous attempt at assuming good faith and listing some good facts.
- Standard of living has increased incomprehensibly over the last 40 years.
- Huge cities with incredible culture and history.
- Safe to walk around at night. Imagine walking around downtown NYC or LA at 3am without feeling like you're gonna get mugged.
- Despite all the saber rattling with neighbors Taiwan, Japan, and India, and quarterly tank parades, not involved in hot wars since a misguided invasion of Vietnam in the 80s. Belt & Road might have some predatory loans but they're better than Predator drones.
- COVID has been well-controlled. Wuhan escape was inevitable, just look at how fast variants have spread even with (initially) 70-90% effective vaccines.
- Hong Kong Colony was leased to Britain under duress and returned by mutual and legal agreement; there is no independence argument here
- The last invasion of Taiwan was by the KMT when they fled there in 1949. Today's military provocation consists of flying some jets into an ADIZ (50% of which actually covers Fujian province in China) or shooting some ordnance into the sea.
>- Standard of living has increased incomprehensibly over the last 40 years.
So did in Taiwan, SK, Japan, Hong Kong, Sinagpore, etc. in the 50s-90s. China is actually behind, and was slow to develop because of the mess that the revolution caused.
>- Safe to walk around at night. Imagine walking around downtown NYC or LA at 3am without feeling like you're gonna get mugged.
As above, the authoritarianism didn't cause this. Walk around 3am at night in any city in Japan, SK or Taiwan, it is the same.
Unfortunately, that's not the case in HK anymore, especially if you look young, as you'll probably be treated as an insurgent by the police.
>Belt & Road might have some predatory loans but they're better than Predator drones.
Since we're playing et tu now, how about all the bases in the South China Seas and the border skirmishes with India? By all indications, if the US was not the world police, then China's (or Russia's) response, judging by their recent actions, would have been even worse.
You also failed to mention China's role in the Korean war, in addition to Vietnam.
>- COVID has been well-controlled. Wuhan escape was inevitable, just look at how fast variants have spread even with (initially) 70-90% effective vaccines.
Hard to see COVID as a defence for China given that most of the world is still ticked off that China covered everything up, twice, leading to pandemic both times. It's surprising that they didn't learn the mistakes of SARS, and here we are with SARS-2.
>- Hong Kong Colony was leased to Britain under duress and returned by mutual and legal agreement; there is no independence argument here
This really betrays your sympathies. You don't even consider that what the people of Hong Kong desires and their right to self-determination. Hong Kong is more than just a few islands and a bit of land hanging off of the mainland.
>- The last invasion of Taiwan was by the KMT when they fled there in 1949. Today's military provocation consists of flying some jets into an ADIZ (50% of which actually covers Fujian province in China) or shooting some ordnance into the sea.
What is even your point here? Are you trying to say that it's actually Taiwan provoking China?
> So did in Taiwan, SK, Japan, Hong Kong, Sinagpore, etc. in the 50s-90s. China is actually behind, and was slow to develop because of the mess that the revolution caused.
I'm certainly not a Great Leap Forward apologist, but Deng salvaging the mess in the 80s-90s and the subsequent development is a great achievement.
> As above, the authoritarianism didn't cause this. Walk around 3am at night in any city in Japan, SK or Taiwan, it is the same.
I'm just citing Good Things about China since the parent seemed to be convinced there weren't any. Not making a value judgement on how it was achieved.
> Since we're playing et tu now, how about all the bases in the South China Seas and the border skirmishes with India? By all indications, if the US was not the world police, then China's (or Russia's) response, judging by their recent actions, would have been even worse. You also failed to mention China's role in the Korean war, in addition to Vietnam.
Some border skirmishes vs an uninterrupted history of global hot, cold, and proxy wars since WWII, you tell me which is more significant?
> Hard to see COVID as a defence for China given that most of the world is still ticked off that China covered everything up, twice, leading to pandemic both times. It's surprising that they didn't learn the mistakes of SARS, and here we are with SARS-2.
The gene sequence was released on this day (1/11) in 2020. There had been 41 cases and one death at that point. Look at the American virus response and tell me if any city would've locked down at that point. There was no coverup, it's simply an incredibly contagious virus.
> This really betrays your sympathies. You don't even consider that what the people of Hong Kong desires and their right to self-determination. Hong Kong is more than just a few islands and a bit of land hanging off of the mainland.
We'll have to agree to disagree here. I don't think the majority of Hong Kongers wants to secede from the mainland, even in a magical world where they wouldn't have to fight an independence war and subsequent complete economic/diplomatic isolation to get it.
> What is even your point here? Are you trying to say that it's actually Taiwan provoking China?
I'm saying that it's dumb to treat flying into a corner of a giant rectangle that's mostly not covering your own land as some major provocation
The CPC were trying to finish the war and the KMT were a military dictatorship that had just overrun the island. Presumably at this point an outsider country has no real horse in this race, except that the KMT dictatorship was massacring its people because they were communists, while the CPC was doing the opposite, hence the American support. You have to understand that things are different now because Taiwan evolved into a successful democracy, but that was not a given pre-1980s or so.
The civil war ended in 1949. So this was an attempt of invasion after the end. What happened after 1949 in both Taiwan and China was horrible. But thankfully Taiwan is thriving now. If only could get over it’s illegitimate claim to Taiwan so my family and I can feel safe.
Not only did civil war not end in 1949 (or 2022) but ROC implemented port closure policy to blockade PRC coastal shipping in 1949 (lasting 30+ years), which led to Tuapse incidence in 1954, which led to first and second strait TW crisis you referred to in 1954 and 58. Both "invasions" were direct fallout from ROC provoked aggression, and distills the geopolitical essence for why the civil war will continue until one side becomes completely subservient to the other for security reasons.
At the beginning of the day, the producer listed the opinions he wanted to get. "Ok, we'll get a middle aged guy who says this, a younger couple saying something along these lines". He knew exactly what he wanted at the start of the day.
There were three camera crews working most of the day getting interviews. I get the feeling that with a bit of editing you could have make "the public" have pretty much any view on a topic that you want.