The Lens of the Times: Using Timelines to Unearth the Politics Behind News

What news of 2017 made you the most angry? I, silent for 30 seconds, can't remember anything.

It is said that netizens have only one month's memory, so time is the friend of power. They escape responsibility mainly by dragging their own words—waiting for a new hot spot to emerge, and the public will throw it out of sight. When those "flash-in-the-pan" accidents and rights protection, scholars convicted for their words, and netizens who have been drinking tea fade from our memory, under the cover of carefully arranged entertainment to death, they are quietly publicizing evil laws one by one. Politics, and quietly growing communities are methodically transforming our world. Maybe it's only when you wake up with misfortune that the world has become so fucked up.

Why have so many little pinks popped up in recent years, why has rationality faded and abusive rage is rampant, and the original patriot suddenly turned into a rebel? In the end what happened? Did you change, or did the world change? ...even, are these real or your own depression? Is it the society to blame or yourself for not keeping up with the times?

When you blame yourself for these problems, they have served their purpose, because after blaming yourself is thinking about giving up, giving up on yourself and becoming the person you hate. You don't believe that there are really a group of manipulators behind all this. After all, how can the myth of God creating man happen in the real world?

Professor Zhang Qianfan said that the core of totalitarian rule is ideology[3]: once your brain is injected with the ideology carefully designed by the slave owners, you will consciously defend the slave owners, so that they can control your cost Go down to zero - or even negative - and you'll probably enjoy helping them hunt down those awakened minorities. For outliers, they only need to "ban" and add a "conspiracy theory" hat to make it disappear, and the blocked account can't refute it.

As for how big a net ideological manipulator needs, and how to step on the forgetting curve to boil frogs for the public, I am afraid you will have to spend time reading "On Consciousness Manipulation". But the most important theoretical basis for conscious manipulation is not our imperfect human nature, but our unreliable memory.

Whoever controls the past controls the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past.

—George Orwell, 1984

But things might be different if we didn't forget.

1 Function description

Let's briefly introduce the design and function of this event timeline: The big event timeline is a data crowdfunding project. Enter the following URL and you will see this picture

https://chinatimeline.github.io

Each point on the timeline represents an event, and hovering over or clicking a point with the mouse displays the event and when it occurred. Event timelines should theoretically only have one timeline, but on a 20-year scale, events that happened in a few months would all be huddled together and indistinguishable. Using weeks as the Y axis solves this problem nicely, and it also provides important time information related to the work cycle - after all, who will remember what day of the week September 21, 2011 is? In addition, a small random number is added to the Y-coordinate of each event point, in order to avoid multiple events occurring on the same day completely overlapping and indistinguishable.

Events on the timeline are marked with symbols of different shapes and colors according to the category to which they belong, and the event category represented by each marker is illustrated by the legend to the right. It should be pointed out that "major historical events" are those political and military external events that serve as milestones of the era. Although they have nothing to do with ideological themes, they provide an indispensable background narrative of the era. The background color block represents the term of office of the general secretary of the CPC Central Committee, accompanied by a large number of high-level personnel turnover. Each event category can be hidden or displayed by clicking the corresponding category in the legend, and double-clicking the icon can display a certain category of events individually. When all categories are hidden, double-clicking any legend can open all categories.

Well, let's interpret the timeline of this ideological event.

2 Heavy Weapons of the Kingdom

The first story is, of course, about the Great Fire Wall (GFW for short) that "doesn't exist". [5] Research projects related to GFW can be traced back to before 1998. The increase in funding from 66 million in 2002 to 460 million in 2003 represents a step-by-step upgrade of the project, and the "Golden Shield Project" was also launched as early as 2001. Project has been established. The first official acceptance of GFW should be the July 17, 2007 loss of international e-mail messages from the nationwide e-mail service. After two years of improvement, it finally blocked Google, Facebook, Twitter and other US Internet services in one fell swoop in June 2009. The reason why I waited until 2009 was because I wanted to make a good impression on the international friends at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. In short, this thing is by no means a hothead of a certain leader, but the most important weapon of the country that began to be planned almost at the same time with the birth of the Internet-the Party Central Committee has long seen through the conspiracy of the Internet invented by the US imperialists against our party.

After GFW is perfected, another major project is the social credit system, which is another important tool to ensure the eternal stability of the country. Of course, these were all planned since Fang Binxing started advocating the real-name system on the Internet immediately after he completed the GFW in 2009. The social credit system relies on the cooperation of multiple central government departments to share data and management systems. This is not an easy task within the CCP system, but it was completed quickly within three years, and naturally there is a supreme directive.

Of course, technical tools such as the Great Firewall and the social credit system have always been our party's long-term basic national policy. But everyone didn't call the previous dynasty "Cultural Revolution 2.0", so we had to find those new phenomena from the timeline.

3 Red Guards in the Internet Age

On December 6, 2012, Wang Lijun, an anti-criminal hero, entered the US consulate in Chengdu, thereby ruining Bo Xilai's political future. After the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, the whole country was cheering for the Chongqing model, which was rejected with the fall of King Pingxi, and for the anti-corruption campaign of "fighting tigers and flies together". However, no one has noticed that a large number of far-left propaganda websites have been intensively established in less than two years after the 18th National Congress. The date on the timeline is the time of the domain name registration for these sites (which can be checked via whois.com), which usually precedes the website launch, but is the closest verifiable date to the decision to build the site. It can be seen that among the most active ultra-left ideological websites, apart from the time-honored brands such as World Wide Web, Wuyouzhixiang, and the few websites that bet on Bo Xilai, the most eye-catching ones are those after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China. More than a dozen websites have been built intensively in more than a year - this is obviously different from the rhythm of the previous dynasty. The famous "Chawang" was the first to be established after the 18th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, and the other general "Kunlun Ce" was registered at the end of the same year. [2] Regardless of whether a large number of ultra-left websites have been set up in a short period of time due to the needs of protecting the party’s tasks, or the angel investment model of widely planting low income and competing with each other, in short, this wave of operations has successfully incubated “Chawang” and “Kunlun Policy”. "Such a stronghold of ultra-left ideology.

The only thing that is certain is that these ultra-left websites that have been set up intensively in a short period of time are by no means the civilian Maoists who happened to think of building websites by coincidence, but the government-run media under the instigation of high-level officials. This is nothing more than a reappearance of history: the rebels in Cultural Revolution 1.0 were secretly instructed by Mao, while the mysterious "study group" in 2014 was later found to be run by five young people from the People's Daily. The false identity of the common people is not only to lower the alertness of the audience, but more importantly, it is convenient to do some dirty work that the leaders are inconvenient to come forward with. What kind of dirty work is that?

4 The New Anti-Rightist Movement

As you can probably guess, the government or the party directly and brutally interferes with academic freedom, which is not only too ugly but also unconstitutional, so this work has to be done by the "left-wing masses" and little pink. [1] This wave of newly established ultra-left websites plays the role of recruiting and hiding people's ears. At the same time, the Central Document No. 9 was released in March and released a policy signal. Two months later, the anti-American propaganda film "The Contest of Silence" jointly produced by the National Defense University and other units was launched (although it was only known to the public in November). These But it's "My Big Character Poster" in the new era - the total attack signal flare. Under the cover of entertainment to death and anti-corruption campaigns, the ultra-left forces have experienced barbaric growth for several years. On the eve of the 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, they began to intensify their firepower to attack liberals and beat right-wing political opponents who have been brought up today. With the conclusion of the 19th victory, the attacks on intellectuals have been maintained at a high intensity, and the air has become more and more suffocating.

Suppressing academic freedom is a shock to the liberals within the system, so for the wild liberals outside the system—the virtual community that is booming with the Internet, a strategy of giving precedence to the army is adopted. The first "li" is naturally the "Communist Youth League Central" inspired by the "Learning Fan Group" Weibo account, which has entered major social media platforms, leading to unite the little pinks to attack the liberals. But helplessly, "Tuantuan" found that he and his little pinks were really better than the Zhihu rightists who made millions a year. Therefore, after the "ceremony", it is naturally a "soldier", but others are also referees. Therefore, they resorted to the administrative stick to directly greet major Internet platforms such as Zhihu and Station B, forcing them to increase their censorship and follow the party.

5 Big Retrospectives: Reform is Dead

Finally, we summarize the four types of events other than technology, and review the ongoing "Cultural Revolution 2.0". The thumbnail at the bottom of the timeline may illustrate the problem more clearly: after each CCP congress completes the personnel layout and the handover of power, it will follow a major policy change, which is reflected in the intensive outbreak of similar events around the 18th and 19th National Congress of the Communist Party of China respectively. The recent policy direction is aimed at social media: from the establishment of a far-left website as shown by the yellow square to build a far-left community, to the green diamond represented by the entry into major social media platforms, to intensive intervention in various types of social media attributes Internet platforms, as well as the siege and suppression of intellectuals by the extreme left and small pink groups. There is no doubt, certainty, certainty, and certainty that our world has fallen into the hands of the new Red Guards of the digital age under the covert command of the CCP.

The above is my interpretation of 137 news items in 20 years.

reform? Don't be naive, reform is dead, and the grass on the grave is ten feet high.

6 So what?

As a programmer who is aware of political hindsight, I don't know where the progress bar of this Cultural Revolution 2.0 has gone. But I believe that as long as we recall and remember everything that happened together, we will not be fooled.

Few people can read 137 news stories in 5 minutes, but many people can read this timeline in 5 minutes. So, if it only takes 5 minutes to wake up the friend who is not pretending to be asleep, your N hours will be worth it.

Memory, the most important weapon of the people, needs you together. please hit here

PS: Is it easy for me to be a fucking programmer who manipulates the hearts of journalists with terrible writing? Professional reporters and humanities gods, come and save me, and make a Pull Request for revision!

References

• [1] Feng Zheying, Feng Xiaoyu: Patriotism in the Age of Social Media, http://zhanlve.org/?p=6844
• [2] Timeline of the CCP’s Brainwashing and Protecting the Party, https://time.graphics/line/226382
• [3] Zhang Qianfan: The Construction and Deconstruction of Totalitarianism, http://zhanlve.org/?p=195
• [4] China Political and Social Events Timeline Data Warehouse, https://github.com/chinatimeline/data/
• [5] Burn after reading: The past and present of "GFW" https://web.archive.org/web/20170923114736/http://www.chinagfw.org/2009/08/gfw_30.html