The People's Republic of China is a country of many races. The one race that most people in the US think of when they hear "Chinese" is more specifically known as Han Chinese ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese ).
This piece is more nationalistic/jingoistic in spirit than racist.
Furthermore, countries (and their people) do typically exhibit identifiable differences relative to other countries (and their people). A piece about American-made cars relative to Japanese-made cars probably describes perfectly valid generalizations as the cultures of the countries, companies and people involved are probably markedly different.
Had this piece talked about work for hire done by a firm located in the US (or any country besides the PRC) where the owners and most or all of the employee were of ethnic Han Chinese, then you could fairly call it racist, since the focus would then be on their race and not all the attributes (culture, regulatory environment, business practices/norms, etc.) that go along with identifying them by their nationality.
I would have found the piece far more balanced had their repeatedly identified the management as "American management", since all the failings of this project exhibit traits somewhat typical of American management styles. It would have been as fair (i.e. statistically valid generalizations based on facts) as repeatedly identifying the source of the goods as Chinese since historically there have been noticeable quality issues with products produced in the PRC relative to countries like the US, Germany, Japan, etc.
The misunderstanding was because of a rare collision: we banned that commenter a few seconds before carbocation posted his reply.
We almost never kill comments when they have replies. (And strictly speaking we didn't do that here either.) But that comment was so egregious that I'm not inclined to unkill it. Anyone who wants to can read it by turning 'showdead' on in their profile.
On a positive note, the recent changes that we and, more importantly, the community have made to HN threads have had the interesting side effect of making banning less common. It's mostly restricted now to throwaway trolls, spammers, and users with a clearly negative track record on the site.
The People's Republic of China is a country of many races. The one race that most people in the US think of when they hear "Chinese" is more specifically known as Han Chinese ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Chinese ).
This piece is more nationalistic/jingoistic in spirit than racist.
Furthermore, countries (and their people) do typically exhibit identifiable differences relative to other countries (and their people). A piece about American-made cars relative to Japanese-made cars probably describes perfectly valid generalizations as the cultures of the countries, companies and people involved are probably markedly different.
Had this piece talked about work for hire done by a firm located in the US (or any country besides the PRC) where the owners and most or all of the employee were of ethnic Han Chinese, then you could fairly call it racist, since the focus would then be on their race and not all the attributes (culture, regulatory environment, business practices/norms, etc.) that go along with identifying them by their nationality.
I would have found the piece far more balanced had their repeatedly identified the management as "American management", since all the failings of this project exhibit traits somewhat typical of American management styles. It would have been as fair (i.e. statistically valid generalizations based on facts) as repeatedly identifying the source of the goods as Chinese since historically there have been noticeable quality issues with products produced in the PRC relative to countries like the US, Germany, Japan, etc.