{
  "video_id": "reddit_1u0fv7u",
  "channel_slug": "MachineLearning",
  "channel_handle": "r/MachineLearning",
  "title": "STOP racist posts about Chinese researchers [D]",
  "url": "https://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/1u0fv7u/stop_racist_posts_about_chinese_researchers_d/",
  "external_url": null,
  "upload_date": "20260608",
  "published_at": "2026-06-08T18:11:39+00:00",
  "transcript": "Edit: the original post targeting Chinese researchers is removed by the mods. Sorry for any confusion.\n\nYes, I'm calling it out. It IS racism.  As an active member of r/MachineLearning and a researcher who is ethnic Chinese, I am DISGUSTED by unfounded accusations against the group of researchers who constitute over half of the field. Such posts pop up every other week,  grounded in conspiracy theories, and creating a sinophobia echo chamber.\n\nI understand the salty feeling when one's paper is rejected, no matter whether the paper actually deserves acceptance or not. Given the noise in conference organization and reviewing process, and a relatively junior body of participants, it is very likely that one finds a paper \"worse than mine\" slip into the conference, and there's a high chance that the paper has a Chinese author. That's simply because of the composition of the authors, and does not warrant accusations, aka witch hunts, towards certain ethnic groups.\n\nThis sub is about an important scientific subject in the modern world. If anyone agrees with the logic \"80% of the authors are Chinese, so my rejection is their fault.\", they should seriously rethink their career plan since such thinking does not belong to serious scientists. We should be open to discussing the problems we have in the current conference organization and reviewing process, but racism should not have a foothold in our field.\n\n\n\nEdit: Since the post sparked some heated debate, I elaborate a bit. In the comments, some are like \"you might be good, but I had this/that bad experience with Chinese...\" \n\nSound familiar? This is exactly the type of comment racists make to justify racism. We have a systematic failure in the peer-review system and whether a paper/reviewer comes from China does not play any major role contributing to this failure. In a math- and data-driven sub, normalizing such claims is unbelievable and unacceptable. This IS racism.\n\n\n\n--- Top Comments ---\n\n\n[403 upvotes] Collusion rings exists in top ML conferences since at least 20 years. There are soft ways to make them happen : invitations, on invitation workshops....\n\nCurrently in some domains, there is a Chinese ring that tends to reject work outside of their friends. I'm saying that as an AC. I have much more to say, yet it would be too specific.  \n\n[108 upvotes] To the best of my knowledge, China is leading (probably number 1 excluding a few US labs) in ML research, open models, but also stealing IP, copying papers, manipulation of results, etc.\n\nIt is what it is. I can give you examples of Chinese best papers (e.g. NIPS) with manipulated results, that's why people suspect.\n\n[105 upvotes] Like it is racist to claim that Chinese industrial espionage is a thing. \n\n[52 upvotes] The whole \"blame the Chinese researchers\" thing is getting ridiculous. I've seen way too many people using demographics as some kind of excuse for their own rejections rather than actually examining what went wrong with their submissions.\n\n  \nConference reviewing has always been messy and inconsistent - that's the real issue we should be tackling instead of creating conspiracy theories about entire ethnic groups.",
  "transcript_chars": 3176,
  "ingested_at": "2026-06-09T01:30:10.253117+00:00",
  "source": "reddit",
  "yt_meta": {
    "score": 169,
    "upvote_ratio": 0.6,
    "num_comments": 121,
    "author": "AffectionateLife5693",
    "is_self": true
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}