I am not the government, and I cannot take their position to explain this. But here is my naive thoughts: Chinese government are engineers. If there is a bug in a feature cannot be fixed, keep the feature out of the delivery until it is fixed. DL is the feature. Also no one is willing to take the risk of working on the bug, because you may fail your KPI. So every time a customer request this feature, we will scare them off, so that no one is requesting this any more. It is kind of coward, but it doesn't know how to deal with it. And politicians in west really like the influence of DL, his popularity can help them in their career, so they want to bring him up again and again. I guess that basically is what's going on. Does it really matter every time Chinese government freaks out?

I am been told by the moderator not to comment on political issues, mainly because although I use Hacker News for tech news, I do mostly comment on China issues (not many though), apparently it is against the community guideline. so I will not comment any more. For me, I have lost wills to read news, and Hacker News is the only thing I read in the morning before work, it is unfortunately there are more and more political topics here.

Just to repeat what I tried to express elsewhere: I think your perspective is valuable. I think you should keep sharing it, as long as you do so within HN's guidelines (which you've mostly but not always done). But we do also have a rule asking people not to use HN primarily to argue about politics. The best would be for you to participate in other threads that gratify your curiosity as well—even if only to ask questions and learn. That would be much easier for us, because otherwise people are going to complain about why we enforce that rule in some cases but not others.