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Comment by supster | Hacker News Reader

It must help Chinese startups that many SV companies are blocked from competing in China. For example no competition from Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud...

more info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland_C...

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I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled.

As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he's one of the few candidates raising the issue of how unfair our trade relations are with China. The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.

Stop right there. Think of what you are doing. You are already trying to find positive values in Trump. Don't. Resist him. The whole world is in deep shit if he gets elected. Check https://twitter.com/ivan_hernandez/status/694388187284795392 as well :)

No, Trump has made many important and crucial things about USA. The matter of shoddy trade practices by China is one such thing. I guess, Trump is a right candidate for USA now given the situation of Islamist immigration and China and such things.

I think most economists will tell you the USA-China economic trade benefits both countries. Few will tell you it is "unfair". China get American money, and the USA get swath of cheap goods.

China's environment is ruined in the pursuit of cheap goods, which considering weren't really as cheap as China sold them for. China gets American money, which then goes back to buy America real estate just like Japan decided to do on the late 80s after investment oppurtunities started drying up at home. And we know what happened next....

Interesting point, but to be fair China is not the only one to find ways to implement protectionism. The F35 program or even Nasa contracting SpaceX could be seen as examples of the US implementing some level of protectionism.

Every nation has protectionism. Every single one. What's important is the degree of protectionism. So pointing out examples of a nation engaging in protectionism contributes little to the discussion unless you compare it to other nations.

Every nation has protectionism.

Yes, that's my point. Not every one agrees with this and GGP's comment doesn't mention this fact.

So pointing out examples [..] contributes little to the discussion.

It adds examples of US protectionism so you can compare them with the ones from China that were mentioned before. Hopefully, this contributes to a more objective point of view. Why do I need to justify this?

Because China's space program and defense industry are protected as well. So if we're really going to try to decide whether China or the US are more protectionist than the other, in that comparison the examples cancel each other out. All you've done is add examples to both sides of the balance beam.

And we're still left with examples of Chinese internet industry protectionism.

> What's important is the degree of protectionism

The US complaining about China's protectionism is hypocritical. Let's talk about America's farm subsidies. How is that not competing unfairly? It leads to American agricultural produce being dumped on foreign markets at subsidized prices, destroying entire countries' agricultural base. What would you say is the degree of protectionism here?

I'll just repeat my extremely short comment:

> pointing out examples of a nation engaging in protectionism contributes little to the discussion unless you compare it to other nations.

It's being implicitly compared to China, and well, to everyone else.

I thought the implicit comparison to any country was obvious and well known - maybe not to Americans[1]. Can you think of any country that practices protectionism on agriculture at the same level as the US?

1. I would have thought post-"corn-syrup-gate" more Americans would at least know corn is heavily subsidized.

To make a good point, you also need to show that China doesn't have agricultural subsidies.

5 seconds of Google searching reveals a long lists of results:

https://www.google.com/#q=chinese+agricultural+subsidies

http://www.economist.com/news/china/21651272-others-cut-farm...

Agricultural subsidies are really not going to support your point. Most countries have heavy agricultural subsidies.

Farm subsidies is not only about business, it's about national security: you subside food industry so that when you suddenly find yourself in the big war with trade routes cut, your population doesn't starve.

I'm not saying that these subsidies are necessary; I'm just saying that they should be analyzed with a different framework.

Not really,

Being self sufficient for war and producing excess agriculture product and dumping it on foreign markets are two completely different things.

And two can play at that game - china can make the same 'national security' nonsense argument about information espionage when it comes to the internet.

And in the modern world - the internet is more useful then food for a nation state - america can lose 30 million people and still win a total war as long as its nukes are functional.

Its all about protectionism.

That's true but even more so when applied to the computer network. Nowadays, in case of a war, closing emails or zombying all Windows pcs could do more harm than food supplies.

And that's why for countries who aren't US closest allies it makes total sense to base military infrastructure on open-source operating systems and software (because let's be honest, Russian or Chinese military most likely won't be able to produce their own modern OS of comparable quality from scratch).

However, software and hardware on one hard, and internet on another, aren't the same thing: I don't see how one can seriously make the same argument in favor of great chinese firewall. It's only effective against general population, and doesn't seriously negate any cyber-threats, as far as I understand.

Why only military infrastructure? Image a war between, say the USA and Russia, and imagine that the USA manages to shut down or cripple all Windows machines in Russia, this will probably put the enemy on the kneels, even more than weeks of airstrikes. And it may also be better PR as it do not directly "kill" anyone. I have always thought that Microsoft holding 95% of PCs in the world is extremely dangerous, and can't get why American, with their admirable foundness of personal freedom and security, do not decide to put a stop to this anomaly. (Imagine, if 95% of world's oil was provided by one company?)

Because unlike oil, computers running on different OS create difficulties for users and developers. Apart from the point of national security, I think it's reasonable to assume that in an alternative world, where 20 operating systems competed on desktop market with more-or-less equal market shares, everybody would suffer from neverending compatibility problems, we would have worse applications, a lot of businesses would never succeed and a lot less value would be created in IT industry overall.

Hell, we don't even have to imagine — remember testing JS on every browser around 2007?

20 different operating systems would have shown the necessity of a common open protocol for the filesystem being it, and would have given much more space to creativity on the computer.

SpaceX has better and cheaper rockets. I don't think they are exceptionally profiting from a "buy American" effect.

For the F-35 program, it contains a lot of technology which can't be found anywhere else in the world, and much of that technology was funded by the US government. For all the ridicule the project got, the corresponding projects in Russia and China are even worse off... If anything, the F-35 program is overpriced because there are no reasonable adversaries.

They could be, but I'd say that wanting to produce your own fighters (especially for a large military like ours) is reasonable. We're not complaining that the Chinese don't want to buy the F-35.

Isn't SpaceX substantially cheaper than any other alternative at this point?

Chinese social media and search platforms employee loads of people to only censor information. If any of the Western companies tried to match the level of censorship required it would dramatically increase costs of operation. If Facebook or Google agreed to censor their content to the degree that Chinese companies do, I believe they could operate in China. Google and Facebook claim to be morally opposed to censoring information, but it's unclear to me if this is really the case, or if spending the money required to self-censor is the impetus behind their "moral actions." Obviously if China got rid of the censoring then the market would be much more attractive from a profit-based view.

At the same time, if Facebook entered China today I don't know how many people would convert to using it like people from other countries do. WeChat is a really powerful player and a lot of recent Facebook Messenger features are basically pulled straight from WeChat.

Same with Youtube and Vimeo - Youku and PPTV are basically Youtube, Netflix, and HBO combined in one. Chinese users can watch Netflix and HBO shows for free via Youku and PPTV's license deals with Western content producers. Plus Chinese users watch much less user-generated content online, unless it is live-streaming.

1. You're conveniently ignoring the fact that Google did self-censor from 2005 to 2009. So the idea that it's "too expensive" being the reason is just FUD. Unsubstantiated speculation.

2. The question about whether or not Facebook/Google will succeed today is more misdirection. The real question is whether Google would have succeeded 11 years ago, and whether Facebook would have succeeded 7-8 years ago, because that's when they would have entered the market.

I don't think that fact disputes my argument. Let's consider a few assumptions to try to see a more well-rounded view of the firewall problem. Consider for a moment that all domestic firms must comply with self-censorship or be forced offline (see Papi Jiang's recent problems with cursing in her programming and being forced offline). From this we can assume that censorship issues are not only an issue for foreign firms, but also a primary concern for domestic companies. If we accept these assumptions, then censorship is just a market condition in China, the same way that bad infrastructure or government instability are market conditions in some countries. The difference is that through the internet, foreign companies can escape this market condition and still compete with domestic firms. Whereas in a country with poor infrastructure all companies are subject to the market condition. Without a firewall, domestic firms would be at a severe disadvantage because foreign companies would be able to easily escape government discipline.

Now, under these assumptions we can consider the Google case. Google tried to compete under these market conditions and lost. Thus, if we accept that the firewall is a way of the Chinese government extending market conditions to force fair competition, then any argument that Google could have beaten Baidu in the Chinese market is wrong.

Of course, this assumption may not be correct, but unless you work in the Chinese internet bureau it is not possible know the motivations behind the firewall. I'm simply presenting a devil's advocate view.

> From this we can assume that censorship issues are not only an issue for foreign firms, but also a primary concern for domestic companies

This does not follow from the previous statement. Also, it doesn't refute the reality that Google was fine with self-censoring between 2005 to 2009. The self-censorship system was already implemented (because, you know, they were already self-censoring).

Europe has done pretty much everything the US wants, from spying on our citizens to foreign companies paying little to no tax. All you hear these days is how lame Europe is because we don't have a Facebook and how we should all move to the overpriced small town of SV. China doesn't only have a Facebook, it has a Google, an Amazon and an Uber. Which are in many ways surpassing their US counterparts. Since when was trade ever fair? I think the bigger thing here is just that China isn't in the US sphere of influence in terms of politics, but also in terms of culture and it's treating them quite well.

Agreed that it's overpriced in terms of real estate, but I wouldn't call it small; the Bay Area is home to over 7 million: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Bay_Area

The weather is also pretty nice in the South Bay (over 300 days of sunshine according to Wikipedia for San Jose). San Francisco technically gets a lot of sun, but anecdotally they get a lot of fog and shade as well, especially in certain areas of the city. There are other benefits to Left Coast living as well, but the rent is indeed high.

> Left Coast

Please don't do that.

What can I say, Facebooks new headquarters:

https://www.instagram.com/p/05d5kiF_8X/

Tencents (wechat) new headquarters:

http://www.kikiwangarch.com/tencent-hq/

They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's not only me though; my wife and I are learning Chinese and we use songs, tv shows and movies a lot for that; when we ask 'can we use X' to the teacher (who is in Hangzhou) she always answers 'I searched but cannot find it' while the first hits on Google are it it including a video on Youtube (not in China) or Tudou (in China). Not because it's banned but because the search doesn't work.

Besides that you are right; especially things they do better; they have Facebook but the messenger (Wechat) is really were it is at; I use Wechat now instead of Messenger and it is superior even when you are not in China. Mainly because it just always 'works' and it's always fast unlike Messenger. Didi is better than Uber in many ways especially for the Chinese; for foreigners it's fine but Uber is more convenient for us as support is in English and most drivers for Uber speak a bit (enough) of English in China while the Didi ones speak no English at all usually.

Thanks for the interesting observations. No surprises.

In my experience, wechat is a spam monster - too many useless notifications and missing useful features like easy OTT voice calls and read receipts. I find iMessage and whatsapp (I use both hourly) vastly superior.

How old is your uber/didi experience? I find both now to be mostly useless to non-chinese. I tried to get an uber to the airport in Beijing last week and would you believe there is no POI in english for "airport". Search comes up empty. This seems recent, it wasn't an issue last year when I was travelling there frequently. I agree, if you do get a valid destination the uberx drivers have enough english to find you and get you where you are going. People's uber on the other hand... its good for entertainment...

This was a few weeks ago. It is worse than last year but I use a lot of mapping apps to figure out which characters to use. If that does not help me I usually just ask someone on the street.

Uber/didi are still technically illegal for China airport pickup, and operate in a very legal grey zone, it makes sense that the software would lack that POI artificially. There are ways around it, but local knowledge, at least some Chinese skills, is needed to get around it.

The taxi queue at BJS is quite reasonable most of the time, so I don't bother with didi.

But this is why doing biz can be hard in China, so many business models operate in grey zones while the government lets them go on while swinging a huge axe over their head. As another example, did you know electric tricycles are illegal throughout the entire country? And China's whole new goods delivery businesses are built around these....

Bing is not that bad as far as useful dev results go. I still use google at work (I'm an MS China employee) but Bing is perfectly reasonable at home, especially compared to the huge pile of crap that Baidu is.

Didi is great if you can speak a bit of Chinese. I've had a decade of perfecting my taxi driver Chinese though (since I seem to only use Chinese to talk to taxi drivers these days). YouTube is still way better than youku/tudou for content discovery...they have no "popular now" for non Chinese content.

Bing is really reasonable for dev search results. Honestly not sure if the people bashing it have ever tried it for that purpose.

I bet the MS employee has tried it for that purpose. He still uses Google at work.

I'm a researcher, Google still has benefits in that area. For dev, Bing brings up about the same information that Google does. And it is hard to tell the difference these days.

I also resent not being able to use google at home, so I like using it at work.

> And it is hard to tell the difference these days.

For dev results or? Because that's simply not true. Try finding things like knitting/wool shops in Shanghai on the Chinese Bing and on Google. You won't be getting any knitting done if you use Bing; all the hits you get there are closed many many years ago. There are many other examples from daily life which we encounter when in China; we're going there in a few weeks again and i'll jot down the differences then; there is an awful lot which you simply cannot find in Bing while it's in the top hits in Google. We might search for different things but 'hard to tell the difference' is really just weird to say.

I have in China and it's not compared to Google. My colleagues there are missing a ton of efficiency because of it. When I switch on the VPN (which mostly does not actually work otherwise it would stay on) and use Google, we work far faster and more efficient. I can even find datasheets which are only in Chinese faster on Google than they can on Bing.

In Shanghai, using Uber's carpooling feature it is much cheaper to take Uber than Didi. I have had quite a few rides (with 2-3 other people riding with) that were cheaper than it would have cost to take the subway. I'm not sure Didi has the algorithms ready to do this yet. I should say I haven't tried Didi in a few months, it may have improved since the last time I used it.

In Shanghai I find Uber quite cheap when not sharing. That is probably because I am used to London.

Excellent point. The net beneficiaries of 'free trade' rarely have cause to question the policies that have given them great returns. The last 200 years of Chinese history is describes very clearly the impact of the imposition of free trading principles, where the freedom to say 'no' to free trade (of opium) was overturned at the barrel of a gun. To this day, China refers to the 'century of humiliation' and is hyper conscious of being the unequal trading partner of the Western world ever again.

China will no doubt have also learnt from the speed of economic development of the original Asian Tigers (S.Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) whose post WWII protectionist policies allowed domestic manufacturers the time to grow, compete, and in some case super cede with more mature foreign businesses when the time to open up finally came. We would not have Samsung, LG, Sony or Nintendo today if those governments did not protect their own industries from German, Italian, UK and US electronics manufacturers of that era.

It seems that China is one of the few countries to apply these lessons to the internet era, and has the political control and consumer base to make it work.

Whatever the personal agendas involved, it's a fascinating experiment. Perversely, it might even lead to a greater consumer choice in the end - sign up to WeChat, use Baidu - with innovation cycling faster due to the eco-system wide competition created by the firewall

If China had kept its isolationism from before the opium war for much longer, it's hard to imagine its emergence as an economic super power

Yes, I think I would agree. I would draw a difference between protectionism vs isolationism though. Protectionism is more like a temporary ringfence of strategic industries you want to nurture - the long game is always to unleash them into the competitive free market when they are fit for that competition. Perhaps that is indeed the real reason for the firewall - a plan, ridiculously long term plan - to conquer the world with domestically cultivated innovation

> As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he's one of the few candidates raising the issue of how unfair our trade relations are with China. The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.

That's rich coming from the US.

Does the US have a reputation for protectionism? From a domestic point of view it seems like everything outside of steel and farming has been opened up

Auto industry. US/Canada have their own standards different from the UN standards the rest of the world adopts. Very few European cars are sold in NA beside a few high-end models.

> The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.

On the other hand, the west has profited quite a bit from the underdevelopment of China in the past. So I can't really blame them.

No, it's definitely primarily about censorship. This is a one-party rule system...the party sets all of the policies at will, and their main goal is to keep themselves in power. The economy is merely a tool for them to keep themselves in power. Censorship and control of the media is a more powerful tool to keep themselves in power. They are much more worried about information flow than they are about protecting some tiny Chinese internet companies. That's not the mentality in China -- the mentality is..."let's help the big guys."

You're misrepresenting the real situation - China is the US's 3rd largest export partner, and we export over $200B of goods, and much more in services to China per year, which is greater than the GDP of silicon valley. Trump is proposing that we stop all of that, which will lead to a depression.

Absolutely.

Corollary: When running a country, protectionism of tech businesses can really pay off if your population is large enough.

Should every country follow Beijing's example? I'm not sure it leads to a good outcome globally, but on a per-country basis it seems like countries with large populations do have something to gain by acting selfishly.

Protectionism is a sorta tragedy of the commons type of deal, if everybody did it the advantage it offered would disappear.

Every country on track to become a major super power enacts policies of protectionism at the beginning. America had one of the biggest. In fact, American independence spurred from imposed protectionism from Britain on tea. Later they imposed the same policies for their own benefit. It is only natural to do it.

I'd say it's very much alive now-a-days. If it wasn't for protectionism, the American auto industry would've collapsed long ago (not adopting international safety standards, inferior product line for NA market).

What does China actually gain from this?

For the government the answer is clear: locally situated companies that they have total control over. WeChat will obviously never pull a Google style "encrypt all the things" - they'll happily help the state reduce the credit scores of political dissidents and anyone who is friends with them.

For politically connected cronies (e.g. WeChat owners), the answer is also clear.

But if you are just a Chinese citizen, what do you gain? Inferior substitutes for the Google/Facebook/etc infrastructure? Isolation from the rest of the world?

[1] This excellent article argues that WeChat's "conversational interface" is just a crude hack around app store restrictions. http://dangrover.com/blog/2016/04/20/bots-wont-replace-apps....

> But if you are just a Chinese citizen, what do you gain?

Apps that are localized to their needs.

> Inferior substitutes for the Google/Facebook/etc infrastructure?

They aren't necessarily inferior. WeChat for example has a very intuitive privacy settings, which make a lot more sense than the complicated Facebook ones.

> Isolation from the rest of the world?

Many of these apps are expanding outside of China (To mixed success).

If apps localized to one's needs provide value then there is no need for protectionism. People will choose to use the localized apps.

India has a thriving ecosystem of local apps, but with negligible protectionism [1]. Uber, Ola, Zomato and others do a great job of localizing for Indian needs. Based on recent experiences I'd say Uber does a better job than Ola in this regard, in fact.

When I visited Malaysia, several folks I spoke to said they have a similar ecosystem.

The best thing is that Indians/Malaysians don't have to give up Gmail or Facebook if they don't want to.

[1] At least negligible protectionism w.r.t other apps. Ola competes on equal footing with Uber, but both suffer from protectionism w.r.t. legacy taxi providers.

I am not saying that their policy is good or that I agree with it. I just think there are two sides to the picture.

Many countries have protectionist policies, in particular in the automotive industry. The United States even had limits on Chinese parts imports[1]. China had an interesting policy to allow its automotive industry to grow through joint ventures with foreign companies (e.g. Hyundai[2]). They have done somewhat similar things with tech companies like Google and Microsoft, to nurther talent and guanxi[3].

Also in regards to Malaysia, the government has threatened to ban Facebook before[4], however not as a mean to allow local competition to grow.

[1] http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/protectionism-cannot-save... [2] http://repository.brynmawr.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... [3] http://www.amazon.com/Guanxi-Art-Relationships-Microsoft-Gat... [4] https://globalvoices.org/2014/08/13/malaysian-government-thr...

Edit: Changed tense in regards to America's policy on Chinese imports.

I'm aware that protectionism is rampant around the world and that the US does it too. I also oppose that and believe US protectionism harms US consumers.

China doesn't want to end up like Europe, which has no major Internet companies of its own on the same level as Google or Facebook. There has been immense political consequences and soul searching in the EU, and they are trying to push a single digital market concept to better compete against American firms. However, it remains to be seen how effective this strategy will be.

How does it benefit a Chinese or a frenchie if apps are provided to them by another frenchie, as opposed to by a foreigner?

Would I benefit if I received a haircut or transportation from a white man or an American as opposed to a Marathi?

I wish the UK would block American SV firms in a similar way, to be quite honest.

You're undermining the fact that to build services of that scale is not trivial at all, and the fact they have managed to do it is the basis of why they are an effective competition to SV, now that they are as economically strong as the Bay Area is.

Once they are done with "replicating" SV, they'd start "inventing" too. What's stopping them from that?

I'm not undermining them - simply stating that there was a vacuum created by the lack of competition. Even cloning successful services at scale is incredibly difficult, but it's not 0 to 1, it's 1 to n. Nonetheless, I agree Chinese startups are using their current leverage to innovate in really interesting new ways.

I highly doubt there is a "lack of competition" in China. For each and every one of those "Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat, Youtube, Gmail, Dropbox, Vimeo, SoundCloud" you mentioned, there are a hundred similar companies.

In fact, I'd argue that competition is rife and more ruthless in China than in Silicon Valley. The moment you have a good idea, ten companies will appear the next day hot on your heels. Even if the American stalwarts were to enter the Chinese market, who's to say they won't be crushed by Chinese competition?

On the other hand, the customer base is also much larger in China.

With that said, reputation and word of mouth is everything in China. Before an app like Didi was the king, people were changing ride share apps every month. New deals, new coupons, new rumors, etc... The tide changes really fast here. Didi just happened to be the only app that could hang in there.

Regardless of how many people there are, if 10 people online say something is not worth using, no one else is going to use it.

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