The Great Firewall, China’s New Cybersecurity Law
edgylabs.com
edgylabs.com
My guess is that we've been approaching this from a moral standpoint (human rights, freedom of speech, etc) but those arguments have never budged China. I can't think of one issue where we've been able to convince them of policy from a "rights" or "morals" perspective. In this regard, they'll go at their own pace.
In the meantime, one of the US's strongest industries (software/internet) stands to lose a ton of competitive ground with the rising middle class in China consuming their own domestic version of the internet. It's already created behemoths like Alibaba and Tencent with genuine innovation (e.g. WeChat Payments). Perhaps if we removed the moral arguments and simply attempted a trade agreement (even if somewhat compromised) we'd get some ground on getting US internet businesses into China. That'll probably have a greater effect on openness in the long run than sitting from an exiled position lobbing moral arguments over the Great Firewall.
And on the other hand we are criticising China for blocking these same services.
This leads in to other avenues of discussion about protectionist economic policy Chinese internet services must store their data in China, vs. a general displeasure in foreign ownership of residential property in the West, and I feel under-qualified to write about, and too under-educated to express in a coherent fashion.
I for one hate the blocking, it makes using the internet in china as an expat quite horrible, often praying that your vpn works today and often being disappointed.
Frankly once you pass the stage of the trouble that you get mad to find how to specify a socks proxy in your most frequently used apps and that you have to always open a window of Firefox which override systemwide proxy settings but kills your laptop battery, you'll just reach inner peace and get used to it.
If you are ignorant on the subject, why not learn before randomly speculating?
I have only read moderately on the subject of China but I am certain the Chinese are aware of the argument that free speech offers economic benefits and many people have made that argument in fact. The Chinese government isn't interested in moral appeals but it is unlikely they're engaging these policies just to spite us for being moralistic. There's no reason to drop a moral approach since does put some pressure on China's image in the world. The Chinese have explicitly decided that security trumps economic opportunity and moreover they've learned that security can protect the interests of Chinese Internet firms.
As for the part about whether moral arguments have ever swayed China -- there's no ignorance there. They set their policies independently of moral lobbying. That's clear to everyone.
Even now with the shift in China's policy on climate change (for example), that didn't come from outside pressure but rather internal pressure from the Chinese population.
My point is that China is more likely to engage in conversation about selectively opening internet access to the West on economic terms rather than moral terms.
No offense but the USA is not in a position to give moral lessons ^^
It might be hard to imagine for an American but the rest of the world doesn't give a damn about your country.
They could totally do that, but I don't get why we leave our markets so open to the Chinese when they've closed theirs so much to us. The reason China doesn't "officially" block Facebook (call china telecom and ask, they won't admit it) is because they don't want to look closed to the WTO, so we play this game of semantics and the US leadership let's them get away with it. Screw that, let them become North Korea if they want, but we don't have to keep our door open in the meantime and cater to their hypocracy.
At the very least I imagine companies would be forced to cooperate with the Chinese government in suppressing free speech and limiting access to dissenting information within China. At worst they'd be pressured into exposing dissidents and actively assisting the government in creating and maintaining an authoritarian police state.
We know this because it is what the media is telling us everyday 24/7. And there is no way that intelligent and decent Chinese people support this, right?
Whoever that support such censorship which clearly violates the principles that we hold so dear must be uneducated and uninformed deplorables, right?
Oh now I see that you are being sarcastic and I am offended, let me give you a lesson on freedom of speech by downvoting you.
1. Each country has its own cultural and historical background. I here state without justification(purely based on my understanding as a Chinese citizen) that China has its own unique cultural and historical backgrounds that discourages the dissemination of information deemed to harm social order or stability. Hence, with that assumption, it is justified that China would adopt such policies on the Internet in contrast to what other countries are doing.
2. Each country is in a different phase of development, and in each phase there are different priorities. Many western countries has been through the stages of industrial revolution and increased productivity, then followed by more freedom of speech and focus on human rights. In this case, China is just in a different phase of development as compared to the country that you are living it, and it has its own priorities, such as economic growth and urbanization. When it comes to policy planning, you need to consider what is your priority, and obviously the priorities would be different for countries in different phases of development. I've written more related to this subject here: https://paradite.com/2014/03/13/linear-progression-and-stage...
Note to moderators: Feel free to detach or mark this as off-topic. I know continuing this discussions would be pointless and not good for the site.
2. Western countries had a significant level of personal freedom and rights well before the industrial revolution. China could easily tolerate a lot more freedom. What is presented as good for all is very good for the well-connected, good for most (probably) and very bad for a sizeable minority.
I find it very interesting that you're putting the globalization in the same group as human rights and freedom of speech.
> We know this because it is what the media is telling us everyday 24/7.
No. We know it goes against freedom of speech by definition. We know it goes against human rights, because suppressing freedom of speech is one of the main ways to get away with violating human rights. We know being able to get away with violating human rights is bad, because we don't want that to happen to us. You don't need to blame media on what can be explained by reasoning and empathy. Media has enough to be blamed for already.
> And there is no way that intelligent and decent Chinese people support this, right?
Of course there is. History is full of intelligent and decent people supporting decisions that range from distasteful to downright horrific. Being intelligent has little to do with this kind of decision. "Decent", on the other hand, is hard to define and agree on. At best, it's a really low bar to clear.
> Whoever that support such censorship which clearly violates the principles that we hold so dear must be uneducated and uninformed deplorables, right?
That would obviously follow if your previous statement were correct.
> Oh now I see that you are being sarcastic and I am offended, let me give you a lesson on freedom of speech by downvoting you.
You seem to be under a false impression that freedom of speech means freedom of consequences. Just like freedom of speech doesn't protect you from legal consequences of falsely shouting "fire" in a crowded theater, it won't protect you from the court of public opinion.
I consider any downvotes to your comment rightfully earned, because it oversimplifies a very complex topic without adding anything to the discussion of it. Worse, the tone of it leads me to believe that it is meant to actively discourage discussion and disagreement.
You did a good job rebutting my comments until this part. Now I am not sure if you are agreeing with me or disagreeing with me because what you said here is exactly the reality in China now and you seem to be okay with it.
BUT, we shouldn't also disregard the historical and cultural contexts. China has always maintained a very strict command of its people to preserve state stability. Just ask the scholars from the Qin Dynasty. Oh that's right, you can't, because their writings were burned while dissenters were buried alive in mass graves.
You can rail all you want about totalitarianism and mass surveillance from the comfort of a Hacker News thread, but let's be honest here: if a several-thousand-year history is any guide, China will likely move in the direction of more surveillance and control, not less.
We're in the same boat -- Chinese customers are just much better served if we can get a physical server in the country, but I've heard the experience is traumatic.
The semi-intersting thing is this server does not even have any public face - it is purely just a back-end data processor for DNA sequences.
I live in Singapore and I get very fast connections to some of the sites in China, such as taobao.com and zhihu.com, which I assued employed some additional mechanism to serve overseas users. In contrast, websites related baidu generally loads slower (>500ms), which I assume is because they have no need to serve overseas users. That's from a user's perspective.
I also have a VPS on DigitalOcean in Singapore region. It is accessible in China and relatively fast when I tried to ssh into it within China (<100ms).
My suggestion would be to get a consultant firm or tech firm that specializes in serving overseas users to get some insights on how to setup your infrastructure. Surely there are ways to it, Valve managed to stream Dota 2 Shanghai Major to millions of people outside China. But you need to start by really understanding how the Internet in China operates, not relying on prior knowledge of setting things up in other countries.
Latency between a China residential connection and a host outside China cannot be predicted knowing just the location of the host. It can vary by up to 5x just depending on the peering/route.
I can’t just hand over the running of this server to a Chinese team since it is not a webserver, but the relatively complex backend for the custom processing of genetic data.
The problem is getting into China from outside - not to the server once inside the Great Firewall.
My point was though, if it's as bad as you describe, an international phone call to the server would probably be cheap enough to work.
I often wonder if laws like these will pressure people not directly affected to do something about it. Then I remember how so much of history was caused by people doing nothing, and I suspect that will continue to happen into the future.
Long term, I don't see China giving up control of anything, only getting tighter restrictions. I just hope this doesn't result in too big a war in the future.
'here' - the internet is not one place. I'm going to assume US, but come on dude.
And of course these two goals are totally contradictory, but based on their campaign promises it will be the worst of both worlds. Happy Friday everyone!
Sure, China is likely doing some despicable things. Abhorrent things. Don't kid yourself that exactly the same shit isn't happening every day in the West. We're all subject to it, we're all victims of it and we all propagate it.
Stop yourself and ask yourself this: How much of the shit I believe is actually true? How much of it can I prove from first principles and how much of it is just built on things I've learned through the media or the biases of other people I trust? How much of what they believe is true? What can you really trust?
Who is really free?
I recently got in a discussion with a friend that wants to start a minimalist news outlet in order to focus on the truth and only the truth, but we still can't decide what exactly that means. Where do we get our information from? Can we trust that source? How much of a bias is automatically assumed by being Western and reading Western news? What's the "correct" proportion of "liberal" and "conservative" news sources? How can we divorce the information we choose to publish from our biases and opinions?
We still don't know.
Would you be able to raise enough of an income to pay those journalists what they would be worth? Could you get your news out there without it being crowded out by the propaganda machine at large?
It's a worthy idea, truly. Is it realistic? When you're up against the entire media establishment? You're going to be a very lonely salmon swimming up the world's largest waterfall - that's if you even manage to keep yourself out of the kind of trouble that you will bring upon yourself and keep yourself out of jail or perhaps even worse. Perhaps you'd end up having to defect to another country or live in a foreign embassy to retain some semblance of freedom.
I realize that's an extremely fatalist and cynical stance to take, but that's basically what you're up against.
I have zero understanding what would need to be undertaken in order to get there, I have no understanding of marketing or funding. I don't have the first clue how you would begin to take such a stand. But that doesn't mean it shouldn't be taken.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standard...
The west has no shortage of propaganda. media complicity, censorship, and legislation drafted up in the name of "national security." You yourself admitted as much.
Please tell us by which objective measure are you referring to? You mention "by any objective measure.", please enumerate what those "any" are.
I believe you are referring to an ICP license which would is more regulatory/bureaucracy than anything else. You are also wrong, you can still put a web server without an ICP license. You won't go to jail for not having one nor does not having an ICP license mean you will automatically be censored . However if you want to have a large online presence then yes you will need to get an ICP license because hosting provider won't allow you to order rack or cages without one. You should read this.
https://webdesign.tutsplus.com/articles/chinese-icp-licensin...
source: I worked for a CDN that put servers in China.
The West doesn't require websites to display their licence number in their footers. They don't require printing presses to be registered with the government. True there's widespread surveillance, but there's no official and intrusive "great firewall": encrypted connections aren't throttled, there isn't widespread use of proxies just to simply _access_ popular sites in other countries. You can use whatever VPN you like in the West. Western movies are routinely banned in China, whereas I can't find a single example of a Chinese movie being banned in the Western world.
Are you seriously making the claim that censorship in the West is literally at the same level as it in China? Because that's all I've said isn't true. I'm not saying that the West doesn't censor or propagandize, I'm saying that it (at least so far) hasn't engaged in to the same degree. I'm as angry at the media and the government surveillance in the West as anyone, but hyperbole does nothing to further the debate.
No I never made that claim, what I said was that the OPs post was not a false equivalence and that the west had no shortage of similar things done "in the name of national security."
There was no hyperbole or any superlatives used in anything I wrote.
The West has some of the best hackers on the planet... you don't think at least some of them work for the establishment ensuring that you're well identified, tagged, understood, documented, tracked?
Stop kidding yourself. You might think you're free, but you're just the product of the media you and your friends and family consume, echoing exactly what you've been conditioned to echo. Some of it is quite probably true fact. Much of it is probably some version of the truth you've been spoon fed since childhood. The rest is bullshit you've been fed in the hope that it'll continue to propagate the machine that keeps everyone towing the line.
Are you really free? Do you know that for sure?
"and systematic identity verification of Internet users – measures that would make it virtually impossible to use the internet anonymously in China."
Does anyone think for a minute that that doesn't exist in the West?
You can't ignore this this sentence either:
"The new law, arguably similar to what the Patriot Act was for the U.S. with legal clauses detailing national security, espionage and treason, reinforces the regime’s ability mount stronger charges in court."
I don't think it's disingenuous in the slightest. I'm not arguing that the Chinese state run propaganda machine isn't bad... but have you got any first hand experience of it? Do you have any clue about it that you haven't learned from other sources? Can you trust those sources? I'm pretty well read and I don't know anything as fact any further than I did before I started reading. All I know is what other people present as evidence. I had no hand in collecting the evidence, I have no proof the evidence hasn't been tampered with or is even true. Do you?
Unless you have first hand experience, what do you actually know for sure?
This is my point.
This is a luxury in China.
It has never been about specific outlets. It has always been about whether there are artificial obstacles between my computer and the rest of the free internet.
Before you could even decide whether or not to believe what you see, in China you are simply blindfolded in a non-deterministic (to you) fashion.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10965313
I think (hope?) we haven't quite reached this level here.