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Comment by blacktulip | Hacker News Reader

I think a more efficient way for China to 'block the internet' is to stop teaching English altogether in schools. And I won't be surprised if that actually happens.

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Some people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that. Stopping right now all English courses in China would be harmful and unproductive. As would be blocking VPNs for real.

> Some people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that.

History disagrees with that statement. Communism was China shooting itself in the foot in the first place. The Great Firewall is China shooting itself in the foot. The lack of numerous freedoms the developed world takes for granted, is China shooting itself in the foot. China has a very long history of regularly shooting itself in the foot. They'd be a far more advanced nation economically, scientifically and culturally, were they to end the Communist Party oppression.

Brexit happened after a long period of political stability in a country with a long, mature history at the forefront of international politics. Communism in China came to the fore during the tumult of the second world war, which had foreign troops razing half of China - after a period where China was colonised by a different foreign power which kept the powers in China as ignorant as possible. They're very different things.

There is an odd tendency to ascribe some sort of scheming long-term vision to the Chinese government, probably based on memories of dynasties that managed to reign over an empire for centuries. The CCP is nothing like that. As soon as they got into power, they triggered the "great leap forward" (miscalculated "modernization", and famine that killed dozens of millions), followed by the Cultural Revolution that bordered on civil war and spawned a generation of illiterate, starving zombies ("lost generation ").

The CCP has a pretty terrible record at avoiding shooting themselves (or China) in the foot. They probably killed more Chinese people than Imperial Japan did.

The current norms of CCP leadership were established in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution for the express purpose of avoiding such a catastrophe in the future. Since 1989, the guiding philosophy of China's central leadership has been economic growth in exchange for limits on political freedom. The CCP is currently shooting itself in the foot in numerous ways (the VPN ban being one of them), but crippling the country's economic competitiveness by limiting English language instruction is not something they would ever consider.

You are right that the party became notably less insane when Deng Xiaoping took over. However the various administrations since then have spent significant resources and time going in different (and sometime opposite) directions, and not always in a blunder-safe way. The example I have in mind is the declaration last month by the foreign affairs ministry that the Hong Kong "Joint Declaration" is not binding any more for China. They rolled that back a week later (probably after they realized where that was going), but essentially for a few days their official stance was "we don't respect treaties we have signed, even the ones we pretty much wrote and that gave us what we wanted. Our word as a government has no value". Kind of a risky move, and could have set a precedent.

As for your specific point regarding teaching English, I think you're right they wouldn't do that now, however it's a bet I could see them make if their domestic economy becomes slightly larger. After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate, and they get away with it.

> However the various administrations since then have spent significant resources and time going in different (and sometime opposite) directions, and not always in a blunder-safe way.

Yeah, because there are different factions within the party that sometimes have conflicting goals or ideas. It's not as unified as outsiders think it is. I agree that they aren't always scary competent. The whole Bo Xilai scandal was a huge black eye that they didn't see coming, for instance.

> The example I have in mind is the declaration last month by the foreign affairs ministry that the Hong Kong "Joint Declaration" is not binding any more for China.

What? I didn't hear about this at all. That does seem pretty crazy. Do you have a link to a news article?

> After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate

Don't know about Russia or France, but Japan still teaches English in schools. Japan and China probably have a similar "penetration rate" for English. They do lots of business done with English speaking countries but the average man on the street is by no means fluent. I suspect the same is true of France. If domestic consumer demand increases, China might be able to get away with it, but the export economy is so big, I can't see them making that choice.

"Joint declaration" declaration:

>> On Friday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, on 1 July 1997, Beijing controversially announced that the Sino-British joint declaration was “now history” and no longer had “any practical significance nor any binding force”[1]

Re: language. I am not saying that English is not taught at school in these countries (it is), only that it has minimum impact in these societies in practice. Right now China is trying to move away from its export economy (where indeed English is needed), and if it does I think it would make sense for a paranoid government to think "well these other countries are functioning without the common citizen knowing much English, so let's stop teaching it except to some professions" -- and pronto, the next generation is cut off from 99% of foreign news sources.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/01/china-humiliat...

There is a lot of Chinese language content to censor coming from Taiwan, Hong Kong and diaspora

I know Google Translate and other translation services make loads of mistakes, but they often give you a pretty good idea of what's being said.

From English to Spanish things are pretty decent. But from English to other languages it can get pretty horrible.

But that doesn't even matter - the main thing is the barrier to reading a lot, not getting the gist from one article. If you can read English, you'll probably encounter Western perspectives all the time on the Internet. But if you're forced to go through a broken Chinese machine translation every time you encounter something in English, you're going to stay on the Chinese parts of the Internet.

I would be absolutely shocked if this happens. Less than 1% of China's population speaks English beyond learning for business purposes. Making learning English illegal would be impossible to enforce, you would have to build additional infrastructure on the internet just to specifically block english courses. What you are suggesting is actually more complex.

To be fair, there is a world of difference between 'stop teaching English in schools' and 'making learning English illegal'.

My Chinese friends tell me it's no longer mandatory for students to take English classes, but it'll likely never be banned outright.

I would never want to underestimate the ability of the CCP to scale solutions to political problems. It is, after all, the whole reason the party exists. We once thought the GFW would be impossible and laughed at it.

They still want to make money. What they're doing instead is to reduce the percentage of foreign (translated) textbooks in schools, especially in universities.

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