Censorship or Protectionism? Reassessing China’s Regulation of Internet Industry [pdf]
ijssh.org
ijssh.org
No, it really isn't. This was an interesting read right up to this part of the conclusion, then they blew it.
Yes of course China's strict censorship of foreign services creates an opportunity fir domestic rival services, but the censorship came first and takes primacy over commercial considerations both for internal services and external ones. The Chinese government sees pervasive control of society as a primary political objective and their grip on the domestic internet gives them that. Every firm of internet communication is scanned, filtered and traced. All the major message broadcast services, equivalents of e.g. Twitter and Facebook, are astroturfed with pro-government propaganda. This is not going to stop just so that a few Chinese internet companies might possibly have a Chance of making a bit of money overseas. To think that's possible is astoundingly naive.
Anyway, why would they have to? They could just partition their foreign services to not include domestic filters.
This is a conspiracy theory. Prove it.
>They could just partition their foreign services to not include domestic filters.
Already done with WeChat.
They're already doing this. Wechat public accounts are partitioned. If you have a Chinese public account, you cannot login via the international site and vice-versa. To partition things in this manner does very much align with Xi's notion of "cyber sovereignty".
To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of.
These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent.
If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service.
To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent.
All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers.
As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it.
I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant about the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).
You perfectly described the ethos of the US Christian Film industry, which is why, in my perspective, their products are consistently inferior on an Objective basis because they start with a premise first and work backwards. As long as there is a "function" of Something to be achieved, the Something itself ceases to be the achievement. I doubt the Chinese government cares much about this dichotomy, which, to me, is kind of reassuring. Self-sabotage is quite often the most effective avenue to hindering progress.
It's a way for China to comply with the letter of trade agreements while still refusing to open their markets. Getting a bit tougher with China on trade is one of the few things I actually agreed with Trump about and the main thing I disliked about Clinton.