Chinese Man Sentenced to Prison for Selling VPN Software
whatsonweibo.com
whatsonweibo.com
As a former law professor of mine explained, thirty years ago, if you visited a "law firm" in China, they resembled a back-alley bodega. This example serves to elucidate that the nation itself is a Party-based system, which is by definition entirely different than a nation based on the rule of law or a constitutional system.
It's not merely the enforcement that is arbitrary, but the defining, application, ruling and interpretation of "law" is actually simply just attempting to appease the enigmatic communist party and its policy agenda.
At what point do we stop drooling over the market size and advocate for dignity and rights for 18% of the world's population? Not to mention the danger authoritarian regimes pose just by existing. An apparatus that powerful that could be structurally hijacked by a tiny number of people is a scary thing.
I lived in China for a few years, and finally left early this year. Standard of living has been declining ever since I arrived, for me and for my local friends, many of them that were from other provinces that came to Shanghai. The declining factors included:
1.) Increasingly worse air pollution. It was not smart to exercise outdoors in the summer or winter.
2.) Increasingly worse water pollution (even reported by the state media). The frequency of diarrhea keeps going up.
3.) Increasingly worse food supply (there was a scandal of a company in northern China that used toxic industrial agents in common food items for 10!! years)
4.) Lack of jobs for migrants. Alot of them had to head back home to their farms.
5.) Censorship Censorship Censorship. Not a day went by that I wasn't frustrated with my VPN not being able to hit a western site.
6.) Inflation. Everything is more and more expensive, in tier 1, 2, 3, and even 88 cities. But standards haven't gone up.
7.) Anyone rich is trying to get out. Australia, US, Canada, anywhere.
Lastly, 8.) Chinese government regressing into a dictatorship, with the possibility of Xi Jin Ping taking a 3rd term.
Everyone is as complaining about inflation. Inflation has gone crazy for over a decade, but since I first went there average wages in China have gone up by about 8x. The thing is they can't have high wages without High inflation. If wages go up then the workers in the factory making stuff get paid more, the truck driver that takes the goods to the shop is paid more, the shop assistants get paid more, the shop owner pays more rent. Therefore they have to charge more for their goods. But this is not a bad thing.
Meanwhile the exchange rate has made foreign goods twice as expensive. But if wages are up 8x then those foreign goods are actualy 4x more affordable. Hence all the foreign cars. It's all just the Chinese economy converging on global norms. When I first went, cars were an impossible luxury for most Chinese and in my wife's city the streets were bare except for taxis, busses and bicycles. Now there are traffic jams everywhere.
The problem is China has already almost reached international norms. The disparity that has allowed it to grow so fast is almost equalised. Factory wages are increasing because most of the untapped rural labour has been tapped. Within 10 years Chinese will be much better off, but China will have all the same problems every other advanced economy has and its economic miracle will have played out.
EDIT: Wolfram says bigger multiples than I thought. Wow, things change fast.
That's understandable, given that's against the law and would probably be a prison sentence.
For me that says more about them than about China.
Until they are allowed to speak on the subject, we will not know. But the near-daily peasant uprisings around the country would tend to indicate dissatisfaction.
That said, it is useful to constantly remind yourself that your point of view on China is only ever a tiny corner of the picture. I lived there for 15 years (not to make this a pissing contest) and speak Chinese fluently, and my peer group there was mad as hell about the government. But I know that hanging out with writers and journalists is going to give me a pretty skewed point of view on the country as a whole.
Lastly, about "thousands of years of single party rule", I think Chinese history over the past 150 years makes it abundantly plain that Chinese people have absolutely had it with single party rule. From the Xinhai Revolution, to May Fourth, to the early 1950 political participation, to 1989, to the Charter '08, the history of China in the modern period is the history of a people who are doing their goddamn best to throw off authoritarianism, and who keep getting crushed by the authorities. And then, twenty or thirty years later, they get up and do it again. It's fucking heartbreaking, to be honest. Each time it's led by an educated elite, not necessarily "the masses", but that's how change usually happens.
The big difference now is that the educated elite has been numbed by consumerism, and the pissed-off folks are on the bottom. That's also a bad place to be, though, as far as the government is concerned.
This is not how revolutions work. Revolutions are always and everywhere the work of frustrated elites, people who have the education and skills to be the ruling class who aren't. The only successful slave revolt in history was lead by the educated creoles of Haiti. Revolts never come from those at the bottom of society because they're too poor and weak to riot and demonstrate. Social unrest happens when things have been getting better and then they get worse. The Party-State is secure as long as the economy keeps growing.
Hmm. Interesting. This implies that the government will do everything in its power to ensure that the economy keeps growing.
Would you say that contributes to long term prosperity of its subjects?
The people at the bottom just simply don't have much experience in organising politically.
Well, from my decade as an entrepreneur, I can assure you, it is sometimes quite useful to generalize. One skill required to survive is to form opinions based on limited access to information under conditions of uncertainty. So I'd caution against your own use of the word "never". Anyway, my original comment did state "on the whole". This means "most".
The people I know in China are perfectly well aware of how corrupt, oppressive, arbitrary and immoral their government is. They simply believe there is nothing they can do about it. It affects everybody. For example recently in my wife's home town all holiday for all policemen for the rest of the year was cancelled with no compensation. If officials want to do something, they just do it.
Just because people can't protest about it doesn't mean they like it. They know other countries have free press and democracy, a real say and voice in society, and of course most of them want that. What kind of person wants less say and fewer basic freedoms, especially when they can see plenty of very prosperous and safe countries that have them? They just can't see any practical way to get it.
Or as if India isn't already basically replicating the same feat with a democracy, but 10 years delayed.
It isn't a "Western view" to understand that governments that respect human rights generally lead to happier civilizations in the long run. It's simply observable from empirical data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_Terror_(Taiwan)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Chung-hee#Legacy
That being said, I don't necessarily disagree with the principle of your statement about free societies being better.
The difference is that China's mini-revolution (June 4, 1989) failed, where theirs succeeded.
Perhaps Chinese people know better than anyone just how violent revolution can be.
I suppose that really depends on the Communist party...
In china, rule of law is not even an ideal, its system is not setup to support it, it is considered a western imperialistic concept that does not fit china.
Third world problems vs. first world ones.
Just remember that, as with The Great Firewall and the (commercial) development and initial sales of its technologies, so too with this: China is the prototype.
Can be as cheap as 3€/month. You can even put OpenVPN on top of that (SOCKS) if you need to use your company network.
I have an impression Beijing doesn't care so much about restricting IP blocks of small hosting companies from the region. It'd probably change if millions of people went this road.
(A genuine concern of mine, we're building an embedded product based on Win 10 IoT and using its PPTP VPN for remote diagnostics.)
It is unlikely that it would be blocked in China since eavesdropping is easily possible.
(Vanilla) OpenVPN is blocked in China, likewise is IPsec and L2TP. SSTP can also easily be detected via Active Probing but I'm not sure if the GFW currently does that.
have any more technical details on how this is an issue?
That's just how it is. Each country gets to choose its policies. I mean, that's one of the fundamental points of being a country, isn't it?
Yes, but that’s not what’s happening in China. The fundamental point of being a country is to serve the common good, and to protect the life and liberty of your citizens. In China the ruling party doesn’t care about any of those things.
A policy such as this would be a lot less horrible if ‘the country’ actually chose their own rules and rulers instead of a small handful of permanent party appointees. 1.3(?) billion people who have no say in these policies or in those who make them should be a tragedy no matter how cynical you are.
Important to recognize that this is your worldview, and one I agree with, but it is not the only view available! There are other motivations for government to maintain the existence of the state which they govern.
For example, for some governments the motivation is to maintain the current lifestyle of them and those around them, at the expense of the populace.
Do you also think it's a tragedy that most of the world can't vote for the US government? They're affected by it but have no say in it. Especially countries that get invaded - which never stops happening.
China values the first more than the other two and so if it has to choose those will be compromised on. America used to value liberty over the common good, but that is slowly turning.
So yes, the distinction between China and the US is fuzzier than typically claimed. And in both, the asserted justification is limiting the field to candidates who are competent and experienced.
But without democracy, it is in no sense "the country" that chooses the policy, it's just whatever group of thugs happens to be in control of the capital city.
Democracy doesn't mean anything, if systems are rigged, and voters are effectively manipulated. And with modern software, it's getting much worse. Elections are becoming clashes of voter-manipulation systems.