China Blocks WhatsApp, Broadening Online Censorship

Most of us (on HN) probably still feel relatively safe in our mostly-functioning democracies oceans away from the country, but the way that China casually blocks any service which it's not easily able control or monitor is fairly terrifying.

China's almost 1.4 billion people now. It's been removing possible channels of dissent one by one, and even recent history shows that they're not afraid to treat anyone who steps out of line with extreme prejudice.

The controlling government's been in an advantageous position for some time now in that living conditions in the country have been improving rapidly for a lot of the population (i.e. moving from rural poverty to middle-class by world standards), but you have to wonder what would happen if things tapered off. Large-scale unrest might be treated with the kind of brutality that the world hasn't seen in decades, and the country's citizens would have few safe channels through which to organize.