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Comment by Aperocky | Hacker News Reader

It seems the US (and Australia) is hell bent on banning Wechat, if they think this is going to win any minds of wechat user, they're just dead wrong. People use wechat to communicate with their family and friends, just like how people in the west use facebook, except more.

Imagine if you are a Chinese person overseas, all of your family and friends are on wechat, then one day BAM it's all banned. Would you be thankful for US government for 'saving your personal information from CCP'?

The day that Apple removes Wechat from appstore is the day they sell their last iPhone in China. You can't live in China without it, simple as that. It essentially replaces phone numbers.

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Why has Wechat became pretty much the only way the oversea Chinese communicate with their family and friends in China? One of the reasons is, CCP has banned the rest.

Probably you might be aware of this https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-people-support-... Over 100k Chinese American petitioned to ban Wechat and TikTok in the US.

How do you know that the anonymous online petition signers are all Chinese Americans?

And for WeChat becoming so ubiquitous, it's a case of network effect. China isn't the outlier, the West is. Try living in South America without Whatsapp.

Whatsapp however does not engage in censorship, something both Tiktok and Wechat have been proven to do.

That's because Whatsapp doesn't have a feed. You are aware that Facebook and Twitter engage in censorship, aren't you?

It can't, it's a direct messaging app. There is no app which has the full functionality of WeChat or Facebook that doesn't have some censorship.

Actually facebook (Owners of whatsapp) does engage in censorship.

They censor nipples, kamallaharris.info website, and certain right wing groups.

I think the fact that you are this one-sided in the “censorship” department shows how propagandized you’ve become. Propaganda is everywhere, done by all factions. It’s not just something the communist party does. Every party does it.

I never claimed Facebook didn't engage in censorship. I was talking about Whatsapp.

Whatsapp is wholy owned by Facebook.

https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-call-investigat...

Over 600k American petitioned banning Bill Gates' Foundation obviously.

> The day that Apple removes Wechat from appstore is the day they sell their last iPhone in China. You can't live in China without it, simple as that. It essentially replaces phone numbers.

No. I will just buy iPhones for my parents and start using iMessage. I simply cannot wait to see WeChat got banned in Europe. Disclaimer: a Chinese living in Germany.

And your parent doesn't need to communicate to anybody else in China..

They are Android users now, nothing stops them continue using WeChat on Android to communicate with other Android users. They just have a (better) way to communicate with their son without WeChat.

Nothing is stopping you now from doing this without WeChat being banned

You are right. But it's just too much trouble to force the olds to change anything if you don't have a good enough reason.

It's very difficult to say something like this and has an effect: "Mom and Dad, there's much cooler and securer chat app out there, let's try it out." They will just say WeChat is good enough and they don't care about privacy because they don't anything to hide.

But it'd be much easier to ask them like this: "Mom and Dad, those asshole Americans and Europeans and Australians banned WeChat and I can't reach out to you anymore, can we please switch to that much cooler and securer chat app?" This will likely work.

But to friends I am not so nice. I force them to communicate with me either through iMessage or email (or Telegram, but it's banned in China). Some friends switch to iPhone and we still keep in touch (but probably not solely because of me), and others didn't and we lose touch ever since. It's just a choice we all have to make at some point.

The responsibility of the US government is not to placate any citizen from another country, it's to protect its own citizens' data. Any Chinese app being used in your own country at a massive scale is a liability waiting to be (or already) used by the Chinese Govt.

The responsibility of the US government is to its residents, not just its citizens. These includes being an attractive location for foreign visitors with money and labor to spend in US.

And also to be member of the world community.

Finally many Chinese people with friends in China are citizens.

How much would you recommend importing Chinese censorship before it outweighs the benefits you're suggesting here? I'm not saying there's no valid trade-off there, but catering to the needs you're describing does have a cost.

'A member of the world community' in the same way that China is 'a member of the world community'?

Let's be clear: the Chinese government is going to cause its citizens great pain because it performs this information manipulation with its own technology. It is at fault if other countries take steps to protect the world from the CCP's actions, not the nations taking those steps. Don't victim-blame either the other countries or the Chinese people, both of who are harmed by the CCP's actions.

Same way that Iraqi was freed from Saddam, it's all his governments fault for having weapons of mass destruction.

Speaking of information manipulation, just because people have the freedom to access all information, doesn't mean they won't be manipulated, you're seeing this happen in front of your very eyes.

At least in China people know they're not seeing the full story from the media. They know they can't access certain website because of censorship. In the US people just swallow whatever that they happen to see and believe, the results are comical.

In many ways, Chinese people are less manipulated than certain set of people in America. There were genuine anger when Li Wenliang died. But then eventually they realized that shits so much worse elsewhere - meanwhile in the US people still believe that disease China is worse because - manipulation? Or inability to overcome cognitive dissonance.

You do realize that China and the US are held to different standards because of different stated goals.

If we want to uphold freedom and be a part of the world community then yes, we in fact cannot sink to the same tactics and policies as the Chinese government.

Actually this is a well understood principle, and is in fact why our police cannot use criminal tactics to catch criminals (at least on paper).

Apparently, China is having no problem attracting foreign investment while conducting every kind of human rights abuse that exists including genocide. So, not sure, your point stands in practice.

That’s one of the main reasons China blocked foreign social media apps.

" if they think this is going to win any minds of wechat user, they're just dead wrong."

The US government is not trying to 'win the minds' of wechat users.

Also, why would Apple pull it in China?

I think you are misunderstanding the motivations for the ban.

I don't have to imagine. I'm a Chinese living in US. I use Wechat to video chat with my parents who live in China every week. In the past a couple weeks I have been trying to convince my dad to find a backup plan. Apparently anything owned by Facebook isn't an option. I don't know if Signal is an option but he won't try anyway. Telegram isn't an option. Snap isn't an option. So we went back to good old Skype. Guess what, there isn't Google play store in China. The Huawei app store (my dad uses a Huawei phone) doesn't have Skype in it. He managed to find the Chinese Skype website, operated by a company that isn't Miscrosoft but MS's partner in China, to download the APK, then his Huawei phone rejected to install it, because the APK isn't blessed by some Huawei security thingy.

We eventually settled down to use QQ which is also owned by Tencent. He also mentioned we could use this Tencent business meeting app, or that Alibaba business meeting app (dingding), but at that point i rejused. I was quite fed up after he couldn't to install Skepe on his phone. I think MS is one of the US companies that's so willing to bend over to most requests from Chinese gov but they are still treated like crap. If Trump bans QQ as well then I will just call my parents with the good old international telephone call. These Chinese tech co isn't gonna get another weekly active user just like that.

I even thought about setting up my own Jitsi server and let them just Jitsi to it, then i thought it must be even harder than installing Skype. VPN isn't an option. Any other way to circumvent the GFW will be too complicated for them. They will all be too low bandwidth to video chat anyway. Plus, illegal. You can find cases where individuals got punished because they use VPN. The government even lists them on a website. They ain't hiding or sugar-coating this crap no more.

So after this process, if you ask me, a Chinese living overseas, which side I'm gonna blame for how we got here, guess what, it won't be the US gov.

(Also this is from a burner account because I don't want nobody to knock on my parents door for this post.)

As a software engineer, I don't think the process you went through is of much use. Unless the US set up a firewall ala China you can still call your parents with the wechat already installed on your phone any time.

Also, you probably should buy your dad a computer.. I've never heard of anybody having trouble to install skype on a computer. Since Huawei was blocked from transaction with any US entity, I guess it make sense why Skype doesn't exist on Huawei store? Not by their choice if I have to guess.

> I even thought about setting up my own Jitsi server and let them just Jitsi to it, then i thought it must be even harder than installing Skype.

Jitsi works in mobile web browsers and yes it can access camera

If the international students I've met are any indication, trying to win the hearts and minds of Chinese nationals is a lost cause. It's not a problem of information. The problem is they already know what the CCP does and they agree with it on the basis of it being necessary for the good of society.

Is there any WeChat alternative available in China that supports end-to-end encryption?

Not that I am aware of. Only alternative is iMessage, but if you enable "Messages in Cloud", your data will be backed-up to "Guizhou-Cloud" and they might or might not be encrypted there.

WeChat alternatives? I don't think there's even any alternatives to that in any form. But for messaging there are still apps that support e2ee that you can use in the mainland.

> WeChat alternatives? I don't think there's even any alternatives to that in any form.

ByteDance (the same company as TikTok) launched feiliao [0, 1] last year to compete with WeChat but I don't think they gained much market share. Also, it obviously has no end to end encryption for chats.

[0] https://www.feiliao.com/

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/19/bytedance-flipchat/

Well I guess I'm wrong, although not in a meaningful way. But interesting to know that there's at least one competitor out there.

The purpose is not to win the minds of Chinese citizens. There’s little that can be done to counter a lifetime of propaganda, even more so when its citizens obtain most of their information from heavily censored platforms controlled by the CCP.

> The purpose is not to win the minds of Chinese citizens. There’s little that can be done to counter a lifetime of propaganda, even more so when its citizens obtain most of their information from heavily censored platforms controlled by the CCP.

Actually, that's probably the only good justification for banning WeChat. If someone's views were formed by propaganda, when you disconnect them from their reinforcement, they'll probably at least mellow with time. The point to point communications features of WeChat can mostly be replaced, but less so with the social media aspects.

IIRC, the CCP spends considerable effort trying to maintain influence over the Chinese diaspora (for instance, by getting control of foreign Chinese-language newspapers), though this effort pales in comparison to their domestic efforts.

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