Most Chinese Steam users have historically been using the global service instead, as this Chinese version of Steam has only been available since February 2021.
Really makes you want to visit and see how this actually works for yourself. The more I read about China, the more unbelievably contradictive it gets.
The Beijing ones were the most sophisticated
If Steam had a working 'global service' then it almost certainly used local datacenters as proxy. But AFAIK PC gaming is pretty much seen as a niche for computer nerds though (apart from E-Sports), gaming mostly happens on mobile phones.
We connected a fibre tester, and nothing was coming out on hk side. We tried connecting to google.com, and to our surprise this "physical" link was also censored.
Then the cableman basically says, use this link, and VPN over it. The speed was quite good still.
As this was about five years ago, the situation may well have changed, but at the time exemptions definitely were possible.
Also, keep in mind yours is but one experience out of many.
Saying that both are bad and so nobody can be blamed is a bad faith argument.
Fixed it for you.
I would change to directly from the CCP, because there is no independent free press in China at any meaningful scale.
Not only does a lot of their media get big readership online here, People's Daily and others.
Also does anyone know how much SCMP's independence has eroded now? I don't know that much on that one but it still gets placements in news aggregators for example as if it were the NyTimes.
CCP also pays for reach, spending millions to get their content in the large US based media like WaPo. Most people don't realize they are reading an ad, not an actual article by a WaPo reporter.
Though maybe funnily on the opposite end, a CCP persecuted group Falun Gong owns the Epoch Times, which has grown huge too. In the past few years they have been one of the top sources of social media/fb links. A lot of it is just meme & engage bait. but it's still interesting to think about.
Russia Today too ;)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-... https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/beijings... https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/ccp-buys-med...
By in the “West” what do you mean? US? North America? Any place but China?
I was there in 2016, and besides the usual, like Google, Netflix, Facebook or Twitter, most western sites seemed to work, just very, very slow for some reason.
Also, some high end hotels did provide unfettered access to the Internet for some reason, so I guess anyone could go there and browse Facebook for the price of an expensive coffee.
Practically everybody who is knowledgeable with computers uses a VPN - restrictions are only for "the plebs"
Skype worked ok, but text chat only. Images never arrived.
I’m wondering if foreign SIM cards are not subjected to filtering.
iirc it really just depended on where you were... Sometimes Fi let me break through the GFW, but it definitely did not in Beijing.
In fact, I built a tool to specifically circumvent this: https://github.com/nneonneo/iOS-SOCKS-Server. It provides a SOCKS proxy through which you can tunnel any TCP connection, and have the connection appear to originate from your phone (and thus not be subject to the tethering rate limit). I used this when I was in China recently (2019).
Over the years, I came to understand that contradictions are almost always just false assumptions.
For a country governed by a so called “communist” party, there are glaring inequalities. If we limit ourselves to free Internet usage, it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people would only be able to consume government approved content, whereas elites could have access to anything.
How does having "a communist" party imply that there would be no inequalities? Especially given that merely a few decades ago China was poor like hell and everyone outsourced all the cheap labor there?
> it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people
Isn't education in China largely sponsored by government?
That's not by design, that's just the virtue of human ingenuity. Give us something we ain't supposed to do, and people will invest a lot of effort to still make it work.
Case in point; For a while Germany wanted to put Internet filters in place, based on DNS blocks [0]
Trivial to circumvent for anybody remotely familiar with networking, yet seemingly impossible for the vast majority of people who have no expertise in the field.
Was it designed like that to lock out the poor, uneducated, Germans?
Exactly that. It took me >30 minutes just load my emails - if I found a spot where the VPN would connect at all. Basically I needed two coffees. One for the time to load the email, and the 2nd coffee to wait while my repliess were sending.
At the same time, access to Chinese websites was super-fast.
The I changed the strategy to create a VM in azure and it was never blocked for years, the only down time was M$ trying to save me some credit by automatically shutting it down as the load of the VM had always been almost 0%.
Steam is one of the few popular international services that escaped getting blocked by the Great Firewall, despite hosting content that the Chinese government ostensibly considers illegal or inappropriate. There have been a lot of articles about how Chinese indie game developers were using Steam as a loophole to sell their games without getting the official government approval to sell games inside China. It's never been clear why Steam was an exception to the blocks, but that's par for the course. The government never explains to the people why something gets blocked, sites just suddenly stop working from one day to the next and the people are expected to accept it and move on.
The internet blocks are set up by the internet providers in the country, so somebody must know what's going on, but - like many things that happen in China - the people just need to guess the reasoning by reading between the lines of impenetrable Party literature or relying on supposedly independent editorials in the tabloid newspapers.
So nobody knows for sure, but people have deduced that there are several reasons that the government blocks websites. One is as a "punishment" for a foreign company, because that company published content that insulted or offended some officials in the government. Another is if the foreign company is specifically and deliberately producing content aimed at Chinese-speakers that discusses topics the Chinese government does not want Chinese people to discuss freely (June 4/Tiananmen massacre, Hong Kong autonomy, alternative governing models that do not include the the Party at the core etc). Another one might be if the foreign company refuses to allow the Chinese government to install their surveillance hooks. But I think perhaps more relevant to the case of Steam is economic protectionism - the Chinese government tends to block foreign services that could compete with Chinese companies, so that Chinese companies can become dominant in the space.
The thing with Steam is that there wasn't really a local alternative with a wide enough catalog of games that it would please the middle class/educated/moneyed gamer in the country, so that's probably why Steam was quietly allowed to continue for so long. A few years ago Valve announced a partnership with Perfect World (local media company) to produce a Chinese version of Steam, but for whatever reason it took ages to come out. Now that it is out, and presumably up and running (I don't know since I don't live in China any more), the government has no incentive to allow people to buy from the international version, so that is probably why it now got blocked.
As usual, Chinese government only block in one direction - every day, every month, every year there are more and more things blocked. Eventually even though technically people in China are still able to visit most of the internet outside of China, the sites that are the most popular in China will all be owned by Chinese companies (or partnerships) and exist completely inside the monitoring and self-censorship bubble of the Chinese cultural sphere. So it's not like people in China don't have the opportunity to see other content, it's just that those other sources are very far outside the mainstream and not frequently accessed by the average person. If it did become popular, that's when the government would make a move.
A censor find something matching a keyword, and he gets CNY 0.5. That's the whole story to it.
That being said, if you go then please try to walk into a random hotel/apartment you see on the street to try to book a room.. then you'll discover that 9/10 hotels/apartments won't allow foreigners to live there. I lived in China for more than a year before I realized this was the case, and I have on multiple occasions even been kicked out of friends/partners apartment because someone told the landlord there was a foreigner in the building (or maybe they saw through the surveillance camera).
That said, definitely in the case of hotels there are loads of hotels it seems there is a legal aspect as well. If you lived in China you might be familiar with the long and boring process of registration with the police every time you move house. Sometimes you even have to register at more than one place because you moved into a different urban area. According to the law, all foreigners must do this everywhere they go in China, including tourists who are on holiday. It wouldn't be very efficient to make tourists spend a couple hours at the police station every time they checked into a hotel, so some hotels have some arrangement with the local police to do this on their guests' behalf behind the scenes. Most tourists nowadays don't even know that they have been registered with the police everywhere they travel. But smaller hotels don't provide that service. I have successfully blagged my way into staying at one smaller hotel by assuring them i would visit the local police myself to register, but a lot of them don't want the hassle or (perhaps) attention from the local authorities, so they just ban foreigners.
When I left China it was during the pandemic, and pretty much no hotels at all would allow foreigners to stay. This was xenophobia, pure and simple. There were a few times I had to first visit the police station and ask the police where I could stay, because hotel after hotel after hotel refused me, despite my green health code, valid visa and so on.
Also I was always greeted with utter friendliness, so I don't get the everybody's xenophobic aspect. I do speak some (very basic) Mandarin though so maybe that helps with how you're treated.
It is true that people in China tend to be fairly polite, although when it blows up it tends to go straight to 11. (I saw a lot of this happening between police and residents during the coronavirus lockdowns.) But just because people are polite, don't assume that means they're not bigots. In some parts of the country, particularly amongst more affluent people, there is a sort of attitude that foreigners should be treated with kid gloves, which is thoroughly degrading.
Needless to say, I loved it.
Also, I don't know what makes you think that Chengdu is off the beaten path - it's a massive tourist destination, in particular because of its panda reserve, presumed proximity to Tibet and the global renown of Sichuan cuisine (home of mapo tofu, hotpot etc).
Thirdly, this coddling of foreigners is exactly the kind of racist behavior that I find to be degrading. It might feel superficially nice to be treated like you are special or unique, but really it means you are not being treated with respect. They are treating you like a child, or a curiosity. If you visit some of the indigenous communities of China then you will often see the Han majority treat the ethnic minorities in the same way, as if they are just props for photos or some kind of weird creatures to be gawked at. It's gross, imo.
It’s definitely taken too far sometimes though.
Try go to the country side to see the real China.
For the racism part, I wouldn't say that signs with "no foreigners" in shops are common, but I have seen them a couple of times during my 5 year stay in China.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Western expats in East Asia tend to be quite polarized about their country of residence, and expats in poorer countries even more so. Over time, the tint of novelty wears off and the warts begin to stand out. Poorer countries have more warts.
For folks like myself who are extra sensitive, the negatives get an outsized representation, while the positives and neutrals get filtered out. It took me years of to develop the habits to compensate. I'm far from where I'd like to be, but I'm learning to accept that as well.
This is especially true in places of higher density. If you encounter 1 bad apple in a place of 100 people, vs 10 bad apples of 1000 people, the ratio is the same, but subjectively the latter feels ten times worse. It’s the price you pay for living the city life.
And when you have an under-stimulated career, the idle mind becomes the devil's playground.
We let collective narratives plays a greater role in colouring our opinions (as opposite to direct experience) than we'd like to admit. In this day and age, I don't think it's especially controversial to say that we get more dopamine hits from internet discussions than having a stroll down the street. Ultimately, unless we consciously intervene, the chemicals get to decide what we let ruminate in the back of our minds.
The idiosyncrasies you used to brush off or find amusing are now small but cumulative signs of impending doom. What we get right in direction we get wrong in magnitude. The sprinkles of verifiable truth can often as easily fuel our biases as they moderate them.
It seems to get worse every year also. My first visit in 1999, foreigners were quite welcomed. Then it simply got more mundane from there. My visit twas chengdu in 2006 was fairly like you stated though.
Most people are still ok, but some fraction of the population has a mixture of fear and hatred of foreigners. They think foreigners are dangerous because we bring the virus. Far fewer places accept foreigners than before.
I love my life and my friends here, but walking down the street in a village and having a guy wearing an official-looking coat scream at you to “fuck off” has a way of souring one’s mood.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to deny your own experience or making any accusations here. I'm just presenting the other side and clarifying that I don't feel it's a universal experience.
The era of Northern Europeans ("whites") dominating the globe is over forever, so no need to beat yourself up about it. Just letting you know that this extreme narrative is quite bizarre to non-Americans.
I remember this sales guy who always made it a point to tell every woman he talked to that he did Peace Corps in Africa and how it changed him working with Africans. Like, you could've just volunteered somewhere on the south side of the city if you really wanted to help some African folk.
Africa won't want for charitable aid labor in spite of this sentiment, it just can field those grunt work jobs from people who're, you know, from the area itself rather than Western tourists looking for a story to tell or a CV to pad.
This, in my experience, is simply not true.
There is a value in going to different places, changing every variable there is to your life except yourself.
When you are somewhere you've never been to, where you know nobody, where the food, language and customs are all different, then you can find out which parts of yourself stay, who you are and what you are capable of. That has value.
And even if you do fall through the tourism system and find yourself elbow to elbow with a native, the thought that you as a foreigner will unlock their culture in handful of days when most natural born members of a group will be learning their own eccentricities to the day they die is one of the more disgusting flavors of arrogance.
https://www.lostlaowai.com/blog/china-stuff/china-travel/for...
So many foreigners/laowai spread the same misinformation. You can stay, if you have sufficient Chinese/Mandarin, you can explain the above and it works. If you have a good friend explain, it also works. Most say the same thing as you "kicked out" "not allowed" or "rascism".
Not true at all, - at some hotels where I stayed I was really the first foreigner to ever pass through. (I wasn't staying in typical Shanghai places for example, more north and more west.)
Not an issue at all, explained, showed, registered, done.
In China you either need to go through an agency that have something similar to "The Negro Motorist Green Book" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book), or you need to speak Chinese, convince the reception that they don't need a certificate they believe they're legally required to have, convince the reception to call the owner who will no doubt repeat a foreigner is not allowed, then you need to contact the police to convince the owner, if the police agree that a certificate is required then you need to convince the police that they don't know their own laws, convince them to call the Provincial Foreign Affairs Bureau.. that's what the person in your blogpost has been doing. She even told the police to give her their badge numbers so she could file an official complaint. That person is certainly living on the edge.
Even if it's technically legal, then surely the end result will be the same - 9/10 hotels and apartments will refuse foreigners (for the apartments I rented then everything was done on paper, I doubt they have the booking system mentioned in the blogpost - not sure if all hotels use the same since I have never walked behind the desk and looked at their computer.. and they probably wouldn't allow it if I asked) because who in their right mind want to spend several hours and likely get the police involved just so they can rent a room for 200rmb.
If you go off the beaten path or less than 4 stars hotels, then that.
And not unique just in China, Japan will do it too with some places - granted mostly it's love hotels which is ironic cause they're not supposed to know whose checking in, no passport is required, but many a foreigner can't read Kanji or talk.
There are nearly 200 countries on this planet, in that context your claim sounds more like quite the generalization, on your part, rather than an actual fact.
edit; Wow, never would have thought that stating a simple fact could be controversial on HN.
What is going on in these comments? People acting like everybody is American/Canadian, and as if the whole world is all the same, but only China is some weird outlier, smh
Particularly this;
> when you're not willing to risk your life to understand and uncover the parts the government doesn't want you to see
Just reads like FUD, it's not China that locks up people at the highest rate on the planet. That "feat" is reserved to a country were nobody would say "don't visit there you might die!" even tho the chance for that to happen there is much more likely than in China or NK, where most police don't even carry guns.
It's a shame though, I always wanted to see China.
Of course, it does feel a bit suspicious when you say something mildly critical of the government online or during a meal with friends and then "mysteriously" the next day your VPN stops working, but it's just as likely that it could be coincidence and you're reading too much into it. But that's exactly how things are supposed to work in an authoritarian regime. Most of the time the government isn't explicitly watching over everyone, but because the legal system is deliberately opaque, everyone maintains a tiny bit of fear inside them that maybe they could be being watched, or that there might be a secret police just around the corner, so they self-censor and limit their behaviors just in case.
So, you're right that you might have anxiety the whole trip, but arguably that means you're getting to experience the "real China". Living under a constant chilling effect[0] is probably worse for locals than foreigners. At least as a foreigner you can leave when the pressure gets too much. Most locals don't have that privilege.
Who were only locked up after Canada locked up a Chinese citizen at the request of the US.
Weirdly enough, that is framed in a completely different context than China's response to it.
So let's just ignore the context of why and how that happened, or what kind of anxiety that translates to for Chinese people visiting countries like Canada or the US?
I mean, who there started arresting other nations nationals as geopolitical gambling chips? It wasn't China, it was Canada at the command of the US.
> I just don't see how I could go there and not have anxiety for the whole trip.
As a German national, I don't see how or why that should affect me. Can you please expand on your reasoning there?
You should assume that you get a bugged room too.
Russians did it in the 80s, even easier now.
The rooms aren’t bugged. Most foreigners aren’t that special. Maybe they will big some special hotel that gets lots of diplomats? But most of us won’t stay in those.
I was reading a reply by a guy who counter-commented on this, a bunch of links of people on YouTube walking around this same area and not seeing anything like this.
Then went to comment, and it says "flagged" and was deleted, in under 10 minutes.
I don't really care about politics or China at all, but that is some spooky-tier censorship here on HN. Wtf is going on here?
Here's one of the links I followed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29684814
> I don’t think any political entity has any interest in controlling what individuals post on a tiny website like HN.
The comment boiled down to:
"VICE isn't what I'd call the most reputable/unbiased source. I'd encourage everyone to do their own research/make their own decision. Here are a bunch of links of people walking around the same area, and it looks nothing like what is cut together from that VICE episode."
I just wanted to call out this very odd behavior. I don't see HN as a place where people who speak objectively + respectfully get silenced, generally.
So using the razor, I think we can conclude what happened.
User makes a new throwaway account to spread easily disproved information
Other users downvote the misinformation
HN autoflags the comment to protect against preceived-spam.
Although you are right to question what you see. It is never wrong to take a second to ask “what’s going on here?”
Or to put it another way with a much more mild example, you can make a video full of happy black folks in some of the most backwards racist oppressive parts of the US. The existence of happy people does not negate the oppression they continue to endure.
I have no idea. I've never been to China. It could be really bad, exactly the way the video makes it out to be. The video could be dramatized, and not representative of the situation as a whole.
I'm not sure I would believe things that China told me about the US
By the same logic, I'm not sure I believe all the things that US/US-allied media tell me about China
Without access to verifiably unbiased information (which is difficult in an age where nations have entire agencies dedicated to misinformation for political purposes) it's something that's hard for me to form an objective opinion on. And I'm not that invested in it to want to form an opinion.
I just wanted to point out this odd behavior that I've not seen much of on here.
There is heavy tracking and surveillance in China [1], especially in Xinjiang [2][3].
Hence any reporting of Xinjiang, including the YouTube links you mentioned and posted, have selection bias.
That is, unfavorable reports or videos are censored, while favorable videos are selected, if not outright sponsored as part of large-scale online disinformation campaigns [5][6].
=====
The tracking and surveillance of reporters in Xinjiang, where journalists are tracked and have photos deleted for no reasons [2]:
I was in Kashgar to report on how the Chinese authorities had turned to technology to cement their control of the Xinjiang territory, a region in the west of the country. Foreign journalists who travel there are tracked. I became one of the watched.
[...snipped...]
Another time, a police officer stopped us close to our hotel. Inspecting Chris’s photos, he deleted a shot of a camel. When Chris asked why that photo was deleted, the man turned to Chris and said, “In China, there are no whys.”.
The tracking and surveillance of reporters in general, using the pandemic as an excuse and using visas for control [3]:
Several foreign and domestic journalists were forced to abandon stories after being told "to leave or be quarantined on the spot," the report highlighted. Press credentials were commonly canceled by Beijing officials and embassies were routinely tasked with trying to renew revoked visas from journalists. The report said foreign journalists were used as "pawns" in China's international diplomatic disputes.
The sponsorship of favorable YouTube and other social media videos, also covering ethnic mintorities [5]:
The Barretts are part of a crop of new social media personalities who paint cheery portraits of life as foreigners in China — and also hit back at criticisms of Beijing’s authoritarian governance, its policies toward ethnic minorities and its handling of the coronavirus.
[...snipped...]
State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers’ travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
[...snipped...]
His videos do not mention the internal government documents, firsthand testimonials and visits by journalists that indicate that the Chinese authorities have held hundreds of thousands of Xinjiang’s Muslims in re-education camps.
They also do not mention his and his family’s business ties to the Chinese state.
> Hey what sort of bullshit is this HN?
This sort of bullshit (sponsored videos) should not be promoted on HN, which may fuel the disinformation campaigns [5][6].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/29/china-province... "Chinese province targets journalists and students in planned surveillance system"
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/insider/china-xinjiang-re... "Being Tracked While Reporting in China, Where ‘There Are No Whys’"
[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/china-harassing-intimidating-journa... "China Harassing, Intimidating Journalists With Surveillance Built to Curb COVID-19"
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/13/technology/ch... "How Beijing Influences the Influencers"
[5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20211224143113/https://www.nytim... "How Beijing Influences the Influencers"
[6]: https://miburo.substack.com/p/cotton-the-act "Cotton the Act: Large-Scale Network of CCP-aligned Facebook Accounts Deny Mass Atrocity in China's Xinjiang Province"
Edits: added more links.
> This sort of bullshit (sponsored videos) should not be promoted on HN.
The original commenter says "China is X way".
Someone responds and says "China is Y way."
Everyone ought to be able to upvote/downvote, and argue + discuss to their hearts content.
I have no horse in this race, but I would have expected the person to just get downvoted into oblivion or responded to with posts like yours, containing responding counter-arguments/links, if the majority of people disagree with or hold contrary evidence to.
My reaction was less to do it about it being anything specifically related to China, and more about the principle/premise of the matter.
It could equally have been "Person 1 says eggs are bad for you, Person 2 says eggs are good for you." and I would have had the same reaction.
Some things shouldn't be up for debate and calling doubt on reality is a weapon used by those who have political stakes.
China is a tough one too because as we saw on a top HN post from a few days ago we know the CCP has a large, active operation to comment and engage in online forums to sway opinion.
Article gave examples of typical straw man, whataboutism, handy wavy redirection.
The kind of comments exactly like what got flagged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661475 "Spamouflage: CCP-Aligned Disinformation Campaign on Facebook Twitter YouTube"
There have been a few over the years. One I remember talked about a gamified app which is like so innovative and sad at the same time
I'm personally opposed to the idea of visiting certain countries, such as USA since they searched phones at the border and you could be treated like a criminal based on who knows what.
You can't even compare the USA and China; China is objectively less free and more repressive.
I was also part of an Obama administration sponsored group of Americans sent to China for an entrepreneurship exchange trip and I think more Americans should be sent to China to learn about it rather than reading biased second hand accounts over the internet. While it was a guided and escorted tour, we were also allowed to freely wander the cities in some of the evenings. It would go a long way to ease tensions and reduce enmity between the two nations if there was more genuine cultural interaction instead of spooky observations from afar. People tend to exaggerate and boogeyman what they don’t know and understand.
But I agree, for any random foreigner the government is not competent enough to surveil him/her and much less motivated to do so. The fact is any given foreigner is not actually that important...
Japan had a similar problem being previously not very rich (they invented kotatsu for that reason).
Even if “every step is observed” is exaggerated, the surveillance system in China is pretty extensive: it can target journalists and international students among other “suspicious people”, and can compile individual files on such persons using 3,000 facial recognition cameras (in a single province) that connect to various national and regional databases. [1]
And this surveillance system is part of the bigger tracking program, which the Chinese authority has used to harass and intimidate journalists [2] (see this comment for more [3]).
And according to the memoir “A Promised Land”, even Obama and his staff were worried about Chinese surveillance during their stay at the Beijing hotel (see this review [4] or this summary [5]):
“To make calls involving national security matters from the hotel, I had to go to a suite down the hall fitted with a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) — a big blue tent plopped down in the middle of the room that hummed with an eerie, psychedelic buzz designed to block any nearby listening devices. Some members of our team dressed and even showered in the dark to avoid the hidden cameras we could assume had been strategically placed in every room. (Marvin, on the other hand, said he made a point of walking around his room naked and with the lights on — whether out of pride or in protest wasn’t entirely clear.)” [4]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-chinese-provinc... "EXCLUSIVE Chinese province targets journalists, foreign students with planned new surveillance system"
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/china-harassing-intimidating-journa... "China Harassing, Intimidating Journalists With Surveillance Built to Curb COVID-19"
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685703
[4]: https://georgetoparis.medium.com/obamas-a-promised-land-on-c... "Obama’s “A Promised Land”, on China"
[5]: https://www.bannedbook.org/en/bnews/baitai/20201121/1434392.... "Obama recalls his first visit to China and was under surveillance"
Countries spy on foreign visitors. Friendship trips are carefully planned to show none of the underside of a society. China is one of the most oppressive regimes out there - see the detention of Jack Ma, who was five years ago one of their most celebrated businessmen.
The naïveté is not understanding that China’s problems is not so much they are evil masterminds rather than just incompetent bureaucrats. The takeaway from the trip is that 90% of what they expose to the outside world is a facade to save face for their own politicians, not that they are competent super spies.
They may have spied on us, but we’d have not much value being spied upon. If spying is somehow the benchmark of authoritarian regimes then the US and Israel probably lead the pack of these types of regimes.
Secondly, just because you disagree with government policies doesn’t make it some evil regime. You cited Jack Ma but he is still out and about.
We’ve seen enough already.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/starrated-hotel-operation/... claim there are 10 million hotels in China - what percentage do you reckon are included in the international hotel booking apps? My guess would be less than 0.5%. That's why you need to walk into the random hotels/apartments you see on the street if you want to verify the reality of the situation. For you specifically then it might be difficult since you're ethnically Chinese, so while you might encounter some discrimination and exclusion from society (if you don't have a national id card) then it certainly won't be comparable to what white and especially black people experience while living in China. In my experience then the 9/10 number is not an exaggeration at all but if you asked other westerners who visited China then they will likely give different numbers based on their price range, location, booking method, etc.
I also think you greatly exaggerate how much you actually learn about another country by going there for a short trip. Even the most brutal regimes can look like a wonderful paradise, e.g. see the national day celebration in 1959 which took place at a time where tens of millions of people were dying of starvation (https://youtu.be/M-XQSffVpfY?t=43).
Most 4-5 star hotels are still dirt cheap in China. We’ve stayed in budget hotels (by Chinese standards) in non first-tier cities with no problem.
I’d say if you got turned away it’d be some combination of obviously looking like a foreigner (in which you could get them reported for some infractions) and not being licensed to accept foreigners.
I remember getting 300KB/sec at the best of times to overseas sites. VPNs didn’t really make a difference for speed (I believe I had poor routing on top of that), but I could use WG and SS to maintain access to blocked content for weeks on end.
The end result is that internet users are corralled into domestic services where the CCP can flex its power. If anything overseas continues to be too anti-government then it cops a more concrete block.
As also mentioned, the educated class might get VPN access but Joe Bloggs on the street won’t know how to. Also, it’s hard to get a VPN from within China, but once set up with one you can relatively easily keep using it.
The GF doesn't care about 100% accuracy either. They won't always perfectly ban stuff. But they will hinder it often enough to make some "banned" service effectively useless inside China.
In general, when it comes to other countries, I think visiting them when possible and talking with the people there when you can is often eye-opening and can reveal personal biases you didn't realize you had. To give another example, speaking with people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc made me realize that many of the assumptions I had (adopted from the traditional "common sense" American narrative) were overly simplistic or just plain wrong.
> lived there
China is fast devolving into dicatorship's way of life. 2+ years away is along time.
> keep in contact with many friends
Those friends are afraid to say anything negative to a foreigner living outside the guo on a platform closely watched by the government
> consume a lot of TV and podcasts from there
Government approved safe and patriotic contents
You have to be a native citizen who is living there 10+ years to understand
It’s not really weird: most Chinese prefer the best choices possible, and if it isn’t blocked (and often even it is) they will use the service if t has more than a watered down local version. The government blocks internet global services via the great firewall because otherwise they would get used in China (and also makes jumping the wall annoying because otherwise more people would jump it).
- You cannot travel abroad (no passport issued for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad)
- You cannot go beyond China's intranet legally (VPN is technically illegal in China). VPN services keep getting slowed/banned.
- You cannot transfer much money out of country legally (50k limit a year, but you end up going to bank 10+ times just to be able to transfer 10k)
- You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally
- You have very little rights as LGBT
- You have to work 9-9-6. Which is why many citizens are lying flat (not working/pursuing marriage)
- You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list
- You should not get rich (1/3 of billionaires have died or disappeared). The state discourages showing off wealth
- You have little recourse as a woman who is abused by men in power
- You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold
- Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship
终究怀揣的不安，是愈来愈近的丧钟声
None of the government/public workers are working that schedule. Or someone who finds a job in the private companies who aren't insane.
> You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold.
Speaking from anecdotal experience, my parent has been subjugated to none in 2021 because they were not living in an affected location. Mass covid testing are only carried out where there are outbreaks.
> You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list
Might apply to your personal case? I don't know even one person who are constantly invited to police station for tea, despite having hundreds of friends in China.
> You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally
Except that everyone does, and I'm not aware of any prosecutions. Also, Spiderman, BTS, squid game does not even touch laws, they just haven't been screened in cinemas, you can still get them from different sources (which often means piracy in China).
> Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship
We'll see then. The rhetoric have been around for decades.
Some of what you said is true to a degree, but you are painting it in a very biased fashion. China has a lot of flaws, but what you said certainly does not apply to an 'average' Chinese citizen. In fact, all of these combined are almost impossible to happen to a single Chinese citizen, average or not.
I did not say anything like that. Why are you setting up a strawman when you can easily go and refute/debate any language in my previous comment? Do you have any disagreement with any specific things I have said? Please be specific.
As for the play-time restrictions —- how is it much different from drinking age restrictions that are pretty ubiquitous around the world?
Oddly enough, on my first trip to China in 1999, everyone was still expected to work Saturdays. The change to getting Saturday off is relatively recent…maybe 15 or so years ago?
> Except that everyone does, and I'm not aware of any prosecutions. Also, Spiderman, BTS, squid game does not even touch laws, they just haven't been screened in cinemas, you can still get them from different sources (which often means piracy in China).
“Rule by law”, as opposed to “rule of law”, means laws are arbitrarily enforced according to the whims of the party. So they aren’t going to prosecute you for watching banned media…until they want to get you for something (and in that case, they’ll find something).
Also, do you have anything to refute my comment?