What's interesting to me is that despite recent improvements in relations with China and Russia's strong dislike of a dependence on Western equipment providers, they still don't trust Huawei to provide 5G equipment.
I think that's sadly inevitable; total information control is necessary to maintain an autocracy.
This seems to be less about censorship and more about decoupling from the western tech stacks (digital import substitution).
This isnt really a shock. Neither China nor Russia want the US to be able to turn the tap off on their tech infrastructure.
Well, that's one way to defend against Google/Facebook monopoly...
Regarding censorship: if the Chinese firewall was really about censorship and not about foreign monopolies, China would be prosecuting people for going around it. And they don’t - VPNs are commonplace, government doesn’t care.
This claim was recently made by one of the Chinese Olympians, but it is not true. VPNs were made illegal in 2017, and since 2021 China has been clamping down hard on their own citizens using VPNs to bypass the great firewall, while looking the other way for foreign nationals. The CCP does not send everyone to jail who uses a VPN, but they have the authority to do so if they see fit.
[citation needed]. Every source I've seen says the same: nobody cares, VPNs are "illegal" same way weed is illegal in UK.