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Comment by WinstonSmith84 | Hacker News Reader

I was wondering about simply using VPNs, which is not mentioned in the article at all, but checking GFW on Wikipedia, it tells:

> The use of VPNs in China can provide individuals access to the international internet, but in China, it can be a potential legal risk. In 2017, the Chinese government declared all unauthorized VPN services to be illegal.[94] An example of the use of this punishment is Vera Zhou, a student at the University of Washington, who, when visiting her Hui parents in Xinjiang, China, used a VPN to access her school homework. She was arrested and sent to a Xinjiang internment camp from October 2017 until March 2018, followed by house arrest after her release. She was not able to return to the US until September 2019.[95][96]

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More context about this WikiPedia excerpt:

→ https://www.chinafile.com/extensive-surveillance-china

→ https://www.rfa.org/cantonese/news/student-01272020075256.ht...

It looks like 周月明 (Vera Yueming Zhou) was sent to a Chinese concentration camp mostly because she was part of a religious minority and not necessarily for using a VPN to access the University of Washington’s website.

> Vera was living in her hometown of Kuytun (Kuitun) in Ili Prefecture, an area directly north of the Tian Shan mountains that borders Kazakhstan. She had been trapped there since 2017, when—in the middle of her junior year at the University of Washington, where I was an instructor—she had taken a spur-of-the-moment trip back home to see her boyfriend, a former elementary school classmate. Using digital surveillance tools, the Kuytun police had noticed that Vera had used a Virtual Private Network in order to access websites such as her university Gmail account. Given her status as a member of a Muslim minority group, this could be deemed a “sign of religious extremism.”

That's the thing about "illegal but everyone does it"...it's nothing to worry about until the government decides it's convenient to enforce (against an individual or group), and then it's definitely something to worry about and it becomes a low barrier pretext for all sorts of oppression.

Remember this next time you're driving above the speed limit on the highway. Especially if you live in the US and are white.

WTF are you talking about. Being white means it's a non-issue. Being not-white is potentially fatal.

I'm pretty sure that's why they are asking white people to think about it. Others already know.

I think you missed the point

Encamped for your beliefs and not for breaking the law, that makes it much better!

Just tragic. Hard to imagine living in such a backwards place

Thanks for this elaboration. Upon reading original comment, it felt very strange that she was "encamped" for using VPN to access her school homework. Immediately I knew there was more than it meets the eye.

The best bit is that we're enacting very similar laws in the West [0]. As much as China is often deplorable I do wonder how much of a blind spot we have here to our own sins.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36428046

It’s subjective of course, but the real story seems worse.

Exactly. This is the period when Muslim ethnic groups like the Uigurs were being rounded up on any pretense to be reeducated into not wanting to be separatists anymore (often with no indication that they had anything to do with separatism other than their ethnicity.) Seeing the VPN pop up was more than enough of an excuse. Calling it a "genocide" is 99% propaganda, but it was obviously a sinofication meant to get rid of separatist identities and cultures, and a horrible injustice. In the beginning, they were inspired and immunized by the US's anti-Muslim fervor during the GWB invasions (we were not only not criticizing, but probably even sharing intelligence with China.)

> In the beginning, they were inspired and immunized by the US's anti-Muslim fervor during the GWB invasions (we were not only not criticizing, but probably even sharing intelligence with China.)

Yeah, seems to be overlooked quite a lot since it's convenient for the US narrative lately.

> Starting in 2002, the American government detained 22 Uyghurs in the Guantanamo Bay detainment camp. The last 3 Uyghur detainees, Yusef Abbas, Hajiakbar Abdulghupur and Saidullah Khalik, were released from Guantanamo on December 29, 2013, and later transferred to Slovakia.

> None of the Uyghurs wanted to be returned to China. The United States declined to grant the Uyghurs political asylum, or to allow them parole, or even freedom on the Naval Base.

> A May 2008 report by the Inspector General of the United States Department of Justice claimed that American military interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese officials at Guantánamo Bay to enact sleep deprivation of the Uyghur detainees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uyghur_detainees_at_Guantanamo...

Why do you say it's 99% propaganda?

"sinofication" sounds a lot like "eliminating the existing culture" which sounds a lot like genocide. Genocide is more than just murdering everyone like in some of the most well known cases like the Holocaust -- it includes elimination of an ethnic group by any means possible, including "nativification"

I understand where you're coming from, but -cide implies killing.

the "cide" in genocide refers to destroying

for example, a cultural genocide refers to destroying culture, e.g. Uighur or Muslim culture

Would you say the choice of the word "genocide" here is because it's the most accurate description of what's going on?

Or is it chosen for rhetorical/propaganda effect without too much concern for accuracy?

Not the person you're responding to, but it is an accurate description of genocide under its current meaning as defined by the UN (probably the most authoritative body on this kind of matter).

https://www.un.org/en/genocideprevention/genocide.shtml

What the Chinese are doing there is covered under Article II, c.

If you are being pedantic by holding fast to the literal Greek translation of "geno" and "cide" then, well, this is simply not the complete modern meaning of the term.

There is no authoritative body on the definitions of words. More generally, if genocide can mean "not killling, but very bad" then it is not much use except as an epithet - a negatively-loaded bomb to be lobbed in partisan debates at people who you think are doing something very bad. Virtually every controversial policy could be described as, "Causing serious bodily or mental harm to" some group.

> There is no authoritative body on the definitions of words.

false: there are a few. They aren't always correct, but they're more correct than you personally

> More generally, if genocide can mean...

there is no question what it means, you simply personally disagree with it

and since you definitely aren't an authoritative body on the definition of words, your personal pedantic insistence that the word mean only what the strict etymological roots imply, rather than how people actually use it, is irrelevant

> a negatively-loaded bomb to be lobbed in partisan debates

it's quite telling that you seem to view usage of the term "cultural genocide" to refer to cultural genocide as a bigger issue than actual cultural genocide

don't like people using the correct term to refer to the action? maybe get those perpetrating the action to stop, instead of telling everyone we're using the wrong words to describe it.

The definition, US propaganda under Pompeo as head of State tried (and failed to meet), was UN's convention on genocide, which would trigger legal responses on member states. The TLDR is Pompeo laundered very tortured legal analysis through Zenz and some Gulanist Saudi think tank (IIRC) to try insinuate PRC met the definition when most credible international lawyers saw through the bullshit, but noted PRC actions closer to cultural genocide, which does NOT have definition at UN, and hence not prosecutable. The result is PRC actions merely labelled as potential human rights abuses at UN, aka business as usual, and a bunch of useful idiots who ate Pompeo's bait thinking PRC actually met the definition of genocide when it manifestly did not. And buy business as usual, of human rights abuses / cultural genocide, it puts PRC XJ actions in league with behaviours of the west. Hence you don't hear much about the XJ campaign anymore from western propaganda, because the propaganda was mostly useful if the genocide label stuck at UN, and made PRC actions more nefarious not equal to west. Now it's mostly used by US to justify XJ sanctions and trying to partners onboard to cripple XJ industry like solar, cotton, agriculture.

That article IIc pivots on the key phrase "physical destruction".

Look, internment isnt good either, why dig in your heels on the most loaded possible word?

physical destruction, internment, cultural genocide, they are all happening

why not focus on that, rather than your personal, individual dislike of a term?

why dig your heels in on the semantics of the thing, rather than the substance?

It's absolutely not. There's a reason US propaganda under Pompeo had to manufacture and launder reports with tortured legal interpretation to try to get the genocide label to stick but couldn't because there's no intent to destroy, hence useful idiots trying to be pedantic and argue how enforcing family planning reflect intention even though that applied to Han majority, or mass (temporary) internment / inflicting "pain" somehow equivalent to physical destruction while population continues to grow.

Modern definition of genocide at UN explicitly wouldn't categorize what PRC is doing in XJ - cultural genocide - because members, especially west went out of their way to ensure cultural genocide would have little legal ramifications, otherwise Canada would have been sanctioned to death for self professed cultural genocide a few years ago. Incidentally the entire reason Pompeo tried to propagandize genocide label was because it would trigger diplomatic ramifications at UN. What the PRC is doing in XJ is cultural genocide, and bluntly that’s permissible thanks to lobbying from the west.

The entire manufactured genocide narrative is so retarded because if PRC wanted to, they could just... commit genocide. At PRC scale they can wipe out the 12M Uyghurs in a few weekends on the cheap instead of wasting trillions of RMB trying to sinicize them.

Would you say the common, accurate usage of the term "cultural genocide" to refer to what the term refers to, is a bigger or smaller problem than the actual cultural genocide itself?

"-cide" is a suffix that means "to kill," as in:

  * suicide
  * regicide
  * fratricide
  * insecticide
  * pesticide

It comes from the Latin word "caedo," which means "to kill." The phrase "cultural genocide" is not the same as "genocide," and indeed the legal definition of "genocide" expliticly says that destruction of a culture is not genocide.

Using the word "genocide" to refer to something other than mass murder - and then falling back to the claim that "genocide" doesn't mean mass murder - is just playing rhetorical games.

Of a nation or ethnic group.

> Why do you say it's 99% propaganda?

I suspect because of propaganda.

Just a small personal anecdote from another country with tight restrictions:

When I rented a furnished apartment in Saigon back in 2008, there was an ethernet cable on the table and a piece of paper in English that said "Do not visit websites of anti-government propaganda, or pornography, or news such as the New York Times."

Naturally, as the police held my passport for the entire year I was in Vietnam, I was cautious. But after a few days, I just went ahead and openly browsed the NYT for a few minutes. My internet was shut off for about 3 hours. The next time I did it, it was shut off for 24 hours, and then I knew it wasn't a glitch. It wasn't exactly immediate, either; it took a few minutes. I was pretty sure there was a semi-dedicated person assigned to watch my traffic.

That wasn't over a VPN. I wanted them to see my traffic. But I knew running over a VPN would just raise suspicion. When I opened up VPNs to check email after that, I did it from cafes, and I did it in short spurts.

    In fact, the US Department of State recommends that all US citizens have a photocopy of their passport with them, when traveling abroad.

Supposedly you get in shorter lines at the consulate if you have at least a photocopy of your passport available. You should be able to petition the consulate of your home country to issue you a new passport.

I think it may be illegal, but I've heard from people who travel to places where it's sketchy for Americans to travel, that they report their passport as destroyed, get a second copy issued, then keep the first one.

The reasoning is that certain immigration departments see red flags if they see visa stamps from certain other countries, and you may get grief for having visited them. Cuba and the US used to be one, but cross-border rivalries are another. Knowing who hates who and presenting the right passport to receive the stamp would save you grief. Also if you encounter corruption/extortion you can schedule the next flight out and run.

With the electronic ones now I don't know how many places that still works.

USA will issue “anyone” 2-3 valid passports at the same time. This is designed for two reasons:

1) you travel a lot and sometimes may need to mail your passport off to get a pre-travel visa from some consulate, while you are still outside the USA. This way you can send off one passport to get the visa for your next country, while keeping a valid passport with you while you’re abroad.

2) You need to travel between Israel and countries which have laws against visiting Israel (Historically, GCC countries). This way you can always present whichever passport doesn’t have Israel’s entry and exit stamps on it.

I’ve had two valid US passports at the same time, and I’m just a random nobody American.

Israel no longer gives you any visa stamps in passport.

https://www.touristisrael.com/the-israeli-passport-stamp/974...

But your passport is still tainted if you use any Israeli land crossing--they see the stamp from the other country and infer you were in Israel. Unlike what we saw in the 80s in Africa--so long as "South Africa" didn't appear you were ok. The border stamps into/out of South Africa didn't cause problems. The possession of a fair quantity of supplies with packaging in English/Afrikaans didn't matter--but the first day across the border the organizer had us stop and very carefully go over everything with a sharpie looking for labels that said "product of South Africa"--those had to be totally blotted out.

And to show how stupid things were--he also had a stamp he had made up to make forged entries on our yellow books. At that time your average joe certainly did not have an up-to-date smallpox shot--but at multiple border crossings they would hit you up for a bribe if you didn't have an up-to-date smallpox shot. Hence fake them. (Even around 2000 which was the last time I had occasion to have anything added to my yellow book there still was no anti-counterfeit protection.)

"Tainted" is an odd word. Any country that would reject a Jew from entering for having an Israeli stamp in their passport is a country I would never want to step foot in, whatever my views on Israeli politics.

I visited Israel circa 2012 and this was true even then.

> I visited Israel circa 2012 and this was true even then.

It used to depend on where you were coming from. When travelling to Israel for work a few years back, my passport (irish citizen) was not stamped, but my colleague's (at the time, a Turkish citizen) was.

That’s… were they fucking with him?

No idea, Israeli border security are weird. Like, for the first few times I went there, they treated my like a terrorist (i am concerned that someone may have placed bombs in your bag etc). The last two times, OTOH, it's just been like a normal airport.

No idea why.

sad to hear this, but not suprised as much. according to wikipedia, turkey is one of the few countries/regions where israel requires a visa from; along with india, pakistan and arab countries.

Anyone that says you should keep your passport on you when you're in a foreign country has never traveled. I never keep my passport on my person when I'm walking around outside the US. I lock it away as securely as I can wherever I'm staying, and carry a color copy of it in my pocket.

Part of this is simply because American passports are extremely valuable. Another part is that anyone who wants to fuck with you in some semi-official capacity now has to choose whether to go back to your hotel or arrest you on the spot, which puts them in a better mind to give up or take a bribe.

Another part is that anyone who wants to fuck with you in some semi-official capacity now has to choose whether to go back to your hotel or arrest you on the spot, which puts them in a better mind to give up or take a bribe.

Happened to me at an airport in Thailand. Some airside police officer demanded to inspect my passport, then wouldn't give it back to me until I walked him to an ATM so I could pay him a "tax" in cash.

I never went back to Thailand.

Had this in Hungary about 2004. Had no money at all at the time. They handed me a notice in 15 languages which said I was now permanently excluded from ever entering Hungary again ^_^

But please don't keep it in a room safe at a hotel. If I had a dollar for the people I know who put valuables in the room safe and lost them...

The most secure place to keep it is on your person *under* your clothing. Waterproof protection would be a good idea if you're in a warm climate.

It most certainly can be done--I wore mine basically 24/7 for a year. The only time it wasn't under my clothing was for border crossing or bathing--and in the latter case it almost always was under a traveling companion's clothing. No close calls--but someone else in the group wasn't so cautious and hers was snatched. Fortunately, the thief wasn't sophisticated, kept the cash and dumped everything else quickly.

Yep, laminated color copy is the way to go.

Reporting the passport lost or stolen is generally not a good idea. Legality issues aside, when a passport is reported lost or stolen then it is marked in the system as invalid. Depending on the country it will be reported to Interpol's STLD database [1] which can be checked by immigration authorities in other countries.

In the end you'll have two passports but one of them is now useless and it will be flagged the moment you actually use it for traveling. It may not be pleasant when you're abroad and the authorities catch you using an invalid travel document.

I guess it makes more sense if you never intend to use the old passport again for crossing borders?

[1] https://www.interpol.int/en/How-we-work/Databases/SLTD-datab...

Some countries will issue second passports legally exactly for the reasons you list, but you typically need to apply for permission. Replacing your passport early without needing to pretend it's lost because it has stamps from a "problematic" country tends to be easier most places, but of course a hassle if you travel to these countries more than once.

Wait, the police held your passport? Why?

If you're an American and you rent an apartment, the local police keep your passport until you leave. You keep a xerox. That's how it was at the time. I don't know if that's still the case.

I didn't feel good about it when I found out (actually, the moment I signed the lease), but there was nothing I could do about it.

My exit from Vietnam was almost humorous. I had about 50 DVDs in my suitcase, mostly encrypted backups and burned movies, and every single one was inspected by sight, holding it up to the light (to see how far the burn went?), then left on the floor of the airport for me to pick up. Upon re-entering the US, the customs officers did almost the same thing, and then just confiscated all my discs.

Weirdly, no one on either side checked my laptop.

They took your DVDs? On what pretext? Did you get them back?

The pretext was piracy, since some of them were labeled with the names of movies. I protested they should just keep those ones, but they took them all and said I was lucky they weren't going to prosecute me. I didn't even try to get them back.

So how do you travel outside the country then, if the police are holding your passport?

You need to request it from the police for travel. In my experience, I did it via my landlord, and it took about a day.

A lot of people actually use VPNs in China (since 2010 even), and some of them call it "加速器" which basically means "booster" (for your internet). Some use it for lower latencies when playing foreign games. The issue is that VPN connections get easily blocked. We aren't really worried about legal issues.

Except for that one time when police (of a certain district, not everywhere in China) knocked on people's doors to inspect their phones for VPNs during the "white paper protest" I believe.

Surely Xinjiang has stricter rules and more aggressive enforcement than the other provinces/regions? They always put a hardliner in as party head.

Probably, but there's a real history of many terrorist attacks in China being planned online. It's why Facebook is blocked. Look at what the US did to Muslims after 9/11

This. I don't worry about generating illicit traffic in China--but there's no way I'm going to Xinjiang. If I had to go there I would stay off the internet entirely.

Sure, but you're ruining the yellow peril narrative we need for our cold war with China.

When I was in China in 2019, the VPN built into google fi actually got me around the GFW with zero effort. I didn’t even realize it until I caught myself checking American social media unhindered.

My experience is most younger and tech savvy people have a VPN. It’s common / casual, like speeding your car by 10mph on the highway.

Most people are not persecuted for using a VPN, I assume that’s reserved for people who the government already wanted to persecute and just need to give an excuse for why they detained their target.

Assuming what you mean is over mobile data (and not over wifi), mobile data works differently than typical internet. You can think of it like when you connect to a mobile network what you're actually doing is making an IPsec connection to your carrier, with all data flowing over that IPsec connection. As such any carrier with a roaming agreement in China will bypass the GFW entirely -- and this is by design, Chinese carriers have to whitelist the APNs of western companies they do business with.

I think China doesn’t care if foreigners use a VPN, it’s their own people they want to keep under control.

I keep contact with a girl in China and from her reports using VPNs is kinda common for young people with college education. She would do it sometimes to access YouTube, and would laugh it off when I would say she should be careful doing such things.

I suppose for the government, as long as it isn’t the majority of people doing something that would cause trouble, it isn’t worth tracking down all things, as expected.

This is intentional; "Oh it's not authoritarian/bad, people use VPNs all the time and get away with it".

Except for that muslim chick another commenter pointed out, or anyone else the party decides is undesirable.

Just be prepared to spend a year or two in prison if relations between your country and China worsen and they need a hostage.

Like the executive from Huawei who was imprisoned in Canada

s/Huawei/Chinese State Security/

She was a spy--look at how intense their reaction was.

Unfortunately, they tend to grab innocents to exchange for captured spies. However, they're going to go for big fish, not little ones. As an average joe I'm not concerned about being held for a spy swap, but if I were a highly placed executive there's no way I would set foot in China.

Meng was PRC royalty - the daughter of Huawei's president, imagine a literal billionaire being a spy. She was taken hostage under Pence's China Initative for Iranian sanctions shenanigans that historically was dealt via fines. The initiative explicitly called for targetting PRC nationals.

Hence intense reaction. The 2 Canadian Michaels on the other hand, were text book spys with NGO covers. Western propaganda likes insinuate PRC would capture innocent westerners when state security have massive state survillance capability that completely dismantled CIA networks a few years prior. Like literally friend of Michael hinted he was in "intelligence" and CSIS (Canadian CIA) publically celebrated on twitter upon their return. The Michaels weren't executives. The TLDR, while in PRC, don't traffic drugs, don't be a spy/do anti state activities, don't get involved in expensive legal proceedings - the latter is what actually get (white) westerners in trouble via exit bans.

It's time for the West to stop playing around and allowing this sort of hostage taking. If China and Russia want to play dirty, play dirty back. They take a hostage, start taking their nationals hostage and plant large quantities of fentanyl on them.

Do you have any proof she was a spy? She absolutely was not. An extremely high ranking executive of one of the largest technology companies on earth would be literally the worst possible choice for a spy.

That's because the GFW allowed it, GFW has no problems to block any VPN at will.

GFW is sophisticated beyond imagination, one way to detect VPN traffic(or SSL, or SSH) is to observe its patterns and where the traffic is going. It's not too hard to have a blacklist of all VPN vendors too.

shadowsocks was designed to bypass it(to make traffic looking random), I recall its developers were visited by cops and warned to stop doing that.

It's said China built the largest LAN on earth, the government is just too scared by its people to get educated, it's a true parallel universe.

The reverse is true as well. I traveled in India with a friend from China who used their Chinese sim card in India, and their data was censored through the firewall. Really annoying to be outside China and not able to use Google maps.

Mostly that's india blocking Chinese comms.

Could that just be India blocking Chinese sims?

That's roaming, not a VPN.

Google Fi offers a VPN as well: https://support.google.com/fi/answer/9040000?hl=en

This is the same in Qatar, and probably in other Middle-East countries. Most of the residents use a VPN to get around the firewall, but I don't think anyone would be prosecuted for it unless the police wanted a nice easy reason to get you into custody.

> The use of VPNs in China can provide individuals access to the international internet, but in China, it can be a potential legal risk. In 2017, the Chinese government declared all unauthorized VPN services to be illegal. An example of the use of this punishment is Vera Zhou, a student at the University of Washington, who, when visiting her Hui parents in Xinjiang, China, used a VPN to access her school homework. She was arrested and sent to a Xinjiang internment camp from October 2017 until March 2018, followed by house arrest after her release. She was not able to return to the US until September 2019.

Use of VPNs is... universal... among middle-to-upper-class Chinese. This is obviously not an example of legal risk associated with using a VPN. Rather, it's an example of a punishment coming down on someone who was targeted for other reasons.

An immediate implication is that, if you repealed all the laws against VPNs, nothing about anything would change.

And for those who don’t feel in legal jeopardy many VPNs are still being blocked and reconfigured in an endless arms race between the provider and the GFW

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