I personally don't think that exception should exist and I'm OK banning it solely on trade parity grounds.
Either technology has improved or they stopped trying as hard, which makes sense now that the local internet economy has matured.
"Every Han Chinese of a certain background" is the more accurate reference.
the vast majority of the population cannot easily use a VPN, especially not on their phone which many people use instead of a PC
Most/all apps aren't banned outright, but they require VPNs to access.
I wonder: Are there any Western apps which Chinese citizens would lose social credit or are officially prohibited from using?
For Westerners, could they get GFOC-excluded commercial PoP internet connections or wireless carriers?
Perhaps in the near future, China's middle- and upper-class will insist on specific changes in policy like unfettered internet access as a bargain for not demanding democracy. With all of the advances in economic mobility and details of life outside the GFOC, there will be more asks.
So long as the CCP delivers on economic prosperity this won't happen; people will not risk it. Those who can't handle it, and have the means, emigrate or have a plan B (i.e., their kids at a US university who can continue their career abroad; many Chinese would come to the US just to have a baby to ensure their kid had US citizenship--the US has clamped down on that). This is why the CCP's survival depends on economics.
I think the era of hockey-stick growth and development China is more or less over now, growth will continue but slow to a drip, and will face 3 threats: rising economic inequality, drying up of external joint ventures, and male-female ratio demographics imbalance. It has BRI going for it but external investments can't address domestic structural socioeconomic concerns. Xi will be blamed first because he rode economics to the top of the mountain. I'm concerned that starting a war, a common political tactic for any government system, maybe used to distract from domestic economic woes.
I am suspicious that BRI might be more hot air than substance. That or world journalism is oblivious to what is supposedly the largest international infrastructure program in the world. Or Google doesn't index it.
China's housing market is its biggest problem. Most people invested their savings in second/third/etc. apartments as the stock market was notoriously unreliable (and investing abroad was very difficult). That means that a tremendous amount of middle-to-upper-class wealth is tied up in property values, creating a tremendous bubble. But the gov cannot let the bubble pop (see Evergrande, others before), as Japan did in the 90s, as that is the one thing that (in my opinion) could actually bring the CCP down.
I remember that era fondly as the golden era of unfettered torrenting.
That might be to do with going to a Digital Ocean IP, but if you can use an innocent IP, anything works. So what benefit is Outline supposedly offering?
That's not how it works. The apps are not officially banned, they are just unavailable or don't work. If they're not on the China iOS store (separate than US) then you can't install them, and if you went abroad and managed to install them, they just can't connect to the IG or whatever servers once you're back in China. Same for Android.
But that overt request was unusual. Most apps are simply removed as part of Apple's "compliance with local regulations".
That's because roaming phone traffic is routed through your home carrier, through whatever telephone traffic peering agreement the phone companies have.
If a Chinese person roams to the US using a Chinese cell phone plan, it works in the other direction. So their phone is still behind the great firewall even though they're physically outside of China.
I guess this last part is the loophole they will drive a truck through in hindsight. They will make up some nonsense or maybe even find a legitimate scam and ban Facebook based on that?
But really once they ban Facebook, we should be able to reciprocate and ban tick tack.
All the talk of a digital services trade war/import ban ignores that US tech companies were facing a de facto export ban from the US side by being prohibited from complying with Chinese regulations.
They are yet same thing. You know, if it looks like a duck.
This is standard operating procedure for the communist party. They rarely say any kind of topics or activities are banned outright. It’s just that if you say the wrong things in the wrong place, a bunch of plainclothes police will come to your home in the middle of the night.
The laws in question are becoming a subsidiary of the state, of course.
One side note, the United States Embassy has free Wi-Fi if you're close enough to it. You can get access to everything through it.
Yes, you can't use these services in China. But unlike the US's TikTok ban, China will not officially tell everyone what they banned. It just suddenly stops working.
They banned, allowed and banned again GitHub. Without any explanation. Your parent comment is correct.
There are these Kiosks where you get Wi-Fi Access. You scan your passport, and it gives you a username and password. It specifically states accessing prohibited internet sites is a crime.
Then you click the link, and Facebook, Twitter, Google, ... are all on the list. They're pretty in your face about it.
There are some odd things though. You can access Steam in some areas, but not in others. Internet Cafe's have signs saying Steam Games allowed, while others don't. Some will say New York Times available.
Leaving the country was much harder than entering now. We missed several flights and were in the Airport for almost 2 days before they allowed us to leave.
This last trip in February, I made the mistake of buying an Unicom SIM card. So get this, I go through US Customs, they point me over to a desk with a curtain, a guy reads my declaration document again, then walks me over to do a door, and opens it. In side is a little waiting area. I sit down, and about 10 minutes later a woman slides the glass window open and asks me for the SIM card. They already knew I had bought it when I arrived. There is no SIM card declaration on the form.
She told me I should probably destroy the phone. I don't think any of us have any idea what is going on.
I won't be returning to China. They have made it very clear they're not interested in Americans investing or visiting.
None of those services need apps, I never used apps to access them.
The China's own social media is full of posts ridiculing people like me who have believed in the American ideology, espoused the virtues of freedom of speech and rallied against the GFW. They call us naive and credulous. And I can't refute them.
When I was young, I was taught in China that China lost its superpower status after it chose to isolate itself from the rest of the world. And then it isolated itself. I was taught by the US the importance of freedom of speech. Then it ditched it. My education was a lie.
Plus, freedom of speech is about protecting American Citizens from being censored by American Government. Banning an ungovernable, foreign owned business does not stop you from freely expressing yourself on the internet.
Your education was not a lie, but you should still get a refund on your failed education. You clearly did not learn to think critically.
I just don't see how this law will affect your ability to converse with others on Chinese social media.
This is very different from the GFW, and many orders of magnitude less restrictive.
This issue isn't about speech and censorship, but media ownership. These rules has always been in place in many Western countries precisely because of the impact it has on society (even beyond geopolitics).
That's true, but when I had a hard time convincing them when the US were the *perfect* model of no speech restrictions, it's much harder when US is just less restrictive. They will just dismiss such difference in quantity as cultural difference, rather than different principles when China and US had qualitative differences.
This is what most people don't know, that TikTok itself is banned in China.
The real reason you can't "espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China" is because they will arrest you. Let's not mince words here. The Chinese government would shoot their citizens before they would let them protest or speak their mind freely.
After those happened, they still think that the government intervention of speech is a good idea. The only problem is that a small group of officials not handling the regulating power correctly. But if they were to adopt the American model, how could they be protected from the evil influence of foreign adversaries? You know, like me, an agent of US propaganda. Or Tencent, whose major shareholders are actually not Chinese.
I really can't maintain a straight face hearing Americans repeating that same argument.
Freedom of speech applies to humans living within US borders not to entities controlled by a foreign government.
(Unless China is within US borders, freedom of speech argument doesn't stand).
We want freedom of speech because we can never know that our opinions are the ultimate Truth, so we need to ensure that everyone can speak their mind, and so can the real Truth be propagated and preserved. And that everyone includes foreigners and foreign governments.
Every time China's governments (including the past ones, like the Qing Dynasty) rejects the idea of freedom and democracy, it demonizes them by painting them as plots of foreign governments trying to overthrow and destablize China. So you can see why I am so wary of the argument that it is OK to silence the words if those come from a foreign government.
Smart philosophers have studied this. You may not like the answer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
> we can never know that our opinions are the ultimate Truth
Oh yeah, but we can easily spot propaganda/bias from CCP from miles away.
For the principle of freedom of speech to survive, it can never be absolute.
The same way how the Chinese people can smell the propaganda of capitalist reactionaries.
I'm being sarcastic. You share the same school of thought with CCP.
Also, TikTok has never intolerant. CCP is quite intolerant of its own people's views, but it strictly segregates TikTok and Douyin to avoid trampling on the toes of non-Chinese. Therefore the argument of "tolerance of intolerance" isn't applicable.
As far as I know, tiktok's services are deployed on Oracle servers in the United States and are subject to supervision. It was banned just because it comes from China. Look how many times the CEO of Singapore was questioned if he is Chinese. Maybe the Congressman thinks Singapore is also a part of China.
74% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese. The Congressman's questions are not unreasonable in questioning if the CEO has some ties with mainland China.
I read both Chinese and English, and I read both the opinions of within GFW and without. If anything, I've critically analyzed every idea from both sides. I can't fathom the hubris of someone who has ever lived on one side yet believes his truth is the ultimate truth and anyone disagreeing must not be thinking critically.
It's ignoring international laws with neighbors, instead of using weapons, it's using water cannons against fishers and Philippines coast guard.
China is a "friend without limits" of Russia, who started a war on European soil lately.
I think it's safe to say that the west is decoupling from China.
It has nothing to do with "freedom of speech", most voters agree with that decoupling.
I have never heard of a pro China argument before from a politician party and it seems that most democracies nearby China think the same, even with the BRI initiative.
( Note: I'm not from the US)
My deeply held belief is that we should allow speech from even the most hostile foreign countries. Do you know that every administration of China, starting from Qing Dynasty, resisted the idea of freedom and democracy by painting them as plots of foreign governments to destabilize China?
I am being called a sock puppet of China here, and I have been accused of being agents of US propaganda in China. That is how the future holds. Every thought deviating from mainstream is labelled as propaganda from a foreign government, ergo not subject to the protections of freedom of speech.
The tracking/propaganda dangers of TikTok are unrelated to freedom of speech, as banning TikTok doesn't affect freedom of speech.
People can spread their opinion on any other app.
Note : I'm responding and sharing my opinion for the following you mentioned:
> The China's own social media is full of posts ridiculing people like me who have believed in the American ideology, espoused the virtues of freedom of speech and rallied against the GFW. They call us naive and credulous. And I can't refute them.
Influence operations aren't about "winning" or even convincing anyone anymore. It's about flooding peoples screens with untold amounts of toxic garbage.