Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions | Hacker News Reader

Tokyo University Used "Tiananmen Square" Keyword to Block Chinese Admissions

unseen-japan.com

16 pointsryzvonusef18 comments

    > In a bombshell accusation, Todai Shimbum, the student-run paper of Tokyo University, alleges that a graduate admissions site embedded a keyword related to Tiananmen Square for over a year. The goal was apparently to prevent the page from loading in mainland Chinese and thus block Chinese students from attending, the paper alleges.

    > Todai Shimbun reports that the keyword appeared on the website for graduate admissions to its Computational Biology and Medical Sciences Program (メディカル情報生命専攻). The keyword used was 六四天安門 (roku-shi tenanmon), or “June 4th Tiananmen.” June 4th was the date of the student Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989.

To my knowledge, as much as this tactic is made fun of, it does work to prevent the page from being accessible from China without a solid VPN. Is there anyone with enough experience in China to confirm or deny this?

Wait... so I can put it on my website to prevent traffic from China?

To my understanding, as long as they're not using a VPN, yes. Now as another commenter pointed, if it's a website that the GFW blocks already anyway (e.g. Reddit), there's no point. So first thing to do would be to check if the GFW blocks your website.

Checking whether the GFW blocks the website in question demonstrates that it remains accessible despite the keyword injection: https://blocky.greatfire.org/detail/684702/https%3A%2F%2Fwww...

That only shows today, and the keyword has already been removed for a while.

Not sure I see a problem here. Certainly for Chinese individuals there was a huge downside impact.

Geopolitically being overt you want to reduce the impact of Chinese applications and .. I dunno maintain access for other communities? That would have been very confronting and invited overt Chinese state action. This way... they made the Chinese state apply back pressure for them.

Maybe it's short sighted, engagement is the best path to changing oppositional views in the long term.

This is as OVERT as it gets, since you cannot hide keyword which can be trivially archived online, with no plausbile denialbility. If university wanted covert policy they would quietly just get registrar to reject PRC applicants and this story wouldn't even exist. Not to mention most PRC applicants with aspiration abroad run VPN anyways, especially now, if only to use chatGPT.

IMO this looks like the action of smooth brained rogue operator mad that PRC accounts for ~50% of Japanese international students, and thinks reddit style Tianamen copypasta would get a PRC netizen's computer to explode and get abducted by MSS, i.e. it's a hack job done by a racist idiot (of which there are many in JP). My understanding is University of Tokyo has one of the highest international enrollement, very PRC friendly as well from what I hear.

Quick search online it has 4968 international students, 3232 is PRC, or 65%, substantially higer than JP average, which is way more than I thought.

You don’t really have to hide it though, you can just plainly put it there and still have (at least some) plausible deniability. Just put a stupid „you might also like these blog posts:“ section in the footer and make a blog post about the keyword.

It'd be pretty wierd to shoehorn 6/4 (not just Tiananmen) in a graduate enrollment website, and as I mentioned, PRC applying overseas will have VPN already, so it won't do anything.

> especially now, if only to use chatGPT.

Aren't the Chinese models competitive?

> thinks reddit style Tianamen copypasta would get a PRC netizen's computer to explode and get abducted by MSS

Bit of a weird exaggeration. As the article states, it was likely simply to prevent them from applying, and to my knowledge this is indeed a successful way to do so as it does get the page to be blocked by the GFW, no?

Many people use VPN and still use western models. Ditto for those looking to study abroad, the key point the audience we're dealing with, i.e. those who want to go abroad for school overlap with cohorts who will invariably have VPNs, so if a site doesn't work due to GFW, one falls back to using VPN anyway. Hence embedding senstive terms trying to get rid of PRC users who are used to leaping the wall (in this case literally) is stupid, like commenter posting copypastas in reddit or youtuber thinking it would kick PRC users when they were on VPN to skirt GFW filtering in first place.

It's the CCP who blocked its own netizens from accessing the admission page, not Todai.

Bound to happen. It’s like that guys name that causes ChatGPT to seize up, people who don’t like ChatGPT will just weaponize that behavior against them. Foreign websites intentionally tripping up the GVW to unofficially shape policy sounds very feasible in comparison.

why is this site allowed to be posted? most of his stories are completely fabricated with no evidence. he doesn’t even live in Japan but just cosplays as being a resident here. so frustrating seeing his content taken seriously anywhere online.

Agree -- I can almost say this is completely false and made up:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42356652

> completely fabricated with no evidence

You can check the source yourself, the meta tag is right there: [https://web.archive.org/web/20240221120301/https://www.cbms....

I can't tell how this would work, given that the URL in the screenshot uses https for the website (yes the .ac.jp one). GFW is powerful, but it can't just do MITM however it wants. Most of what it does these days is blocking based on known domain names/IP addresses/traffic pattern, not magically reading E2E encrypted content, for a single page out of a domain. If there is a problem with the content, with https, the entire domain gets blocked (which is a bigger problem), not just that single page of the site. GFW doesn't even know which page you are reading.

It might be true back in the day when most of the traffic is in HTTP, and Wikipedia pages would be blocked simply based on the URL which contains the page title. But this story just doesn't make any sense.

PS: The article says "That means there’s a strong possibility that the admissions page wouldn’t load for Chinese students ..." it either loads or doesn't load, which is very easy to verify. But all it says is "strong possibility". What kind of nonsense is this? If you want to write about this topic, use some concrete evidence to prove that.

To people who downvote me: provide your technical analysis instead of just disagreeing like a coward

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