Another bad thing about GFW is that Chinese government can export the filtering infrastructure to other countries who also favor the idea of "cyberspace sovereignty". They might have been doing this already.
Also, VPNs are mostly used by academic institutions and corporations. Common netizens often use "Shadowsocks", a protocol that focuses on obfuscation rather than encryption, to make it more difficult for the Wall to recognize its pattern, hence more unlikely to be filtered. It has been working perfectly for 5+ years until recently some people were saying that their Shadowsocks traffic got recognized by the police, then ISP suspended their Internet, they had to visit the police station to sign a commitment of "never use unauthorized means to access Internet" to resume their Internet connection.
This could be "fake news" but still worrisome because if GFW will whitelist only registered VPN servers, and now that Shadowsocks is down, there will be no alternatives.
That said, this is only a concern of probably less than 1% of people. The others either don't know the existence of the Wall, or don't care about the world outside the Wall. In that sense, GFW is already a success.
I've tended to think that determined people can get full Internet access in China because people can get around the firewall, and the Chinese government wouldn't want the economic hit associated with blocking the Internet altogether.
Lately, though, it sounds like the government is making gains on the technical workarounds. So, maybe the most effective sort of activism right now would be to produce something that the Chinese government wants to exist, which can't exist without VPN traffic.
I don't think that's likely to be an effective strategy. The #1 priority for the CCP is to ensure that it is the sole and uncontested source of power and authority in the entire country. There's nothing anyone could offer that would outweigh that.
> So, maybe the most effective sort of activism right now would be to produce something that the Chinese government wants to exist, which can't exist without VPN traffic.
But isn't this use case—academia—already a very crucial aspect of society that China wants to exist? If this won't convince the CCP it's difficult to imagine what would.
Hypothetically, if you start a VPN business with a large pool of random ipv6 addresses and assign each customer one of those, could that be a start as a work-around?
Think of regular internet as postcards, secure web traffic as those window envelopes that are easy to recognize, and most vpn traffic as bubblewrap envelopes.
You read the postcards, and build a list of sender/receivers that communicate stuff you don't approve of.
You can use that list to block window envelopes of encrypted web traffic - you don't know what's in the envelope, but you have a pretty good idea who's talking to whom.
Now, the bubblewrap envelopes - they don't sort quite like other envelopes, they're a bit heavier. Maybe they're going to an unknown recipient, and you think that's odd. They look a bit different. Put those recipients on a list. One gets too high, maybe block them and see if anyone you care about complain.
Now, clearly, people will figure out a way to make their bubblewrap envelopes look like the regular business envelopes with windows. Look like secure web traffic.
But traffic patterns are likely to look different for streaming and peer-to-peer. You might have an idea of who you'd like to enable streaming media from.
In short - you can use pure traffic analysis to make an educated guess about the nature of a data stream. Packet size, frequency, bandwidth, participants (ip addresses).
Some packages says "VPN" clearly on the side. Some pretend to be HTTPS traffic. The latter might get through, some of the time.
(Not an attempt at summarizing the video, just an attempt at an analogy for packet inspection)
I think the Chinese government can do deep-packet inspection to detect common VPN protocols like IPSec. Even if you use something like TLS-based VPN, the government uses bandwidth statistics to tell normal browsing apart from VPN.
Last time I was there (about two years ago), ssh command line sessions worked fine, but using the SOCKS proxy functionality killed the connection. It's getting quite clever.
While I was reading the article I thought that this kind of issues don't apply only to China. If people focus on workarounds instead of addressing problems they get burned when the workarounds don't work anymore.
Yes. It's a kind of technical debt. If you are offered a job in china, you can't just assume that you'll be able to work around all the gfw problems; even your work might be forced to give up their unfiltered connection eventually.
Any other place that has similar restrictions must be treated the same.
I live part of the year in a country that regularly filters the internet. I've had no issue so far using VPNs, but I prefer to tunnel directly through the PCs I have running 24/7 in my US office. Would tunneling work in China or does the Great Firewall prevent that too? I'm curious because there may come a day when I need better workarounds myself.
If you're talking about SSH tunneling then, no, it wouldn't work. My experience is that SSH tunnels get throttled (all the way down to zero) pretty soon after you send significant bandwidth through them.
most of my browsing are done with tunneling and it got filtered 3-4 times in the pass year. No biggie, I just redeploy another vps with a new IP from snapshot and the problem usually goes away.
> "Universities – which fall under the control of Communist Party committees – have repeatedly been told to maintain purity in their socialist ideology, including steering clear of teaching topics such as press freedom and civil rights."
This isn't new or anything, but every time I read about it, I find myself really angry. The behavior of the Chinese communist party is shockingly, disgustingly immoral.
Blocking information because it might undermine the grip your ideological brainwashing has on a population. It really is a sort of fundamental evil, a primary stain on the history of the human species.
I have some anecdotal stories from friends in China. It's actually quite a bit worse for the average academic than we think. The pressure to include communist party propaganda in one's research is incredibly strong – and in some cases mandatory (e.g. if you want funding).
That reminds me of academia in USSR, where all students, no matter what they were studying, had mandatory subjects like scientific communism and marxism-leninism; and your thesis, no matter if it's about literature, agronomy, astronomy or math had better describe its relevance for the proletariat and communism if it's to be defended.
Some of these preambles (can't link because that all is pre-internet) are quite funny from the modern context (especially those linking abstract sciences e.g. math to the party propaganda), but were treated as quite serious back then.
Marxism is still a mandatory subject in China. In one instance the exam date for a course I was taking as an exchange student had to be changed because some of the PhD students might have missed their examination on Marxism otherwise.
I really wonder how contemporary Chinese students square the information from their Marxism class with what Chinese society is like today. Does the Marxism class teach real Marxism or "Marxism with Chinese characteristics"? Granted, it's doubtful most students pay much attention to it anyway, since they just need to memorize the info and regurgitate it on the exam.
Lysenkoism is a prime example where an ideology influenced the researcher so much that it all broke down.
tl:dr for the younger folks:
Darwinism was disliked by the Soviets as it was bourgeois pseudoscience implying that the people are different. Many geneticists and biologists were fired, shot or went to the gulag. Lysenko was a agriculturist who became famous by inventing an alternative biology similar to Lamarckism where organisms inherit acquired traits. This (most of the time) didn't work but you couldn't do research showing the opposite, Stalin loved it too much.
In some ways it might be good if they do manage to block VPNs. At least then people won't have any option other than to put real pressure on the government to give up their ridiculous censorship.
The censorship is already there, and the government is hard to pressure. What I'm saying is that blocking VPNs will make more people put pressure on the government. Right now there is very little pressure, so they can get away with it. Can they get away with it if a large percentage of highly educated and well connected people are very strongly opposed to it and can't do their jobs properly?
> Can they get away with it if a large percentage of highly educated and well connected people are very strongly opposed to it and can't do their jobs properly?
Well, Mao certainly could during the cultural revolution.
Look at GDP graphs for China, and you can see very clearly when the political upheavals ended and business got a stable, predictable regime to deal with (look at GDP graphs in general, and it quickly becomes clear that stability matters much more than the specifics of the economic or political system)
The Chinese government has demonstrated very clearly over the last few decades that it is more concerned about maintaining economic growth than about maintaining "ideological purity".
OK, the government might say, here's a wad of money for you to create replacement, so that we don't miss these outside-GFW resources anymore.
Of course, the money would go to those capable and loyal enough to actually try and make something. It could be used to both decrease the objective dependence on the politically dangerous but important outside-GFW resources, and bring enough rivalry between the less loyal for the access to the government grants to weaken any latent opposition.
As far as I understand, GFW does not block all access; it blocks politically-sensitive access. There's plenty scientific / engineering / whatever resources on the Internet that don't carry political messages, and don't try to. I bet effectively indexing and censoring the outside-GFW internet is a viable task for China's IT. It does not need to be as good as Google; it needs to just be OK to allow the important R&D to continue.
It's not just the technical services those platforms provide, but also the content hosted on them and the other users who use them. The article mentions Dropbox and Google Drive. Even if a Chinese file-sharing service was created as a replacement, good luck convincing foreign collaborators to use it. Also blocked are YouTube and Twitter, which are great platforms for promoting your work to a global audience. I just don't see the Chinese government handicapping their researchers this way just for some extra control.
What's more likely is they'll work out a deal with trusted universities and corporations to give their employees access to an official VPN through which they can get unrestricted internet access. But all traffic through this VPN will be closely monitored.
I don't see why getting certain videos whitelisted and proxied through an official site or GFW directly would not be viable.
Same for twitter: send your tweets via an approved gateway, get them reviewed an pushed to Twitter, get pre-censored retweets as they appear and get approved. Make the international voice of the PRC researchers official-only, Soviet-style.
With corporations, it's harder. But for each "we don't trust your servers" from a Western corp side there could be a symmetric "we don't trust your servers" from Chinese side. The resolution depends on who needs the other side more; I bet that in most cases it would be Western corporations giving in.
Authoritarian-in-chief Xi Jinping will be reelected for a second term during the Congress. Since various factions within the CCP are at war (with Xi having initiated very public takedowns that crossed a few lines), they don't want the slightest chance of a hint of uncontrolled rumors, and all media will be under increased lockdown.
Unlike GP I'm not sure the situation will improve all that much post-Congress, though.
Yeah, that doesn't sound promising at all. The guy who instituted this bullshit to cement his power will remain in power, but maybe he'll loosen up? That doesn't sound like any authoritarian ever.
The point is that any kind of attempt at weakening his grip on power is more likely to come before the congress. Assuming he comes out of the congress with his people in all key positions, he has very little to fear afterwards.
It's very possible he won't lighten up on the control, but it's also very possible that the political cost of people being annoyed at the increased blocks makes it expedient to ease up on it once there's no compelling political reason to keep it this tight.
It may not sound like any authoritarian ever, but adapting the level of oppression to what is politically expedient has been common practice for Chinese authorities for decades.
I was curious how SCMP is able to publish an article critical of government policy. Does anyone know the specifics of what is publishable and what isn't? I thought maybe the SCMP might have been out of Beijing's jurisdiction, but it is owned by Alibaba, so I would think it would be under the same scrutiny as any other Chinese news publication.
I lived in China for many years. Honestly, the government is very clever about how they censor. They don't do things so obviously and they allow a little bit of criticism. there is no hard and fast law as to how they censor. While I lived their they were constantly hopping between VPNs. Some of their censorship is political, some is a also protectionist. Had China not blocked google, Baidu would probably have been dead by now.
To start with this article is published in English. They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it so its no big deal. I have seen articles in Shanghai daily which give minor criticism to the government. But overall they always try to project a good sentiment about the country. Furthermore often what is published in English print written by Chinese is not the same as what is written in Chinese print. Language is ultimately their greatest tool for censorship.
Also, 90% of the population remains unaffected by their blockages since they can't understand what the rest of the internet is saying. If you were to try to access youku (Chinese website akin to youtube) within china you would find that the streaming speeds put youtube to shame. So for the average person why would they be interested in youtube?
As long as the government provides people with basic infrastructure and safety people are willing to put up with some amount of censorship.
That is interesting. Yeah it can be a wise move to allow limited criticism, since (1) I think they realize some criticism can be beneficial to fix faults of the government, and (2) it helps provide the appearance that the people are in control of the government. There is also strategic ambiguity in not having to obey a "hard and fast law as to how they censor", since the government can censor in what it deems the most pragmatic manner.
"They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it". But in my experience in China at summer programs in universities, I found that almost all university students (at least in Beijing & Shanghai) can read English. I suppose they will of course prefer to read Hànzì.
The more extreme example of the benefit of allowing criticism was Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign, where the government actively encouraged criticism, only to abruptly change course, and arrest many of those who took the opportunity.
In other words: Encourage a little bit of criticism, and you will be able to observe those who join in - even if they don't go too far - and be able to obtain a handy register of people to pay extra close attention to.
But the common person cannot. Also you are looking at the best universities of the country in Beijing and Shanghai. And as you stated, they still will prefer to communicate in their own tongue.
Of course. And I'm aware that the best universities are in Beijing and Shanghai. But still that is a sizable population of intelligent English-reading Chinese. I'm sure the government would be concerned about them being exposed to ideological influences in english media.
The government doesn't fear intelligent people, who are by definition smart enough not to risk their career or physical safety to openly criticize. This "sizable population of intelligent English-reading Chinese" are primarily focused on exploiting Party connections to help them build wealth, and then expatriate the money beyond the government's reach.
Nobody is talking about a revolution, that would be suicide. The intelligentsia are far more concerned with using government to their advantage, which naturally responds very well to money exchanged for favors (like how baidu got rid of Google).
It's poor people that government worries about. Because when poor people rise up, that's bad news for anyone in power who hasn't yet fled the country. And if most poor people don't read English, well then there is not much harm in allowing some printed criticism of the Party, as long as it's in English.
A classic move from Japan and South Korea's economic rise was a closed home market, but with home companies forced to export.
This created a safe pool where new local companies could grow before they were able to face international competition. These companies could incubate and then burst onto the international stage.
I wonder if this is an electronic version of, e.g. what Korea does with its automobile industry using taxes...
The gap is that Chinese online companies don't seem to be exporting much as yet. In the case of chat at least, I think it is actually being held back by GFW because you need a chinese phone line to register.
1) Verizon had added China to TravelPass in the last year, so it now costs $10 a day for up to half a gig of data, plus unlimited voice and text.
2) There was complete access to Google and Twitter because my iPhone was using an international SIM.
Yes, I was in no way suggesting that this was a practical alternative for Chinese researchers needing to bypass the Great Firewall. Besides the expense, I presume there are laws against Chinese citizens using international SIM cards for the purpose of bypassing the firewall.
I was simply making the point that the government has made accommodations to ease the use by international business travelers.
I'll also add that my ExpressVPN account (which I used from different Wi-Fi networks) often failed to connect, presumably because the Great Firewall is looking for VPN network patterns to block.
I have tried that and doing a whois on my public IP revealed that it belongs to the original ISP, not whatever local ISP I was using. Even visiting Google shows the Google page of the original country. I guess they just have agreements to tunnel traffic in a way that circumvents the Great Firewall.
But politically it is much easier to understand. The only people who are likely doing this are tourists, and the government certainly doesn't want to hurt tourism.
>a whois on my public IP revealed that it belongs to the original ISP, not whatever local ISP I was using
did you do other checks to see if your traffic was being censored? a whois of your public ip says nothing about whether your traffic has been manipulated.
> Even visiting Google shows the Google page of the original country. I guess they just have agreements to tunnel traffic in a way that circumvents the Great Firewall.
The Great Firewall doesn't in general modify traffic. It either allows traffic to pass though, or blocks it (TCP RST, rate limiting, etc). I was able to visit normally blocked sites like Google at full speed of a typical cellular connection.
It works because cellular roaming traffic travels over a tunnel to your carrier's source country. This greatly simplifies data billing calculations, since they only have to keep track of the usage of one connection.
The traffic is already tunneled when it passes through the GFW.
I believe so. When I was in China, my mainland SIM didn't work at all in HK. I assume many people get prepaid SIMs when traveling out of China so they wouldn't be subject to filtering anyway.
Yes, effectively a VPN but I would just call it a tunnel, I don't think it fits the definition of a VPN.
I'm not sure if this traffic is encrypted (I assume it is), but I know GFW filtering happens at egress points so mobile traffic would already be tunneled by then. They could add dedicated hardware at mobile towers to GFW this traffic but I don't think the govt sees a need to. The primary target of the GFW is to stop Chinese citizens from accessing foreign services. Foreigners on foreign roaming data plans are not the intent of the GFW.
My bet is that they could filter this, but it's not worth the infrastructure investment.
The other half of why this works (everyone else has already covered the technical end), is that the party is not really concerned with controlling foreigners' access (at least not nearly as much as they are concerned about domestic). So they focus their efforts at blocking traffic that isn't liable to be 99% non-resident.
It's all about controlling the narrative, for the very same reason Western governments have also increased their influence over everything digital over these past 10 years.
China might be doing it in the most obvious and blunt way, but they are not doing anything that's especially unique, other countries just have less obvious ways to get what they want. Like enacting laws to fine social media companies or pressuring them to tow the line trough less visible means.
Just be aware that this law didn't change that much, the legal situation was already horrendous in Germany before that due to the "Mitstörerhaftung".
If you run a website in Germany you are liable for any and all content on your website, this includes user submitted content like comments.
Add to that the fact that Germany has libel laws and considers Holocaust denial a crime and it's not surprising at all that barely any German websites allow for comments and if they do it's pretty much only moderated comments.
While this might not be "direct censorship", it has the de-facto effect of censorship by suppressing "unpopular" opinions and putting scissors in people's head if they want their opinions to be published.
What's preventing people to host German sites from an entity outside of Germany though? For instance, if I lived just across the border in the Netherlands and hosted a popular blog with unmoderated comments. What could they even do?
> What's preventing people to host German sites from an entity outside of Germany though?
Nothing at all, that's the thing German legislators seem completely ignorant about like a lot of other facts about the Internet. But what German news company would go that route? Not a single one because it would make them look like they want to "break the law on purpose".
So they all keep on hosting in Germany and moderating their comments or sometimes do not allow them at all because certain topics are way too much effort to moderate.
Keep in mind: This has been the state of things for decades and if you ask any regular ass German about this they wouldn't even know about it and instead keep on complaining how it's media companies who are censoring them and their opinions, even tho these companies are pretty much forced to do so by German laws, at least if they want to prevent massive legal issues for themselves.
It's a very comparable system to how Germany censors/bans media like movies, music or video games. It's not the German government "banning" certain media, the German government merely puts very heavy restrictions on certain media, which, for all purpose and effect, makes it impossible to sell them.
That's how you create an system of censorship even when your Grundgesetz (German constitution) quite clearly states "There shall be no censorship", just don't call it censorship but rather "youth protection" and you are a-okay.
> Nothing at all, that's the thing German legislators seem completely ignorant about like a lot of other facts about the Internet.
Oh, they are well aware of that. However, they rightfully see technology alone not as a valid reason to stop caring about something. If you target the German market from abroad, they will try to apply German law. If you make it obvious by moving an already existing operation abroad without noticeable change to the user doubly so. Why should the physical location of the server change anything? Usually the people arguing against regulation say that there are no borders in the internet. Somehow that argument is only used when it suits them.
This is not unique to the internet. Radio stations that targeted other countries learned the same lesson 40 years ago. The same happens to people who try moving their financial assets to some tropical island. Just because technically the money isn't in the country anymore does not mean the government gives up on taxing.
Dunno, they could persuade the Netherlands to prosecute under its own laws?
Merkel also started mentioning regulating the Internet around the G20 meeting and even before that. She's been quite evasive though, only giving some hints, since they have elections in Germany this fall and there would be no talk of pensions or censorship before that. So better watch out for EU-wide Internet censorship using the German model.
It's to combat anything the gov't decides is fake news or hate speech or something else that is not so convenient for its agenda today, maybe the AfD website tomorrow?
So if you write a poem critical to Edrogan, whoops, it's libel against other heads of state punishable by law.
Oh, ya it must all be the same! America brain washes everyone with faux news, no wait, CNN, but the president said that was fake news. Dammit, the USA government is doing a horrible job at controlling its propaganda machine. Meanwhile, Chinese censorship must be exactly the same as American censorship because of course everything is black and white and there is no room for dark and light grayness.
Why do you get upset when someone points out that the US heavily censors the internet through public companies, like in China, and that the US is heavily invested in controlling the narrative, aka public relations aka propaganda. Your world seems extremely black and white - US good, China bad. No room for nuance at all.
Surely there's nuance but the false equivalence here is pretty stunning. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a co-worker who is from China when he said something along the lines of, "There's censorship in America too! There's a Wikipedia article I can show you that lists all the instances!" ...uh yeah that's the point, we can both access Wikipedia directly here and nobody risks arrest or fines for having this very conversation.
Contrary to the party line China is truly an aberration when it comes to censorship for a modern, wealthy, industrialized country. Pointing out that China belongs to a tiny group of outliers compared to the entire rest of planet Earth when it comes to censorship does not equate to somehow claiming the US has no faults.
I get upset because of the binary thinking, as well as the what aboutism, but mainly the binary thinking.
It's like, the USA executes people, china executes people too, so they must be the same. Ignore the fact that china executes a hell of a lot more people than the USA (even on a per capita basis), they aren't the same at all. Likewise, the USA has corruption, so does china, but the scales of the problems are completely different. Talking about the USA's censorship problem in the context of China's is like talking about a flu in the context of terminal brain cancer. Ya, they both suck, but one sucks a lot more than the other.
> It's like, the USA executes people, china executes people too, so they must be the same.
On principle they are the same, just because the scales are different does not mean the US is in any position to criticize Chinese behavior on that issue.
It's pretty much the equivalent of "do as I say, not as I do" and a very easy to spot double standard.
> Ya, they both suck, but one sucks a lot more than the other.
Murder is murder, regardless of the scale, the injustice stays the same. Let's also put the scale into context [0]
"China, together with Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the US (the only G7 country to still execute people) carried out the most executions last year."
China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, that's a list the US wants to be on too, really?
From 2007 to 2012 the US executed more people than Pakistan, Yemen or North Korea did.
> Likewise, the USA has corruption, so does china, but the scales of the problems are completely different.
You realize that if you read Chinese media, you'd get exactly the opposite stories about how corrupt the US is?
What does this mean? That all Chinese are constantly lying and all US Americans are always telling the truth? No, it only means countries control the narrative to make themselves shine in the most positive light possible. They do this regardless of what form of government they run, the only thing that changes are the methods they are using.
You are the one with a binary mindset. Any flaw that is pointed out is "whataboutism" to you because it disturbs your black and white worldview of US good, China bad.
> Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery in British English) is a variant of tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, which is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.
The ruling socialist/communist party fears any discussion of its characteristics and its flaws. It's a way of keeping total control of a society when you can be sure that people won't just naturally find themselves aligned with the ideology the government is trying to push.
That doesn't explain why they've banned Justin Bieber, Winnie the Pooh or celebrity gossip. If anything, those would distract conversation away from the party. They're also trying to be a moral police.
Winnie-the-Pooh is reportedly banned because of the superficial similarity to Mr Xi. (I have no sources for this because as usual the Chinese government doesn't publish an official policy explaining why they ban certain things on the Internet.)
Then they should really ban basketball. The NBA seems to be the most popular part of American culture in China.
Personally, I think not all censorship is in some way aimed at free speech, that's just the most obvious parts.
Anything the party leadership disagrees with can potentially be censored. That includes criticism and ridicule of the party, but also pornography or memes they don't like.
Yes, this is definitely true. Porn sites are also blocked for instance. Political censorship is the primary purpose of the firewall, but since the tool already exists, they go ahead and block things that don't fit into their conception of a "harmonious society".
The obvious answer is political censorship, but there also exists a persuasive economic argument. By blocking, or inhibiting the performance, of foreign Internet products, China gives a "head start" domestic clones (e.g. Baidu<->Google, TenCent<->FB, etc) to corner the market. The GFW effectively hamstrings foreign products, making it easier for domestic companies to compete in their early growth stages.
As an example, think of all the nastiness on social networks and the role they played in the most recent US election. Why would you want to invite that into your country?
I live in China and use a Chinese-language product that combines SOCKS proxying with packet obfuscation, and it works flawlessly, unlike anything else I've tried. I can't find an English reference, but Obfsproxy for TOR is similar. So if anyone wonders how they could contribute to bypassing the GFW, working on that kind of packet obfuscation software might be a good way.
He now bypasses the firewall with his university’s VPN system. Since researchers could still access legal VPNs through work, he did not think the restrictions were harmful to China’s academia – “at least for now”.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it sounds like this won't affect academics.
What seems more interesting is that China is apparently creating a two tier system for access to information.
Not just hotels, it's common for businesses to be able to access Google (though not necessarily Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
Interestingly, in one such westerner-oriented hotel it was pretty much impossible to use other (TCP-based) VPNs, presumably because they were already doing some kind of tunneling to Hong Kong and three layers of congestion control were too much...
The deleted word 'an' from the title (currently "VPN crackdown 'unthinkable' trial by firewall for China's research world"; in the article, "VPN crackdown an 'unthinkable' trial by firewall for China's research world") made it a real garden-path sentence for me—I initially read it as "VPN crackdown 'unthinkable'", and struggled to parse the rest separately. Is it really necessary to chop off the indefinite article?
From the standpoint of international competition, the Great Firewall isn't such a bad thing. Wasn't it Sun Tzu himself who said, "When your enemy is making a mistake, don't interfere?"
But research (ideally) benefits us all, so we'd be making a mistake of our own to adopt such a provincial attitude. The Chinese scientific community is not our "enemy." It's a shame the Great Firewall can't be worked around as easily as sci-hub worked around Elsevier and other artificial roadblocks to scientific communication.
It's not just the Chinese scientific community that "isn't our enemy" - it's the entire Chinese population, with the possible exception of those in government.
The last time China isolated itself from the world they fell back so far that a few gun ships brought down their dynasty. Are they looking to repeat this mistake?
I wouldn't consider China to be isolationist, because China's history is full of foreign interaction.
The reason China fell back and lost the Opium Wars was not due to isolationism, but rather because for some other reason(s), they missed out on the industrial revolution. But the exact reasons(s) they missed out on the industrial revolution is a great debate, and is the quadrillion dollar question...
I think a more efficient way for China to 'block the internet' is to stop teaching English altogether in schools. And I won't be surprised if that actually happens.
Some people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that. Stopping right now all English courses in China would be harmful and unproductive. As would be blocking VPNs for real.
> Some people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that.
History disagrees with that statement. Communism was China shooting itself in the foot in the first place. The Great Firewall is China shooting itself in the foot. The lack of numerous freedoms the developed world takes for granted, is China shooting itself in the foot. China has a very long history of regularly shooting itself in the foot. They'd be a far more advanced nation economically, scientifically and culturally, were they to end the Communist Party oppression.
Brexit happened after a long period of political stability in a country with a long, mature history at the forefront of international politics. Communism in China came to the fore during the tumult of the second world war, which had foreign troops razing half of China - after a period where China was colonised by a different foreign power which kept the powers in China as ignorant as possible. They're very different things.
There is an odd tendency to ascribe some sort of scheming long-term vision to the Chinese government, probably based on memories of dynasties that managed to reign over an empire for centuries. The CCP is nothing like that. As soon as they got into power, they triggered the "great leap forward" (miscalculated "modernization", and famine that killed dozens of millions), followed by the Cultural Revolution that bordered on civil war and spawned a generation of illiterate, starving zombies ("lost generation ").
The CCP has a pretty terrible record at avoiding shooting themselves (or China) in the foot. They probably killed more Chinese people than Imperial Japan did.
The current norms of CCP leadership were established in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution for the express purpose of avoiding such a catastrophe in the future. Since 1989, the guiding philosophy of China's central leadership has been economic growth in exchange for limits on political freedom. The CCP is currently shooting itself in the foot in numerous ways (the VPN ban being one of them), but crippling the country's economic competitiveness by limiting English language instruction is not something they would ever consider.
You are right that the party became notably less insane when Deng Xiaoping took over. However the various administrations since then have spent significant resources and time going in different (and sometime opposite) directions, and not always in a blunder-safe way. The example I have in mind is the declaration last month by the foreign affairs ministry that the Hong Kong "Joint Declaration" is not binding any more for China. They rolled that back a week later (probably after they realized where that was going), but essentially for a few days their official stance was "we don't respect treaties we have signed, even the ones we pretty much wrote and that gave us what we wanted. Our word as a government has no value". Kind of a risky move, and could have set a precedent.
As for your specific point regarding teaching English, I think you're right they wouldn't do that now, however it's a bet I could see them make if their domestic economy becomes slightly larger. After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate, and they get away with it.
> However the various administrations since then have spent significant resources and time going in different (and sometime opposite) directions, and not always in a blunder-safe way.
Yeah, because there are different factions within the party that sometimes have conflicting goals or ideas. It's not as unified as outsiders think it is. I agree that they aren't always scary competent. The whole Bo Xilai scandal was a huge black eye that they didn't see coming, for instance.
> The example I have in mind is the declaration last month by the foreign affairs ministry that the Hong Kong "Joint Declaration" is not binding any more for China.
What? I didn't hear about this at all. That does seem pretty crazy. Do you have a link to a news article?
> After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate
Don't know about Russia or France, but Japan still teaches English in schools. Japan and China probably have a similar "penetration rate" for English. They do lots of business done with English speaking countries but the average man on the street is by no means fluent. I suspect the same is true of France. If domestic consumer demand increases, China might be able to get away with it, but the export economy is so big, I can't see them making that choice.
>> On Friday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, on 1 July 1997, Beijing controversially announced that the Sino-British joint declaration was “now history” and no longer had “any practical significance nor any binding force”[1]
Re: language. I am not saying that English is not taught at school in these countries (it is), only that it has minimum impact in these societies in practice. Right now China is trying to move away from its export economy (where indeed English is needed), and if it does I think it would make sense for a paranoid government to think "well these other countries are functioning without the common citizen knowing much English, so let's stop teaching it except to some professions" -- and pronto, the next generation is cut off from 99% of foreign news sources.
From English to Spanish things are pretty decent. But from English to other languages it can get pretty horrible.
But that doesn't even matter - the main thing is the barrier to reading a lot, not getting the gist from one article. If you can read English, you'll probably encounter Western perspectives all the time on the Internet. But if you're forced to go through a broken Chinese machine translation every time you encounter something in English, you're going to stay on the Chinese parts of the Internet.
I would be absolutely shocked if this happens. Less than 1% of China's population speaks English beyond learning for business purposes. Making learning English illegal would be impossible to enforce, you would have to build additional infrastructure on the internet just to specifically block english courses. What you are suggesting is actually more complex.
I would never want to underestimate the ability of the CCP to scale solutions to political problems. It is, after all, the whole reason the party exists. We once thought the GFW would be impossible and laughed at it.
They still want to make money. What they're doing instead is to reduce the percentage of foreign (translated) textbooks in schools, especially in universities.
Another bad thing about GFW is that Chinese government can export the filtering infrastructure to other countries who also favor the idea of "cyberspace sovereignty". They might have been doing this already.
Also, VPNs are mostly used by academic institutions and corporations. Common netizens often use "Shadowsocks", a protocol that focuses on obfuscation rather than encryption, to make it more difficult for the Wall to recognize its pattern, hence more unlikely to be filtered. It has been working perfectly for 5+ years until recently some people were saying that their Shadowsocks traffic got recognized by the police, then ISP suspended their Internet, they had to visit the police station to sign a commitment of "never use unauthorized means to access Internet" to resume their Internet connection.
This could be "fake news" but still worrisome because if GFW will whitelist only registered VPN servers, and now that Shadowsocks is down, there will be no alternatives.
That said, this is only a concern of probably less than 1% of people. The others either don't know the existence of the Wall, or don't care about the world outside the Wall. In that sense, GFW is already a success.
From this link it looks like Russia is a customer already. [0]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/29/putin-china-in...
Yep, Pakistan has reportedly agreed to be a part of it in the name of CPEC.
There is no such thing as a "whitelisted" VPN in China
I've tended to think that determined people can get full Internet access in China because people can get around the firewall, and the Chinese government wouldn't want the economic hit associated with blocking the Internet altogether.
Lately, though, it sounds like the government is making gains on the technical workarounds. So, maybe the most effective sort of activism right now would be to produce something that the Chinese government wants to exist, which can't exist without VPN traffic.
I don't think that's likely to be an effective strategy. The #1 priority for the CCP is to ensure that it is the sole and uncontested source of power and authority in the entire country. There's nothing anyone could offer that would outweigh that.
> So, maybe the most effective sort of activism right now would be to produce something that the Chinese government wants to exist, which can't exist without VPN traffic.
But isn't this use case—academia—already a very crucial aspect of society that China wants to exist? If this won't convince the CCP it's difficult to imagine what would.
Hypothetically, if you start a VPN business with a large pool of random ipv6 addresses and assign each customer one of those, could that be a start as a work-around?
No as they do DPI and protocol detection so they would shut down your users pretty quickly. There was more about this on 32C3, I think this is the correct link: https://media.ccc.de/v/32c3-7196-how_the_great_firewall_disc...
Sorry for not watching your video. Could you give a ELI5 explanation of why some vpns still work now if they have this tech?
Think of regular internet as postcards, secure web traffic as those window envelopes that are easy to recognize, and most vpn traffic as bubblewrap envelopes.
You read the postcards, and build a list of sender/receivers that communicate stuff you don't approve of.
You can use that list to block window envelopes of encrypted web traffic - you don't know what's in the envelope, but you have a pretty good idea who's talking to whom.
Now, the bubblewrap envelopes - they don't sort quite like other envelopes, they're a bit heavier. Maybe they're going to an unknown recipient, and you think that's odd. They look a bit different. Put those recipients on a list. One gets too high, maybe block them and see if anyone you care about complain.
Now, clearly, people will figure out a way to make their bubblewrap envelopes look like the regular business envelopes with windows. Look like secure web traffic.
But traffic patterns are likely to look different for streaming and peer-to-peer. You might have an idea of who you'd like to enable streaming media from.
In short - you can use pure traffic analysis to make an educated guess about the nature of a data stream. Packet size, frequency, bandwidth, participants (ip addresses).
Some packages says "VPN" clearly on the side. Some pretend to be HTTPS traffic. The latter might get through, some of the time.
(Not an attempt at summarizing the video, just an attempt at an analogy for packet inspection)
What about data stenography? I've heard of people using DNS packets to transmit HTTP data.
Imagine tracking a "raw data sent vs raw data received" for every host your network talks to. What _should_ DNS look like?
Now imagine tunneling all your network traffic over that DNS server, independent of how you encode it, you still need to send the bits to and fro.
How does that change the sent/received profile?
HTTPS VPNs work fine, but they are slow as you have to use TCP
I think the Chinese government can do deep-packet inspection to detect common VPN protocols like IPSec. Even if you use something like TLS-based VPN, the government uses bandwidth statistics to tell normal browsing apart from VPN.
Last time I was there (about two years ago), ssh command line sessions worked fine, but using the SOCKS proxy functionality killed the connection. It's getting quite clever.
What about X forwarding?
I didn't try it, but I'd suspect it would also get blocked.
While I was reading the article I thought that this kind of issues don't apply only to China. If people focus on workarounds instead of addressing problems they get burned when the workarounds don't work anymore.
Yes. It's a kind of technical debt. If you are offered a job in china, you can't just assume that you'll be able to work around all the gfw problems; even your work might be forced to give up their unfiltered connection eventually.
Any other place that has similar restrictions must be treated the same.
I live part of the year in a country that regularly filters the internet. I've had no issue so far using VPNs, but I prefer to tunnel directly through the PCs I have running 24/7 in my US office. Would tunneling work in China or does the Great Firewall prevent that too? I'm curious because there may come a day when I need better workarounds myself.
It’s pretty sophisticated at detecting tunnels, but presumably still possible to evade. This post was on HN recently:
http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...
If you're talking about SSH tunneling then, no, it wouldn't work. My experience is that SSH tunnels get throttled (all the way down to zero) pretty soon after you send significant bandwidth through them.
most of my browsing are done with tunneling and it got filtered 3-4 times in the pass year. No biggie, I just redeploy another vps with a new IP from snapshot and the problem usually goes away.
Shadowsocks definitely works too.
> "Universities – which fall under the control of Communist Party committees – have repeatedly been told to maintain purity in their socialist ideology, including steering clear of teaching topics such as press freedom and civil rights."
This isn't new or anything, but every time I read about it, I find myself really angry. The behavior of the Chinese communist party is shockingly, disgustingly immoral.
Blocking information because it might undermine the grip your ideological brainwashing has on a population. It really is a sort of fundamental evil, a primary stain on the history of the human species.
I have some anecdotal stories from friends in China. It's actually quite a bit worse for the average academic than we think. The pressure to include communist party propaganda in one's research is incredibly strong – and in some cases mandatory (e.g. if you want funding).
That reminds me of academia in USSR, where all students, no matter what they were studying, had mandatory subjects like scientific communism and marxism-leninism; and your thesis, no matter if it's about literature, agronomy, astronomy or math had better describe its relevance for the proletariat and communism if it's to be defended.
Some of these preambles (can't link because that all is pre-internet) are quite funny from the modern context (especially those linking abstract sciences e.g. math to the party propaganda), but were treated as quite serious back then.
Marxism is still a mandatory subject in China. In one instance the exam date for a course I was taking as an exchange student had to be changed because some of the PhD students might have missed their examination on Marxism otherwise.
I really wonder how contemporary Chinese students square the information from their Marxism class with what Chinese society is like today. Does the Marxism class teach real Marxism or "Marxism with Chinese characteristics"? Granted, it's doubtful most students pay much attention to it anyway, since they just need to memorize the info and regurgitate it on the exam.
Lysenkoism is a prime example where an ideology influenced the researcher so much that it all broke down.
tl:dr for the younger folks: Darwinism was disliked by the Soviets as it was bourgeois pseudoscience implying that the people are different. Many geneticists and biologists were fired, shot or went to the gulag. Lysenko was a agriculturist who became famous by inventing an alternative biology similar to Lamarckism where organisms inherit acquired traits. This (most of the time) didn't work but you couldn't do research showing the opposite, Stalin loved it too much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
In some ways it might be good if they do manage to block VPNs. At least then people won't have any option other than to put real pressure on the government to give up their ridiculous censorship.
It's the other way around, censorship makes it harder to pressure governments.
That's not what I'm saying...
The censorship is already there, and the government is hard to pressure. What I'm saying is that blocking VPNs will make more people put pressure on the government. Right now there is very little pressure, so they can get away with it. Can they get away with it if a large percentage of highly educated and well connected people are very strongly opposed to it and can't do their jobs properly?
> Can they get away with it if a large percentage of highly educated and well connected people are very strongly opposed to it and can't do their jobs properly?
Well, Mao certainly could during the cultural revolution.
Not repeating the cultural revolution is one of the top priorities of the Chinese government now.
>Well, Mao certainly could during the cultural revolution.
Political conditions were very different during the cultural revolution than they are now.
Look at GDP graphs for China, and you can see very clearly when the political upheavals ended and business got a stable, predictable regime to deal with (look at GDP graphs in general, and it quickly becomes clear that stability matters much more than the specifics of the economic or political system)
The Chinese government has demonstrated very clearly over the last few decades that it is more concerned about maintaining economic growth than about maintaining "ideological purity".
There will be even less pressure once those highly educated get censored too.
OK, the government might say, here's a wad of money for you to create replacement, so that we don't miss these outside-GFW resources anymore.
Of course, the money would go to those capable and loyal enough to actually try and make something. It could be used to both decrease the objective dependence on the politically dangerous but important outside-GFW resources, and bring enough rivalry between the less loyal for the access to the government grants to weaken any latent opposition.
As far as I understand, GFW does not block all access; it blocks politically-sensitive access. There's plenty scientific / engineering / whatever resources on the Internet that don't carry political messages, and don't try to. I bet effectively indexing and censoring the outside-GFW internet is a viable task for China's IT. It does not need to be as good as Google; it needs to just be OK to allow the important R&D to continue.
It's not just the technical services those platforms provide, but also the content hosted on them and the other users who use them. The article mentions Dropbox and Google Drive. Even if a Chinese file-sharing service was created as a replacement, good luck convincing foreign collaborators to use it. Also blocked are YouTube and Twitter, which are great platforms for promoting your work to a global audience. I just don't see the Chinese government handicapping their researchers this way just for some extra control.
What's more likely is they'll work out a deal with trusted universities and corporations to give their employees access to an official VPN through which they can get unrestricted internet access. But all traffic through this VPN will be closely monitored.
I don't see why getting certain videos whitelisted and proxied through an official site or GFW directly would not be viable.
Same for twitter: send your tweets via an approved gateway, get them reviewed an pushed to Twitter, get pre-censored retweets as they appear and get approved. Make the international voice of the PRC researchers official-only, Soviet-style.
With corporations, it's harder. But for each "we don't trust your servers" from a Western corp side there could be a symmetric "we don't trust your servers" from Chinese side. The resolution depends on who needs the other side more; I bet that in most cases it would be Western corporations giving in.
There is no such thing as an "official VPN"
It's very likely this will all lighten up after the National Congress in the Fall.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_National_Congress_of_the_...
How so? I don't know the people or forces involved.
Authoritarian-in-chief Xi Jinping will be reelected for a second term during the Congress. Since various factions within the CCP are at war (with Xi having initiated very public takedowns that crossed a few lines), they don't want the slightest chance of a hint of uncontrolled rumors, and all media will be under increased lockdown.
Unlike GP I'm not sure the situation will improve all that much post-Congress, though.
Yeah, that doesn't sound promising at all. The guy who instituted this bullshit to cement his power will remain in power, but maybe he'll loosen up? That doesn't sound like any authoritarian ever.
The point is that any kind of attempt at weakening his grip on power is more likely to come before the congress. Assuming he comes out of the congress with his people in all key positions, he has very little to fear afterwards.
It's very possible he won't lighten up on the control, but it's also very possible that the political cost of people being annoyed at the increased blocks makes it expedient to ease up on it once there's no compelling political reason to keep it this tight.
It may not sound like any authoritarian ever, but adapting the level of oppression to what is politically expedient has been common practice for Chinese authorities for decades.
I was curious how SCMP is able to publish an article critical of government policy. Does anyone know the specifics of what is publishable and what isn't? I thought maybe the SCMP might have been out of Beijing's jurisdiction, but it is owned by Alibaba, so I would think it would be under the same scrutiny as any other Chinese news publication.
I lived in China for many years. Honestly, the government is very clever about how they censor. They don't do things so obviously and they allow a little bit of criticism. there is no hard and fast law as to how they censor. While I lived their they were constantly hopping between VPNs. Some of their censorship is political, some is a also protectionist. Had China not blocked google, Baidu would probably have been dead by now.
To start with this article is published in English. They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it so its no big deal. I have seen articles in Shanghai daily which give minor criticism to the government. But overall they always try to project a good sentiment about the country. Furthermore often what is published in English print written by Chinese is not the same as what is written in Chinese print. Language is ultimately their greatest tool for censorship.
Also, 90% of the population remains unaffected by their blockages since they can't understand what the rest of the internet is saying. If you were to try to access youku (Chinese website akin to youtube) within china you would find that the streaming speeds put youtube to shame. So for the average person why would they be interested in youtube?
As long as the government provides people with basic infrastructure and safety people are willing to put up with some amount of censorship.
That is interesting. Yeah it can be a wise move to allow limited criticism, since (1) I think they realize some criticism can be beneficial to fix faults of the government, and (2) it helps provide the appearance that the people are in control of the government. There is also strategic ambiguity in not having to obey a "hard and fast law as to how they censor", since the government can censor in what it deems the most pragmatic manner.
"They know that 99% of their population will not be able to read it". But in my experience in China at summer programs in universities, I found that almost all university students (at least in Beijing & Shanghai) can read English. I suppose they will of course prefer to read Hànzì.
The more extreme example of the benefit of allowing criticism was Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign, where the government actively encouraged criticism, only to abruptly change course, and arrest many of those who took the opportunity.
In other words: Encourage a little bit of criticism, and you will be able to observe those who join in - even if they don't go too far - and be able to obtain a handy register of people to pay extra close attention to.
But the common person cannot. Also you are looking at the best universities of the country in Beijing and Shanghai. And as you stated, they still will prefer to communicate in their own tongue.
Of course. And I'm aware that the best universities are in Beijing and Shanghai. But still that is a sizable population of intelligent English-reading Chinese. I'm sure the government would be concerned about them being exposed to ideological influences in english media.
The government doesn't fear intelligent people, who are by definition smart enough not to risk their career or physical safety to openly criticize. This "sizable population of intelligent English-reading Chinese" are primarily focused on exploiting Party connections to help them build wealth, and then expatriate the money beyond the government's reach.
Nobody is talking about a revolution, that would be suicide. The intelligentsia are far more concerned with using government to their advantage, which naturally responds very well to money exchanged for favors (like how baidu got rid of Google).
It's poor people that government worries about. Because when poor people rise up, that's bad news for anyone in power who hasn't yet fled the country. And if most poor people don't read English, well then there is not much harm in allowing some printed criticism of the Party, as long as it's in English.
A classic move from Japan and South Korea's economic rise was a closed home market, but with home companies forced to export.
This created a safe pool where new local companies could grow before they were able to face international competition. These companies could incubate and then burst onto the international stage.
I wonder if this is an electronic version of, e.g. what Korea does with its automobile industry using taxes...
The gap is that Chinese online companies don't seem to be exporting much as yet. In the case of chat at least, I think it is actually being held back by GFW because you need a chinese phone line to register.
Currently, SCMP is not accessible in China.
An easy and legal way to circumvent the firewall is to buy a SIM card from a foreign country and use roaming.
I was in Beijing a few weeks ago for the Linux Foundation conference <https://www.lfasiallc.com/linuxcon-containercon-cloudopen-ch... and was amazed that:
1) Verizon had added China to TravelPass in the last year, so it now costs $10 a day for up to half a gig of data, plus unlimited voice and text. 2) There was complete access to Google and Twitter because my iPhone was using an international SIM.
$10/day is $300/mo. Per line. A lot of people, especially people in China, can't afford that.
Yes, I was in no way suggesting that this was a practical alternative for Chinese researchers needing to bypass the Great Firewall. Besides the expense, I presume there are laws against Chinese citizens using international SIM cards for the purpose of bypassing the firewall.
I was simply making the point that the government has made accommodations to ease the use by international business travelers.
I'll also add that my ExpressVPN account (which I used from different Wi-Fi networks) often failed to connect, presumably because the Great Firewall is looking for VPN network patterns to block.
I use the poor man's version of this. T-Mobile One plans give you uncensored 2G data at no extra cost.
I make a pretty decent salary in the US, and I wouldn't call that affordable.
Why would that work? My internet traffic would be routed through the local cell tower and have to traverse the Great Firewall.
I have tried that and doing a whois on my public IP revealed that it belongs to the original ISP, not whatever local ISP I was using. Even visiting Google shows the Google page of the original country. I guess they just have agreements to tunnel traffic in a way that circumvents the Great Firewall.
But politically it is much easier to understand. The only people who are likely doing this are tourists, and the government certainly doesn't want to hurt tourism.
>a whois on my public IP revealed that it belongs to the original ISP, not whatever local ISP I was using
did you do other checks to see if your traffic was being censored? a whois of your public ip says nothing about whether your traffic has been manipulated.
> Even visiting Google shows the Google page of the original country. I guess they just have agreements to tunnel traffic in a way that circumvents the Great Firewall.
google serves pages depending on your public ip
The Great Firewall doesn't in general modify traffic. It either allows traffic to pass though, or blocks it (TCP RST, rate limiting, etc). I was able to visit normally blocked sites like Google at full speed of a typical cellular connection.
It works because cellular roaming traffic travels over a tunnel to your carrier's source country. This greatly simplifies data billing calculations, since they only have to keep track of the usage of one connection.
The traffic is already tunneled when it passes through the GFW.
So I guess the reverse is true also, which explains why my mainland SIM card wouldn't have unfiltered access roaming in HK.
I believe so. When I was in China, my mainland SIM didn't work at all in HK. I assume many people get prepaid SIMs when traveling out of China so they wouldn't be subject to filtering anyway.
Isn't this effectively a VPN? Or is the traffic not encrypted?
Yes, effectively a VPN but I would just call it a tunnel, I don't think it fits the definition of a VPN.
I'm not sure if this traffic is encrypted (I assume it is), but I know GFW filtering happens at egress points so mobile traffic would already be tunneled by then. They could add dedicated hardware at mobile towers to GFW this traffic but I don't think the govt sees a need to. The primary target of the GFW is to stop Chinese citizens from accessing foreign services. Foreigners on foreign roaming data plans are not the intent of the GFW.
My bet is that they could filter this, but it's not worth the infrastructure investment.
The other half of why this works (everyone else has already covered the technical end), is that the party is not really concerned with controlling foreigners' access (at least not nearly as much as they are concerned about domestic). So they focus their efforts at blocking traffic that isn't liable to be 99% non-resident.
Why is China still doing this? What do they have to fear about the outside world and the open Internet?
It's all about controlling the narrative, for the very same reason Western governments have also increased their influence over everything digital over these past 10 years.
China might be doing it in the most obvious and blunt way, but they are not doing anything that's especially unique, other countries just have less obvious ways to get what they want. Like enacting laws to fine social media companies or pressuring them to tow the line trough less visible means.
> enacting laws to fine social media companies or pressuring them to tow the line trough less visible means
This sounds like the Merkel approach to Internet censorship.
Just be aware that this law didn't change that much, the legal situation was already horrendous in Germany before that due to the "Mitstörerhaftung".
If you run a website in Germany you are liable for any and all content on your website, this includes user submitted content like comments.
Add to that the fact that Germany has libel laws and considers Holocaust denial a crime and it's not surprising at all that barely any German websites allow for comments and if they do it's pretty much only moderated comments.
While this might not be "direct censorship", it has the de-facto effect of censorship by suppressing "unpopular" opinions and putting scissors in people's head if they want their opinions to be published.
What's preventing people to host German sites from an entity outside of Germany though? For instance, if I lived just across the border in the Netherlands and hosted a popular blog with unmoderated comments. What could they even do?
> What's preventing people to host German sites from an entity outside of Germany though?
Nothing at all, that's the thing German legislators seem completely ignorant about like a lot of other facts about the Internet. But what German news company would go that route? Not a single one because it would make them look like they want to "break the law on purpose".
So they all keep on hosting in Germany and moderating their comments or sometimes do not allow them at all because certain topics are way too much effort to moderate.
Keep in mind: This has been the state of things for decades and if you ask any regular ass German about this they wouldn't even know about it and instead keep on complaining how it's media companies who are censoring them and their opinions, even tho these companies are pretty much forced to do so by German laws, at least if they want to prevent massive legal issues for themselves.
It's a very comparable system to how Germany censors/bans media like movies, music or video games. It's not the German government "banning" certain media, the German government merely puts very heavy restrictions on certain media, which, for all purpose and effect, makes it impossible to sell them.
That's how you create an system of censorship even when your Grundgesetz (German constitution) quite clearly states "There shall be no censorship", just don't call it censorship but rather "youth protection" and you are a-okay.
> Nothing at all, that's the thing German legislators seem completely ignorant about like a lot of other facts about the Internet.
Oh, they are well aware of that. However, they rightfully see technology alone not as a valid reason to stop caring about something. If you target the German market from abroad, they will try to apply German law. If you make it obvious by moving an already existing operation abroad without noticeable change to the user doubly so. Why should the physical location of the server change anything? Usually the people arguing against regulation say that there are no borders in the internet. Somehow that argument is only used when it suits them.
This is not unique to the internet. Radio stations that targeted other countries learned the same lesson 40 years ago. The same happens to people who try moving their financial assets to some tropical island. Just because technically the money isn't in the country anymore does not mean the government gives up on taxing.
Dunno, they could persuade the Netherlands to prosecute under its own laws?
Merkel also started mentioning regulating the Internet around the G20 meeting and even before that. She's been quite evasive though, only giving some hints, since they have elections in Germany this fall and there would be no talk of pensions or censorship before that. So better watch out for EU-wide Internet censorship using the German model.
Even better: host it on IPFS.
I didn't know that was a thing...but googled it. Merkel argues it is to combat "fake news".
I'd argue government restrictions on free speech is a bigger threat than fake news.
It's to combat anything the gov't decides is fake news or hate speech or something else that is not so convenient for its agenda today, maybe the AfD website tomorrow?
So if you write a poem critical to Edrogan, whoops, it's libel against other heads of state punishable by law.
Oh, ya it must all be the same! America brain washes everyone with faux news, no wait, CNN, but the president said that was fake news. Dammit, the USA government is doing a horrible job at controlling its propaganda machine. Meanwhile, Chinese censorship must be exactly the same as American censorship because of course everything is black and white and there is no room for dark and light grayness.
/s
Censorship in America is not through retroactive erasure, it's through the Overton window.
Why do you get upset when someone points out that the US heavily censors the internet through public companies, like in China, and that the US is heavily invested in controlling the narrative, aka public relations aka propaganda. Your world seems extremely black and white - US good, China bad. No room for nuance at all.
Surely there's nuance but the false equivalence here is pretty stunning. Reminds me of a conversation I had with a co-worker who is from China when he said something along the lines of, "There's censorship in America too! There's a Wikipedia article I can show you that lists all the instances!" ...uh yeah that's the point, we can both access Wikipedia directly here and nobody risks arrest or fines for having this very conversation.
Contrary to the party line China is truly an aberration when it comes to censorship for a modern, wealthy, industrialized country. Pointing out that China belongs to a tiny group of outliers compared to the entire rest of planet Earth when it comes to censorship does not equate to somehow claiming the US has no faults.
I get upset because of the binary thinking, as well as the what aboutism, but mainly the binary thinking.
It's like, the USA executes people, china executes people too, so they must be the same. Ignore the fact that china executes a hell of a lot more people than the USA (even on a per capita basis), they aren't the same at all. Likewise, the USA has corruption, so does china, but the scales of the problems are completely different. Talking about the USA's censorship problem in the context of China's is like talking about a flu in the context of terminal brain cancer. Ya, they both suck, but one sucks a lot more than the other.
> It's like, the USA executes people, china executes people too, so they must be the same.
On principle they are the same, just because the scales are different does not mean the US is in any position to criticize Chinese behavior on that issue.
It's pretty much the equivalent of "do as I say, not as I do" and a very easy to spot double standard.
> Ya, they both suck, but one sucks a lot more than the other.
Murder is murder, regardless of the scale, the injustice stays the same. Let's also put the scale into context [0]
"China, together with Iran, North Korea, Yemen and the US (the only G7 country to still execute people) carried out the most executions last year."
China, Iran, North Korea, Yemen, that's a list the US wants to be on too, really? From 2007 to 2012 the US executed more people than Pakistan, Yemen or North Korea did.
> Likewise, the USA has corruption, so does china, but the scales of the problems are completely different.
You realize that if you read Chinese media, you'd get exactly the opposite stories about how corrupt the US is? What does this mean? That all Chinese are constantly lying and all US Americans are always telling the truth? No, it only means countries control the narrative to make themselves shine in the most positive light possible. They do this regardless of what form of government they run, the only thing that changes are the methods they are using.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/mar/29/death-...
You are the one with a binary mindset. Any flaw that is pointed out is "whataboutism" to you because it disturbs your black and white worldview of US good, China bad.
> Whataboutism (also known as whataboutery in British English) is a variant of tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument, which is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda.
The ruling socialist/communist party fears any discussion of its characteristics and its flaws. It's a way of keeping total control of a society when you can be sure that people won't just naturally find themselves aligned with the ideology the government is trying to push.
That doesn't explain why they've banned Justin Bieber, Winnie the Pooh or celebrity gossip. If anything, those would distract conversation away from the party. They're also trying to be a moral police.
Winnie-the-Pooh is reportedly banned because of the superficial similarity to Mr Xi. (I have no sources for this because as usual the Chinese government doesn't publish an official policy explaining why they ban certain things on the Internet.)
I would guess they view these sorts of topics as "gateway drugs" into American culture, culminating with free speech and open criticism.
Then they should really ban basketball. The NBA seems to be the most popular part of American culture in China.
Personally, I think not all censorship is in some way aimed at free speech, that's just the most obvious parts.
Anything the party leadership disagrees with can potentially be censored. That includes criticism and ridicule of the party, but also pornography or memes they don't like.
Apparently not:
http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-china-blog-40627855
Yes, this is definitely true. Porn sites are also blocked for instance. Political censorship is the primary purpose of the firewall, but since the tool already exists, they go ahead and block things that don't fit into their conception of a "harmonious society".
The obvious answer is political censorship, but there also exists a persuasive economic argument. By blocking, or inhibiting the performance, of foreign Internet products, China gives a "head start" domestic clones (e.g. Baidu<->Google, TenCent<->FB, etc) to corner the market. The GFW effectively hamstrings foreign products, making it easier for domestic companies to compete in their early growth stages.
As an example, think of all the nastiness on social networks and the role they played in the most recent US election. Why would you want to invite that into your country?
Was this sarcasm or are you suggesting censorship is an acceptable solution to fake news, internet trolls, etc?
Maybe not acceptable, but it seems plausible that it could be effective.
And killing people is a great way to reduce the unemployment rate.
They already have it! The only difference is that the only party legally allowed to be awful and partisan is the Communist Party of China.
And you think that's done by regular VPN users bypassing the gov firewall?
I live in China and use a Chinese-language product that combines SOCKS proxying with packet obfuscation, and it works flawlessly, unlike anything else I've tried. I can't find an English reference, but Obfsproxy for TOR is similar. So if anyone wonders how they could contribute to bypassing the GFW, working on that kind of packet obfuscation software might be a good way.
I am very curious about this tool you are super happy with and would be totally fine with a reference about this entirely in Chinese ;P.
If you email me (an email is in my profile), or give me some way to message you, I'll send you a link. I'd rather not post in public.
nice try, agent lau /s
Shadowsocks + obfs?
Pretty much.
He now bypasses the firewall with his university’s VPN system. Since researchers could still access legal VPNs through work, he did not think the restrictions were harmful to China’s academia – “at least for now”.
Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it sounds like this won't affect academics.
What seems more interesting is that China is apparently creating a two tier system for access to information.
People have been commenting for years that westerner-oriented hotels appear to have less filtering than other places in China.
That seems to only be true in southern Chinese cities. You ain't gonna get around the gfw even in a five star western branded Beijing hotel.
Not just hotels, it's common for businesses to be able to access Google (though not necessarily Facebook, Twitter, etc.).
Interestingly, in one such westerner-oriented hotel it was pretty much impossible to use other (TCP-based) VPNs, presumably because they were already doing some kind of tunneling to Hong Kong and three layers of congestion control were too much...
The deleted word 'an' from the title (currently "VPN crackdown 'unthinkable' trial by firewall for China's research world"; in the article, "VPN crackdown an 'unthinkable' trial by firewall for China's research world") made it a real garden-path sentence for me—I initially read it as "VPN crackdown 'unthinkable'", and struggled to parse the rest separately. Is it really necessary to chop off the indefinite article?
From the standpoint of international competition, the Great Firewall isn't such a bad thing. Wasn't it Sun Tzu himself who said, "When your enemy is making a mistake, don't interfere?"
But research (ideally) benefits us all, so we'd be making a mistake of our own to adopt such a provincial attitude. The Chinese scientific community is not our "enemy." It's a shame the Great Firewall can't be worked around as easily as sci-hub worked around Elsevier and other artificial roadblocks to scientific communication.
It's not just the Chinese scientific community that "isn't our enemy" - it's the entire Chinese population, with the possible exception of those in government.
It's very annoying to see such a comment assuming that HN readership is all and only US citizen. Very exclusive of the other people.
It's very annoying to see such a comment assuming that HN readership is all and only US citizen.
Sorry, that wasn't my intention at all. But:
Very exclusive of the other people.
It's not the US who's running the Great Firewall, remember.
I'd like to think we wouldn't tolerate such a thing here. I've been wrong a lot lately, though.
I don't see anything in that comment that implies a US perspective.
The last time China isolated itself from the world they fell back so far that a few gun ships brought down their dynasty. Are they looking to repeat this mistake?
Uh. Are you thinking of Japan? The Qing dynasty was brought down by more than just a few gunships.
Though the larger point about isolationism is still valid.
I wouldn't consider China to be isolationist, because China's history is full of foreign interaction.
The reason China fell back and lost the Opium Wars was not due to isolationism, but rather because for some other reason(s), they missed out on the industrial revolution. But the exact reasons(s) they missed out on the industrial revolution is a great debate, and is the quadrillion dollar question...
> will be permitted only to connect to a company’s headquarters abroad
And HQs gateway to the wide world web?
I think a more efficient way for China to 'block the internet' is to stop teaching English altogether in schools. And I won't be surprised if that actually happens.
Some people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that. Stopping right now all English courses in China would be harmful and unproductive. As would be blocking VPNs for real.
> Some people are happy to shoot themselves in the feet (looking at your brexit) but I don't think Chinese are like that.
History disagrees with that statement. Communism was China shooting itself in the foot in the first place. The Great Firewall is China shooting itself in the foot. The lack of numerous freedoms the developed world takes for granted, is China shooting itself in the foot. China has a very long history of regularly shooting itself in the foot. They'd be a far more advanced nation economically, scientifically and culturally, were they to end the Communist Party oppression.
Brexit happened after a long period of political stability in a country with a long, mature history at the forefront of international politics. Communism in China came to the fore during the tumult of the second world war, which had foreign troops razing half of China - after a period where China was colonised by a different foreign power which kept the powers in China as ignorant as possible. They're very different things.
There is an odd tendency to ascribe some sort of scheming long-term vision to the Chinese government, probably based on memories of dynasties that managed to reign over an empire for centuries. The CCP is nothing like that. As soon as they got into power, they triggered the "great leap forward" (miscalculated "modernization", and famine that killed dozens of millions), followed by the Cultural Revolution that bordered on civil war and spawned a generation of illiterate, starving zombies ("lost generation ").
The CCP has a pretty terrible record at avoiding shooting themselves (or China) in the foot. They probably killed more Chinese people than Imperial Japan did.
The current norms of CCP leadership were established in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution for the express purpose of avoiding such a catastrophe in the future. Since 1989, the guiding philosophy of China's central leadership has been economic growth in exchange for limits on political freedom. The CCP is currently shooting itself in the foot in numerous ways (the VPN ban being one of them), but crippling the country's economic competitiveness by limiting English language instruction is not something they would ever consider.
You are right that the party became notably less insane when Deng Xiaoping took over. However the various administrations since then have spent significant resources and time going in different (and sometime opposite) directions, and not always in a blunder-safe way. The example I have in mind is the declaration last month by the foreign affairs ministry that the Hong Kong "Joint Declaration" is not binding any more for China. They rolled that back a week later (probably after they realized where that was going), but essentially for a few days their official stance was "we don't respect treaties we have signed, even the ones we pretty much wrote and that gave us what we wanted. Our word as a government has no value". Kind of a risky move, and could have set a precedent.
As for your specific point regarding teaching English, I think you're right they wouldn't do that now, however it's a bet I could see them make if their domestic economy becomes slightly larger. After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate, and they get away with it.
> However the various administrations since then have spent significant resources and time going in different (and sometime opposite) directions, and not always in a blunder-safe way.
Yeah, because there are different factions within the party that sometimes have conflicting goals or ideas. It's not as unified as outsiders think it is. I agree that they aren't always scary competent. The whole Bo Xilai scandal was a huge black eye that they didn't see coming, for instance.
> The example I have in mind is the declaration last month by the foreign affairs ministry that the Hong Kong "Joint Declaration" is not binding any more for China.
What? I didn't hear about this at all. That does seem pretty crazy. Do you have a link to a news article?
> After all there are other countries (Japan, Russia, France...) where English has a low penetration rate
Don't know about Russia or France, but Japan still teaches English in schools. Japan and China probably have a similar "penetration rate" for English. They do lots of business done with English speaking countries but the average man on the street is by no means fluent. I suspect the same is true of France. If domestic consumer demand increases, China might be able to get away with it, but the export economy is so big, I can't see them making that choice.
"Joint declaration" declaration:
>> On Friday, the eve of the 20th anniversary of Hong Kong’s handover, on 1 July 1997, Beijing controversially announced that the Sino-British joint declaration was “now history” and no longer had “any practical significance nor any binding force”[1]
Re: language. I am not saying that English is not taught at school in these countries (it is), only that it has minimum impact in these societies in practice. Right now China is trying to move away from its export economy (where indeed English is needed), and if it does I think it would make sense for a paranoid government to think "well these other countries are functioning without the common citizen knowing much English, so let's stop teaching it except to some professions" -- and pronto, the next generation is cut off from 99% of foreign news sources.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/01/china-humiliat...
There is a lot of Chinese language content to censor coming from Taiwan, Hong Kong and diaspora
I know Google Translate and other translation services make loads of mistakes, but they often give you a pretty good idea of what's being said.
From English to Spanish things are pretty decent. But from English to other languages it can get pretty horrible.
But that doesn't even matter - the main thing is the barrier to reading a lot, not getting the gist from one article. If you can read English, you'll probably encounter Western perspectives all the time on the Internet. But if you're forced to go through a broken Chinese machine translation every time you encounter something in English, you're going to stay on the Chinese parts of the Internet.
I would be absolutely shocked if this happens. Less than 1% of China's population speaks English beyond learning for business purposes. Making learning English illegal would be impossible to enforce, you would have to build additional infrastructure on the internet just to specifically block english courses. What you are suggesting is actually more complex.
To be fair, there is a world of difference between 'stop teaching English in schools' and 'making learning English illegal'.
I would never want to underestimate the ability of the CCP to scale solutions to political problems. It is, after all, the whole reason the party exists. We once thought the GFW would be impossible and laughed at it.
My Chinese friends tell me it's no longer mandatory for students to take English classes, but it'll likely never be banned outright.
They still want to make money. What they're doing instead is to reduce the percentage of foreign (translated) textbooks in schools, especially in universities.
r/titlegore
What's the point of this article... the VPN block was fake news anyway.
Or maybe the OneParty was trying to see just how far they push their censorship, after it already passed a draconian "cybersecurity" law recently.