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From my experience in China, it seems that the vast majority of Chinese citizens have no idea what a VPN is and or why they would use it. Friends of mine that a

From my experience in China, it seems that the vast majority of Chinese citizens have no idea what a VPN is and or why they would use it. Friends of mine that are Chinese citizens that study abroad in the US make extensive use of VPNs to circumvent the GFW. Every technology company that I've come across in China has invested a great deal of effort into establishing stable VPN connections. I have seen several "VPN microservices" that act to tunnel all foreign-bound traffic out of the country. In the vacuum of mature, western technologies many Chinese copycats have popped up. I have been hoping that we would start to see more and more Chinese technology companies exporting their technology [1]. With these new legislative actions, it seems like a step in the wrong direction. I'm struggling to come to terms with the restrictive policies that the Chinese government continually struggles to hoist over their citizens. During the midst of one of the most dramatic periods of economic development in history, the Chinese government is moving to artificial isolate themselves from the developing global economy? [1] Strikingly: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/striking-ly#/entity https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/striking-ly#/entity

duncan_bayne 9y ago
This isn't the first time, either. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/663/why-did-china-shut-itself-out-of-the-world-in-the-15th-century https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/663/why-did-chin...
- dis-sys 9y ago
  it is completely different, in the 15th Century, the Haijin policy was used to stop "barbarians" from flooding the country. there is nothing to gain from trading with the rest of the world because the country was ranked No.1 in the world in almost all metrics. today's GFW is to protect a young but fast growing industry - because the overall economy is not that strong.
  - barry-cotter 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage The rest of the world totally did have things the Chinese wanted, silver and gold. Not much else at that stage to be fair but China was sucking precious metals from Western Eurasia for most of the first and second millenia.
    - privateprofile 9y ago
      I was under the impression that silver was what the chinese emperor/government imposed as a means of payment for the most sought chinese exports: tea and silk. But the "rest of the world" (meaning mostly the UK in that time period) did have something that was "in demand" in china: opium. It was the imbalance between imports and exports - china wasn't interested in buying/importing what europeans were selling/exporting - that prompted the uk to start smuggling opium against chinese law, thus paving the way to the opium wars.
dis-sys 9y ago
Like it or not, the GFW helped to created the "most dramatic periods of economic development" in Chinese history. Back in 2010, when Google chose to exit China, many argued the exact same that China is isolating itself from the outside. Such feeling is understandable from a western point of view, I mean for anyone from a western background there is simply no Internet if google/twitter/fb etc. are all unavailable. However, a bold however, 7 years after Google's exit from China, it has been proved again and again that the biggest motivation of GFW is the protectionism aiming to help domestic Internet companies - and that actually paid off pretty well. You don't need Google/fb/twitter etc to have booming Internet/high tech economy. Look at China's social media, online payment, e-commerce, online gaming, AI, shared economy etc, did China miss out. Let me give you a bloody simple number: I didn't use any cash or bank card/credit card in the last 45 days, everything, I mean 100% everything, was paid by mobile. This is not about some cheap nationalism - it is _all_ about how many good paying jobs can be made available in China for Chinese. It is the exact same as the Making America Great Again crap. Blocking google/fb/twitter was the first essential step to achieve that.
- AzMoo_ 9y ago
  Where are you in China? I just spent a week in a relatively small city in Shandong and there were so many places that were cash only. Couldn't even use card, let alone mobile.
  - beisner 9y ago
    I just spent the last 6 weeks in Beijing and Shanghai (currently in Shanghai) and I have run into several places that don't even accept cash anymore, and only accept WeChat Pay or Alipay.
  - dis-sys 9y ago
    I live in Shanghai. You can still see people paying cash here but mostly from those who don't use any tech/electronics. Not talking about big/fancy businesses, most street food vendors accept/encourage mobile payment, beggars are holding their printed QR code signs asking for changes paid by mobile.
  - deleted 9y ago
throwaway312373 9y ago
I once dim-wittingly interviewed with one cheap Chinese Jibo clone maker. The thing that struck me was the how much they relied on VPNs. At one point, I was told their plan was to use Google Translate (through a VPN) for Mandarin-English translation, at which point "tensorflow" would come in and do some magic. Needless to say, I roadrunner-ed out of there.
SeoxyS 9y ago
Luxury hotels in China have transparent VPN for their entire networks. I was quite impressed staying at a brand new St Regis in a 3rd tier city recently and discovering that I had full access to anything when connected to their WiFi network.

duncan_bayne 9y ago

This isn't the first time, either. https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/663/why-did-china-shut-itself-out-of-the-world-in-the-15th-century https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/663/why-did-chin...

dis-sys 9y ago
it is completely different, in the 15th Century, the Haijin policy was used to stop "barbarians" from flooding the country. there is nothing to gain from trading with the rest of the world because the country was ranked No.1 in the world in almost all metrics. today's GFW is to protect a young but fast growing industry - because the overall economy is not that strong.
- barry-cotter 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage The rest of the world totally did have things the Chinese wanted, silver and gold. Not much else at that stage to be fair but China was sucking precious metals from Western Eurasia for most of the first and second millenia.
  - privateprofile 9y ago
    I was under the impression that silver was what the chinese emperor/government imposed as a means of payment for the most sought chinese exports: tea and silk. But the "rest of the world" (meaning mostly the UK in that time period) did have something that was "in demand" in china: opium. It was the imbalance between imports and exports - china wasn't interested in buying/importing what europeans were selling/exporting - that prompted the uk to start smuggling opium against chinese law, thus paving the way to the opium wars.

dis-sys 9y ago

Like it or not, the GFW helped to created the "most dramatic periods of economic development" in Chinese history. Back in 2010, when Google chose to exit China, many argued the exact same that China is isolating itself from the outside. Such feeling is understandable from a western point of view, I mean for anyone from a western background there is simply no Internet if google/twitter/fb etc. are all unavailable. However, a bold however, 7 years after Google's exit from China, it has been proved again and again that the biggest motivation of GFW is the protectionism aiming to help domestic Internet companies - and that actually paid off pretty well. You don't need Google/fb/twitter etc to have booming Internet/high tech economy. Look at China's social media, online payment, e-commerce, online gaming, AI, shared economy etc, did China miss out. Let me give you a bloody simple number: I didn't use any cash or bank card/credit card in the last 45 days, everything, I mean 100% everything, was paid by mobile. This is not about some cheap nationalism - it is _all_ about how many good paying jobs can be made available in China for Chinese. It is the exact same as the Making America Great Again crap. Blocking google/fb/twitter was the first essential step to achieve that.

AzMoo_ 9y ago
Where are you in China? I just spent a week in a relatively small city in Shandong and there were so many places that were cash only. Couldn't even use card, let alone mobile.
- beisner 9y ago
  I just spent the last 6 weeks in Beijing and Shanghai (currently in Shanghai) and I have run into several places that don't even accept cash anymore, and only accept WeChat Pay or Alipay.
- dis-sys 9y ago
  I live in Shanghai. You can still see people paying cash here but mostly from those who don't use any tech/electronics. Not talking about big/fancy businesses, most street food vendors accept/encourage mobile payment, beggars are holding their printed QR code signs asking for changes paid by mobile.
- deleted 9y ago

throwaway312373 9y ago

I once dim-wittingly interviewed with one cheap Chinese Jibo clone maker. The thing that struck me was the how much they relied on VPNs. At one point, I was told their plan was to use Google Translate (through a VPN) for Mandarin-English translation, at which point "tensorflow" would come in and do some magic. Needless to say, I roadrunner-ed out of there.

SeoxyS 9y ago

Luxury hotels in China have transparent VPN for their entire networks. I was quite impressed staying at a brand new St Regis in a 3rd tier city recently and discovering that I had full access to anything when connected to their WiFi network.