7 ms·

Hong Kong protest: What is mainland China hearing?

tus88 7y ago
"I Support HK Police, You Can Proceed To Beat Me!"
walrus01 7y ago
I'm honestly astonished when I see people in North America with tencent, wechat/wepay or alipay apps installed on their phones. Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to Beijing's censorship, have all of your chat contents run through a centralized server in the mainland, and have every one of your payment transactions easily tracked/monitored by Beijing...
- mc32 7y ago
  It’s probsbly not too different from why people have Facebook even if they don’t like the platform. It’s a convenient gateway to communicate with parents or friends who are otherwise hard to communicate with (asynchronously or what have you).
- Larrikin 7y ago
  Some people have Chinese friends and don't realize what the app is doing in the background. I didn't when I installed it, just assumed it was Chinese LINE. I had it on my phone for a while for a couple friends that were new to the country. They eventually switched over to other things and I forgot about the app. I hadn't opened it in a couple months but noticed I had been going through data quickly. WeChat, an app that once again hadn't been opened in two months and I talked to less than five people on a handful of times, had uploaded two gigs of data in that time frame. I immediately uninstalled and explain the reasoning every time I'm asked to reinstall. Most people have no clue how egregious it is.
  - __sy__ 7y ago
    Any studies on the type of data that WeChat is uploading in the background?
    - walrus01 7y ago
      as I recall, it hashes all of your photos and videos in preparation for comparison against a list of known-banned things, because one of its centralized one-to-one chat and group-chat features is implementing CCP government policy censorship. Try sharing to a group chat an image of something going viral that the CCP doesn't want mainlanders to see. You might see it as posted to the chat, but nobody else receives it.
      - yorwba 7y ago
        That happens when you share that specific file, I don't think they preemptively scan the filesystem in the background.
  - prewett 7y ago
    Is that on iOS or Android? If it's Android I'm not surprised, the permissions system was a disaster last time I used it (admittedly a while ago), but I would hope that iOS doesn't allow WeChat to run in the background.
  - yorwba 7y ago
    > WeChat, an app that once again hadn't been opened in two months and I talked to less than five people on a handful of times, had uploaded two gigs of data in that time frame. Was that just upload or all data usage? If your contacts posted to their "moments" during that time frame, I'd expect WeChat to download the content in case you want to look at it.
    - Larrikin 7y ago
      I don't remember, it may have been a combination or just upload. I just uninstalled it after seeing it had such massive data usage in comparison to everything else on my phone and I hadn't even opened it in 2 months.
- bcheung 7y ago
  That's largely the belief system that is behind Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc being banned in China.
- dx87 7y ago
  Might be ignorance of that fact. A chinese national posted a tour guide on reddit for an esports tournament in Shanghai, and this was their description of WeChat. >Wechat: Chinese Whatsapp and Facebook rolled into one, you should set it up beforehand. This is THE most used app in China, just about everyone uses it and it is an essential means of communication. If you meet anyone you want to stay in touch with, add them through Wechat and you’re good to go. Perhaps someday you might even discover the fabled meme trove of China that is Wechat Stickers… If you don't do your own research and just listen to mainland Chinese opinions, it could seem like an innocuous app like anything else.
  - 0max 7y ago
    this is partly why I have reservations about installing TikTok
  - ivalm 7y ago
    At the same time, wechat IS the most used app in China. So if you do want to keep up with Chinese mainlanders you're somewhat stuck (and I realize all the shit that comes with the app)...
- munk-a 7y ago
  I don't see it too different from the big players in North America that don't guarantee end-to-end encryption (and for those apps there's also an assumption of honesty when it comes to that guarantee). Just because Facebook isn't directly owned by the US government doesn't mean it can't be creepy as all get-out.
  - analognoise 7y ago
    You're comparing a public US tech company to an authoritarian regime who is known to harvest the organs of dissidents. Are you being serious that you don't see those things as "too different"?
  - PavlovsCat 7y ago
    > Just because Facebook isn't directly owned by the US government doesn't mean it can't be creepy as all get-out. Sure, but being "creepy" is hardly the issue here.
- avocado4 7y ago
  Also TikTok. Check out the manifest of their Android app and trace the traffic - they are definitely uploading more than they should.
- o_p 7y ago
  Eh better be spied by the goverment in the other side of the world than in yours.
  - m-p-3 7y ago
    So you end up being spied by both.
    - o_p 7y ago
      They can certainly try, but they usually cant, and you see China banning american services, US against Huawei,etc
- m463 7y ago
  I had an app "camscanner pro" that I believe was purchased by tencent along the way and then they tried to put everything "in the cloud".
- syedkarim 7y ago
  I do business with Chinese contract manufacturers and have WeChat installed to communicate with them. Can you tell me what the app is doing on an iPhone when it's either in the background or not running at all? My assumption has always been that communications over WeChat are accessible by the Chinese government, but is there more to it than just that?
- pdm491 7y ago
  i guess you probably already forgot all the information leaked by Snowden and the PRISM project.
tzakrajs 7y ago
Sounds like CCP did a good job of stoking division between HK and mainland China leading up to this powder keg being lit.
xster 7y ago
> "The fastest-growing period of Hong Kong has already passed, so the young people there find no way to climb up the social ladder. They feel choked in an environment of expensive housing, sweltering climate and a neighbour [the mainland] that's becoming richer and richer," I think these problems will continue to re-occur until this root issue is solved. In the same way how I believe Caesar/Sulla/Gracchi brothers are all symptoms of an underserved common populace by the senate class and where the commoners are constantly ready to be incited into a mob rule when economic interests are not pinning them to vest in the system. And now the vestigial, oligarchic functional/geographic-split legco voting system and the colonial parallel governorship (aka chief executive)/legislative system is failing the Hong Kong common class with 20% poverty rates and twice the housing to pre-tax median annual income ratio than San Francisco in a monopolistic/unregulated/colonial elite-serving economic framework. And that's without even counting in the half-million class-less filipino/indonesian domestic serfs. I think their way out of their structural societal problems would be to emphasize the class issue and on decolonializing their governmental and economic framework as soon as possible (which I think part of the protest movement gets, and which isn't against Beijing's interests) or go the Chinese socialism route (since China holds humanity's record on poverty reduction, but the locals will obviously not accept this route). But re-glorifying their colonial past or preserving the status quo (which I find is the mainstream protest ideology) isn't it. To put it in American terms, I think they need Bernie, not Trump.
- downrightmike 7y ago
  Every dynasty in china for the last few thousand years has ended in revolt. The people eventually rebel against a uncaring ruling class.
  - xster 7y ago
    I agree and I support their struggles for economic fairness. But what does it have to do with CCP/Beijing? The CCP didn't put in a taxation system that protects the monopoly of the real estate tycoons.
    - 7y ago
AnimalMuppet 7y ago
I'm not sure it matters so much what they're hearing now. What matters more is what they've heard for the last decade or two - that it's all about great China and uniting to follow the CCP leadership, that anyone disturbing that is an antisocial troublemaker, and that such people deserve negative consequences. After having that mindset drummed into you for long enough, it may not matter what perspective they hear about the Hong Kong protests, at least if they don't hear it for too long.
- walrus01 7y ago
  https://www.reddit.com/r/simonfraser/comments/ciymgc/id_like_to_share_my_own_experience_at_the_lennon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/simonfraser/comments/ciymgc/id_like...
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    "You don't have the right" to post separatist opinions on a wall in Canada? Boy, that makes my blood boil. Yes, they DO have the right to post separatist opinions there! They can not only say that Hong Kong should secede, they can even say that Quebec should.
- Leary 7y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4GXZOss6J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4GXZOss6J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxXCTpHARQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxXCTpHARQ This is the scene that mainland Chinese people are seeing. A reporter of Global Times was bound by protesters in the airport and attacked until unconscious.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - yorwba 7y ago
    Those are on YouTube, so law-abiding citizens aren't seeing them. The search results for Hong Kong on Weibo are a bit different: https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=100103type%3D1%26q%3D%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=100103type%3D1%26q%3D%...
shane369 7y ago
let's not pretend we believe in BBC, CNN. Mr Trump said it clear and loud "Fake news".
flying_sheep 7y ago
I lived in Hong Kong for 30 years. What was happened in these 3 months did not come out of nowhere. 1997 - now: HK gov allows 150 people from China to immigrate to Hong Kong every day, even there are strong opinion to suspend immigration due to lack of housing and crazy population density problem. Even worse, HK gov does not pose ANY restrictions of the immigrant about their education, language, or criminal background. There was one case that one pro-Beijing arsonist killed 2 immigration Officers but still obtained residency in HK. 2012: HK gov tried to introduce a compulsory brain-washing subject to high school. 500 thousands (out of 7 millions) people protested. 2013: HK gov used crappy reason to turn down a well-known HK businessman to obtain free public broadcast license. So that HK has effectively only one company to run free TV channel. And the news of that channel is highly biased. 2019: HK gov tried to pass extradition law to China. Even after 1 million people protested, HK gov still continues legislation. After 2 millions people protested, the CEO of HK gov only said "the bill is dead" in TV but did not formally withdraw the bill in legislation council. This is only a tiny list of what gov did in the past 22 years. What gov is going to do is to pass a construction that cost trillions of HK dollars (app. 120 billion USD). That will basically empty the treasury of HK, and the future of every HK people. That's why people are so frustrated and protest in that extend.
- ToniCipriani 7y ago
  Article 23 and the National Security provisions is also a big one.

"I Support HK Police, You Can Proceed To Beat Me!"

I'm honestly astonished when I see people in North America with tencent, wechat/wepay or alipay apps installed on their phones. Why would you voluntarily subject yourself to Beijing's censorship, have all of your chat contents run through a centralized server in the mainland, and have every one of your payment transactions easily tracked/monitored by Beijing...

mc32 7y ago
It’s probsbly not too different from why people have Facebook even if they don’t like the platform. It’s a convenient gateway to communicate with parents or friends who are otherwise hard to communicate with (asynchronously or what have you).
Larrikin 7y ago
Some people have Chinese friends and don't realize what the app is doing in the background. I didn't when I installed it, just assumed it was Chinese LINE. I had it on my phone for a while for a couple friends that were new to the country. They eventually switched over to other things and I forgot about the app. I hadn't opened it in a couple months but noticed I had been going through data quickly. WeChat, an app that once again hadn't been opened in two months and I talked to less than five people on a handful of times, had uploaded two gigs of data in that time frame. I immediately uninstalled and explain the reasoning every time I'm asked to reinstall. Most people have no clue how egregious it is.
- __sy__ 7y ago
  Any studies on the type of data that WeChat is uploading in the background?
  - walrus01 7y ago
    as I recall, it hashes all of your photos and videos in preparation for comparison against a list of known-banned things, because one of its centralized one-to-one chat and group-chat features is implementing CCP government policy censorship. Try sharing to a group chat an image of something going viral that the CCP doesn't want mainlanders to see. You might see it as posted to the chat, but nobody else receives it.
    - yorwba 7y ago
      That happens when you share that specific file, I don't think they preemptively scan the filesystem in the background.
- prewett 7y ago
  Is that on iOS or Android? If it's Android I'm not surprised, the permissions system was a disaster last time I used it (admittedly a while ago), but I would hope that iOS doesn't allow WeChat to run in the background.
- yorwba 7y ago
  > WeChat, an app that once again hadn't been opened in two months and I talked to less than five people on a handful of times, had uploaded two gigs of data in that time frame. Was that just upload or all data usage? If your contacts posted to their "moments" during that time frame, I'd expect WeChat to download the content in case you want to look at it.
  - Larrikin 7y ago
    I don't remember, it may have been a combination or just upload. I just uninstalled it after seeing it had such massive data usage in comparison to everything else on my phone and I hadn't even opened it in 2 months.
bcheung 7y ago
That's largely the belief system that is behind Google, Facebook, YouTube, etc being banned in China.
dx87 7y ago
Might be ignorance of that fact. A chinese national posted a tour guide on reddit for an esports tournament in Shanghai, and this was their description of WeChat. >Wechat: Chinese Whatsapp and Facebook rolled into one, you should set it up beforehand. This is THE most used app in China, just about everyone uses it and it is an essential means of communication. If you meet anyone you want to stay in touch with, add them through Wechat and you’re good to go. Perhaps someday you might even discover the fabled meme trove of China that is Wechat Stickers… If you don't do your own research and just listen to mainland Chinese opinions, it could seem like an innocuous app like anything else.
- 0max 7y ago
  this is partly why I have reservations about installing TikTok
- ivalm 7y ago
  At the same time, wechat IS the most used app in China. So if you do want to keep up with Chinese mainlanders you're somewhat stuck (and I realize all the shit that comes with the app)...
munk-a 7y ago
I don't see it too different from the big players in North America that don't guarantee end-to-end encryption (and for those apps there's also an assumption of honesty when it comes to that guarantee). Just because Facebook isn't directly owned by the US government doesn't mean it can't be creepy as all get-out.
- analognoise 7y ago
  You're comparing a public US tech company to an authoritarian regime who is known to harvest the organs of dissidents. Are you being serious that you don't see those things as "too different"?
- PavlovsCat 7y ago
  > Just because Facebook isn't directly owned by the US government doesn't mean it can't be creepy as all get-out. Sure, but being "creepy" is hardly the issue here.
avocado4 7y ago
Also TikTok. Check out the manifest of their Android app and trace the traffic - they are definitely uploading more than they should.
o_p 7y ago
Eh better be spied by the goverment in the other side of the world than in yours.
- m-p-3 7y ago
  So you end up being spied by both.
  - o_p 7y ago
    They can certainly try, but they usually cant, and you see China banning american services, US against Huawei,etc
m463 7y ago
I had an app "camscanner pro" that I believe was purchased by tencent along the way and then they tried to put everything "in the cloud".
syedkarim 7y ago
I do business with Chinese contract manufacturers and have WeChat installed to communicate with them. Can you tell me what the app is doing on an iPhone when it's either in the background or not running at all? My assumption has always been that communications over WeChat are accessible by the Chinese government, but is there more to it than just that?
pdm491 7y ago
i guess you probably already forgot all the information leaked by Snowden and the PRISM project.

tzakrajs 7y ago

Sounds like CCP did a good job of stoking division between HK and mainland China leading up to this powder keg being lit.

xster 7y ago

> "The fastest-growing period of Hong Kong has already passed, so the young people there find no way to climb up the social ladder. They feel choked in an environment of expensive housing, sweltering climate and a neighbour [the mainland] that's becoming richer and richer," I think these problems will continue to re-occur until this root issue is solved. In the same way how I believe Caesar/Sulla/Gracchi brothers are all symptoms of an underserved common populace by the senate class and where the commoners are constantly ready to be incited into a mob rule when economic interests are not pinning them to vest in the system. And now the vestigial, oligarchic functional/geographic-split legco voting system and the colonial parallel governorship (aka chief executive)/legislative system is failing the Hong Kong common class with 20% poverty rates and twice the housing to pre-tax median annual income ratio than San Francisco in a monopolistic/unregulated/colonial elite-serving economic framework. And that's without even counting in the half-million class-less filipino/indonesian domestic serfs. I think their way out of their structural societal problems would be to emphasize the class issue and on decolonializing their governmental and economic framework as soon as possible (which I think part of the protest movement gets, and which isn't against Beijing's interests) or go the Chinese socialism route (since China holds humanity's record on poverty reduction, but the locals will obviously not accept this route). But re-glorifying their colonial past or preserving the status quo (which I find is the mainstream protest ideology) isn't it. To put it in American terms, I think they need Bernie, not Trump.

downrightmike 7y ago
Every dynasty in china for the last few thousand years has ended in revolt. The people eventually rebel against a uncaring ruling class.
- xster 7y ago
  I agree and I support their struggles for economic fairness. But what does it have to do with CCP/Beijing? The CCP didn't put in a taxation system that protects the monopoly of the real estate tycoons.
  - 7y ago

AnimalMuppet 7y ago

I'm not sure it matters so much what they're hearing now. What matters more is what they've heard for the last decade or two - that it's all about great China and uniting to follow the CCP leadership, that anyone disturbing that is an antisocial troublemaker, and that such people deserve negative consequences. After having that mindset drummed into you for long enough, it may not matter what perspective they hear about the Hong Kong protests, at least if they don't hear it for too long.

walrus01 7y ago
https://www.reddit.com/r/simonfraser/comments/ciymgc/id_like_to_share_my_own_experience_at_the_lennon/ https://www.reddit.com/r/simonfraser/comments/ciymgc/id_like...
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  "You don't have the right" to post separatist opinions on a wall in Canada? Boy, that makes my blood boil. Yes, they DO have the right to post separatist opinions there! They can not only say that Hong Kong should secede, they can even say that Quebec should.
Leary 7y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4GXZOss6J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4GXZOss6J4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxXCTpHARQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YdxXCTpHARQ This is the scene that mainland Chinese people are seeing. A reporter of Global Times was bound by protesters in the airport and attacked until unconscious.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- yorwba 7y ago
  Those are on YouTube, so law-abiding citizens aren't seeing them. The search results for Hong Kong on Weibo are a bit different: https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=100103type%3D1%26q%3D%E9%A6%99%E6%B8%AF https://m.weibo.cn/search?containerid=100103type%3D1%26q%3D%...

shane369 7y ago

let's not pretend we believe in BBC, CNN. Mr Trump said it clear and loud "Fake news".

flying_sheep 7y ago

I lived in Hong Kong for 30 years. What was happened in these 3 months did not come out of nowhere. 1997 - now: HK gov allows 150 people from China to immigrate to Hong Kong every day, even there are strong opinion to suspend immigration due to lack of housing and crazy population density problem. Even worse, HK gov does not pose ANY restrictions of the immigrant about their education, language, or criminal background. There was one case that one pro-Beijing arsonist killed 2 immigration Officers but still obtained residency in HK. 2012: HK gov tried to introduce a compulsory brain-washing subject to high school. 500 thousands (out of 7 millions) people protested. 2013: HK gov used crappy reason to turn down a well-known HK businessman to obtain free public broadcast license. So that HK has effectively only one company to run free TV channel. And the news of that channel is highly biased. 2019: HK gov tried to pass extradition law to China. Even after 1 million people protested, HK gov still continues legislation. After 2 millions people protested, the CEO of HK gov only said "the bill is dead" in TV but did not formally withdraw the bill in legislation council. This is only a tiny list of what gov did in the past 22 years. What gov is going to do is to pass a construction that cost trillions of HK dollars (app. 120 billion USD). That will basically empty the treasury of HK, and the future of every HK people. That's why people are so frustrated and protest in that extend.

ToniCipriani 7y ago
Article 23 and the National Security provisions is also a big one.