7 ms·

It seems the US (and Australia) is hell bent on banning Wechat, if they think this is going to win any minds of wechat user, they're just dead wrong. People use

It seems the US (and Australia) is hell bent on banning Wechat, if they think this is going to win any minds of wechat user, they're just dead wrong. People use wechat to communicate with their family and friends, just like how people in the west use facebook, except more. Imagine if you are a Chinese person overseas, all of your family and friends are on wechat, then one day BAM it's all banned. Would you be thankful for US government for 'saving your personal information from CCP'? The day that Apple removes Wechat from appstore is the day they sell their last iPhone in China. You can't live in China without it, simple as that. It essentially replaces phone numbers.

abc-xyz 6y ago
The purpose is not to win the minds of Chinese citizens. There’s little that can be done to counter a lifetime of propaganda, even more so when its citizens obtain most of their information from heavily censored platforms controlled by the CCP.
- ardy42 6y ago
  > The purpose is not to win the minds of Chinese citizens. There’s little that can be done to counter a lifetime of propaganda, even more so when its citizens obtain most of their information from heavily censored platforms controlled by the CCP. Actually, that's probably the only good justification for banning WeChat. If someone's views were formed by propaganda, when you disconnect them from their reinforcement, they'll probably at least mellow with time. The point to point communications features of WeChat can mostly be replaced, but less so with the social media aspects. IIRC, the CCP spends considerable effort trying to maintain influence over the Chinese diaspora (for instance, by getting control of foreign Chinese-language newspapers), though this effort pales in comparison to their domestic efforts.
_hzw 6y ago
> The day that Apple removes Wechat from appstore is the day they sell their last iPhone in China. You can't live in China without it, simple as that. It essentially replaces phone numbers. No. I will just buy iPhones for my parents and start using iMessage. I simply cannot wait to see WeChat got banned in Europe. Disclaimer: a Chinese living in Germany.
- Aperocky 6y ago
  And your parent doesn't need to communicate to anybody else in China..
  - _hzw 6y ago
    They are Android users now, nothing stops them continue using WeChat on Android to communicate with other Android users. They just have a (better) way to communicate with their son without WeChat.
- YarickR2 6y ago
  Nothing is stopping you now from doing this without WeChat being banned
  - _hzw 6y ago
    You are right. But it's just too much trouble to force the olds to change anything if you don't have a good enough reason. It's very difficult to say something like this and has an effect: "Mom and Dad, there's much cooler and securer chat app out there, let's try it out." They will just say WeChat is good enough and they don't care about privacy because they don't anything to hide. But it'd be much easier to ask them like this: "Mom and Dad, those asshole Americans and Europeans and Australians banned WeChat and I can't reach out to you anymore, can we please switch to that much cooler and securer chat app?" This will likely work. But to friends I am not so nice. I force them to communicate with me either through iMessage or email (or Telegram, but it's banned in China). Some friends switch to iPhone and we still keep in touch (but probably not solely because of me), and others didn't and we lose touch ever since. It's just a choice we all have to make at some point.
nafizh 6y ago
The responsibility of the US government is not to placate any citizen from another country, it's to protect its own citizens' data. Any Chinese app being used in your own country at a massive scale is a liability waiting to be (or already) used by the Chinese Govt.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  The responsibility of the US government is to its residents, not just its citizens. These includes being an attractive location for foreign visitors with money and labor to spend in US. And also to be member of the world community. Finally many Chinese people with friends in China are citizens.
  - montagg 6y ago
    How much would you recommend importing Chinese censorship before it outweighs the benefits you're suggesting here? I'm not saying there's no valid trade-off there, but catering to the needs you're describing does have a cost.
  - Fellshard 6y ago
    'A member of the world community' in the same way that China is 'a member of the world community'? Let's be clear: the Chinese government is going to cause its citizens great pain because it performs this information manipulation with its own technology. It is at fault if other countries take steps to protect the world from the CCP's actions, not the nations taking those steps. Don't victim-blame either the other countries or the Chinese people, both of who are harmed by the CCP's actions.
    - Aperocky 6y ago
      Same way that Iraqi was freed from Saddam, it's all his governments fault for having weapons of mass destruction. Speaking of information manipulation, just because people have the freedom to access all information, doesn't mean they won't be manipulated, you're seeing this happen in front of your very eyes. At least in China people know they're not seeing the full story from the media. They know they can't access certain website because of censorship. In the US people just swallow whatever that they happen to see and believe, the results are comical. In many ways, Chinese people are less manipulated than certain set of people in America. There were genuine anger when Li Wenliang died. But then eventually they realized that shits so much worse elsewhere - meanwhile in the US people still believe that disease China is worse because - manipulation? Or inability to overcome cognitive dissonance.
Causality1 6y ago
If the international students I've met are any indication, trying to win the hearts and minds of Chinese nationals is a lost cause. It's not a problem of information. The problem is they already know what the CCP does and they agree with it on the basis of it being necessary for the good of society.
- alisonkisk 6y ago
  You are seeing them in their first moments outside of the complete control of the Chinese Communist Party. Deprogramming takes time.
  - FooBarWidget 6y ago
    You've got to be kidding me. Why can't they have a genuine opinion of their own? You may not agree with them because you have different values, but that's very different from claiming that their opinions are illegitimate and merely a result of "brainwashing". I find it very strange (understatement) that on the one hand people say they support the Chinese people, but on the other hand when Chinese people have a different opinion, then those Chinese people are dismissed as being brainwashed, a paid shill, spies, etc. Way to dehumanize them.
    - abc-xyz 6y ago
      I’d say being brainwashed is the most generous assumption you could make about someone supporting the CCP.
      - FooBarWidget 6y ago
        Oh, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the past 40 years have been the best out of 4000 years, the fact that 800+ million people have been lifted out of poverty, that dirty streets have been transformed to clean ones, that famines have disappeared and everybody has enough to eat, that violent crimes have nearly all disappeared and the streets are safe. I don't say this because I've been fed propaganda, I say this because I saw it with my own eyes. When I grew up, nearly nobody travelled abroad. 15 years before I was born, people couldn't choose what to wear, what work to do, where to live. All of that has changed, and today hundreds of millions of Chinese travel abroad, and they nearly all return voluntarily. Some choose to emigrate, but that number declines every year because China gets nicer every year. Before you accuse me of being brainwashed: the above is corroborated by Kishore Mahbubani, ex-Singapore diplomat, ex-UN Security Council head. Is he brainwashed too? I'd say your opinion is just due to lack of perspective. There are more things that are important than the ability to express political dissent. Freedom from hunger, freedom from being robbed, freedom to get medical care without being bankrupted, freedom to travel. All of these aspects HAVE improved. Of course there are still many problems. But you're judging China through a single dimension only. That's not fair.
llboston 6y ago
Why has Wechat became pretty much the only way the oversea Chinese communicate with their family and friends in China? One of the reasons is, CCP has banned the rest. Probably you might be aware of this https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-people-support-ban-wechat-and-tiktok https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-people-support-... Over 100k Chinese American petitioned to ban Wechat and TikTok in the US.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  How do you know that the anonymous online petition signers are all Chinese Americans? And for WeChat becoming so ubiquitous, it's a case of network effect. China isn't the outlier, the West is. Try living in South America without Whatsapp.
  - mschuster91 6y ago
    Whatsapp however does not engage in censorship, something both Tiktok and Wechat have been proven to do.
    - colordrops 6y ago
      That's because Whatsapp doesn't have a feed. You are aware that Facebook and Twitter engage in censorship, aren't you?
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      It can't, it's a direct messaging app. There is no app which has the full functionality of WeChat or Facebook that doesn't have some censorship.
    - chrischen 6y ago
      Actually facebook (Owners of whatsapp) does engage in censorship. They censor nipples, kamallaharris.info website, and certain right wing groups. I think the fact that you are this one-sided in the “censorship” department shows how propagandized you’ve become. Propaganda is everywhere, done by all factions. It’s not just something the communist party does. Every party does it.
ujrvjhtifcvlvvi 6y ago
I don't have to imagine. I'm a Chinese living in US. I use Wechat to video chat with my parents who live in China every week. In the past a couple weeks I have been trying to convince my dad to find a backup plan. Apparently anything owned by Facebook isn't an option. I don't know if Signal is an option but he won't try anyway. Telegram isn't an option. Snap isn't an option. So we went back to good old Skype. Guess what, there isn't Google play store in China. The Huawei app store (my dad uses a Huawei phone) doesn't have Skype in it. He managed to find the Chinese Skype website, operated by a company that isn't Miscrosoft but MS's partner in China, to download the APK, then his Huawei phone rejected to install it, because the APK isn't blessed by some Huawei security thingy. We eventually settled down to use QQ which is also owned by Tencent. He also mentioned we could use this Tencent business meeting app, or that Alibaba business meeting app (dingding), but at that point i rejused. I was quite fed up after he couldn't to install Skepe on his phone. I think MS is one of the US companies that's so willing to bend over to most requests from Chinese gov but they are still treated like crap. If Trump bans QQ as well then I will just call my parents with the good old international telephone call. These Chinese tech co isn't gonna get another weekly active user just like that. I even thought about setting up my own Jitsi server and let them just Jitsi to it, then i thought it must be even harder than installing Skype. VPN isn't an option. Any other way to circumvent the GFW will be too complicated for them. They will all be too low bandwidth to video chat anyway. Plus, illegal. You can find cases where individuals got punished because they use VPN. The government even lists them on a website. They ain't hiding or sugar-coating this crap no more. So after this process, if you ask me, a Chinese living overseas, which side I'm gonna blame for how we got here, guess what, it won't be the US gov. (Also this is from a burner account because I don't want nobody to knock on my parents door for this post.)
- Aperocky 6y ago
  As a software engineer, I don't think the process you went through is of much use. Unless the US set up a firewall ala China you can still call your parents with the wechat already installed on your phone any time. Also, you probably should buy your dad a computer.. I've never heard of anybody having trouble to install skype on a computer. Since Huawei was blocked from transaction with any US entity, I guess it make sense why Skype doesn't exist on Huawei store? Not by their choice if I have to guess.
sbmthakur 6y ago
Is there any WeChat alternative available in China that supports end-to-end encryption?
- _hzw 6y ago
  Not that I am aware of. Only alternative is iMessage, but if you enable "Messages in Cloud", your data will be backed-up to "Guizhou-Cloud" and they might or might not be encrypted there.
- godelski 6y ago
  WeChat alternatives? I don't think there's even any alternatives to that in any form. But for messaging there are still apps that support e2ee that you can use in the mainland.
  - angio 6y ago
    > WeChat alternatives? I don't think there's even any alternatives to that in any form. ByteDance (the same company as TikTok) launched feiliao [0, 1] last year to compete with WeChat but I don't think they gained much market share. Also, it obviously has no end to end encryption for chats. [0] https://www.feiliao.com/ https://www.feiliao.com/ [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/19/bytedance-flipchat/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/19/bytedance-flipchat/
    - godelski 6y ago
      Well I guess I'm wrong, although not in a meaningful way. But interesting to know that there's at least one competitor out there.
jariel 6y ago
" if they think this is going to win any minds of wechat user, they're just dead wrong." The US government is not trying to 'win the minds' of wechat users. Also, why would Apple pull it in China? I think you are misunderstanding the motivations for the ban.

abc-xyz 6y ago

The purpose is not to win the minds of Chinese citizens. There’s little that can be done to counter a lifetime of propaganda, even more so when its citizens obtain most of their information from heavily censored platforms controlled by the CCP.

ardy42 6y ago
> The purpose is not to win the minds of Chinese citizens. There’s little that can be done to counter a lifetime of propaganda, even more so when its citizens obtain most of their information from heavily censored platforms controlled by the CCP. Actually, that's probably the only good justification for banning WeChat. If someone's views were formed by propaganda, when you disconnect them from their reinforcement, they'll probably at least mellow with time. The point to point communications features of WeChat can mostly be replaced, but less so with the social media aspects. IIRC, the CCP spends considerable effort trying to maintain influence over the Chinese diaspora (for instance, by getting control of foreign Chinese-language newspapers), though this effort pales in comparison to their domestic efforts.

_hzw 6y ago

> The day that Apple removes Wechat from appstore is the day they sell their last iPhone in China. You can't live in China without it, simple as that. It essentially replaces phone numbers. No. I will just buy iPhones for my parents and start using iMessage. I simply cannot wait to see WeChat got banned in Europe. Disclaimer: a Chinese living in Germany.

Aperocky 6y ago
And your parent doesn't need to communicate to anybody else in China..
- _hzw 6y ago
  They are Android users now, nothing stops them continue using WeChat on Android to communicate with other Android users. They just have a (better) way to communicate with their son without WeChat.
YarickR2 6y ago
Nothing is stopping you now from doing this without WeChat being banned
- _hzw 6y ago
  You are right. But it's just too much trouble to force the olds to change anything if you don't have a good enough reason. It's very difficult to say something like this and has an effect: "Mom and Dad, there's much cooler and securer chat app out there, let's try it out." They will just say WeChat is good enough and they don't care about privacy because they don't anything to hide. But it'd be much easier to ask them like this: "Mom and Dad, those asshole Americans and Europeans and Australians banned WeChat and I can't reach out to you anymore, can we please switch to that much cooler and securer chat app?" This will likely work. But to friends I am not so nice. I force them to communicate with me either through iMessage or email (or Telegram, but it's banned in China). Some friends switch to iPhone and we still keep in touch (but probably not solely because of me), and others didn't and we lose touch ever since. It's just a choice we all have to make at some point.

nafizh 6y ago

The responsibility of the US government is not to placate any citizen from another country, it's to protect its own citizens' data. Any Chinese app being used in your own country at a massive scale is a liability waiting to be (or already) used by the Chinese Govt.

alisonkisk 6y ago
The responsibility of the US government is to its residents, not just its citizens. These includes being an attractive location for foreign visitors with money and labor to spend in US. And also to be member of the world community. Finally many Chinese people with friends in China are citizens.
- montagg 6y ago
  How much would you recommend importing Chinese censorship before it outweighs the benefits you're suggesting here? I'm not saying there's no valid trade-off there, but catering to the needs you're describing does have a cost.
- Fellshard 6y ago
  'A member of the world community' in the same way that China is 'a member of the world community'? Let's be clear: the Chinese government is going to cause its citizens great pain because it performs this information manipulation with its own technology. It is at fault if other countries take steps to protect the world from the CCP's actions, not the nations taking those steps. Don't victim-blame either the other countries or the Chinese people, both of who are harmed by the CCP's actions.
  - Aperocky 6y ago
    Same way that Iraqi was freed from Saddam, it's all his governments fault for having weapons of mass destruction. Speaking of information manipulation, just because people have the freedom to access all information, doesn't mean they won't be manipulated, you're seeing this happen in front of your very eyes. At least in China people know they're not seeing the full story from the media. They know they can't access certain website because of censorship. In the US people just swallow whatever that they happen to see and believe, the results are comical. In many ways, Chinese people are less manipulated than certain set of people in America. There were genuine anger when Li Wenliang died. But then eventually they realized that shits so much worse elsewhere - meanwhile in the US people still believe that disease China is worse because - manipulation? Or inability to overcome cognitive dissonance.

Causality1 6y ago

If the international students I've met are any indication, trying to win the hearts and minds of Chinese nationals is a lost cause. It's not a problem of information. The problem is they already know what the CCP does and they agree with it on the basis of it being necessary for the good of society.

alisonkisk 6y ago
You are seeing them in their first moments outside of the complete control of the Chinese Communist Party. Deprogramming takes time.
- FooBarWidget 6y ago
  You've got to be kidding me. Why can't they have a genuine opinion of their own? You may not agree with them because you have different values, but that's very different from claiming that their opinions are illegitimate and merely a result of "brainwashing". I find it very strange (understatement) that on the one hand people say they support the Chinese people, but on the other hand when Chinese people have a different opinion, then those Chinese people are dismissed as being brainwashed, a paid shill, spies, etc. Way to dehumanize them.
  - abc-xyz 6y ago
    I’d say being brainwashed is the most generous assumption you could make about someone supporting the CCP.
    - FooBarWidget 6y ago
      Oh, it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that the past 40 years have been the best out of 4000 years, the fact that 800+ million people have been lifted out of poverty, that dirty streets have been transformed to clean ones, that famines have disappeared and everybody has enough to eat, that violent crimes have nearly all disappeared and the streets are safe. I don't say this because I've been fed propaganda, I say this because I saw it with my own eyes. When I grew up, nearly nobody travelled abroad. 15 years before I was born, people couldn't choose what to wear, what work to do, where to live. All of that has changed, and today hundreds of millions of Chinese travel abroad, and they nearly all return voluntarily. Some choose to emigrate, but that number declines every year because China gets nicer every year. Before you accuse me of being brainwashed: the above is corroborated by Kishore Mahbubani, ex-Singapore diplomat, ex-UN Security Council head. Is he brainwashed too? I'd say your opinion is just due to lack of perspective. There are more things that are important than the ability to express political dissent. Freedom from hunger, freedom from being robbed, freedom to get medical care without being bankrupted, freedom to travel. All of these aspects HAVE improved. Of course there are still many problems. But you're judging China through a single dimension only. That's not fair.

llboston 6y ago

Why has Wechat became pretty much the only way the oversea Chinese communicate with their family and friends in China? One of the reasons is, CCP has banned the rest. Probably you might be aware of this https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-people-support-ban-wechat-and-tiktok https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/we-people-support-... Over 100k Chinese American petitioned to ban Wechat and TikTok in the US.

sudosysgen 6y ago
How do you know that the anonymous online petition signers are all Chinese Americans? And for WeChat becoming so ubiquitous, it's a case of network effect. China isn't the outlier, the West is. Try living in South America without Whatsapp.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Whatsapp however does not engage in censorship, something both Tiktok and Wechat have been proven to do.
  - colordrops 6y ago
    That's because Whatsapp doesn't have a feed. You are aware that Facebook and Twitter engage in censorship, aren't you?
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    It can't, it's a direct messaging app. There is no app which has the full functionality of WeChat or Facebook that doesn't have some censorship.
  - chrischen 6y ago
    Actually facebook (Owners of whatsapp) does engage in censorship. They censor nipples, kamallaharris.info website, and certain right wing groups. I think the fact that you are this one-sided in the “censorship” department shows how propagandized you’ve become. Propaganda is everywhere, done by all factions. It’s not just something the communist party does. Every party does it.

ujrvjhtifcvlvvi 6y ago

I don't have to imagine. I'm a Chinese living in US. I use Wechat to video chat with my parents who live in China every week. In the past a couple weeks I have been trying to convince my dad to find a backup plan. Apparently anything owned by Facebook isn't an option. I don't know if Signal is an option but he won't try anyway. Telegram isn't an option. Snap isn't an option. So we went back to good old Skype. Guess what, there isn't Google play store in China. The Huawei app store (my dad uses a Huawei phone) doesn't have Skype in it. He managed to find the Chinese Skype website, operated by a company that isn't Miscrosoft but MS's partner in China, to download the APK, then his Huawei phone rejected to install it, because the APK isn't blessed by some Huawei security thingy. We eventually settled down to use QQ which is also owned by Tencent. He also mentioned we could use this Tencent business meeting app, or that Alibaba business meeting app (dingding), but at that point i rejused. I was quite fed up after he couldn't to install Skepe on his phone. I think MS is one of the US companies that's so willing to bend over to most requests from Chinese gov but they are still treated like crap. If Trump bans QQ as well then I will just call my parents with the good old international telephone call. These Chinese tech co isn't gonna get another weekly active user just like that. I even thought about setting up my own Jitsi server and let them just Jitsi to it, then i thought it must be even harder than installing Skype. VPN isn't an option. Any other way to circumvent the GFW will be too complicated for them. They will all be too low bandwidth to video chat anyway. Plus, illegal. You can find cases where individuals got punished because they use VPN. The government even lists them on a website. They ain't hiding or sugar-coating this crap no more. So after this process, if you ask me, a Chinese living overseas, which side I'm gonna blame for how we got here, guess what, it won't be the US gov. (Also this is from a burner account because I don't want nobody to knock on my parents door for this post.)

Aperocky 6y ago
As a software engineer, I don't think the process you went through is of much use. Unless the US set up a firewall ala China you can still call your parents with the wechat already installed on your phone any time. Also, you probably should buy your dad a computer.. I've never heard of anybody having trouble to install skype on a computer. Since Huawei was blocked from transaction with any US entity, I guess it make sense why Skype doesn't exist on Huawei store? Not by their choice if I have to guess.

sbmthakur 6y ago

Is there any WeChat alternative available in China that supports end-to-end encryption?

_hzw 6y ago
Not that I am aware of. Only alternative is iMessage, but if you enable "Messages in Cloud", your data will be backed-up to "Guizhou-Cloud" and they might or might not be encrypted there.
godelski 6y ago
WeChat alternatives? I don't think there's even any alternatives to that in any form. But for messaging there are still apps that support e2ee that you can use in the mainland.
- angio 6y ago
  > WeChat alternatives? I don't think there's even any alternatives to that in any form. ByteDance (the same company as TikTok) launched feiliao [0, 1] last year to compete with WeChat but I don't think they gained much market share. Also, it obviously has no end to end encryption for chats. [0] https://www.feiliao.com/ https://www.feiliao.com/ [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/19/bytedance-flipchat/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/19/bytedance-flipchat/
  - godelski 6y ago
    Well I guess I'm wrong, although not in a meaningful way. But interesting to know that there's at least one competitor out there.

jariel 6y ago

" if they think this is going to win any minds of wechat user, they're just dead wrong." The US government is not trying to 'win the minds' of wechat users. Also, why would Apple pull it in China? I think you are misunderstanding the motivations for the ban.