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Note: this refers to the global Steam service/community - Valve still offers Steam China with a very limited/censored selection of mostly-Valve games, adhering

• foverzar 5y ago
  I really love how we all have an impression of China as a country without access to global internet, but then there are things like "Most Chinese Steam users have historically been using the global service instead". Really makes you want to visit and see how this actually works for yourself. The more I read about China, the more unbelievably contradictive it gets.
  • blahgeek 5y ago
    It’s not true that chinese don’t has “access to global internet”. Many sites are blocked (including most top sites), but still it’s a blacklist instead of a whitelist
    • mrjin 5y ago
      I thought so too until one day I suddenly found myself was able to access google.com etc. without any issue for days until I search some sensitive keywords when I was in mainland China. So the blocking seems to be heuristic instead of a blacklist. And also it seems GFW is able to filter SSL contents as I have always been using HTTPS if I can.
      • whimsicalism 5y ago
        The GFW is not a monolith, it seems to differ depending on where you are. I think ISPs implement it differently. The Beijing ones were the most sophisticated
  • flohofwoe 5y ago
    IME the Great Firewall doesn't outright block global traffic apart from some selected services, but makes them so unreliable and slow that it's almost impossible to directly connect and use services from the other side (think 'analog modem speed'), companies (maybe just IT companies, not sure) can get an exemption (they need to connect to github after all), but even then it's not very reliable. If Steam had a working 'global service' then it almost certainly used local datacenters as proxy. But AFAIK PC gaming is pretty much seen as a niche for computer nerds though (apart from E-Sports), gaming mostly happens on mobile phones.
    • baybal2 5y ago
      There are no such exemptions, and I don't know from where did this idea came
      • newhouseb 5y ago
        I worked in Beijing at Microsoft Research in 2008 and at the time they had a fiber link to Japan that was completely uncensored and the fastest internet I had ever used at the time. Perhaps this is no longer allowed but it certainly used to exist.
        • baybal2 5y ago
          We were buying exactly same "direct physical link" to HK. It came not to be such. We connected a fibre tester, and nothing was coming out on hk side. We tried connecting to google.com, and to our surprise this "physical" link was also censored. Then the cableman basically says, use this link, and VPN over it. The speed was quite good still.
      • flohofwoe 5y ago
        I worked multiple times for a few weeks at a game development company in Shanghai in 2017 which definitely had a GFW bypass in place, and it was explained to me that companies can obtain a "license" to legally do this. How much of this is true, I don't know, but I could access the global internet at full speed (minus some occasional hickups) from within the company network, but not elsewhere.
  • qybaz 5y ago
    You should be sceptical of all the news about China that come from the West.
    • ChemSpider 5y ago
      Why? It matches exactly my experience while being in China.
      • manuelabeledo 5y ago
        Same here. And lately I’m getting the feeling that people systematically “distrusting” western media takes on China, would just take Chinese media at face value.
      • oreally 5y ago
        Because china is the rising power to US dominance, and both sides will discredit each other from time to time. Also western journalist orgs have an incentive to paint an unflavourable picture while getting non of the blowback. Also, keep in mind yours is but one experience out of many.
        • foepys 5y ago
          China has no free press. Literally none. Hongkong's free press was obliterated shortly after China broke the treaties they had with the UK about keeping Hongkong independent. Try traveling to the areas where Uigurs are being detained to look for yourself if China is lying. You can't and so can't journalists or independent observers. Why is that? Saying that both are bad and so nobody can be blamed is a bad faith argument.
          • oreally 5y ago
            Not what I'm saying. Blame both sides but this is just tit for tat behaviour that happens especially when one side deems the punishments unfair. You are never going to solve anything in that manner.
    • 5y ago
  • manuelabeledo 5y ago
    It is indeed a country full of contradictions. I was there in 2016, and besides the usual, like Google, Netflix, Facebook or Twitter, most western sites seemed to work, just very, very slow for some reason. Also, some high end hotels did provide unfettered access to the Internet for some reason, so I guess anyone could go there and browse Facebook for the price of an expensive coffee.
    • qybaz 5y ago
      >Also, some high end hotels did provide unfettered access to the Internet for some reason, so I guess anyone could go there and browse Facebook for the price of an expensive coffee. Practically everybody who is knowledgeable with computers uses a VPN - restrictions are only for "the plebs"
      • nothis 5y ago
        Whenever I read about countries banning sites, people post "just use a VPN, lol". But I wonder: If China really wants to, couldn't they just block VPNs? At the worst, just whitelist a bunch of sites and services and literally block everything else?
        • flohofwoe 5y ago
          Technically, VPN apps are banned, and VPN usage by individuals is illegal in China. Don't know how much this is enforced though, probably not much.
        • netheril96 5y ago
          The GFW is evolving. Many VPN protocols or servers that worked in the past works no longer. It’s definitely not as simple as “just run a VPN”, but more like a cat and mouse game.
        • RealityVoid 5y ago
          I think this would make unworkable way too many things. Is it even the internet at that point?
  • idxoutofbounds 5y ago
    There's a small minority of college educated youth that speak english and are able to use VPNs to bypass GFW.
    • flohofwoe 5y ago
      I might be wrong, or it may changed in the meantime, but I had the impression that VPN traffic is also slowed down extremely. While it allows you to connect to any foreign service, it's so slow as to be nearly useless. I only tried VPN services that were located outside China though. Maybe there are Chinese VPN services which have a 'fast route' to the outside world (I'd be very surprised if this is legal though).
      • ChemSpider 5y ago
        > VPN traffic is also slowed down extremely. Exactly that. It took me >30 minutes just load my emails - if I found a spot where the VPN would connect at all. Basically I needed two coffees. One for the time to load the email, and the 2nd coffee to wait while my repliess were sending. At the same time, access to Chinese websites was super-fast.
      • mrjin 5y ago
        It depends on how your VPN services are hosted. I actually tried to host VPN myself on google app engine and the first time lasted a day or so before it was blocked. The second time lasted 1 hour or so. The I changed the strategy to create a VM in azure and it was never blocked for years, the only down time was M$ trying to save me some credit by automatically shutting it down as the load of the VM had always been almost 0%.
      • netheril96 5y ago
        Wrong protocol. If GFW suspects that you are trying to bypass it without confidence, it slows you down instead.
      • whimsicalism 5y ago
        Only if the GFW identifies you as likely VPN traffic do they throttle. I used Googles VPN service thingy and kept switching hosts everytime it slowed.
  • alisonatwork 5y ago
    I don't know who "we all" is who has the impression that China doesn't have access to the global internet. There must be thousands of people on this website alone who have either lived in China in the past or still do now who regularly comment and show that not to be the case. There are plenty of articles in the mainstream western media that discuss exactly how censorship and surveillance works in the country. Steam is one of the few popular international services that escaped getting blocked by the Great Firewall, despite hosting content that the Chinese government ostensibly considers illegal or inappropriate. There have been a lot of articles about how Chinese indie game developers were using Steam as a loophole to sell their games without getting the official government approval to sell games inside China. It's never been clear why Steam was an exception to the blocks, but that's par for the course. The government never explains to the people why something gets blocked, sites just suddenly stop working from one day to the next and the people are expected to accept it and move on. The internet blocks are set up by the internet providers in the country, so somebody must know what's going on, but - like many things that happen in China - the people just need to guess the reasoning by reading between the lines of impenetrable Party literature or relying on supposedly independent editorials in the tabloid newspapers. So nobody knows for sure, but people have deduced that there are several reasons that the government blocks websites. One is as a "punishment" for a foreign company, because that company published content that insulted or offended some officials in the government. Another is if the foreign company is specifically and deliberately producing content aimed at Chinese-speakers that discusses topics the Chinese government does not want Chinese people to discuss freely (June 4/Tiananmen massacre, Hong Kong autonomy, alternative governing models that do not include the the Party at the core etc). Another one might be if the foreign company refuses to allow the Chinese government to install their surveillance hooks. But I think perhaps more relevant to the case of Steam is economic protectionism - the Chinese government tends to block foreign services that could compete with Chinese companies, so that Chinese companies can become dominant in the space. The thing with Steam is that there wasn't really a local alternative with a wide enough catalog of games that it would please the middle class/educated/moneyed gamer in the country, so that's probably why Steam was quietly allowed to continue for so long. A few years ago Valve announced a partnership with Perfect World (local media company) to produce a Chinese version of Steam, but for whatever reason it took ages to come out. Now that it is out, and presumably up and running (I don't know since I don't live in China any more), the government has no incentive to allow people to buy from the international version, so that is probably why it now got blocked. As usual, Chinese government only block in one direction - every day, every month, every year there are more and more things blocked. Eventually even though technically people in China are still able to visit most of the internet outside of China, the sites that are the most popular in China will all be owned by Chinese companies (or partnerships) and exist completely inside the monitoring and self-censorship bubble of the Chinese cultural sphere. So it's not like people in China don't have the opportunity to see other content, it's just that those other sources are very far outside the mainstream and not frequently accessed by the average person. If it did become popular, that's when the government would make a move.
  • legofr 5y ago
    I'm personally opposed to the idea of visiting certain countries, such as China and North Korea, to 'see for yourself', especially when you don't know the language, when you're not willing to risk your life to understand and uncover the parts the government doesn't want you to see, like VICE did in Xinjiang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ That being said, if you go then please try to walk into a random hotel/apartment you see on the street to try to book a room.. then you'll discover that 9/10 hotels/apartments won't allow foreigners to live there. I lived in China for more than a year before I realized this was the case, and I have on multiple occasions even been kicked out of friends/partners apartment because someone told the landlord there was a foreigner in the building (or maybe they saw through the surveillance camera).
    • RealityVoid 5y ago
      I am surprised at what you say regarding the hosting of foreigners. My girlfriend was there for a couple of months and she didn't notice any such thing, and she actually rented a place with a couple of friends, also foreigners. Is this what you describe because of racism or because of government?
      • arvigeus 5y ago
        Depends on where she lived. Beijing, Shanghai and other first tier cities are ok for foreigners. The further away you get, the more blurry situation gets.
        • whimsicalism 5y ago
          • mlindner 5y ago
            What? The US doesn't require anyone to register with the local government when traveling, foreigner or US citizen. Where are you getting this kind of misinformation?
  • trasz 5y ago
    There’s no contradiction if you understand that all those bans are on companies, not users. People just use VPN, like they did anyway, but for companies it means they have to comply with Chinese law to make money there.
  • NamTaf 5y ago
    As other posts have said, the GFW isn’t just a whole heap of blocked IPs. There’s some of that (Google, FB, etc.), but a lot more of it is DPI and other inspection techniques that also have the effect of slowing overseas data to a crawl. In that sense it is quite sophisticated. I remember getting 300KB/sec at the best of times to overseas sites. VPNs didn’t really make a difference for speed (I believe I had poor routing on top of that), but I could use WG and SS to maintain access to blocked content for weeks on end. The end result is that internet users are corralled into domestic services where the CCP can flex its power. If anything overseas continues to be too anti-government then it cops a more concrete block. As also mentioned, the educated class might get VPN access but Joe Bloggs on the street won’t know how to. Also, it’s hard to get a VPN from within China, but once set up with one you can relatively easily keep using it.
    • jfoster 5y ago
      How does DPI work on encrypted traffic? Most of the web uses HTTPS now. Are they able to decrypt most of that?
      • blahgeek 5y ago
        No they don't. But they are able to classify the encrypted traffic (e.g. if it's used as VPN)
      • Syonyk 5y ago
        SNI often allows you to discern the domain being accessed, and depending on how well you know that domain, the nature of the traffic flows can unwrap a lot more than most people would really like (timing and sizes of requests/responses - even wrapped with https, the size of a GET vs POST uploading data are pretty obvious). The GF doesn't care about 100% accuracy either. They won't always perfectly ban stuff. But they will hinder it often enough to make some "banned" service effectively useless inside China.
  • bnralt 5y ago
    I think visiting and seeing the country for yourself is a good idea. I have a lot of experience with the country (lived there, keep in contact with many friends from there, consume a lot of TV and podcasts from there), and the picture of it usually painted by Hacker News comments is completely different from what I've experienced. I usually avoid the topic here, though, because heterodox opinions often are met with hostility or accusations of being propaganda. In general, when it comes to other countries, I think visiting them when possible and talking with the people there when you can is often eye-opening and can reveal personal biases you didn't realize you had. To give another example, speaking with people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc made me realize that many of the assumptions I had (adopted from the traditional "common sense" American narrative) were overly simplistic or just plain wrong.
    • chunghuaming 5y ago
      I doubt you're getting the accurate picture still > lived there China is fast devolving into dicatorship's way of life. 2+ years away is along time. > keep in contact with many friends Those friends are afraid to say anything negative to a foreigner living outside the guo on a platform closely watched by the government > consume a lot of TV and podcasts from there Government approved safe and patriotic contents You have to be a native citizen who is living there 10+ years to understand
  • myrandomcomment 5y ago
    I have been there more then once. Most of the web outside of China is blocked. The government actively blocks VPNs and any long lived connections (more then a few minutes) that cannot be identified is dropped. Not sure why that is so hard to understand.
  • mcculley 5y ago
    I have been studying Mandarin and reading about China for years. I suspect that China is so big and diverse that the average Chinese person cannot speak generally about China. I wouldn’t expect someone who has only lived in Alabama to be able to describe America generally. Yet we fall into that trap often with other cultures.
    • ashwagary 5y ago
      Do you think this problem is 4 times worse in China because of the population size.?
      • mcculley 5y ago
        I think it probably is, but I don't really know. I don't know how different various parts of China can be versus how uniform modern communication and travel can make them.
  • codeddesign 5y ago
    Who would think that China doesn’t have internet?? They aren’t North Korea. Even Cuba where it’s literally banned has internet.
  • seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    > Really makes you want to visit and see how this actually works for yourself. The more I read about China, the more unbelievably contradictive it gets. It’s not really weird: most Chinese prefer the best choices possible, and if it isn’t blocked (and often even it is) they will use the service if t has more than a watered down local version. The government blocks internet global services via the great firewall because otherwise they would get used in China (and also makes jumping the wall annoying because otherwise more people would jump it).
  • xedrac 5y ago
    I was in China for about a month, up until a couple weeks before the covid outbreak started. The internet was so locked down I could hardly do anything. Thankfully I had set up my laptop and home server with Wireguard, so I was able to route everything through my home server back in the US. Interestingly, the factory I was in had a room with a "special" connection to the internet, which apparently wasn't nearly as locked down (but probably monitored heavily). This was so they could do things like video calls with businesses outside the country. I don't know if this is representative of China in general, but it was certainly oppressive.
• sebow 5y ago
  Ok, this makes much more sense than the click-baity title, i already knew that to a degree.They'll probably never ban steam because it doesn't make sense, even if you are "PRC"
• chunghuaming 5y ago
  As an average Chinese citizen right now: - You cannot travel abroad (no passport issued for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad) - You cannot go beyond China's intranet legally (VPN is technically illegal in China). VPN services keep getting slowed/banned. - You cannot transfer much money out of country legally (50k limit a year, but you end up going to bank 10+ times just to be able to transfer 10k) - You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally - You have very little rights as LGBT - You have to work 9-9-6. Which is why many citizens are lying flat (not working/pursuing marriage) - You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list - You should not get rich (1/3 of billionaires have died or disappeared). The state discourages showing off wealth - You have little recourse as a woman who is abused by men in power - You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold - Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship 终究怀揣的不安，是愈来愈近的丧钟声
  • Aperocky 5y ago
    > You have to work 9-9-6. Which is why many citizens are lying flat (not working/pursuing marriage) None of the government/public workers are working that schedule. Or someone who finds a job in the private companies who aren't insane. > You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold. Speaking from anecdotal experience, my parent has been subjugated to none in 2021 because they were not living in an affected location. Mass covid testing are only carried out where there are outbreaks. > You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list Might apply to your personal case? I don't know even one person who are constantly invited to police station for tea, despite having hundreds of friends in China. > You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally Except that everyone does, and I'm not aware of any prosecutions. Also, Spiderman, BTS, squid game does not even touch laws, they just haven't been screened in cinemas, you can still get them from different sources (which often means piracy in China). > Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship We'll see then. The rhetoric have been around for decades. Some of what you said is true to a degree, but you are painting it in a very biased fashion. China has a lot of flaws, but what you said certainly does not apply to an 'average' Chinese citizen. In fact, all of these combined are almost impossible to happen to a single Chinese citizen, average or not.
• teeray 5y ago
  This also does not refer to the gaseous form of water, which was my first impression reading the headline