17 ms·
Chinese Netizen Fined over 1M Yuan for Using VPN
- lziest 3y agoThe fine is actually 200 yuan, but the salary, over 1 million yuan, which he received while working remotely has been deemed as "illegal income" and subject to confiscation.
- b112 3y agoHaving your income confiscated is very much a "fine".
- mark_up 3y ago[dead]
- npteljes 3y agoNot really. Confiscating the illegal earnings is not part of the punishment, the fine is just the extra part.
- b112 3y agoWhat?! He did the work, likely diligently and with aplomb. He performed excellent work, in exchange for money. And then a third party, the government, who had no part in this, took money from him. No matter how it was assessed, was a fine.
- npteljes 3y agoI disagree. I don't like the their govt rules, and I especially condemn their lack of rule of law and selective enforcement, but the fine is 200, and the rest is the confiscation of illegal earnings. I do wonder where the employer is in this picture. Who are they? Do they not protect their employee? It's well known that VPN and GitHub is banned in China, did they make this netizen use the VPN and the illegal service knowingly? Did the netizen use these knowing it's illegal, or were they misled to believe they have legal access? Was the employee a remote contractor of sorts?
- lziest 3y agoThere is a difference, at least in China. Confiscation of properties can happen immediately while the fine has to be paid later. On the contrary, there was another piece of ridiculous news in China: in year 2022, an old farmer profited 14 yuan in buying (from a neighbour) then selling 35kilo of celery, which were later found to contain exceeding amounts of pesticide. His profit was confiscated, and he was fined 50K yuan! He never paid the fine since he couldn't afford it. The fine was doubled. Eventually the fine was waived when the law enforcement agency sought a property confiscation in lieu of the fine through the courts.
- throwaway290 3y agoLet's not forget about others who got fined a bit more than 200 yuan of course (like dozens of years behind bars https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/student-sentenced-06082023154805.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/uyghur/student-sentenced-06...)
- skilled 3y ago$138,000 USD Also an Archive link because the site timed out for me, http://web.archive.org/web/20231006045251/https://here.news/post/93c46bbd-ea0d-48e2-bba6-135e58887f81/chinese-netizen-fined-over-1-million-yua http://web.archive.org/web/20231006045251/https://here.news/...
- janalsncm 3y agoWell it’s around 3 years of his earnings which is probably a more meaningful csbenchmark.
- _hypx_ 3y agoThere's no possibility of China having a competitive tech industry with these kinds of restrictions.
- Barrin92 3y agoChina has literally already built the second largest tech sector on the planet on restrictions like this
- eru 3y agoChina has a thriving hardware industry. Partially built on not enforcing restrictions. The rest of their tech sector is so-so. They do have a big internal market and a population eager for technology. It would be interesting to tease apart how much the restrictions hinder in some places, and perhaps help in a few others.
- makeitdouble 3y agoI kinda wonder how do you evaluate a thriving software economy in China's case. A bit like Japan, I feel they're not going straight at the OS vendors (Microsoft/Apple) as these will bend over backward to accomadate them anyway, and in every area they've been actively blocked they made their own rival version (e.g. cloud services) Is there anything we can point at to say "Chinese don't have the skills to do it" ?
- whatshisface 3y agoHow anyone can look at over a billion unique people and say "Chinese this" or "Chinese that" is as far beyond me as anything.
- makeitdouble 3y agoI think I'd take a "Ethiopians can't build an AWS rival", even if Ethiopians are unique and intelligent. But that wouldn't be true for China (don't know market sizes, but I'd assume Tencent's cloud offering for instance is somewhat viable ?)
- rado 3y agoYet various government agencies sidestep the GFW and use banned social media. Bizarre
- hker 3y agoTo name a few: Chinese Foreign Ministry https://twitter.com/foreignchinese?lang=en https://twitter.com/foreignchinese?lang=en Xi's Moments (official news of Xi Jinping and China) https://twitter.com/XisMoments https://twitter.com/XisMoments
- lvturner 3y agoFrom the article: "One Twitter user raises an important perspective on the incident, highlighting that there are legitimate pathways with private VPNs, including obtaining internet access permits and operating licenses, for information to flow from terminals to networks."
- jgilias 3y agoTo get out of the prison you just need to fill in this form and hand it to the guards who’ll then approve or reject it at their discretion.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoMicrosoft China has its own line into and out of China via China telecom that isn’t through the GFW, all legal and they wouldn’t be able to do anything in China otherwise. I’m sure lots of foreign companies have similar arrangements.
- humanlity 3y agoThe price is overheight, not suit for a small business
- csomar 3y agoIt's important to keep into perspective that China is a 1.4Bn people's country and highly decentralized (much to the chagrin of the pro-US). This happened under the "Chengde" administration. There might be many reasons for this: Chengde is over-zealous, The police has a particular issue with a particular individual, the central state wants some examples, the local state wants to show its toughness on VPN, the local state needs some tax money and is pillaging, etc..
- notimetorelax 3y agoThanks, but I feel that you didn’t finish your thought. Why is that important to consider it in this context?
- aydyn 3y agoIt sounds like he's saying this is not an abuse of the central government, but by a local one. I doubt VPNs are illegal in China in general.
- fastball 3y agoI think they are, no? Otherwise the Great Firewall is kinda pointless.
- winrid 3y agoThe firewall also blocks popular VPNs. I got NordVPN before I went and it did not work. My backup VPN on a linode worked - but they would cut it after a bit.
- pca006132 3y ago> I doubt VPNs are illegal in China in general. This is a gray area. While people said that the law is only about illegal physical network gateways, in reality the government did sentence people providing VPN services. I think the point they want to make is that even if this is illegal, the penalty in this case is kind of ridiculous.
- hker 3y agoSome context which may be relevant: many local governments in China are in heavy debt, and they need more income: police have been collecting more and more fines, causing some outrages [1]. There are reports that many civil servants are unpaid for months (in Tianjin [2] and other cities [3][4]), in addition to getting heavy wage cuts [3][5]. A penalty of over 1 million yuan (>145K USD) for using VPN is a new development: before this, only VPN service sellers were prosecuted. [1]: Law-enforcement agencies have been imposing larger and more frequent fines for offenses: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-local-governments-are-so-cash-strapped-they-use-police-to-raise-revenue-30c4fcaf https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-local-governments-are... "China’s Police Are the New Earners for Cash-Strapped Governments" [2]: https://eightify.app/summary/chess/tianjin-government-crisis-unpaid-salaries-and-impending-bankruptcy https://eightify.app/summary/chess/tianjin-government-crisis... "The Tianjin government's financial crisis, with unpaid wages and high debt ratios, reflects a larger problem in China's declining land finance and unsaleable real estate market, raising concerns about the stability of other Chinese cities." [3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=242pUa9rXgg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=242pUa9rXgg "Civil Servants go unpaid and Local Government Borrowed From Temples/Protests surge in China" [4]: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wages-09082023112323.html https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wages-09082023112323.... "Chinese local governments struggle to pay civil servants' wages" [5]: The government is trimming a combination of bonuses, cash subsidies and base pay for many employees, according to interviews with 10 local civil servants: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-12/pay-cuts-in-finance-tech-threaten-xi-s-campaign-to-revive-china-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-12/pay-cuts-... "Bankers’ 40% Pay Cuts Show the China Dream Fading in Its Richest Cities"
- ithkuil 3y agoIndeed the fine was only 200 yuan in this case
- throwaway4good 3y agoSo this is because local authorities are short on money? Surely there would be more money in fining people for jaywalking or driving without a bicycle helmet?
- throwaway4good 3y agoI don't actually understand the Chinese rules on uncensored internet access. When I travel to China with a mobile phone subscription that supports roaming, I get completely uncensored access to the internet. Surely this is according to Chinese rules. Likewise all the expats and Chinese I have met all used whatever they wanted of US social media plus they had a shit ton of pirated(?) American TV shows and movies. Perhap the policies are changing? I don't know but this particular case sounds like a very modest fine (200 yuan) for using a VPN and sizeable fine for not reporting (and being taxed on) a foreign income.
- pca006132 3y ago> I don't know but this particular case sounds like a very modest fine (200 yuan) for using a VPN and sizeable fine for not reporting (and being taxed on) a foreign income. I read this kind of comments in mainland's internet forums as well. People opposing this theory said that it should be the national tax authority handling this, not a local police department. Considering the local government did something crazy previously as well (collect fees from local corporations by threatening them), this seems like a problem with the local government instead of a nation-wide thing.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoTaxes in China are collected locally. There is no IRS in China, each city (or province? I’ve never worked in a province before) will collect income taxes and then send off a large portion to the central government. Since the central government usually has a huge take on income taxes and VAT, localities are often very starved for funding (they used to make most of their budget via land transfer and development fees).
- aragonite 3y agoMy understanding is that there's is an entirely legal official channel. All the tech companies use that to access GitHub, for example. Likewise for some universities and hotels. It's an important detail that this guy is using VPN to work from home, not at work for a company.
- 3y ago
- decremental 3y ago[dead]
- mherrmann 3y ago1M Yuan is roughly 137,000 USD.
- bjornsing 3y agoWhere I live (Sweden) it’s legal to use GitHub (with or without a VPN). But if I fail to report 138000 USD in earnings I’d still be in for a world of hurt: First the tax authority would take about 100000-200000 USD from me. Then I’d be prosecuted for tax fraud. Nobody would be upset or come to my defense. Not saying I prefer the Chinese system, but it’s interesting that in this specific case it’s probably more lenient. EDIT: But I guess this guy didn’t have the option to report the income and pay his taxes? In that case it’s definitely another dimension of repression…
- raverbashing 3y ago> But if I fail to report 138000 USD in earnings I’d still be in for a world of hurt: First the tax authority would take about 100000-200000 USD from me. Then I’d be prosecuted for tax fraud And where in the world do you think this would not be the case? (except maybe in 3rd world countries with bribable authorities) (such a fine of 100k is probably on the higher end for most places though)
- throwaway10507 3y agoIn most of EU, the tax authority first asks you nicely to fix your mistake, and only if you don't, they confiscate the owed amount plus a small fine (given that it's your first offense and they don't see it as intentional fraud). I used to have my life in serious disorder and they confiscated the owed tax three times from me. Never got fined more than $100, though I had to call and apologize the second and third time to have it reduced from ~$500.
- raverbashing 3y agoYeah, you're paying the tax owed, not much way around that unless you have allowed deductions or something else But the higher fines/criminal charge are usually for very, very egregious failures to pay
- jolmg 3y ago> And where in the world do you think this would not be the case? I think their point is precisely that this Chinese case might be more similar rather than different to the rest of the world. > (such a fine of 100k is probably on the higher end for most places though) In neither the Chinese case nor on the Swedish case does it seem to be a fine. It's rather a confiscation of illegal earnings, which is then followed by an actual fine.
- hknmtt 3y agoI will never understand China or Chinese people.
- washadjeffmad 3y agoI feel the same about HN, sometimes.
- Simulacra 3y agoChina is not a country anyone should be doing business with, let alone visiting. The level of human rights abuses and the potential for extra judicial actions make it far too dangerous.