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More and more I feel like this is pure protectionism and not internal security or censorship. The Chinese government already has a vice-like grip on the intern

More and more I feel like this is pure protectionism and not internal security or censorship. The Chinese government already has a vice-like grip on the internet and has no qualms about locking up dissidents. We know from the Harvard social network study that they really only care about activism and not criticism. Most of the population has been through the Chinese education system and they are generally speaking apathetic and passive when it comes to politics or the possibility of change. And, don't forget, just like most Western netizens, users are mostly interested in non-political aspects of the web - chatting to friends, getting work done, watching movies online.... The only sense for this blanket ban/slowdown/disruption of big foreign online services seems to be to shelter Chinese companies from foreign competition.

k_sze 12y ago
That does seem to be the case. This July I travelled to the Hubei and Jiangsu provinces. I couldn't get on Gmail or Dropbox without going through Tor. But I had no problem opening the zh.wikipedia.org (the Wikipedia in Chinese), which has content that the Party decidedly would not like to see, such as the account of the Tiananmen events. And I could do that with HTTP or HTTPS, without VPN or Tor. I'm guessing they don't block Wikipedia because nobody in the population really cares anymore, and Baidu is not making enough money out of Baidu Baike (Baidu's online encyclopedia) for it to matter.
- 1stop 12y ago
  Or perhaps they just edit the chinese version of the wikipedia article to be more sympathetic. It's not like chinese don't know that tiananmen square happened. They just (generally) don't believe it was wrong. Also studying the event, it's pretty grey in general. The west's portrayal of it is not without bias.
  - k_sze 12y ago
    "They just (generally) don't believe it was wrong." That's not exactly true. The deeper issue is that the Party wants the people to forget the incidence or make it look trivial and insignificant, so that any discussion about right or wrong does not even surface. In fact, there isn't much that the Party needs to do about it nowadays. The population is literally drowned in entertainment, amusing themselves to death, which is part of the reason the government can start to repurpose the GFW towards protectionism.
- westiseast 12y ago
  yeah - blogs, the UK tax website, news websites (when they aren't intentionally blocked like nytimes) are mostly fast to load, reliable etc. Tech services, especially highly networked/connected services like document sharing, emails, social networks, tend to be slow, intermittent and difficult.

k_sze 12y ago

That does seem to be the case. This July I travelled to the Hubei and Jiangsu provinces. I couldn't get on Gmail or Dropbox without going through Tor. But I had no problem opening the zh.wikipedia.org (the Wikipedia in Chinese), which has content that the Party decidedly would not like to see, such as the account of the Tiananmen events. And I could do that with HTTP or HTTPS, without VPN or Tor. I'm guessing they don't block Wikipedia because nobody in the population really cares anymore, and Baidu is not making enough money out of Baidu Baike (Baidu's online encyclopedia) for it to matter.

1stop 12y ago
Or perhaps they just edit the chinese version of the wikipedia article to be more sympathetic. It's not like chinese don't know that tiananmen square happened. They just (generally) don't believe it was wrong. Also studying the event, it's pretty grey in general. The west's portrayal of it is not without bias.
- k_sze 12y ago
  "They just (generally) don't believe it was wrong." That's not exactly true. The deeper issue is that the Party wants the people to forget the incidence or make it look trivial and insignificant, so that any discussion about right or wrong does not even surface. In fact, there isn't much that the Party needs to do about it nowadays. The population is literally drowned in entertainment, amusing themselves to death, which is part of the reason the government can start to repurpose the GFW towards protectionism.
westiseast 12y ago
yeah - blogs, the UK tax website, news websites (when they aren't intentionally blocked like nytimes) are mostly fast to load, reliable etc. Tech services, especially highly networked/connected services like document sharing, emails, social networks, tend to be slow, intermittent and difficult.