That isn’t accurate, the CPC (let’s use the correct acronym at least, even if the word order is different in Chinese) doesn’t dictate, they just tell the private companies “don’t allow anything that will make us mad”, and they then have to enforce rules that aren’t dictated, but are left intentionally very vague.
The internet companies would of course be in a much better place if the government just did all the filtering for them. Unfortunately they don’t get off that easily. The GFW is another matter altogether: the government simply maintains a list of what to block that all ISPs (most state owned) plug into.
> That isn’t accurate, the CPC (let’s use the correct acronym at least, even if the word order is different in Chinese)
No thank you. The English web is still wholey organized around the term CCP. I'm not going to switch my terminology because the party wants me to, no matter how nicely they ask.
> doesn’t dictate, they just tell the private companies “don’t allow anything that will make us mad”,
You are aware of the definition of dictate correct? So, you can see how that is what that is, no? Vague, sure, but that's still a command, and still carries legal consequences if you do it wrong. Just because Xi doesn't feel the need to create a formal list everytime a new meme pops up doesn't make it less of dictation.
> The internet companies would of course be in a much better place if the government just did all the filtering for them
Cost savings for the party I suppose.
> the government simply maintains a list of what to block that all ISPs (most state owned) plug into.
Wait, I thought it was vague? Sounds like it's absolute, just ever changing. That's not what vague means.
> it isn't CPC driven (rather, private companies are supposed to self censor
The CCP dictates what gets filtered, so not sure what you mean by them not 'driving' it. Are you saying that because they don't own the hardware? If so, that's rather pedantic, given that the party has effectively unlimited power to dictate how any given resource is used, and is doing so in this case.
> The Great Firewall specifically is package filtering technology installed at ISPs with out-of-china links.
If this were an academic conversation about what the word means, or where it originated, then yeah, I get you. However, I was pointing out what the term has come to mean colloquially and why. If you generally have a gripe about the confusing overload of the term, then your argument should focus on potential confusion.
> China can't use it against internal traffic because it would basically shut the internet down completely in the entire country (given its slow performance).
Edit: I misread your last paragraph.
There s ample evidence the CCP deploys the same type of filtering internally, I don't think it being potentially different hardware or methods is anything more than technical detail is the outcome if the same.
> We believe, as do many people as far as I have seen, that if a country like China could block the entire world of Internet, they would.
I don't feel this is a correct belief. China is a secular nation state, not a religious cult. They don't block parts of internet out of ideology, but for political and economical reasons. Cutting off the Internet, even if within realm of possibility for them, doesn't make economical or political sense.
> You want the people in China consuming more and not less of it.
Want all you wish, the Chinese government is actively stopping and blocking the outside internet at an alarming rate. I was in Beijing a few weeks ago and couldn't load google, youtube, gmail, gmaps, instangram, facebook, twitter, various chatting apps, imgur, and on and on. Even using VPNs were difficult. I don't see this stopping anytime soon since it allows 1) control of the people and 2) growth from copying a western products and forcing the people inside the firewall to use the Chinese cloned version.
> Another way to make censorship impossible: Ask all governmental, educational and technological websites to provide VPN services or links to other VPN services. If China wants to implement censorship, it has to ban all these websites that are essential for its economic development.
Censorship is always possible. You can make it more expensive, but the censoring regime could just decide to bear the cost.
The PRC government may decide that China has developed enough that they no longer need to provide any access to the worldwide internet to their general population. They could switch the Great Firewall to default-deny mode, and only whitelist the minimum number of services they need to keep their economy running. I think that list is much smaller than a lot of people would assume, given the domestic coercive power of the Chinese state and willingness of foreign businesses to bend to its rules.
>Newbie question but what is China's rationale for their internet censorship and firewall? What are they afraid of?
Aside from the CCP wanting to maintain its control in-land, there's this little real issue, that 80% the internet is mostly controlled from a handful of companies, all in the hands of foreign nationals (who are all "patriotic" and all reside in countries other than China).
That is, things like search, social media, etc services are not a neutral international ground, but mostly dominated by a single country's companies. Those foreign countries get to siphon the data, dictate what's acceptable, promote their culture, viewpoints and national interests 24/7, censor or bury what they don't like, etc.
So, while lesser countries might bend over and take it, it makes sense for a country that is a superpower in itself, and has billions of people, to take control of its own web and have its own search, social media, etc -- orthogonally to if they censor them or not.
Ask yourselves: if Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft where e.g. Russian or Chinese, would the US (as a state and as citizens) be using them them all the same?
> Let china continue to block mostly everything except theirs
But that's not what's happening. China just makes laws that require vendors to comply with censorship. You know, Germany does the same, only on different topics. Google and others have then decided not to do business in China, they weren't blocked.
The trade problem with China isn't about blocking companies, it's about state subsidies that China gives to key industries that are perceived as unfair.
> As to why CCP is blocking the internet? Because, the blocked sites contains values that is not really about freedom or human rights, instead that is like virus, that will do harm to our values and the interest our the Chinese people.
Who defines what is in the best interest for the Chinese people?
>...it is foreseeable that the protectionism by Internet censorship will be abolished after Baidu, Youku, Sina Weibo, and Renren mature enough.
No, it really isn't. This was an interesting read right up to this part of the conclusion, then they blew it.
Yes of course China's strict censorship of foreign services creates an opportunity fir domestic rival services, but the censorship came first and takes primacy over commercial considerations both for internal services and external ones. The Chinese government sees pervasive control of society as a primary political objective and their grip on the domestic internet gives them that. Every firm of internet communication is scanned, filtered and traced. All the major message broadcast services, equivalents of e.g. Twitter and Facebook, are astroturfed with pro-government propaganda. This is not going to stop just so that a few Chinese internet companies might possibly have a Chance of making a bit of money overseas. To think that's possible is astoundingly naive.
Anyway, why would they have to? They could just partition their foreign services to not include domestic filters.
> We should absolutely ban it, the same way China bans Instagram, Facebook, Google, etc for the same reasons: national security threat.
China has not banned those. Foreign internet companies can operate in China if they obey the same rules that Chinese internet companies have to obey, such as Chinese censorship requirements and requirements to share data with the government.
Most US internet companies aren't willing to meet those requirements, so don't operate there.
Wow. Talk about being disingenuous. “oh you can vote - you just have to take a literacy test first and show us 5 different types of ID we’re sure you don’t have - it’s just the law”.
“It’s just the rules” - what else could it be? Censorship isn’t this mystical thing the government does - it’s implemented with rules. Sounds like “go back to your country” at company scale.
> 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).
> why does the CCP not simply regulate them using the same rules as is uses for homegrown companies like TikTok?
They do, which is why TikTok is blocked. Only Douyin, a separate content silo with shared codebase, is allowed to operate. Products by American companies like Facebook or Google Search that are now blocked used to censor the content they made available in China, but then stopped.
Other products by American companies, like Microsoft's Bing and Google Ads, continue to censor and continue to operate.
People on the English-speaking internet often seem to think that American companies' difficulties operating in China stem from them being specially and unfairly singled out, but the thing is that Chinese companies operating in China have to fight the same obstacles. And the majority of companies trying to make it big in China are Chinese, so they bear the brunt of the burden.
When a company building a platform for user-generated content gets more users and more content, that would usually be something for them to celebrate, but in China it also means they need to spend more resources censoring content to remove everything that might displease the government.
E.g. HelloTalk, a language-exchange app made by a Chinese company, restricted their Chinese users' accounts in 2020, most likely because some were using the app to talk about censored topics: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/glf14q/wh...
Other Chinese companies abandon the Chinese market completely and focus on the rest of the world while blocking Chinese users from accessing their product so they don't have to fear getting shut down by the government over lacking censorship.
> The government is deeply enmeshed in these tech companies' products, from requiring real verified names to censorship and other draconian policies.
This simply has no factual evidences, let me give you examples:
One claims CCP install party committee in all companies, and those committee controls major personnel appointment, and other critical managerial activities, etc. As we inquired, there is no open report whatsoever about such powerful "committee"...
The person then gave a link of a old USSR organization [2]. For all we know CCP is about as different than USSR than US is to USSR...
As for the Chinese internet law [3], does not apply to company like TikTok, which explicitly does not allow mainlander to join the network. See [4], "Important: TikTok checks your cell’s SIM card at startup and if you are using a Chinese SIM it will block the access."; there is no way the company voluntarily to bend to a law that it has no obligation to comply...
> As someone living blissfully unaware of the struggles people go through in countries with rampant government censorship
Where do you live? Because I know of no major country without rampant government censorship.
> They want to make sure they have someone by the balls. It's either you personally, or someone willing to step up and take the risk of jailtime on your behalf if you publish anything the Grand Pooh Xi doesn't like.
No offense but you make a good argument for why china restricts access. Your comment seems to come from a political operative than someone trying to spin up some web servers in china.
> Meanwhile, I can spin up a server in Dubai or South Africa or Brazil like... right now. No paperwork. No prostrating myself in front of the Police to beg for permission to be able to post government-approved content.
You make it sound like that's a good thing? It's not. Also, all those countries you listed have censorship...
> Remind me, why do we do business with these people again? Why do we give them our money?
I don't know. Why are you so desperate to do business in china? Shouldn't you be happy since you aren't doing business in china?
I don't understand people like you. You say we shouldn't do business with china. But you whine about not being able to do business in china.
>corporations must not be the ones deciding which laws are applicable where.
This is literally restating this:
>the lack of political freedom in China is tolerable because that's just how Chinese culture is
Who decides when and where it is okay to disobey laws that restrict freedom/privacy? If not the modern day multi-nation states of corporations, who? Serfs?
> You enter someone's country and you ought to obey the local laws there.
China doesn’t have rule of law, they never had a law about censorship, at least not back when google left. It was basically the party telling Google that they had to police themselves and not to talk about what they told them in public, because transparency is a horrible thing in China.
It’s like a top secret law that no one is allowed to know about but everyone must follow.
Google leaving China the first place was about bad governance and corruption, not censorship.
That isn’t accurate, the CPC (let’s use the correct acronym at least, even if the word order is different in Chinese) doesn’t dictate, they just tell the private companies “don’t allow anything that will make us mad”, and they then have to enforce rules that aren’t dictated, but are left intentionally very vague.
The internet companies would of course be in a much better place if the government just did all the filtering for them. Unfortunately they don’t get off that easily. The GFW is another matter altogether: the government simply maintains a list of what to block that all ISPs (most state owned) plug into.
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