China’s scary lesson to the world: Censoring the Internet works

Of course it does. I wouldn&#x27;t bet that it will last though. I often tell people how I was born under communism and that what happened before 1989 in Romania and maybe in other Easter European countries makes the 1984 novel seem unrealistic and boring. We had far worst forms of censorship and propaganda, paranoia about being caught with doublethink by nosy neighbors was at al times high, yet everything looked normal, roses red, sky blue, etc. But the social dissent was there, buried within all layers of society, because you cannot stop thought or even word of mouth. And it didn&#x27;t happen overnight, it took more than 40 years, but in the end we shot our dictators on Christmas day. Not a smart thing to do, not real justice, but you know, when the revolution came people feared for their lives and in the end the many trump the few, a fact that governments tend to forget.<p>I don&#x27;t care much about what the Chinese do within their borders. The far more aggravating thing is that we tolerate China, choose to do business with Chinese companies and buy Chinese products.<p>Now that&#x27;s fucked up, because we are trading our values, for which people freaking died to win, for short term convenience, also sending the message that it&#x27;s OK as a country to violate basic human rights, as long as you&#x27;re powerful enough. Money trumps everything, great thing to teach our kinds, kudos folks.

China&#x27;s firewall is largely constructed to create technology transfer towards China.<p>This may be in the form of hindering sales for comapanies they may have interesting opportunities for investment, from sports shoes to embedded microchips, to financial products.<p>It is also part of a much greater Golden Shield network.<p>But a lot has changed over the past 5 years. A contrast of goals&#x2F;objectives: the Golden Shield formerly largely about public security and media control, a network prided under the former premier (national harmony being the end-game), but now goals are much, much, more nationalistic at a strategic level across China.

I don&#x27;t subscribe to common western black and white views on US vs Chinese freedom, and in fact I am fairly paranoid about the US government overreach of power, however I don&#x27;t see that Chinese-style internet censorship has any applicability to the US or European governments.<p>I&#x27;m far more concerned about the power exterted by increasingly large corporations who want extract as much rent from the network as possible. I&#x27;m also more concerned about covert government surveillance. But in terms of outright censorship, that will just piss off too many people for little gain. There&#x27;s no competitive advantage to be gained the way there is for China.

Maybe it doesn&#x27;t work. I&#x27;ve always wondered why, among so many long-ruling authoritarian regimes, China is almost the only one with such strict censorship. Yes there was the Arab Spring but look at Saudi Arabia, Russia, Belarus, Vietnam..., they don&#x27;t ban Facebook yet the incumbents&#x27; rule do not face exceptionally greater challenge than China. Maybe all censorship does is to give the Communist Party is false sense of security. Maybe it&#x27;s something else that&#x27;s working and censorship is simply free-riding.

This article fails to define what &quot;works&quot; means<p>Does censorship give China a better economy? Does it make people more happy? Safe?<p>Does censorship eradicate certain ideas? Does it prevent people from communicating domestically or internationally?<p>There&#x27;s no data in the article that suggests any of this is true.

So what about Tor and obfsproxy? Does it actually (still) work? If so, why don&#x27;t more people use it?; if not, why not?<p>I can&#x27;t easily find up-to-date information about this through Google - which I find odd, since China is such an important use case for Tor that I would expect them to maintain some sort of status page. Maybe the information is more readily available in Chinese...

You can censor by scarcity (China) or censor by overabundance of trivia (Western).<p>When Kardashian out weigth cultural news, PR of corps outweigth economical analysis, half baked tutorial replaces consistent tutorial, unproven science replaces science : you drown signal in noise.<p>How many Western citizens have read that the middle eastern wars are mainly about the top 4 weapon dealers (UK, USA, Fr, Russia) bribing locals (see #clintonmails &amp; #panamapapers) in order to ensure the growth of their economy and the disposal of scarce resources (oil, Phosphate, Uranium, Copper, Gold)?<p>How many citizens knows that we are fueling education&#x2F;health bubbles based on good intentions (NHS) without control (incompetence?) that results in counter productive results?<p>There are 2 ways to censor: cut the access to information (earth friendly solution) or hide the information in a haystack (resulting in 2-3% of global energy burned in spin doctoring).

Not surprising. And I doubt other country can do the same. Several factors makes China a unique case: 1. Massive domestic market, China along can have its own internet ecosystem, which is the fundamental reason why GFW can endure.<p>2.Conformist culture due to its Confucian tradition<p>3.Communist government has firm grasp of its power and stay vigilant to any sign or power that acts against it.

The sad fact is most people do not care about political freedom as long as they feel that their economic situation is adequate.

It may work now, but I suspect in the longer term it could be very harmful. As with stocks, it is like getting short-term calmness for the price of blowing up in the future. Noise of internet freedom train society deal with rumors etc., that may be essential for survival.

I would argue that even without the Great Firewall, China starts isolated by the fact that its language isn&#x27;t really shared by anybody else.

The thing is, information is the weapon of the 21st century. We are already litigating the cold war in the 3 most popular courts: the olympics, the media, and financial markets.<p>We cooperate with China, but what will become obvious if a horrifying 1984 censorship scenario evolves more forecfully is that nations and powerbrokers have different information thay want buried&#x2F;codified. So while China censors it&#x27;s internet, there will be many places that actively promote (or at best do not dissuade) the content that China is burying.<p>Just as Russia publishes content the U.S. would prefer not to be published&#x2F; is critical of America. So Censorship does work as does fearmongering and threats of violence. However, even in China&#x27;s situation (which is horrifying) where you can be killed for promoting information&#x2F;speaking out about some things there will always be groups outside the region with the information and as it becomes scarce it becomes more powerful. Peacekeepers, activists, anti-chinese nationals and subversive governement agents all have incentive to work against chinese censorship, so censorship as a whole can not be successful hopefully as there will always be factions and these factions will gain the highest leverage disseminating the information that is the most policed and downright censored shit in their counterparties region.

<p><pre><code> &gt; In April, the U.S. government officially classified &gt; it as a barrier to trade </code></pre> Interested to see what happens if this gets taken up at the WTO.

&gt; On the Sina Weibo microblogging site, his post was deleted by censors, and his newspaper soon afterward published an opinion piece defending the barrier and attacking Western media for hating it so much.<p>I&#x27;d love to read this piece, I&#x27;m genuinely curious on how the GFW can be seen as a positive thing for ordinary people because I really can&#x27;t see it as defensible.

To play devil&#x27;s advocate: The US does also engages in censorship. Non-citizens are heavily restricted in the kind of political lobbying and contributions that they are allowed to make. We can argue about the distinction between political contributions&#x2F;lobbying vs speech, but let&#x27;s examine the intent behind the US laws: to limit the influence that foreign countries&#x2F;organizations can have on domestic politics.<p>One could credibly argue that Chinese censorship of the internet falls along the same vein. A completely open internet would immediately result in China being inundated by western perspectives and arguments. An inundation that would be disproportionate, simply due to the west&#x27;s economic lead and online headstart. One can understand any non-western-aligned nation being concerned about its domestic politics being strongly influenced by the western-free-speech-megaphone.<p>Overall, I still think that internet censorship does more harm than good, but it&#x27;s worth considering the above.

Why is it surprising that it works? It comes from strength as well as buy-in. People know its censored, but they accept the bargain.<p>In this case, I think Chinese buying the Han homogeneity helps in that there isn&#x27;t an us vs them struggle. But rather an us vs the agitators mentality. And being nationalistic [affinity to the homeland] helps.<p>So long as people see the service provided by the government to be worth the deal, they&#x27;ll put up with it. Just as we make an arguably similar, but obviously different bargain when we put up what some people call security theatre. We &quot;put up with it&quot; so long, in balance the government gives us an acceptable deal.<p>For China, where in a communist country you have daily labor riots or protests against corrupt officials, people buy into the case that with a scandalous press they, the population, by and large, could be worse off due to unrest and instability which could arguably threaten the viability of the CCP as well as the one nation notion.

Link to the actual report: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freedomhouse.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;freedom-net&#x2F;freedom-net-2015" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;freedomhouse.org&#x2F;report&#x2F;freedom-net&#x2F;freedom-net-2015</a><p>Let&#x27;s not kid ourselves, though. The US scored 19 and UK scored 24 (on the scale of 0-100, 0 being most free)<p>Censorship is alive and well in the West.

The metric saying 1&#x2F;3 of the world faces heavy internet censorship seems large until you remember 1&#x2F;5 of the world lives in China<p>China is one of two countries that doesn&#x27;t have access to Facebook and Twitter. The other is Iran.<p>I&#x27;m not in love with FB or Twitter, but for tracking censorship, they are a useful measurement.

&quot;The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it&quot; -- John Gilmore.<p>Even back in the slashdot days I always thought this oft-repeated quote was more of a hopeful rallying cry than an actual statement of fact. And I think it&#x27;s been clear for at least ten years that it&#x27;s definitely not true.

The Chinese own China and can decide for themselves what is best for their country. But as an American living in China, I fear that some of what I see here can and will happen in America one day.

It&#x27;s really odd when my Chinese friends go home and go &quot;dark&quot; on &quot;free world&quot; social media until they return. They usually get emails while in China, though.

I have wondered if there is a VPN in China so that you can see what China actually sees (the opposite is easy to find).<p>I would imagine such a service not to be very public. I suppose you could buy hosting service in China and do it yourself... or is that not even possible?<p>EDIT.. apparently there are now lots services that do this (I had looked a few years back).

They didn&#x27;t tell you the most dangerous part: The TV box in everyone&#x27;s home. It is far more powerful than the Great Fire Wall.<p>1. It&#x27;s a part of the internet. More than a half internet traffics are video streams. 2. It&#x27;s a bug 3. It can do End2End monitoring and filtering.

To everyone who hold the &#x27;western value&#x27;: do you know that one of the biggest jokes of your &#x27;western value&#x27; is that you think it applies everywhere in the world in the same form, and you take it as a disguise and do harmful things to the people of other countries(of course, this is all done by the hands of politicians). You don&#x27;t understand that there can be different values. So when you look at things from this perspective, you always think that the Chinese government is evil.<p>You put &#x27;human rights&#x27; all day long beside your mouth, haha, but never really investigate if human rights in China really worse than western countries. US government criticizes the Chinese government for this all day long but never say nothing about their arabic friends. And Snowden is from US, right?<p>You have never had experience to truely live in a country of 1.4 billion people, let alone governing one. You don&#x27;t understand how to unite people with such great quantity and diversity. You don&#x27;t understand what chaos will come if everyone can purse his political dreams.<p>Western value emphasizes on the value of individuals, while in china we balance between individual and the whole nation. Interestingly, I want to use the word &#x27;集体(jiti)&#x27; in Chinese, but I can&#x27;t find a suitable word in English, so I used nation. Maybe you never thought of that.<p>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. For now, as a newborn ancient nation, our value is not strong enough yet. Your values will not bring Chinese people human rights and prosperity. No revolution can be done without being based on history, we have our tradition and our value. When it&#x27;s powerful enough, enough that Chinese people won&#x27;t be harmed by western politicians, that you are all convinced the world can have different values and still a harmony world. our value will be more open to the world.<p>To those who won&#x27;t like to trade their values for Chinese goods, my advice: Don&#x27;t Buy ANY Chinese Goods. We can see whose life will become tougher.<p>P.S.: As a Chinese, I have every means to access the &#x27;free&#x27; internet(as anyone who really want in China) and know what&#x27;s all about in it, know all the bad words about China and CCP and know most of them are not real. So I think censorship for now is a great idea for we Chinese to focus on forging a beautiful life for ourselves. for our people.

<i>Leiden University</i> is founded in 1575 in The Netherlands, not in Germany

So by the looks of the picture halfway down the page the porn filter in the UK has also been removed because they are labeled as &#x27;free&#x27;? or is porn not a part of (internet) freedom anymore?

What a good comparison to Berlin Wall that is. Never thought about it. Whenever I went to China the VPN-fight-with-GFW has always been a nightmare, and my Android phone could not get updated either as google is 100% blocked there.<p>On the other hand, in USA the is near 100% freedom including the internet, but that does have some side effects itself, e.g. nowadays any gender can get into any restroom depends on what he&#x2F;she feels, that&#x27;s when I hate &quot;too many freedom&quot;, where a few forces their will on the majority public that is normally silent or staying-politically-correct, yes transgender does deserve their rights, but what about the rights for the 99.9% of us that are not transgenders?

&gt; China has achieved this. It can communicate with the outside world, meanwhile Western opinion cannot easily penetrate as ideological tools<p>Media is powerful. And even in the US, most of us self-censor our news (liberal vs conservative media) to the point where we&#x27;re largely reading only views we agree on (HN is no different in that regard). I always find it amusing that we can all read the same news with different conclusions and come out thinking that we&#x27;re right all the time.<p>A lot of people assume that people in China are unaffected by all the censorship, but even if they&#x27;re aware of it, I wonder if censorship in China actually reduces cognitive dissonance at this point, and it&#x27;s actually more agreeable to read censored news than not. Much like advertising or the opinions of our friends&#x2F;family, ideas can be subtle but extremely influencing.

There&#x27;re a lot of valuable points in this topic&#x27;s comments.<p>I&#x27;d like to add one more which has been ignored: the GFW&#x2F;Golden Shield was built to uphold the central government&#x27;s authority over other provinces.<p>One-to-many propaganda is the most important leverage for Beijing to suppress provincial rivals.<p>And I assert the same propaganda leverage applys to the relationship between Washington D.C.&#x2F;Newyork and other states in the U.S. as well as the relationship between the U.S. and its allies.<p>Censoring&#x2F;manipulating the internet is not merely for silencing individuals.

I&#x27;m not so sure that countries will be all that enthused to follow China&#x27;s example. Aside from the technical and infrastructure costs, it&#x27;s evident that they&#x27;re using a huge amount of human manpower. A lot of countries don&#x27;t have the knowhow or billions to do it.<p>At this point, I suspect the lesson will be to block all sites except those that force people to use their real names, and arrest them if they say something unapproved. Intimidation is pretty cheap.

There would not be a hundred billion dollar ad industry if propaganda didn&#x27;t work. We wouldn&#x27;t run multi-million dollar presidential campaigns if propaganda didn&#x27;t work. The whole field of social psychology and public relations would be a useless exercise if propaganda didn&#x27;t work. This is the fundamental problem with democracy: people are easily influenced.<p>The antecedents of the current Chinese communist party, the Bolsheviks knew this and they decided that the inner party must be the vanguard of the proletariat in order to prevent the proletariat from being easily led astray by the faith of the masses in the monarchs. Of course, they were wrong, for different reasons, but objective truth is a hard thing and often a weak voice amid the bullhorns blasting propaganda.<p>Anyone interested in this topic should watch the great documentary &quot;The Century Of The Self&quot;[1] that goes into the history of the public relations industry and mass persuasion in general.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymotion.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;x2d29tf_the-century-of-the-self-part-1-of-4-happiness-machines_school" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymotion.com&#x2F;video&#x2F;x2d29tf_the-century-of-the-...</a>

Is news.ycombinator.com visible in China?

&gt; VPN Software is pretty simple<p>Can someone explain why VPNs are &quot;simple&quot;? What do they mean by simple?

&gt; VPN software is simple<p>Can someone explain why VPN software is &quot;simple&quot;? I thought it encrypted your data so they cannot be inspected, plus if you tunnel over the HTTP&#x2F;HTTPS ports how can VPN traffic be separated out from &quot;regular&quot; traffic?

Does it?

Remember Edward Snowden?

China is just making real the wet dreams of RIAA and MPAA executives.<p>It is coming in the west too - for copyright, hate speech, terrorism, child porn - the internet will be as tightly locked here too. The fact that so much of it is already a walled garden makes it easier. Remove the web browser from the iDevices and you have a very compelling ecosystem for any dictatorship. It may take 50 years more, but the trends are unmistakable.<p>We need next generation of communication networks. That make laugh of national sovereignty. I think google&#x27;s project loon and the likes are a good way. Fill a country sky with relaying stations and the government will make itself broke trying to take them down.

What bothers me more is the chilling silence on the issue of human rights violation carried out by the followers of communism [1],[2] by most of the intellectuals (mostly humanities professors) in USA who are very keen on criticizing USA for whatever perceived&#x2F;projected censorship and violation of human rights. There is a huge possibility that these intellectuals are either crooks who have been paid and bought by the communists and&#x2F;or are fools (&quot;useful idiots&quot;)[3] who believe in the communist propaganda.<p>For every criticism dealt out against USA for human rights abuse and other governmental crimes&#x2F;sins, the communist nations must be criticized a 1000 times.<p>Communism as a ideology is still a great threat to world peace. The followers and believers of communism have wreaked havoc on various parts of the world that matches nothing and these crooks blame the free market based democratic western nations for problems in their own countries.<p>I don&#x27;t deny that capitalism has its disadvantages but it is by far the most humane, most successful and most benevolent government&#x2F;societal system that has existed ever before whereas communism has resulted in extremely corrupt and very abusive government&#x2F;societal systems in the world.<p>The things like the communist party chairman, the politburo members, and a bunch of their cronies got the entire benefits in a very skewed manner whereas most of the general public got only hardship should not be forgotten at any cost by freedom lovers.<p>So, we must not forget that the USA has served the world by taking a stance against this vicious ideology called communism and its equally vicious followers. We must raise this issue every time USA and capitalist free and open market based democracy gets criticized in favor of communism&#x2F;socialism by the communists&#x2F;socialists.<p>Some links you may find interesting here [2], [3], [4].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sentinelblog.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;10&#x2F;maos-monstrous-record-has-been-suppressed&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sentinelblog.com&#x2F;2015&#x2F;12&#x2F;10&#x2F;maos-monstrous-record-ha...</a> [2] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laogai" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Laogai</a> [3]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Useful_idiot" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Useful_idiot</a> [4] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;article-2017839&#x2F;Madman-starved-60-million-death-Devastating-book-reveals-Maos-megalomania-turned-China-madhouse.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.dailymail.co.uk&#x2F;news&#x2F;article-2017839&#x2F;Madman-starv...</a> [5] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tiananmenstremendousachievements.wordpress.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;maos-tyranny&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tiananmenstremendousachievements.wordpress.com&#x2F;tag&#x2F;m...</a>

See Reddit and Facebook for a domestic examples.<p>I know there are differing views on Reddit in particular, but reality simply is that the &quot;moderation&quot; has become well beyond moderation and is well into censorship and authoritarian type of control and domination of the conversation that totally and fundamentally breaks the foundation of how Reddit is supposed to work.<p>There is really no legitimate excuse (which is what they always are) to censor, remove, and ban users and comments that are not all out direct threats to commit criminal acts or spam. What is going on on Reddit in particular is a thoroughly liberal authoritarianism that is heavily dominated by a kind of perverse paternalistic supremacist, i.e., protecting users from hearing and seeing things that the authoritarian types deem unauthorized.<p>Reddit, as example, is intended to allow the community, through a kind of civil society, determine the dialogue and conversation; but with ever spiking frequency, Reddit in particular is being sabotaged as the authoritarians remove the community&#x27;s ability to shape the conversation.<p>The mods on Reddit in particular are thoroughly acting as common authoritarian goons by patrolling the discussions and routinely removing comments and conversations they decree as unauthorized or very much like &quot;speaking against the regime&quot;. It&#x27;s clearly an authoritarian mentality eating its way through Reddit at the moment.<p>Sure, some will say &quot;private website, blah blah blah&quot; but that&#x27;s not the point really. It&#x27;s about civil responsibility, which, ironically, the liberal authoritarian goons on Reddit supposedly frequently espouse regarding all sorts of other topics. As the internet continues to be consolidated and shrinks and is ever more controlled by the likes of Facebook that is controlled by Zuckerberg, who&#x27;s goal is for Facebook to replace the internet, you will have ever more increasingly controlled spaces for public discussions and at some point there will be no non-private spaces for discussion to any effective degree. At that point we have come full circle and devolved back to a monarchical and aristocratic type of social structure where all of society and it&#x27;s people only operate in &quot;private websites&quot; and the justification is that because the ruling class control everything and all forms of communication, like Kings, Dukes, and Princes, you are claimed to have no right to have conversations.<p>I know many, rather short sighted people may dismiss what I say, but reality is that is a rather counter-intuitive and unexpected manner, the internet is really leading to far more control and consolidation of power and homogenization of society and collapse of diversity. It&#x27;s rather odd that large segments of society are all supportive of things that will end in demise of the very tings they espouse.<p>In many ways, the current phase humanity is in with regard to neo-liberalist views, is akin to investment in a ponzi scheme. Everyone (liberal, tech, globalist, etc types) is all Golden Age level indulged in excess and self-gratification because they invested all their money in a ponzi scheme that has huge returns on paper, but the day will come when you can&#x27;t withdraw the false returns or the scheme collapses altogether.

That&#x27;s ironic because the Washington Post is censoring this article from me with their paywall.

Bread and Circuses: bribe the population with free bread and distract them with circuses whilst the rulers do whatever they want.

Here is an example of recent FaceBook censorship: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=25tYyAgejA8" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=25tYyAgejA8</a>

The Great Firewall actually makes a lot of sense. Everyone thinks of themselves as being rational and unbiased - But in fact, we are all irrational, biased and at times hypocritical. Those people who think that they are rational and objective are usually the least rational and most hypocritical of all because they lack self-awareness.<p>As westerners, as much as we like to pretend that we know the whole truth, in reality, what we know is only a biased approximation of it. The west likes to impose their version of the truth on the whole world but China is determined to stick to their version - I don&#x27;t see anything wrong with that; especially if it works in their favour.<p>Regardless of how you look at it; the west is aggressive when it comes to spreading its ideals and values. If China wasn&#x27;t so protecive, they would have become economically dependent on the west (as opposed to being the powerhouse they are today).

I don&#x27;t really know if it&#x27;s that much worrying. I mean can the entire world really criticize china, when you see so many companies having influence in democratically elected governments?<p>If you look at the political science of it, I think that this firewall is there to mitigate the potential instability of the chinese government. This is not new. I mean I&#x27;m okay with critics as long as it aims for progress, but the reality is that you don&#x27;t just snap your fingers and &quot;tada democracy&quot;! So when you don&#x27;t have democracy, you will have other ways to have a country that is peaceful and thriving enough. Restricted speech is one of those methods.<p>If you compare the situation in china with the west, it&#x27;s not so different: there is still some influence between large corporations and government in western countries, and we don&#x27;t like it either, and free speech doesn&#x27;t always solve those problems. It&#x27;s less corrupt, but I think China has really caught up.<p>I would be cautious about putting &quot;free speech&quot; on a pedestal. What works for western countries wouldn&#x27;t necessarily do for countries which don&#x27;t have the same customs, history, or culture. Free speech is one of those double edged swords that are well regulated in western countries, but is not in other parts of the world.