China doesn't actually ban American social networks, not officially at least. They just don't work for some reason due to technical issues. China has never said "we ban Facebook and Google", you just wake up one day and they aren't working anymore.
This is unfortunately a common tactic of the Chinese government (see their recent dealings with Lithuania). I do not believe a trade barrier not being explicitly stated is a barrier to bringing a WTO case though.
They could operate there if they submitted themselves to Chinese government censorship (aka "local laws"). Google pulled out because it refused to. Facebook really wanted to (Zuck even made a trip there to talk to Chinese officials) but ultimately decided (correctly) that doing so would greatly hurt it in the US/Europe. Same for Twitter (pre-Elon).
No, it should just work.
I can understand having to abide by China PR laws if you have actual money transactions on the mainland but if all my customers are outside China PR and all I'm doing is making my website available to the people in China PR assuming I'm not breaking any laws, my website should be available to users in China PR.
I guess this last part is the loophole they will drive a truck through in hindsight. They will make up some nonsense or maybe even find a legitimate scam and ban Facebook based on that?
But really once they ban Facebook, we should be able to reciprocate and ban tick tack.
China isn't a rule of law country, they admit that they don't even aspire to be a rule of law country, calling it an imperialistic western ideal not compatible with eastern culture. There is no way your expectation can be satisfied.
Even if China worked as a rule of law country, which they explicitly don't, what you're saying is still exactly the same as the previous commenter: you can't lawfully operate in China unless you actively monitor and censor any text you make available. If a user comments in a review on your bakery website that these cookies are so good that even Winnie the Pooh (hint hint) would like them, and you allow that review to be visible, then you are in violation of Chinese laws.
If all you do is open your website to china and don't perform any transactions in the country you're gonna have a hell of a time with your business model. All of these websites rely on advertisers to make money.
Another important detail that has been burried in this discussion is that in the late aughts and early 10s there was a lot of domestic political pressure against US companies building products that could facillitate Great Firewall censorship. At the time that was a bigger concern than being allowed into the Chinese market.
All the talk of a digital services trade war/import ban ignores that US tech companies were facing a de facto export ban from the US side by being prohibited from complying with Chinese regulations.
You haven't been there then. Google, YouTube, Twitter are all banned there. They are blocked completely. You cannot download the apps. In fact, the Google Play Store doesn't work there. They have cracked down on all VPN's now as well. We could only access western social media through a corporate network.
One side note, the United States Embassy has free Wi-Fi if you're close enough to it. You can get access to everything through it.
I lived in China for 9 years through most of the banning. I remember the day Twitter stopped working because the US embassy in Beijing was posting embarrassing AQI readings on their Twitter account (“crazy bad” for a reading that was so high they didn’t expect the label to ever be used). I was there when Facebook became blocked and when google became blocked. YouTube, however, was already blocked in 2007 when I started working there.
None of those services need apps, I never used apps to access them.
You didn't read the parent comment right then. Let me paraphrase it:
Yes, you can't use these services in China. But unlike the US's TikTok ban, China will not officially tell everyone what they banned. It just suddenly stops working.
They banned, allowed and banned again GitHub. Without any explanation. Your parent comment is correct.
I don't remember if they announced it or not. I've been there a total of 4 times over the past 15 years.
There are these Kiosks where you get Wi-Fi Access. You scan your passport, and it gives you a username and password. It specifically states accessing prohibited internet sites is a crime.
Then you click the link, and Facebook, Twitter, Google, ... are all on the list. They're pretty in your face about it.
There are some odd things though. You can access Steam in some areas, but not in others. Internet Cafe's have signs saying Steam Games allowed, while others don't. Some will say New York Times available.
Leaving the country was much harder than entering now. We missed several flights and were in the Airport for almost 2 days before they allowed us to leave.
This last trip in February, I made the mistake of buying an Unicom SIM card. So get this, I go through US Customs, they point me over to a desk with a curtain, a guy reads my declaration document again, then walks me over to do a door, and opens it. In side is a little waiting area. I sit down, and about 10 minutes later a woman slides the glass window open and asks me for the SIM card. They already knew I had bought it when I arrived. There is no SIM card declaration on the form.
She told me I should probably destroy the phone. I don't think any of us have any idea what is going on.
I won't be returning to China. They have made it very clear they're not interested in Americans investing or visiting.
The laws don’t exist. China has a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, press, religion, etc…so actually writing a law that censors the internet isn’t very feasible. The official class just controls the courts (no judicial review allowed) so can do whatever.
These kinds of comments are legally ignorant. I’m always taken aback by these kinds of “but actually” comments on HN that ‘correct’ another user without any regard to how the law would be applied.
I read the persons comment differently: reading between the lines I see them saying that the Chinese government finds other ways to work around the rules in bad faith.
“Officially” is meaningless here. The blocking exists, and it is at the direction or under the control of their government.
They are yet same thing. You know, if it looks like a duck.
This is standard operating procedure for the communist party. They rarely say any kind of topics or activities are banned outright. It’s just that if you say the wrong things in the wrong place, a bunch of plainclothes police will come to your home in the middle of the night.
Perhaps the GFOC must officially support an app via allowlisting, so that it's banned unless it's allowed by inaction, which is effectively the same thing.
Most/all apps aren't banned outright, but they require VPNs to access.
I wonder: Are there any Western apps which Chinese citizens would lose social credit or are officially prohibited from using?
VPNs frequently get banned in China. I bought two major VPN services (nordvpn and one other) and they did not work when I got there. Luckily I had a backup VPN I host on Linode. It would randomly stop working though...
I am currently in China; Outline doesn't work at all reliably.
That might be to do with going to a Digital Ocean IP, but if you can use an innocent IP, anything works. So what benefit is Outline supposedly offering?
> I wonder: Are there any Western apps which Chinese citizens would lose social credit or are officially prohibited from using?
That's not how it works. The apps are not officially banned, they are just unavailable or don't work. If they're not on the China iOS store (separate than US) then you can't install them, and if you went abroad and managed to install them, they just can't connect to the IG or whatever servers once you're back in China. Same for Android.
This doesn't seem correct. It was just in the news that Meta had to remove one of their apps from the Chinese market at the request of the Chinese gov.
That's my point, they are not officially banned, but they're just "not available in the app store" (which is effectively banned, just not under that name).
But that overt request was unusual. Most apps are simply removed as part of Apple's "compliance with local regulations".
If the only way someone can use your product is flying to another country to acquire it, it's a ban. Giving it other language is supportive of Chinese government efforts to soften the reality around their unfair practices.
Ouch. When I was there last 20-some years ago, high-speed interest was just becoming a thing and internet cafes were everywhere. Getting access to the outside world then was also a pain.
For Westerners, could they get GFOC-excluded commercial PoP internet connections or wireless carriers?
Perhaps in the near future, China's middle- and upper-class will insist on specific changes in policy like unfettered internet access as a bargain for not demanding democracy. With all of the advances in economic mobility and details of life outside the GFOC, there will be more asks.
> China's middle- and upper-class will insist on specific changes in policy like unfettered internet access as a bargain for not demanding democracy.
So long as the CCP delivers on economic prosperity this won't happen; people will not risk it. Those who can't handle it, and have the means, emigrate or have a plan B (i.e., their kids at a US university who can continue their career abroad; many Chinese would come to the US just to have a baby to ensure their kid had US citizenship--the US has clamped down on that). This is why the CCP's survival depends on economics.
> So long as the CCP delivers on economic prosperity this won't happen; people will not risk it.
I think the era of hockey-stick growth and development China is more or less over now, growth will continue but slow to a drip, and will face 3 threats: rising economic inequality, drying up of external joint ventures, and male-female ratio demographics imbalance. It has BRI going for it but external investments can't address domestic structural socioeconomic concerns. Xi will be blamed first because he rode economics to the top of the mountain. I'm concerned that starting a war, a common political tactic for any government system, maybe used to distract from domestic economic woes.
China has made a lot of investments into Africa and Central Asian countries, more like IMF-style loans, which give it considerable political leverage. But as to whether this translates into substantial economic advantages for China in terms of cash inflows, not just outflows, I haven't seen much to that effect.
China's housing market is its biggest problem. Most people invested their savings in second/third/etc. apartments as the stock market was notoriously unreliable (and investing abroad was very difficult). That means that a tremendous amount of middle-to-upper-class wealth is tied up in property values, creating a tremendous bubble. But the gov cannot let the bubble pop (see Evergrande, others before), as Japan did in the 90s, as that is the one thing that (in my opinion) could actually bring the CCP down.
I've tried to research details about the size of BRI and find specific projects. It's surprisingly opaque if you're used to FHWA's public disclosure of funds and projects. You could trace most hihhway funding in, say West Virginia, by pulling a few documents. I couldn't find any details on any project. I could not even find a video stream of the last year's conference. Just a keynote translation a week later.
I am suspicious that BRI might be more hot air than substance. That or world journalism is oblivious to what is supposedly the largest international infrastructure program in the world. Or Google doesn't index it.
I was there from 2007-2016, and also in 2002, but that was a dorm experience at PKU. The internet VPNs were just horrible, but the tradeoff was all the pirated video content available on Chinese video websites, so I got used to it.
2003: I went to China with 1 suitcase and came back with 2. The new one was absolutely full to the brim with pirated DVDs and fairly good quality fake LV from the "free markets". Had to chip a Sony DVD player because half of them were random regions. Back then, checking the right boxes and declaring sensible amounts on US claims declaration forms reduced probability of searches.
That is as silly as argument as it is. We know what the game china played and it is not because of technology. Really someone can “hack” the technology. But if one pretend to sleep, you cannot wake them up easily.
> And as far I know, if you go there with roaming ON with your phone, these social networks still work as well.
That's because roaming phone traffic is routed through your home carrier, through whatever telephone traffic peering agreement the phone companies have.
If a Chinese person roams to the US using a Chinese cell phone plan, it works in the other direction. So their phone is still behind the great firewall even though they're physically outside of China.
I was never good at VPNs. We would find one that worked, they wanted a one year subscription up front and...then they would stop working. I assume most VPNs in China are just a scam to make some shady money. Who are you going to complain to, the Chinese government?
China would try to block them so you had to find new alternatives. I used one for years that stayed up, but yes it was often frustratingly slow. You had to really make an effort, and most people aren't going to do that, and then there's the language barrier.
My experiences before was that they were doing some machine learning to detect my socks proxy and slow it down eventually. Last visit I went to China a few months ago I found my Wireguard VPN running at full speed.
Either technology has improved or they stopped trying as hard, which makes sense now that the local internet economy has matured.
If you try and operative a service that relies on frictionless access by saying your users have to fly abroad to download it, and use an illegal and increasingly spotting VPN service to access it, it's banned. You simply cannot succeed under these conditions.
Every Chinese person a Westerner may talk to has a VPN, but you can't compete with Chinese-owned social media without the other 90% of the population. Also, China has been very aggressive with VPN throttling and random outages, since the pandemic.
depends on time and place. its true that now there is less dependence on foreign internet and you can now be fully decoupled from english internet with the number of domestic apps. most people only use a VPN now just to access email (e.g. gmail, university), if they even need to at all. and yeah, if youre in beijing during a congress, then VPNs will be slow. but its trivial to set up and use a VPN, even my 88 year old grandma has one.
It is not easy. One day your VPN stops working, and you need to ask your friends for a new recommendation, and maybe they have if theirs didn't start failing last month, and set that up and hopefully it keeps working for a while longer, maybe until your original routes around the issue. It is high friction, and was a constant pain trying to maintain a functioning satellite office behind the Great Firewall.
