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China Blocks WhatsApp

nytimes.com

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Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#211

Post by FabHK »

micaksica wrote: post #203
FabHK wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's way more powerful than WhatsApp, too (location based chats, payments, etc.). And, of course, it's not E2E encrypted; just the opposite, you can assume that it's being wiretapped/monitored. Thus, please don't install it.

> you can assume that it's being wiretapped/monitored. This can be assumed with any technology stack that is popular, domestically-grown, and well-established in China. I have WeChat installed. Would I use it to converse with people outside of China? No. But casually, it's what's accepted there, what people ask you for, and what everyone's using.

Sure, I might use it myself if I'd return to China, but I'd hate for it to become the default chat app outside China - that's what I meant with "please don't install it"...

> This can be assumed with any technology stack that is popular, domestically-grown, and well-established in China.

Agreed.

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#212

Post by dmix »

frandroid wrote: post #171
tryingagainbro wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Serious question: what would happen if China abolished the Communist Party or whatever they call and chose democracy. Chaos? Breakdown of the country into separate states /provinces? Civil war? Military rule? I would not want to the one in charge the day after. Obviously (moderated) rule by the people is best but not sure how China and say countries in the mold of Saudi Arabia will handle it.

What is "China" in this case? Its government is the Communist Party. It's not going to abolish itself! The question to ask, if you want China to change, is to ask how would the Chinese Communist Party lose its grip on power. That would probably need to happen following an economic crisis. However, looking at how badly the Chavistas are driving Venezuela into the ground these days, and how much they're able to hold on…

> What is "China" in this case? Its government is the Communist Party. It's not going to abolish itself!

I've read that something close to 1/3rd of the Chinese population is a member of the party or whose livelihood directly depends on it in some fashion where they are essentially a member.

So this is a very good question.

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#213

Post by KGIII »

flexie wrote: post #124
chaostheory wrote: post #40

What the long-term effects will be: China's ruling class further cement their power at the cost of China's innovation and future growth. Interesting and useful things are made when people able share and consume information. e.g. Jack Ma's US visit exposed him to Yahoo. Ma Huateng was clearly inspired by his exposure to ICQ. The list goes on. The same thing happens in the West but it happens a lot more often since the…

I think censorship is only part of the reason. Protectionism and national security probably plays a role aswell. Look at the list of websites they block: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Websites_blocked_in_mainland... Google, facebook, instagram, twitter etc. Those are one-way streets that provide next to no jobs, little tech transfer and no tax revenue to the countries they do business in, but tend to outcompete the…

I don't know that the United States has any legal mechanism to prevent an online Chinese company from holding the top position and doing what American-native companies do with the data. At least I can't think of any such mechanism? Perhaps someone here is a legal scholar?

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#214

Post by bluetwo »

meri_dian wrote: post #15

Edit: This is not a justification or defense of internet censorship. It is an explanation of why the Chinese public may be more willing to accept strict government controls than the West. While most Westerners see actions like this as serious violations of individual rights, the Chinese are used to such exercises of control by their leaders. There is a firm historical basis for similar behavior going back thousands o…

China didn't invent communism but somehow they were able to adapt it to their society.

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#215

Post by cnsrshpthroaway »

Chinese oversea student here.

Just taught my gf how to use WhatsApp on her phone last week because we were tired of the poor video chat quality on WeChat and the video call on WhatsApp was surprisingly good. We planned to have another video call this Wednesday. This news is so frustrating.

I just can not make sense of this kind of censorship. It is so sad to see China slowly drifting to a similar direction of North Korea. At first it was YouTube. Then it's Google search. That's understandable because yeah, there really is a lot of fake news bashing the Chinese gov out there. PPTP, L2TP never had worked. OpenVPN got filtered out. SSH tunneling got detected too, even with obfuscation. I had my best experiences with Cisco's VPN protocol, but it was hard to find a provider with that option and I suspect the traffic was monitored as well because the gov had actually worked with Cisco. There was then a protocol called ShadowSocks, which served me well until I moved to study abroad, but the original maintainer was then threatened by the gov and moved away from that project.

I support my government fully for all their effort on making the country and economy stronger and its people's life better. I understand the censorship of neo-nazi propagandas and the like, but is this much censorship really needed? Very few people in China use WhatsApp. Those "bad guys" will always have resources to go around censorship. Good citizens with lawful needs don't.

I suspect China's AI ambition has a lot to do with more advanced censorship. When still using ShadowSocks, I stumbled across posts on how the GFW (Great Firewall) was implementing machine learning to detect ShadowSocks traffics. Looks like China's global "inter"-net firewall is really slowly changing into an operation based on whitelists.

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#217

Post by rwallace »

majormajor wrote: post #165
Certhas wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative: Innovation happens within the context of Chinas censorship and political regime. Blocking of entrenched western competitors allows home grown solutions to spring up, and local technological know how to develop faster. Capitalism and innovation turn out to work within the context of an illiberal society just fine. Especially as China avoids the mistake of closing itself off to the rest of the world, but s…

> Especially as China avoids the mistake of closing itself off to the rest of the world, but stays integrated in the markets, as well as the academic exchanges. So if the strategy is have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too why does the rest of the world play along? Corporate greed outside the control of governmental entities? Like the parent and unlike the grandparent, I'm not convinced "openness" of the sort that fosters innov…

> So if the strategy is have-our-cake-and-eat-it-too why does the rest of the world play along?

As opposed to what? Economic sanctions have a wonderfully consistent track record of making things worse for everyone. China is too powerful for 'destroy the country and slaughter its people in a fit of pique' to work the way it did in Libya and Syria, which is just as well because that also makes things worse for everyone. The one thing that consistently works well is to maintain a free society and demonstrate a better alternative by example. Okay, granted, we should be doing more of that.

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#218

Post by whiddershins »

metaphorm wrote: post #28
meri_dian wrote: post #15

Edit: This is not a justification or defense of internet censorship. It is an explanation of why the Chinese public may be more willing to accept strict government controls than the West. While most Westerners see actions like this as serious violations of individual rights, the Chinese are used to such exercises of control by their leaders. There is a firm historical basis for similar behavior going back thousands o…

Chinese philosophical roots include both Confucianism and Taoism, as well as the imported schools of though associated with Buddhism, and more recently quite a lot of modern Western ideas (particularly Marxism). Taoism is anti-authoritarian in the extreme. Buddhism is significantly more neutral on the subject but is definitely aligned closely with personal liberation and at minimum it does not make special exceptions…

I think your characterization of Buddhism might be a bit one dimensional.

Tradition Tibetan society, for example, seems very hierarchical to me.

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#219

Post by probe »

dmix wrote: post #43
meri_dian wrote: post #15

Edit: This is not a justification or defense of internet censorship. It is an explanation of why the Chinese public may be more willing to accept strict government controls than the West. While most Westerners see actions like this as serious violations of individual rights, the Chinese are used to such exercises of control by their leaders. There is a firm historical basis for similar behavior going back thousands o…

> It's important for Westerners to realize that the Chinese never had a Locke, or a Rousseau, or a Hobbes. Neither did South America but they were inspired by all of them when they formed their modern republics after the various revolutions, after kicking out the Spanish rulers in the 1800s the military generals had a choice to form democracies and they sought inspiration from Europe, just as America did a century ea…

If you look a bit further into Chinese history, it makes sense why they're so hesitant of the west - China was literally screwed over by the West for almost a century (see Century of Humiliation, the Opium Wars, Unequal Treaties, having British military in their capital, etc.). They went from being a leader of the world to being treated like crap by the West in a fairly short time period. This idea of "Chinese Exceptionalism" came from this innate desire for China to be unique again (the original "Make X Great Again").

Mao's success I think reinforced some the idea that the only way for China to stand on its own was to be united and strongly controlled and maintained. The hundreds of years of having different clans pre-Mao (or weak dynasties like Qing) just didn't work.

While I might not completely agree with their arguments, it's worth understanding Chinese criticism and their skepticism of the West. China is literally 4x the size of the US with a very rich and complicated history and thinking, so we can't just assume you can put in Western democracy/thinking just like that. Sure a lot of it may be encouraged by the party, but I think a lot of is much deeper than that.

Re: China Blocks WhatsApp

#220

Post by meri_dian »

nv-vn wrote: post #177
gerbilly wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you didn't intend your comment this way, but I see it as a bit patronizing to assume that just because China hasn't produced a Rousseau or a Hobbes domestically[1], that they couldn't possibly take new ideas from them. Asia is about a lot more than social harmony and the mandate of heaven. There is an incredible diversity of opinion on almost any subject there, just as in the West. [1] Citation needed.

Yes, but what is being said is that Rousseau and Hobbes and Locke are ingrained in Western culture in much the same way that Confucianism is ingrained in Chinese culture. Lapses in the absolute power of Western monarchy opened up a space for an Enlightenment and gave rise to those new ideals, not to mention the prior blows that this style of governance had suffered in the West -- the Magna Carta, more frequent war, r…

Thank you, very well said.
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