11–20 of 157 posts
Yet various government agencies sidestep the GFW and use banned social media. Bizarre
"One Twitter user raises an important perspective on the incident, highlighting that there are legitimate pathways with private VPNs, including obtaining internet access permits and operating licenses, for information to flow from terminals to networks."
It's important to keep into perspective that China is a 1.4Bn people's country and highly decentralized (much to the chagrin of the pro-US). This happened under the "Chengde" administration. There might be many reasons for this: Chengde is over-zealous, The police has a particular issue with a particular individual, the central state wants some examples, the local state wants to show its toughness on VPN, the local s…
A penalty of over 1 million yuan (>145K USD) for using VPN is a new development: before this, only VPN service sellers were prosecuted.
[1]: Law-enforcement agencies have been imposing larger and more frequent fines for offenses: https://www.wsj.com/world/china/chinas-local-governments-are... "China’s Police Are the New Earners for Cash-Strapped Governments"
[2]: https://eightify.app/summary/chess/tianjin-government-crisis... "The Tianjin government's financial crisis, with unpaid wages and high debt ratios, reflects a larger problem in China's declining land finance and unsaleable real estate market, raising concerns about the stability of other Chinese cities."
[3]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=242pUa9rXgg "Civil Servants go unpaid and Local Government Borrowed From Temples/Protests surge in China"
[4]: https://www.rfa.org/english/news/china/wages-09082023112323.... "Chinese local governments struggle to pay civil servants' wages"
[5]: The government is trimming a combination of bonuses, cash subsidies and base pay for many employees, according to interviews with 10 local civil servants: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-09-12/pay-cuts-... "Bankers’ 40% Pay Cuts Show the China Dream Fading in Its Richest Cities"
It's important to keep into perspective that China is a 1.4Bn people's country and highly decentralized (much to the chagrin of the pro-US). This happened under the "Chengde" administration. There might be many reasons for this: Chengde is over-zealous, The police has a particular issue with a particular individual, the central state wants some examples, the local state wants to show its toughness on VPN, the local s…
Thanks, but I feel that you didn’t finish your thought. Why is that important to consider it in this context?
It's important to keep into perspective that China is a 1.4Bn people's country and highly decentralized (much to the chagrin of the pro-US). This happened under the "Chengde" administration. There might be many reasons for this: Chengde is over-zealous, The police has a particular issue with a particular individual, the central state wants some examples, the local state wants to show its toughness on VPN, the local s…
Thanks, but I feel that you didn’t finish your thought. Why is that important to consider it in this context?
When I travel to China with a mobile phone subscription that supports roaming, I get completely uncensored access to the internet. Surely this is according to Chinese rules.
Likewise all the expats and Chinese I have met all used whatever they wanted of US social media plus they had a shit ton of pirated(?) American TV shows and movies.
Perhap the policies are changing? I don't know but this particular case sounds like a very modest fine (200 yuan) for using a VPN and sizeable fine for not reporting (and being taxed on) a foreign income.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, but I feel that you didn’t finish your thought. Why is that important to consider it in this context?
It sounds like he's saying this is not an abuse of the central government, but by a local one. I doubt VPNs are illegal in China in general.
There's no possibility of China having a competitive tech industry with these kinds of restrictions.
China has literally already built the second largest tech sector on the planet on restrictions like this
Take Baidu Maps it launched in 2005, by 2016 it had 348 million users per month, but was still limited to China, Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan. Now days it covers the world but a foreign user finds the UI is still largely in Chinese rather than being localized.
That’s just one example, but it’s obvious large swaths of their tech sector only exist because of protectionism.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks, but I feel that you didn’t finish your thought. Why is that important to consider it in this context?
It sounds like he's saying this is not an abuse of the central government, but by a local one. I doubt VPNs are illegal in China in general.
This is a gray area. While people said that the law is only about illegal physical network gateways, in reality the government did sentence people providing VPN services. I think the point they want to make is that even if this is illegal, the penalty in this case is kind of ridiculous.