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Gmail blocked in China

reuters.com

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Re: Gmail blocked in China

#41

Post by simonh »

WhitneyLand wrote: post #22
akramhussein wrote: post #3

Travelling in China right now. No Google services work but Gmail via SMTP on my iPhone seems fine. I'm not confident all emails go through though. Heading to Hong Kong tonight so not sure if that will be different. Using VPN does open everything but obviously becomes slower. It's not only Google though, all social media. Speaking to locals they don't care. There is an alternative for everything and they are better su…

>>Speaking to locals they don't care Locals don't care that they can't use certain American sites, or don't care that they are intellectually oppressed?

The Chinese have never really had freedom, so they've nothing to compare it to. Even if they did, people are doing well over there right now. Any realistic attempt at political change insitgated from outside the political elite would introduce instability and risk for uncertain benefits. As long as China is economically improving there's no real impetus for change. The only protests you get are from those small minorities that are losing out, and that tends to be temporary and/or local instances that are disconnected from one another.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#42

Post by tokenadult »

simonh wrote: post #41
WhitneyLand wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>Speaking to locals they don't care Locals don't care that they can't use certain American sites, or don't care that they are intellectually oppressed?

The Chinese have never really had freedom, so they've nothing to compare it to. Even if they did, people are doing well over there right now. Any realistic attempt at political change insitgated from outside the political elite would introduce instability and risk for uncertain benefits. As long as China is economically improving there's no real impetus for change. The only protests you get are from those small minor…

That kind of "rationale" for not having democracy in Taiwan used to be convincing, until finally enough people there were fed up with not having freedom and protested in unison to gain freedom. For that matter, that kind of "rationale" used to be convincing in east Germany, until people there realized that if they acted in unison they could improve their lives still more by gaining freedom. I'm not sure when enough of the masses in China will act in unison at the same time to change the system, and for sure the current ruling Communist Party of China tries to prevent any such united action, but I wouldn't characterize people dissatisfied with the current system as a "small minority," as they probably already make up a majority of the rural population, which in turn is a majority of the population of the whole country.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#44

Post by kaptain »

The sentiment that access to Google services doesn't matter because there are sufficient Chinese replacements is absolutely wrong. The Chinese government is handicapping its tech labor development by blocking Google.

I teach a basic web development workshop to university and vocational school students. One of the things we teach is how to look up things for youself on the internet. (Is that a cry of disbelief I hear? You can't imagine how confused I was before we specifically modeled and taught this.) Baidu search results, when it comes to searching for technical answers, are really lame. Google's search results are better, mostly because they tap heavily into the stackexchange network. It's disappointing and frustrating to try to encourage students to search for things via Baidu because the answers to their questions are so difficult to find. I've had students tell me that they turn on a VPN in order to access Google because those search results are that much better.

And it's not just a problem with having poor search results, but blocking the actual sites that have information is mind-boggling to me. I /know/ that China can do finer grain filtering than on a per-domain basis; I've seen specific articles blocked on wikipedia while wikipedia itself remained accessible.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#45

Post by blisterpeanuts »

What do citizens in China think of this? When Google Search was effectively banned, some scientists said that they depended on Google Scholar and Google Books, services which were also affected by the ban. Are Baidu and similar services really an effective replacement?

I'm also wondering what would happen if the U.S. takes this to the World Trade Organization. Arbitrarily blocking some company's services could well be interpreted as unfair trade practices. And a more aggressive U.S. government, perhaps with a more protectionist president in 2016, might well decide to retaliate.

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#47

Post by [deleted] »

hibbelig wrote: post #30
akramhussein wrote: post #3

Travelling in China right now. No Google services work but Gmail via SMTP on my iPhone seems fine. I'm not confident all emails go through though. Heading to Hong Kong tonight so not sure if that will be different. Using VPN does open everything but obviously becomes slower. It's not only Google though, all social media. Speaking to locals they don't care. There is an alternative for everything and they are better su…

My understanding is the locals mostly want to earn good money and have a reasonable life. And it's dangerous to care about the Greate Firewall. So they prefer to look the other way. Of course, this way it's only going to get worse over time.

[deleted]

Re: Gmail blocked in China

#50

Post by smcl »

devll wrote: post #46

I live in Urumqi. Not only Gmail is blocked , but all the google services are blocked here. And it has been quite a long time.

Are you a foreigner or are you Chinese? I'm curious as I naively assumed that due to the unrest\resistance that even tourism in Urumqi was difficult to do legally, and therefore residence\work would be out of the question or nigh on impossible
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