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…
China Blocks WhatsApp
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Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#442Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#443Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm a China hawk, but this is what has been happening and what will continue happening unless something massively more drastic than blocking a single minority foreign app happens. I think there's a tendency for people to overestimate the importance of foreign apps to Chinese consumers and to underestimate the Chinese market. It's almost laughable that people think blocking WhatsApp will make any difference to Chinese…
> I think there's a tendency for people to overestimate the importance of foreign apps to Chinese consumers Then why take the trouble of blocking something so small and unimportant? ;) > eg., the Chinese tech/online market is so huge it can sustain multiple competitors of its own in each sector Doesn't China have bigger aspirations than just the mainland? People are missing the bigger point. I'm not talking about the…
The data is free flowing enough within China though - that's the bigger point ;)
It's not as if you turn off the access to Western information* and suddenly you've got a room full of Chinese developers and entrepreneurs awkwardly twiddling their thumbs - there's enough critical mass within Chinese markets to create the kind of 'daily innovation' without much input from outside.
Genuinely, massively disruptive innovation has always crossed over, and will continue to do so unless something drastically worse happens with censorship/politics.
*EDIT: plus blocking WhatsApp won't actually restrict meaningful foreign information crossing the borders - all it will do is make it difficult for dissidents to hide their online conversations, and piss off Chinese business people who need WhatsApp to converse with foreign clients.
Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#444What 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…
Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#445Edit: 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
#446Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To take the analogy a bit further with the boiling frogs, the frogs jumped out of the water, until Goltz removed the brains from the frogs. So, how does that relate to China? Well, if they still have brains, they will reach a tipping point as the water warms. More closely, so long as they have access to information (I think) they will eventually decide that enough is enough. So, then the question is do they have enou…
As for why people accept the situation, one can probably start with "Nash equilibrium" (I chose not to use the term "prisoners' dilemma" as that could project uneeded connotation in this context).
Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#447Well, at least Mark didn't sacrifice his child for that. What's the end game here? In the early 2000s it seemed like China was going to become this liberal democracy, but it just seems like the government is getting more and more power and control. Is there any sign this (and the rise of several authoritarians) is gonna stop? This made me think of Fukuyama (1989): What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the…
Whoever told you that was lying to you.
Mainland elites have been very clear since the 90s that they want the economic benefits of markets but not democracy. They've explicitly said they don't want democracy. There is widespread consensus on this issue.
You should stop reading whichever propaganda outlet sold you that fools gold.
Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#448What 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…
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…
The possibility that eventually Chinese internet products could by their own merit compete in the global market, outcompeting western alternatives in some cases, is the even more terrifying aspect to me, however. I wrote a lengthy post about it not too long ago, and don't have anything useful to add to it yet, so please excuse the copy-paste:
To authoritarian governments all over the world, the censorship and surveillance frameworks built into many Chinese internet services like WeChat are actually extremely valuable features, rather than something they'd want to opt out of.
These features have been battle-tested in the largest and most ruthlessly robust surveillance state the world has ever seen, and have time and again proven their effectiveness in influencing public opinion and quelling dissent.
If an app like WeChat were to ever gain foothold in a nation with an authoritarian government, all they'd have to do is strike a deal with TenCent, and with the flip of a switch, that government can then enjoy unprecedented control and visibility into the "private" communications of its populace. All the friction involved in the decidedly difficult and costly exercise of building your own large-scale surveillance/censorship infrastructure will suddenly have been removed. The one thing Chinese internet services can offer that no western counterpart can reasonably compete with also makes them by far China's most dangerous export: authoritarianism as a service.
To those of us in democratic nations, we must also remember that authoritarianism usually doesn't manifest itself as a cliff, but rather as a gradual, slippery downward slope. Every government in the past has displayed authoritarian tendencies in their history, to varying degrees, and governments in the future will inevitably continue to do so. The natural tendency of government is to slide down the slope of authoritarianism, because government is power, and power corrupts. It takes diligence and continued effort on the part of the governing body and its citizenship to counteract this natural descent.
All it would take is another 911 type terrorist attack to sway public opinion enough to the point where enacting some kind of dragnet surveillance system in the name of national security would become politically feasible, in any democratic nation in the world. At that point, the horrible user experience and PR nightmare in having to rebalance the national budget or raise taxes to make room for improving your domestic spying infrastructure could be the only thing standing between us and an irreversible descent into authoritarianism. And if a significant portion of a democratic populace happens to be using WeChat at that point, well, let's just say I don't have a lot of faith that my own government could resist the temptation and take a principled stand against such a frictionless way to expand its own powers.
As Chinese offerings mature and become polished and innovative enough to compete with western counterparts in markets outside of China, we could easily start to see users around the world voluntarily start switching to them. That could very well mark the beginning of the end of this golden age of democracy as we know it.
I highly recommend taking a look at Nathan Freitas's excellent talk "The Great Firewall Inverts": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KEJGqNf2rgk. In it, he explores how China's so-called Great Firewall is actually a bit of a misnomer because it's most crucial functionality is its ability to control the flow of information inside its own borders as opposed of keeping information out, how this ability is readily available to be exported to countries around the world in the form of internet services like WeChat, and what we can do about it (which is unfortunately, not a lot, other than to educate others on the very non-obvious non-immediate consequences of using these services, and to be vigilant about the spread of authoritarianism in our own governments).
Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#449Earlier quoted context omitted.
In FinTech in particular, China is years ahead [1]. WeChat Pay had 100m users in 2014. [1] https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/2171739...
This claim gets made a lot, especially by China's government in it's "four great modern inventions" marketing campaign. [1] I don't get it. None of those are Chinese inventions. They're all technologies China adopted really fast. It's a testament to market size, development speed and certain idiosyncrasies about Chinese demographics, etc. But it has nothing to do with invention or innovation. [1] http://www.chinadail…
If the US isn't very good at developing new products because of burdensome regulations, small market size, slowness, demographics, etc. then maybe it's just not very good at technology. Other countries are bad at technology because of poor education, access to finance, skill of workers, culture, etc. They're still bad at technology, whatever the reason.
Re: China Blocks WhatsApp
#450Earlier 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…
100% this. And occasionally these apps out innervate their western counterparts. WeChat is better than WhatsApp, Facebook.
Comparing WeChat to WhatsApp on feature count is big time apples to oranges.