not being a network guru how easy is this? I have my VPN set to run over port 443 but I assume it would be easy to see enough of the traffic to see it's a VPN and not an HTTPS connection. I'm assuming that could be obscured in some way but then I've heard even if you can't see the contents you can generally tell it's not HTTPS by looking at the traffic patterns?
The Great Firewall blocks these no problem, not sure if you realize the scale of who and what you are dealing with.
There are enough side channels leaked trying to proxy an Internet connection through an encrypted tunnel, this is picked up on through Machine Learning or otherwise and it pretty effectively blocks many forms of escape. Read the parent article, let it soak in, and come back.
And from TFA, it looks like whatever China can't block through technology, they are blocking through politics.
The handshake is only one of the many giveaways of a VPN connection. A single HTTPS connection has a certain normal pattern of traffic that is very different from a VPN connection. VPN connections often persist, with bursts of activity as pages are loaded. Even if you repeatedly put up and tear down the VPN connection, you're exchanging large amounts of traffic with a single IP address, which is not typical of normal web browsing behavior. If you can see all of the traffic going in and out of China, you can easily tell which IP addresses and/or ranges host VPN servers. There are many, many features which you can put into an ML model that will identify users that are using VPNs just based on IP headers. Will it block 100% with no false positives? No. However, they can simply set the penalty to be not being able to connect to outside-China IP addresses for half an hour if they detect VPN usage. After tripping this a certain number of times, you get a letter, and then eventually someone pays you a visit. If for some reason this doesn't work, they'll just require everyone to install their MITM root certificate to use the internet like lots of corporations do.
Will some people find ways around it? Yes. However, it will be risky, and if any given technique becomes widespread, they will find a way to block it.
There are lots of corporate VPNs and RPCs. Blocking of these will result in a disaster. So, just mimic, say, one of hundreds Microsoft Windows 10 user data collecting services.
AWS traffic also never will be blocked.
Notice that a selective blocking is not the same as real-time https inspection and filtering, which is an intractable task.
You can make it more difficult, but short of actually disconnecting China's network from the rest of the Internet entirely I don't think there's any way to completely prevent it.
I had a run-in with a particularly aggressive captive portal last week that kept injecting ads into unencrypted pages (if I'm traveling on one of your vehicles, I don't want to buy tickets to travel with you), but fortunately didn't firewall outgoing port 22 so I could use sshuttle to route 0.0.0.0/0 via an SSH connection to my personal server. This works with pretty much any server you can run Python on, so I don't know of a good way to stop it unless you're willing to block anyone from SSHing outside of the country (thus preventing e. g. Chinese companies with a global market from running servers in other countries).
ssh sessions reveal enough that an interactive session, a file transfer (scp), and sshuttle routing someone web browsing look quite different from one another. Sure, you can multiplex and throw in extra traffic, but it's not trivial.
As long as there is a legitimate data format there must be a way to emulate it.
The question isn't really if that's at all possible. The question is if you'd be willing to take the chance if the (fear of) retribution is great.
And even if you or someone still circumvents the GFW, it achieves its purpose of guiding the spirit of the people.
We should primarily cross our fingers, and hope the Chinese turn their collective spirit to global liberty and prosperity. At least, I'm in no position to affect them.
So write a program that emulates 'regular HTTPS' traffic patterns. On the technical side of things, I'm pretty sure the VPNs have the upper hand in this game of cat and mouse.
GFW does not just inspect traffic, it actively probes server IP:ports looking for its responses, can replay packets you sent legitimately, and can impersonate IP addr behind GFW.
As in, it is not only a passive observer periodically resetting connections, it will also make its own to test the waters
Statistical analysis of traffic flow in encrypted communications to determine the type of traffic has been done effectively.
There was a paper a few years ago against VoIP protocols specifically.
This is a sure sign that China is one black swan event away from an economic collapse and possible Arab spring. Between the 300%+ gdp/debt ratio, stalled stock market, complete frozen capital control, second real estate bubble bursting in shanghai/tier1 cities, huge spike in shadow lending, Trump's 100 day ultimatum to China regarding trade deficit, demographics crisis, NK situation, south asia island situation, Foreign Direct Investments leaving China, protectionisms against China in europe/US/Japan, etc. The authoritarian Chinese government is starting to have some sense of fear now.
With China, there is a big difference between what is said, what is law and what is actually enforced.
What's likely to happen is that there will be a crack down, some satisfying numbers will be shown to officials, and then everything will become back to normal soon after.
There has been this kind of talk about cracking down on VPN before, and it's still available, so wait and see
I have a hunch that these kind of news had been circulated before, officials threw a few sacrificial lambs in to reach the quota, then the headlines fade slowly into background.
I think they are getting really serious this time...
Just last year, out of the blue, Xi Jinping replaced the director of the Cyberspace Administration of China with a new guy named Xu Lin (which could be deemed as some sign that Xi Jinping really cares about the functioning of this department). Xu Lin has been staying pretty quietly during the past year, contrary to the flamboyant style of his predecessor...If someone is quiet and still able to stay in his position, especially a position that is concerned by a autocratic leader, then that usually indicates that he has been doing something concrete and not just putting up a show...
In the past, although there had been a lot of talks about regulating (not indiscriminately shutting down, but regulating) VPNs in China, but technically, they still did not have the capability of achieving that goal without shutting down many business at that time. Recently, China started to enforce new cyber security rules (and laws) which, as we could see from the following instance (see [1]), requires firms operating in China, for their communication devices and software, to:
* have regulator backdoor
* use domestic encryption technology
...
After those measures took effect, those companies, if they are still willing to operate in China, could still do their business as long as they are willing to register with the government and let the government monitor their data...And for those data channels which the government could not monitor and figure out its content, then they could easily detect them and shut them down...
My guess is, the communist regime starts to realize that it is really important for them to control the information flow in the country in a way that is firm and concrete...And by observing their North Korean neighbor (as well as the Arabian revolts in the past decade), they understand that as long as they could control their people's mind and disrupt the natural synchronization in the society, they could have an ever lasting rule even there is another great famine or some serious crisis -- and otherwise, even if their people could enjoy a certain share of economic prosperity, the government could be overthrown sooner or later as long as there are continuous occurrences of triggering events, which would be inevitable given the practical difficulty and unscalability of managing a society of one and half billion people with a centralized administration, and given the fact that many officials in the current government are really corrupt, unscrupulous and have a fairly low respect for normal humanity (for the long dehumanization tradition of the communism) at this time...
China is one black swan event away from an economic collapse and possible Arab spring. The authoritarian Chinese government is starting to have some sense of fear now.
Between the 300%+ gdp/debt ratio, second real estate bubble bursting in shanghai/tier1 cities, huge spike in shadow lending, stalled stock market, complete frozen capital control, Trump's 100 day ultimatum to China regarding trade deficit, demographics crisis, NK situation, south asia island situation, protectionisms against China in europe/US/Japan, Foreign Direct Investments leaving China, etc.
The preconditions of revolution exist in the UK, and most western countries. The number of active pre-conditions is quite stunning, from elite isolation to concentrated wealth to inadequate socialisation and education, to concentrated land holdings to loss of authority to repression of new technologies especially in relation to energy, to the atrophy of the public sector and spread of corruption, to media dishonesty, to mass unemployment of young men and on and on and on. [...] Preconditions are not the same as precipitants. We are waiting for our Tunisian fruit seller. The public will endure great repression, especially when most media outlets and schools are actively aiding the repressive meme of 'you are helpless, this is the order of things.' When we have a scandal so powerful that it cannot be ignored by the average Briton or American, we will have a revolution that overturns the corrupt political systems in both countries, and perhaps puts many banks out of business. Vaclav Havel calls this 'The Power of the Powerless.' One spark, one massive fire. - Robert David Steele, ex-Marine, ex-CIA, Open Source Intelligence Expert in The Guardian, 2014-06-19 ... from my fortune DB @ https://github.com/globalcitizen/taoup
Robert David Steele has interesting things to say about OSINT, but one must take him with an entire cow lick of salt. After getting interested in his ideas and watching several interviews with him, I was very disappointed. His personal narrative is exaggerated; he advocates conspiracy theories that are popular but ridiculous; he shows a certain arrogance. He looks & quacks like an aggressive self promoter without much substance to offer.
This man has claimed to be the father of OSINT one day, and said that Pizzagate was spot-on the next. No one with a clue about how to conduct an investigation should have swallowed that.
That is all to say, I believe we are in very troubled times, but I don't believe we are on the verge of revolution.
China undoubtedly faces many challenges, as you fairly point out.
However, there's a long history in China that determines the thinking of both the government and its people. That view is that a strong centre leads to a peaceful and prosperous China, while a weak centre leads to confusion and chaos. An Arab Spring-like event isn't as likely, there just isn't the same desire to be liberated.
No one would challenge the centre unless they were prepared to go all the way. And there's a very powerful state security apparatus ready to come down hard if they do.
what you said above is nothing new, it has been claimed, argued, suggested, predicted in the last 35 years. There are even morons like Gordon Chang making a living by saying such stupid things.
you should probably contact Gordon Chang to see how you can get yourself on a similar payroll by making such claims.
Economic collapse? Are you insane? China very likely has a property crash in its near future but even the very most developed parts of China are not near to Korea, Japan or Taiwan. There's a lot of room for China to grow and there's no reason to believe growth is under 5%. Maybe heavily state directed capitalism can't reach South Korean levels of prosperity but if all of China reaches Shanghai prosperity that will be success.
And the Arab Spring was in very large part a result of rising bread prices as well as being a massive failure in every way outside Tunisia.
Unofficial indicators of Chinese GDP often suggest that Beijing’s growth figures are exaggerated. This column uses nighttime light as a proxy to estimate Chinese GDP growth. Since 2012, the authors’ estimate is never appreciably lower, and is in many years higher, than the GDP growth rate reported in the official statistics. While not ruling out the risk of future turmoil, the analysis presents few immediate indications that Chinese growth is being systematically overestimated.
Look at the graph of Chinese Urban population and Chinese GDP. These graphs are in lock-step. Now look at the graphs of fully developed countries and extrapolate. The rural population is the economic fuel. So long as its there there will not be an economic downturn. There may be slow downs and specific cases of mismanagement, but never a true negative growth rate recession. IMO anyone predicting any change in the Chinese status quo before the mid 2030's is full of it.
I seriously doubt China will go into economic collapse like Venezuela, but I think in the next 5-10 years once growth is down below 3-4%, the economy will start to suffer and people will become uneasy because the economy is affecting how much they can buy. Probably the biggest domestic economic issue you pointed out is the debt to GDP ratio, which is very high, but may not be an issue depending on how China deals with the impending developing to developed country situation. I think that the two largest issues that will face China in the next decade or two are 1) that manufacturing and electronics jobs like at Foxconn will move to countries where labor doesn't cost as much, unless China is really smart and opens up powerful trade deals with certain countries (which it wants to spearhead with the downfall of TPP); and 2) South China Sea will likely become a major point of contention between its neighbors and could lead to a major cooling of relations with bigger economies like USA and Japan. NK possibly could be an issue but only if it becomes war, which all parties including NK want to avoid.
> China is one black swan event away from an economic collapse and possible Arab spring.
This sounds like the Marxists' "eminent collapse of capitalism" or "this will be the year of Linux on the desktop" or Mao Ze-Dong's "America is a giant with clay feet".
Someday you'll be proven right. But only after being proven wrong for a million times.
Previously, there was an implicit understanding that the Great Firewall was in place to prevent unauthorised access to the Internet by the masses. This is to prevent them from being influenced by foreign media, prevent too much information leakage of citizen info (e.g. via facebook), and to give Chinese tech companies a monopoly in China.
If, however, you had the will and ability to use VPN software, the government usually turned a blind eye. Afterall, it was only a minority of people and they usually had a genuine need. In fact, this is what made staying in China tolerable. If this block does truly come into effect, they are essentially closing the door to the outside world.
China was a country of reasonable compromises before, but with Xi Jinping's nationalism, they are starting to think "why should we compromise at all?"
That was never the official or even the implicit position. There has always been a war with VPNs, want VPNs work and don't can change monthly, and it's been like that for the last 10 years. Xi's nationalism is nothing new here, they just think that the tech is good enough to cut off VPNS for good now.
China has been trying to close their internet since after the Olympics. It isn't surprising that they would eventually succeed at it.
Since well before the Olympics actually. I was in China when 9/11 happened and for a brief period of time they opened access to a large number of previously blocked foreign news sites so that people could read what was happening.
The have periodically been discussions about "opening up" in China. Fore-instance the party where split in the decision to crack down on the Falun Gong movement who also included many party members. Likewise were there some opposition to the violent crack down on Tiananmen square. Hardliners seems to win.
why would people be checking a news site that was previously blocked? do you go everyday "oh, let me try cnn.com... oh, still blocked. let's try tomorrow?"
Well, first of all, it's not every day that a news event on the scale of 9/11 happens.
As for how I discovered they were unblocked, I got a phone call from my Mum early in the morning after the attack (the attack happened during the Chinese night time) and went in to the office (which had the only available internet access), and one of my colleagues told me that the bbc and nytimes were no longer blocked.
Not sure how he found out they were unblocked, but he'd been there most of the night.
Then once you know one is unblocked you try them all :-)
I don't think there has been many technical reasons why they couldn't block VPNs. I would presume that it has more to do with the overall cost / benefit of the open Internet.
Access to the open Internet is becoming less and less of a necessity. "The next big thing" isn't really happening. A country like China, having developed their own industry, can safely rely on companies coming to them or developing their own alternatives. At the same time things like ddos, ransomware, money laundering, black markets, foreign influence, rumors, populism etc. is becoming more of a problem.
It's like any other technology adopted by China. They will buy or co-develop something as long as you have something to bring to the table, when you don't they will do it themselves instead.
I don't agree with the Chinese governments position nor methods, but I'm not sure their reasoning around "cyber-sovereignty" wrong.
Non-sense. Just check online articles and blogs to see when they started to block stuff like linux ipsec vpn. You may also check the reports on how/when they "talk" to the shadowsocks vpn author to force him to stop working on the project.
The regular crackdowns on VPNs mean that many who live in the region long since stopped using them and switched to a mobile plan or prepaid sim from China Mobile Hong Kong or Hong Kong Unicom that provides a Hong Kong IP address and unfiltered internet while roaming in the mainland.
From my experience in China, it seems that the vast majority of Chinese citizens have no idea what a VPN is and or why they would use it. Friends of mine that are Chinese citizens that study abroad in the US make extensive use of VPNs to circumvent the GFW.
Every technology company that I've come across in China has invested a great deal of effort into establishing stable VPN connections. I have seen several "VPN microservices" that act to tunnel all foreign-bound traffic out of the country. In the vacuum of mature, western technologies many Chinese copycats have popped up. I have been hoping that we would start to see more and more Chinese technology companies exporting their technology [1]. With these new legislative actions, it seems like a step in the wrong direction.
I'm struggling to come to terms with the restrictive policies that the Chinese government continually struggles to hoist over their citizens. During the midst of one of the most dramatic periods of economic development in history, the Chinese government is moving to artificial isolate themselves from the developing global economy?
it is completely different, in the 15th Century, the Haijin policy was used to stop "barbarians" from flooding the country. there is nothing to gain from trading with the rest of the world because the country was ranked No.1 in the world in almost all metrics. today's GFW is to protect a young but fast growing industry - because the overall economy is not that strong.
The rest of the world totally did have things the Chinese wanted, silver and gold. Not much else at that stage to be fair but China was sucking precious metals from Western Eurasia for most of the first and second millenia.
I was under the impression that silver was what the chinese emperor/government imposed as a means of payment for the most sought chinese exports: tea and silk.
But the "rest of the world" (meaning mostly the UK in that time period) did have something that was "in demand" in china: opium.
It was the imbalance between imports and exports - china wasn't interested in buying/importing what europeans were selling/exporting - that prompted the uk to start smuggling opium against chinese law, thus paving the way to the opium wars.
Like it or not, the GFW helped to created the "most dramatic periods of economic development" in Chinese history.
Back in 2010, when Google chose to exit China, many argued the exact same that China is isolating itself from the outside. Such feeling is understandable from a western point of view, I mean for anyone from a western background there is simply no Internet if google/twitter/fb etc. are all unavailable. However, a bold however, 7 years after Google's exit from China, it has been proved again and again that the biggest motivation of GFW is the protectionism aiming to help domestic Internet companies - and that actually paid off pretty well.
You don't need Google/fb/twitter etc to have booming Internet/high tech economy. Look at China's social media, online payment, e-commerce, online gaming, AI, shared economy etc, did China miss out. Let me give you a bloody simple number: I didn't use any cash or bank card/credit card in the last 45 days, everything, I mean 100% everything, was paid by mobile.
This is not about some cheap nationalism - it is _all_ about how many good paying jobs can be made available in China for Chinese. It is the exact same as the Making America Great Again crap. Blocking google/fb/twitter was the first essential step to achieve that.
Where are you in China? I just spent a week in a relatively small city in Shandong and there were so many places that were cash only. Couldn't even use card, let alone mobile.
I just spent the last 6 weeks in Beijing and Shanghai (currently in Shanghai) and I have run into several places that don't even accept cash anymore, and only accept WeChat Pay or Alipay.
I live in Shanghai. You can still see people paying cash here but mostly from those who don't use any tech/electronics. Not talking about big/fancy businesses, most street food vendors accept/encourage mobile payment, beggars are holding their printed QR code signs asking for changes paid by mobile.
I think their point was that you will pay with mobile via chinese company apps instead of google pay or mastercard... not that places that are too remote for gpay or Mastercard will magically accept the facy new payments from the chinese companies.
> Like it or not, the GFW helped to created the "most dramatic
> periods of economic development" in Chinese history.
Like it or not, several thousands of years ago in ancient Egypt, slavery helped to build many great pyramids -- the "most dramatic periods of economic development" in ancient Egyptian history...
> You don't need Google/fb/twitter etc to have
> booming Internet/high tech economy.
But one does need Google or duckduckgo to have a blooming mind in this age...
I did not know that before...thanks for sharing...
But the whole point is about a fair income distribution in a society...
If you think that as a Pharaoh, without contributing much to a society but could still get all the best things -- including the pyramids -- provided by the people in the country, by telling them that his ruling is god's will -- which does not seem to hold much truth in it...I just feel that this is not justifiable...
This is a similar thing happening in China right now -- with all the propaganda and censorship and limitation on what people could read and talk at their own will, and hence influence the way people think and reason...
If the pyramids were not built by slaves, then there were plenty of other magnificent monuments or grand palaces or great economic achievements that were the labor of masses of hard working coolies who never got what they really deserve...
First thing first, I didn't downvote you or anyone else - because I simply don't have enough karma to downvote anyone. Please check my public profile before pointing fingers, that would be a much more civilised move.
I was educated in the west, with PhD from the top ranking university. I spent 12 years living in your society and do understand where you came from. The problem is you seem to be forcing your definition of freedom onto many people. You can value your free speech, your democratic system etc etc, I'd perfectly happy to respect that. However, it it seems that you refuse to even acknowledge the cultural differences widely observed. To give you a quick hint, majority vote is the preferred way in the west, but apparently Chinese and many Asian cultures value more on consensus based on compromises.
Your arguments on "propaganda and censorship" are quite rude because you are basically arguing that Chinese living in China can not figure out what is truth and what is propaganda, you are basically suggesting that Chinese as a population of 1.4B can be easily manipulated. It is also extremely funny that someone who has never ever lived in China for long term is now jumping up and down lecturing people how bad is the situation in China. Tell me how this is not the definition of arrogance!
Cultural or ideological differences are never good reason to cut all communication. It will backfire(economically, psychologically) and you seem to refuse to even acknowledge this basic fact.
And I am not writing this as some disrespecting westerner, but as Eastern European. Having to figure out what is truth and what is propaganda in non-free-speech environment has severely morally stunted our nations, and I can't believe some "consensus culture" can avoid that.
The link and communication is always there and it is strong. I spent 12 years living/studying/working in the west, such experience is shared by millions of other Chinese in my generation. Most western media are freely accessible from China, e.g. BBC/CNN/Foxnews. Comparing today's China to eastern Europe back in the USSR days is not a good idea, e.g. did USSR encourage its youths to study in the west? China has been doing this in the last 39 years.
It is also questionable whether the so called non-free-speech environment is the same here - not judging what people can/can not do in those old USSR days as I don't know anything about it, but you can openly criticise CCP in China as long as the criticism is not coordinated, I have been doing that for ages, never got into any trouble.
> First thing first, I didn't downvote you or anyone else - because
> I simply don't have enough karma to downvote anyone.
> Please check my public profile before pointing fingers, that
> would be a much more civilised move.
I apologize if my words made you think that I was saying that you double downvoted me...I was just trying to put my observation in its context...but I did not mean you.
> The problem is you seem to be forcing your definition of
> freedom onto many people. You can value your free speech,
> your democratic system etc etc, I'd perfectly happy to respect
> that. However, it it seems that you refuse to even acknowledge
> the cultural differences widely observed. To give you a quick
> hint, majority vote is the preferred way in the west, but apparently
> Chinese and many Asian cultures value more on consensus
> based on compromises.
Thanks for stating your argument in details...
The meta-assumption that you are making in your argument is that there exists a general will in both western society and Chinese society -- which is equivalent to saying that there is a higher intelligent wisdom above all the western people or all the eastern people, represents their collective will and thus having a single voice that "they want democracy" or "they want totalitarian"...
This assumption is too big to discuss here, but from what I observe, many people in China are trying to get across the Great Fire Wall while another group of people (i.e. the government) are trying to forbid the first group to do so, which seems to me is hardly a consensus, not to mention any compromise...
> Your arguments on "propaganda and censorship" are quite rude
> because you are basically arguing that Chinese living in China
> can not figure out what is truth and what is propaganda,
> you are basically suggesting that Chinese as a population
> of 1.4B can be easily manipulated.
Well, I am afraid so...Or, has anyone figured out how many people starved to death during the Great Famine between 1959 to 1961, or how many students had been shot dead during the TianAnMen square protest in 1989 -- and that does not seem to be a consensus nor a compromise...
And from my own experience, many young people born after 1990 in China even do not know that TianAnMen square protest and the shooting even have ever happened...And what about the dramatic increase in the number of people that have been diagnosed with lung cancer or other types of life-threatening illness as a result of the air pollution caused by profit-driven manufacturing planning?
It seems to me that you are fairly funny, and rude, to speak for 1.4 billion individuals, without a validated assumption on the very existence of "general will", without any action or even intention to obtain their opinion, while enjoying all the freedom of speech and convenience of western life, and make a speech that all the 1.4 billion individuals have a consensus based on their compromise -- but more to the fact, a self-narcissus based on other people's extraordinary sacrifice...
> The meta-assumption that you are making in your argument is that there exists a general will in both western society and Chinese society -- which is equivalent to saying that there is a higher intelligent wisdom above all the western people or all the eastern people, represents their collective will and thus having a single voice that "they want democracy" or "they want totalitarian"
Totalitarian/Totalitarianism is not preferred even by the CCP, you have the Chinese Premier criticising those over regulated craps on weekly basis. To give you a quick example, the Chinese Premier spoke highly of the reform to allow business registration to be done though WeChat. I am 100% sure that you guys can not do business registration using Facebook/Twitter style social media or any other private media.
> how many people starved to death during the Great Famine between 1959 to 1961
You do realize that the recent administrations are the exact victims of those failed polices back in the 50s/60s? You do realize that the current Chinese President had his father put into jail because of those policies? Do you even know that the Chinese President himself was sent to the most rural area to work as a farmer/labour for 7 years because of those policies?
Suddenly, the victims need to be responsible for the horrible past.
> And from my own experience, many young people born after 1990 in China even do not know that TianAnMen square protest and the shooting even have ever happened...
It was highly regrettable to have those deaths, one day, the CCP will have to come clean not just to the public but to the book of history. The same can be said to the one-child policy as well. That being said, the timing should never be set/influenced by the CCP or any foreign power, it should be purely decided by Chinese. To answer your question, when most people don't even talk about the Tiananmen square incident, that is because they believe the overall progress made after the Tiananmen Square is good, CCP's explanations at that time (to ensure society stability) is acceptable.
> And what about the dramatic increase in the number of people that have been diagnosed with lung cancer or other types of life-threatening illness as a result of the air pollution caused by profit-driven manufacturing planning?
This is as silly as arguing that thousands of people got killed by flying Boeing-747 and thus it was a bad idea to develop 747.
You are free to check any respectful source you like, you can buy yourself a ticket to China and watch yourself, you'd be seeing one thing pretty consistent - Chinese are living much longer nowadays, life expectancy in the eastern coast has reached almost 80 - my home city Shanghai is already doing better than the US national average. How that was made possible? profit-driven manufacturing.
> It seems to me that you are fairly funny, and rude, to speak for 1.4 billion individuals, without a validated assumption on the very existence of "general will", without any action or even intention to obtain their opinion, while enjoying all the freedom of speech and convenience of western life, and make a speech that all the 1.4 billion individuals have a consensus based on their compromise -- but more to the fact, a self-narcissus based on other people's extraordinary sacrifice...
so just follow your system because it works so well in Arab Spring countries lately? What a joke.
> You do realize that the recent administrations are the exact victims of those failed
> polices back in the 50s/60s? You do realize that the current Chinese President
> had his father put into jail because of those policies? Do you even know that the
> Chinese President himself was sent to the most rural area to work as a
> farmer/labour for 7 years because of those policies?
> Suddenly, the victims need to be responsible for the horrible past.
I used that example only as a counter example to the statement made in your previous post, that "Chinese living in China" can "figure out what is truth and what is propaganda, and "Chinese as a population of 1.4B" cannot "be easily manipulated."
Not to divert too far, I am just saying that, the propaganda and the censorship in the country made it is almost impossible to find out the truth, in many cases such as those ones that I listed in my previous posts.
There is a saying that "in today's China, the history is unknown but the future is always sure..."
Back to your question in your current post: yes, I know that Xi Jinping was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution...So was Bo Xilai, but that doesn't change Bo's apparent fondness about the Cultural Revolution style...
And, please don't mix up the Great Famine with the Cultural Revolution -- they were almost 8 or 9 years apart...and neither Xi Jinping nor Bo Xilai was much affected during the Great Famine...
> This is as silly as arguing that thousands of people
> got killed by flying Boeing-747 and thus it was a bad
> idea to develop 747.
Sometimes inappropriate analogies could misguide people's reasoning...to justify your analogy, you need to also do a cost/benefit comparison and see if the two cases are at a similar ratio or scale...
And just try to live next to one of those factories in some seriously polluted areas in China for several weeks , perhaps you could have some empathy for the local people who have been living there for their entire life...
And how much compensation will they ever get?
Well, again, my original point of using this example was only to address your statement that people in China know the truth well...If that is the case, I don't think people these days, including you and me, would have too much contention about what the truth really was...
In the future, let us try not to divert from topic to topic -- then this discussion would become arguing for the purpose of arguing, instead of for the purpose of getting closer to the truth...
> so just follow your system because it works so well in
> Arab Spring countries lately? What a joke.
If you look at a broader historical picture, then do you happen to know that there was a Spring of Nations around 1848 in Europe? Just look that up...A little more knowledge about the truth won't do you harm -- and, the Spring of Nations is not a joke, it is a historic fact...
==============================
If you have more counter-arguments, please list them below...I will try to come back to address them later when I find some more time...thanks...
You can't downvote people who reply to you, so more likely is that rather than being 'double downvoted' by someone, multiple people find your argument unpersuasive.
Well, I noticed there had been a pattern for my multiple posts on this topic that, for several times, each time when a post was downvoted, it was double downvoted...
So either it was a very synchronized move by several independent minds, or more likely, it was from a same mind who operates several accounts...
Edit 1:
I personally would not mind at all that any of my posts has been downvoted -- and if the person would like to provide any reasoning for his downvoting, then that would be better...After all, the whole point is not to win over your opponent but to find some thing that is closer to the truth and justice -- if there is any...
But manipulating the visibility of other people's words by casting multiple downvotes by a same individual is sheer disgusting and does not make any sense to prove any point...as if that is a way of finding out truth and justice, then truth and justice would be equivalent to registering and manipulating more accounts than your opponents'...this reduces the human talent of reasoning to a series of steps of mechanical movement...it is a waste of his own life, as well as his audience's time...
I downvoted your initial post because, even if I don't think information restriction is right, I don't think it's on the same moral level as slavery.
And additionally, modern archeologists don't believe the workers constructing the pyramids were slaves as such. They were citizens working for the state. In some theories, the arrangement is arguably a form of slavery, but I think we'd usually call the arrangement serfdom, and consider it differently in a historical context.
And I downvoted your subsequent posts because I always downvote people complaining about downvotes. It's offtopic, and usually pointless.
Thanks for letting me know about that, and kindly took the time to provide your reasoning to justify your downvoting...
Well, as I previously stated, that there were multiple concurrent downvotings cast to my multiple posts on this topic, all in a short period of time, and then there weren't many downvotings afterwards...this well synchronized pattern, occurring multiple times, would make one to think, there is a certain level of dependencies behind these actions (and in short, from a statistical point of view, a normal distribution can be normal only because its data are independent -- and by standard normal distribution, we could maximize our information output -- and I thought that is the goal of this forum)...
There had been known information manipulation effected by the Chinese government over many information outlets even outside that country -- so combined with my previously stated observation, I have enough reason to doubt that the coordinated downvoting is a manipulated result...even if there is only one downvote from you -- as there are more than two downvotings, without giving a single word of counter-argument, until your post....
As for the second point, either "slavery" or "serfdom" is only a term, used to describe the situation of severe economic inequality in a society...and this inequality, and information manipulation are my argument points -- actually, I am more interested in the current situation in China than that in the ancient Egypt...
As for the third point,
> modern archeologists don't believe the workers
> constructing the pyramids were slaves as such
do you have more hard evidences? In an academic setting, we always try to compose novel theories -- they may be correct, and they may be wrong...I just feel we should have more evidences in order to prove any point have a long lasting truth in it, but not just by a single study...
Lastly, it's okay for you to downvote my post about the fact that my posts were downvoated...even if you are going to downvote that based on the sole reason that you took it for complaining or so, I am still going to voice out my observation there...
> So either it was a very synchronized move by several independent minds, or more likely, it was from a same mind who operates several accounts...
The latter seems unlikely. You can't downvote until you've accumulated 500 karma (might even be higher now).
That means that in order for someone you replied to downvote you twice, they'd need two separate 500+ karma accounts in addition to their main account (which they wouldn't be able to use to downvote you from).
That's a lot of work just to be petty in the case someone online disagrees with you.
If multiple posts of yours are receiving multiple downvotes, then some reflection might be in order before casting aspersions elsewhere, because it's likely the posts that are problematic.
(And complaining about downvotes is almost guaranteed to get you further downvotes).
> That's a lot of work just to be petty in
> the case someone online disagrees with you.
I am really okay if someone disagrees with me and downvotes me...After all, I do not make a living based on the HN karma points in my account...
But for the reason that I stated in my previous two posts, I feel I have some reason to doubt this could be an act of information manipulation from personnel funded by the Chinese government especially for that purpose...For instance, some of those manipulations are described in,
> and if there were indeed government resources behind this, multiple accounts that each has 500 karma points are nothing...
And if that was indeed the case you would also expect other replies critical of China and the Chinese government to be downvoted to a similar degree, and yet that has not happened in this thread. Why single you out in particular?
My posts, among all the posts sharing some similar views on this topic -- not just in this thread but in many other threads on this topic as well -- are not the only ones that have been downvoted multiple times -- from a purely statistical estimation, this should not be the case...And if you have done some search within the domain of news.ycombinator.com, you could easily find other downvoted instances that have been posted by other commenters, which apparently shows that it is not the case that mine have been "singled out" in that aspect...
I was trying to state my observation on a downvoting pattern and some of my past readings...I am not asserting that the information manipulation here is a sure fact -- to prove that would require some analysis on a global set of data...
But if you only look at one instance, with a small set of data, and make a statement such as "why single you out in particular?", then perhaps you could ask similar questions for any jailed politic dissident in that country, like, "Xiaobo is a criminal; and why single him out in particular?"
I just don't think there is enough evidence here to reasonably kill the doubt that there could be a possibility that certain information has been manipulated for certain government's political ends...
It just seems like you are creating a rather complex theory to explain the reason for your downvotes, rather than accept the more likely reason that you just made a low quality post.
the two examples that you just listed are in this local thread (i.e. a very select and small sample space)...like I said in my previous post, I feel we should have "some analysis on a global set of data", in order to further verify whether there is any information manipulation on HN -- as it is the overall, global and long term data that eventually reveals any potential behavior with a relatively stable purpose by an entity...
> It just seems like you are creating a rather complex theory to explain the
> reason for your downvotes, rather than accept the more likely reason
> that you just made a low quality post.
you seem to be making an implicit assumption here that there is an absolute measurement for post quality...and another assumption that I was also on board with that measurement...
Aren't you creating a theory to justify your own view of the world and then fit me -- not just my posts -- into that frame? And then verify that theory with a small local data set...by all means, if you want to continue with that method of reasoning and that kind of mindset, it would be okay with me...
This period of economic development got started with liberalization in the late 70s. The most you can say is that the GFW helped sustain it recently, and in skeptical of even that.
What you mentioned is a typical misunderstanding. The economic liberalization didn't happen in most part of China until the 90s. For example, Shanghai didn't start until 1991, Beijing was another few years later than that. Even for those two first tier cities, many stuff considered normal in a market economy didn't happen until 10-15 years ago, e.g. buying a property to live in or for investment didn't become mainstream in Shanghai until 2003.
I'd argue that GFW created millions of experienced software engineers for China. It is the assets required for such a developing country. If the market was dominated by Google/Twitter/Fb, how many of them are willing to have their core R&D positions in China? Let's make it no mistake - as a Chinese national, the company need to get your US export license to work on any project that involves stuff like encryption or high performance computing. That export license takes ages to get and there is no guarantee to get it. To send you to the US for meetings/training, you'd be subject to the Mantis Check managed by FBI, it can take anywhere between a few months to a few years to get a 12 months US short term visa.
Now also consider how those companies do their taxes in foreign countries. How much they are going to contribute to the local economy? Just look at how other free countries are attacking their practices.
If you consider all these, it will be clear that Chinese were pushed to the corner to defend the chance/right to develop their country/industry. For me, it is really a choice on whether to kill China's Internet industry or not. Chinese didn't kill it, they kicked out Google/Twitter/Fb etc and build their own Baidu/Alibaba/Tencent/JD/Didi/360, that is all.
I don't see how what I said is a misunderstanding or how these facts support your claim.
China's GDP growth has been high for 40 years. There's no possible way that the GFW created this, given that it wasn't around until about halfway through this period. Even if you say that it somehow doesn't count until the 90s, it still doesn't line up, since the GFW started out as purely political censorship and they weren't wholesale blocking foreign competitors until well into the 2000s.
Please look at my post again, I said GFW _helped_ to create the recent economic development. Of course the economy of a country like China can not be improved single-handedly by a system or by a single sector.
I further pointed out that GFW ensured that all core Internet infrastructures used in China is designed/developed in China, that led to the creation of a Dev community with millions of experienced engineers. Do you believe that such a professional community is a huge asset for a developing country?
How could it help to create something that was created long before it? As I said in my original comment, the best you could say is that the GFW helped sustain it recently, which seems like it might be what you're actually trying to say here.
I would not interpret "one of the most dramatic periods of economic development in history" as referring to the boom of China's internet sector starting in 2008.
If you intend to give credit to the GWF for that particular thing, then by all means do so. But that is not at all what I got from your original comment, nor your first reply.
>I would not interpret "one of the most dramatic periods of economic development in history" as referring to the boom of China's internet sector starting in 2008.
The economic development in the last decade can be safely regarded as the most dramatic period in history, it added ~40% of US GDP in that period. The Internet sector is of course one of the major driving forces for that.
> If you intend to give credit to the GWF for that particular thing, then by all means do so. But that is not at all what I got from your original comment, nor your first reply.
Sorry to get you confused but it is pretty clear to me that 1) GFW is being built/maintained as a tool for protectionism agendas, 2) it blocked most western Internet services to allow Chinese Internet sector to grow faster in the last decade, 3) with such help from the GFW, the Chinese Internet sector managed to get to where it is now and helped to fuel the economic growth in that period.
I once dim-wittingly interviewed with one cheap Chinese Jibo clone maker. The thing that struck me was the how much they relied on VPNs.
At one point, I was told their plan was to use Google Translate (through a VPN) for Mandarin-English translation, at which point "tensorflow" would come in and do some magic.
Luxury hotels in China have transparent VPN for their entire networks. I was quite impressed staying at a brand new St Regis in a 3rd tier city recently and discovering that I had full access to anything when connected to their WiFi network.
Yes, it absolutely is. Outlawing private communications between citizens (or subjects, in the UK's case) is not the first step down this particular slippery slope, it's well past the halfway point.
I recommend watching a movie called The Lives of Others, to those who don't understand or agree. It should be available on either Netflix or Amazon, or if all else fails, the Pirate Bay.
I'm headed to china next week for a few weeks. I need access to at least Gmail. Are there any suggestions here on an easy way to get around it for a VPN noob? I'm usually fine using PrivateInternetAccess but I'm sure that is blocked there.
If you are working for an international company there and will be using your company's network (through VPN or a physical port), then you should be fine -- according to a friend of mine who worked in one of those companies...
VPNs still work; ExpressVPN gives good results. Although I usually just forward gmail to outlook for the time being and will just use that for the weeks I am there.
FWIW, I have been able to access imap.googlemail.com from all Chinese networks I have tried so far. However, the first few times, Google blocked the attempt and I had to use a VPN to log into my Google account and whitelist the access.
This highlights another issue that makes internet access in China inconvenient: Many websites flag Chinese IP addresses by default, presumably because they couldn't handle the spam otherwise.
Shadowsocks-libev on a Linux box hosted at AWS Tokyo region works great. Digital Ocean Singapore region is awful, at least right now. I find ExpressVPN performs very poorly most of the time. Not sure about PIA.
So what we need is a VPN that looks like https traffic or is https forbidden in China too? Is anyone working on this?
After a quick read it's apparent that even the most sophisticated defences are going to be open to the one endpoint having loads of data against it. It would need lots of different "real" IP connections and my guess peer to peer would be difficult too.
Statistics and machine learning will always be good enough to evade attempts I can think of here.
Life finds a way? I could encode 0 to "duck" and 1 to "cat" and I can tell you "duck duck cat duck, cat duck duck cat" and that's 0010 1001, i.e. the letter I. Obviously it need to be more sophisticated than this. Then, you can use the channels that no one's looking at, but I guess China is looking everywhere.
Expats/foreigners/immigrants make heavy use of VPNs according to friends I have. I don't live in China but if I did and this was successful this would be a serious reason to consider leaving for me, access to the internet and www is just too important nowadays.
Currently, https tunnels with replay attack protection hold strong.
UDP VPNs do fail at random right now, I guess GFW people arrived at the point when they can't do anything about obfuscated and replay attack protected endpoints other than blocking all UDP traffic at random
You should not deal with censorshipping countries. Period. That's a dead end road. If you are Chinese - fight for your natural rights. If you are a foreigner: let them alone and try to do business with countries that provide more freedom or that are at least on the right track (I fully understand that not every country is equal or values freedom equally - but at least they should move in the right direction).
gotta love when people don't say this about china right away here, but talk about building your product inside a platform owned by fb or apple and you get the warnings instantly.
also, this is a good time to remember everyone to at least run a 1mbps tor node at home. costs nothing.
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 203 ms ] thread[1] http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...
Emulating a standard browser TLS handshake is a no-brainer.
There are enough side channels leaked trying to proxy an Internet connection through an encrypted tunnel, this is picked up on through Machine Learning or otherwise and it pretty effectively blocks many forms of escape. Read the parent article, let it soak in, and come back.
And from TFA, it looks like whatever China can't block through technology, they are blocking through politics.
Will some people find ways around it? Yes. However, it will be risky, and if any given technique becomes widespread, they will find a way to block it.
AWS traffic also never will be blocked.
Notice that a selective blocking is not the same as real-time https inspection and filtering, which is an intractable task.
I had a run-in with a particularly aggressive captive portal last week that kept injecting ads into unencrypted pages (if I'm traveling on one of your vehicles, I don't want to buy tickets to travel with you), but fortunately didn't firewall outgoing port 22 so I could use sshuttle to route 0.0.0.0/0 via an SSH connection to my personal server. This works with pretty much any server you can run Python on, so I don't know of a good way to stop it unless you're willing to block anyone from SSHing outside of the country (thus preventing e. g. Chinese companies with a global market from running servers in other countries).
Hint: TLS encrypted traffic following an appropriate browser-style handshake cannot be distinguished from "legitimate" https.
Without crypto there's stenography.
As long as there is a legitimate data format there must be a way to emulate it.
The question isn't really if that's at all possible. The question is if you'd be willing to take the chance if the (fear of) retribution is great.
And even if you or someone still circumvents the GFW, it achieves its purpose of guiding the spirit of the people.
We should primarily cross our fingers, and hope the Chinese turn their collective spirit to global liberty and prosperity. At least, I'm in no position to affect them.
As in, it is not only a passive observer periodically resetting connections, it will also make its own to test the waters
- In-Depth Analysis of the Great Firewall of China. Has other good sources at the bottom: http://www.cs.tufts.edu/comp/116/archive/fall2016/ctang.pdf
- How China is Blocking Tor: https://arxiv.org/abs/1204.0447
- Summary of "How China is Blocking Tor" from MIT Review: https://www.technologyreview.com/s/427413/how-china-blocks-t...
https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~rensafi/projects/active-probin...
https://citizenlab.ca/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/ChinasGreat...
No DPI needed.
Until this is circumvented there is no real solution.
Wildcard blocking of these would break too many legitimate services, including banking, airlines, etc.
BTW, the task of DPI-ing of all https traffic on the operator side is intractable.
https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/meek
What's likely to happen is that there will be a crack down, some satisfying numbers will be shown to officials, and then everything will become back to normal soon after.
There has been this kind of talk about cracking down on VPN before, and it's still available, so wait and see
Just last year, out of the blue, Xi Jinping replaced the director of the Cyberspace Administration of China with a new guy named Xu Lin (which could be deemed as some sign that Xi Jinping really cares about the functioning of this department). Xu Lin has been staying pretty quietly during the past year, contrary to the flamboyant style of his predecessor...If someone is quiet and still able to stay in his position, especially a position that is concerned by a autocratic leader, then that usually indicates that he has been doing something concrete and not just putting up a show...
In the past, although there had been a lot of talks about regulating (not indiscriminately shutting down, but regulating) VPNs in China, but technically, they still did not have the capability of achieving that goal without shutting down many business at that time. Recently, China started to enforce new cyber security rules (and laws) which, as we could see from the following instance (see [1]), requires firms operating in China, for their communication devices and software, to:
After those measures took effect, those companies, if they are still willing to operate in China, could still do their business as long as they are willing to register with the government and let the government monitor their data...And for those data channels which the government could not monitor and figure out its content, then they could easily detect them and shut them down...My guess is, the communist regime starts to realize that it is really important for them to control the information flow in the country in a way that is firm and concrete...And by observing their North Korean neighbor (as well as the Arabian revolts in the past decade), they understand that as long as they could control their people's mind and disrupt the natural synchronization in the society, they could have an ever lasting rule even there is another great famine or some serious crisis -- and otherwise, even if their people could enjoy a certain share of economic prosperity, the government could be overthrown sooner or later as long as there are continuous occurrences of triggering events, which would be inevitable given the practical difficulty and unscalability of managing a society of one and half billion people with a centralized administration, and given the fact that many officials in the current government are really corrupt, unscrupulous and have a fairly low respect for normal humanity (for the long dehumanization tradition of the communism) at this time...
--
[1] http://knowledge.freshfields.com/zh/China/r/1514/china_intro...
This man has claimed to be the father of OSINT one day, and said that Pizzagate was spot-on the next. No one with a clue about how to conduct an investigation should have swallowed that.
That is all to say, I believe we are in very troubled times, but I don't believe we are on the verge of revolution.
However, there's a long history in China that determines the thinking of both the government and its people. That view is that a strong centre leads to a peaceful and prosperous China, while a weak centre leads to confusion and chaos. An Arab Spring-like event isn't as likely, there just isn't the same desire to be liberated.
No one would challenge the centre unless they were prepared to go all the way. And there's a very powerful state security apparatus ready to come down hard if they do.
you should probably contact Gordon Chang to see how you can get yourself on a similar payroll by making such claims.
I'm sure that the powers-that-be in China aren't overly scared of a failed popular uprising.
I'm sure it will happen one day, and then all the broken clocks will be right.
And the Arab Spring was in very large part a result of rising bread prices as well as being a massive failure in every way outside Tunisia.
http://voxeu.org/article/measuring-and-mis-measuring-chinese...
Unofficial indicators of Chinese GDP often suggest that Beijing’s growth figures are exaggerated. This column uses nighttime light as a proxy to estimate Chinese GDP growth. Since 2012, the authors’ estimate is never appreciably lower, and is in many years higher, than the GDP growth rate reported in the official statistics. While not ruling out the risk of future turmoil, the analysis presents few immediate indications that Chinese growth is being systematically overestimated.
I read the book a long time ago, so I might be remembering it incorrectly, but aren't all nations just "one black swan event away" from something?
The idea is that you can't predict it and only makes sense when looking back.
What is this ultimatum and why would China actually care or do anything about it?
This sounds like the Marxists' "eminent collapse of capitalism" or "this will be the year of Linux on the desktop" or Mao Ze-Dong's "America is a giant with clay feet".
Someday you'll be proven right. But only after being proven wrong for a million times.
If, however, you had the will and ability to use VPN software, the government usually turned a blind eye. Afterall, it was only a minority of people and they usually had a genuine need. In fact, this is what made staying in China tolerable. If this block does truly come into effect, they are essentially closing the door to the outside world.
China was a country of reasonable compromises before, but with Xi Jinping's nationalism, they are starting to think "why should we compromise at all?"
China has been trying to close their internet since after the Olympics. It isn't surprising that they would eventually succeed at it.
As for how I discovered they were unblocked, I got a phone call from my Mum early in the morning after the attack (the attack happened during the Chinese night time) and went in to the office (which had the only available internet access), and one of my colleagues told me that the bbc and nytimes were no longer blocked.
Not sure how he found out they were unblocked, but he'd been there most of the night.
Then once you know one is unblocked you try them all :-)
Access to the open Internet is becoming less and less of a necessity. "The next big thing" isn't really happening. A country like China, having developed their own industry, can safely rely on companies coming to them or developing their own alternatives. At the same time things like ddos, ransomware, money laundering, black markets, foreign influence, rumors, populism etc. is becoming more of a problem.
It's like any other technology adopted by China. They will buy or co-develop something as long as you have something to bring to the table, when you don't they will do it themselves instead.
I don't agree with the Chinese governments position nor methods, but I'm not sure their reasoning around "cyber-sovereignty" wrong.
the author of shadowsocks vpn is "her", a girl goes by the id "clowwindy"...
And if you add a bonus-kharma system + annoymous payments for smuggling..
The regular crackdowns on VPNs mean that many who live in the region long since stopped using them and switched to a mobile plan or prepaid sim from China Mobile Hong Kong or Hong Kong Unicom that provides a Hong Kong IP address and unfiltered internet while roaming in the mainland.
Every technology company that I've come across in China has invested a great deal of effort into establishing stable VPN connections. I have seen several "VPN microservices" that act to tunnel all foreign-bound traffic out of the country. In the vacuum of mature, western technologies many Chinese copycats have popped up. I have been hoping that we would start to see more and more Chinese technology companies exporting their technology [1]. With these new legislative actions, it seems like a step in the wrong direction.
I'm struggling to come to terms with the restrictive policies that the Chinese government continually struggles to hoist over their citizens. During the midst of one of the most dramatic periods of economic development in history, the Chinese government is moving to artificial isolate themselves from the developing global economy?
[1] Strikingly: https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/striking-ly#/entity
https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/663/why-did-chin...
The rest of the world totally did have things the Chinese wanted, silver and gold. Not much else at that stage to be fair but China was sucking precious metals from Western Eurasia for most of the first and second millenia.
But the "rest of the world" (meaning mostly the UK in that time period) did have something that was "in demand" in china: opium.
It was the imbalance between imports and exports - china wasn't interested in buying/importing what europeans were selling/exporting - that prompted the uk to start smuggling opium against chinese law, thus paving the way to the opium wars.
Back in 2010, when Google chose to exit China, many argued the exact same that China is isolating itself from the outside. Such feeling is understandable from a western point of view, I mean for anyone from a western background there is simply no Internet if google/twitter/fb etc. are all unavailable. However, a bold however, 7 years after Google's exit from China, it has been proved again and again that the biggest motivation of GFW is the protectionism aiming to help domestic Internet companies - and that actually paid off pretty well.
You don't need Google/fb/twitter etc to have booming Internet/high tech economy. Look at China's social media, online payment, e-commerce, online gaming, AI, shared economy etc, did China miss out. Let me give you a bloody simple number: I didn't use any cash or bank card/credit card in the last 45 days, everything, I mean 100% everything, was paid by mobile.
This is not about some cheap nationalism - it is _all_ about how many good paying jobs can be made available in China for Chinese. It is the exact same as the Making America Great Again crap. Blocking google/fb/twitter was the first essential step to achieve that.
I did not know that before...thanks for sharing...
But the whole point is about a fair income distribution in a society...
If you think that as a Pharaoh, without contributing much to a society but could still get all the best things -- including the pyramids -- provided by the people in the country, by telling them that his ruling is god's will -- which does not seem to hold much truth in it...I just feel that this is not justifiable...
This is a similar thing happening in China right now -- with all the propaganda and censorship and limitation on what people could read and talk at their own will, and hence influence the way people think and reason...
If the pyramids were not built by slaves, then there were plenty of other magnificent monuments or grand palaces or great economic achievements that were the labor of masses of hard working coolies who never got what they really deserve...
I was educated in the west, with PhD from the top ranking university. I spent 12 years living in your society and do understand where you came from. The problem is you seem to be forcing your definition of freedom onto many people. You can value your free speech, your democratic system etc etc, I'd perfectly happy to respect that. However, it it seems that you refuse to even acknowledge the cultural differences widely observed. To give you a quick hint, majority vote is the preferred way in the west, but apparently Chinese and many Asian cultures value more on consensus based on compromises.
Your arguments on "propaganda and censorship" are quite rude because you are basically arguing that Chinese living in China can not figure out what is truth and what is propaganda, you are basically suggesting that Chinese as a population of 1.4B can be easily manipulated. It is also extremely funny that someone who has never ever lived in China for long term is now jumping up and down lecturing people how bad is the situation in China. Tell me how this is not the definition of arrogance!
And I am not writing this as some disrespecting westerner, but as Eastern European. Having to figure out what is truth and what is propaganda in non-free-speech environment has severely morally stunted our nations, and I can't believe some "consensus culture" can avoid that.
It is also questionable whether the so called non-free-speech environment is the same here - not judging what people can/can not do in those old USSR days as I don't know anything about it, but you can openly criticise CCP in China as long as the criticism is not coordinated, I have been doing that for ages, never got into any trouble.
The meta-assumption that you are making in your argument is that there exists a general will in both western society and Chinese society -- which is equivalent to saying that there is a higher intelligent wisdom above all the western people or all the eastern people, represents their collective will and thus having a single voice that "they want democracy" or "they want totalitarian"...
This assumption is too big to discuss here, but from what I observe, many people in China are trying to get across the Great Fire Wall while another group of people (i.e. the government) are trying to forbid the first group to do so, which seems to me is hardly a consensus, not to mention any compromise...
Well, I am afraid so...Or, has anyone figured out how many people starved to death during the Great Famine between 1959 to 1961, or how many students had been shot dead during the TianAnMen square protest in 1989 -- and that does not seem to be a consensus nor a compromise...And from my own experience, many young people born after 1990 in China even do not know that TianAnMen square protest and the shooting even have ever happened...And what about the dramatic increase in the number of people that have been diagnosed with lung cancer or other types of life-threatening illness as a result of the air pollution caused by profit-driven manufacturing planning?
It seems to me that you are fairly funny, and rude, to speak for 1.4 billion individuals, without a validated assumption on the very existence of "general will", without any action or even intention to obtain their opinion, while enjoying all the freedom of speech and convenience of western life, and make a speech that all the 1.4 billion individuals have a consensus based on their compromise -- but more to the fact, a self-narcissus based on other people's extraordinary sacrifice...
Totalitarian/Totalitarianism is not preferred even by the CCP, you have the Chinese Premier criticising those over regulated craps on weekly basis. To give you a quick example, the Chinese Premier spoke highly of the reform to allow business registration to be done though WeChat. I am 100% sure that you guys can not do business registration using Facebook/Twitter style social media or any other private media.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2017-07/11/c_136435928.htm
> how many people starved to death during the Great Famine between 1959 to 1961
You do realize that the recent administrations are the exact victims of those failed polices back in the 50s/60s? You do realize that the current Chinese President had his father put into jail because of those policies? Do you even know that the Chinese President himself was sent to the most rural area to work as a farmer/labour for 7 years because of those policies?
Suddenly, the victims need to be responsible for the horrible past.
> And from my own experience, many young people born after 1990 in China even do not know that TianAnMen square protest and the shooting even have ever happened...
It was highly regrettable to have those deaths, one day, the CCP will have to come clean not just to the public but to the book of history. The same can be said to the one-child policy as well. That being said, the timing should never be set/influenced by the CCP or any foreign power, it should be purely decided by Chinese. To answer your question, when most people don't even talk about the Tiananmen square incident, that is because they believe the overall progress made after the Tiananmen Square is good, CCP's explanations at that time (to ensure society stability) is acceptable.
> And what about the dramatic increase in the number of people that have been diagnosed with lung cancer or other types of life-threatening illness as a result of the air pollution caused by profit-driven manufacturing planning?
This is as silly as arguing that thousands of people got killed by flying Boeing-747 and thus it was a bad idea to develop 747.
You are free to check any respectful source you like, you can buy yourself a ticket to China and watch yourself, you'd be seeing one thing pretty consistent - Chinese are living much longer nowadays, life expectancy in the eastern coast has reached almost 80 - my home city Shanghai is already doing better than the US national average. How that was made possible? profit-driven manufacturing.
> It seems to me that you are fairly funny, and rude, to speak for 1.4 billion individuals, without a validated assumption on the very existence of "general will", without any action or even intention to obtain their opinion, while enjoying all the freedom of speech and convenience of western life, and make a speech that all the 1.4 billion individuals have a consensus based on their compromise -- but more to the fact, a self-narcissus based on other people's extraordinary sacrifice...
so just follow your system because it works so well in Arab Spring countries lately? What a joke.
Not to divert too far, I am just saying that, the propaganda and the censorship in the country made it is almost impossible to find out the truth, in many cases such as those ones that I listed in my previous posts.
There is a saying that "in today's China, the history is unknown but the future is always sure..."
Back to your question in your current post: yes, I know that Xi Jinping was persecuted during the Cultural Revolution...So was Bo Xilai, but that doesn't change Bo's apparent fondness about the Cultural Revolution style...
And, please don't mix up the Great Famine with the Cultural Revolution -- they were almost 8 or 9 years apart...and neither Xi Jinping nor Bo Xilai was much affected during the Great Famine...
Sometimes inappropriate analogies could misguide people's reasoning...to justify your analogy, you need to also do a cost/benefit comparison and see if the two cases are at a similar ratio or scale...And just try to live next to one of those factories in some seriously polluted areas in China for several weeks , perhaps you could have some empathy for the local people who have been living there for their entire life...
And how much compensation will they ever get?
Well, again, my original point of using this example was only to address your statement that people in China know the truth well...If that is the case, I don't think people these days, including you and me, would have too much contention about what the truth really was...
In the future, let us try not to divert from topic to topic -- then this discussion would become arguing for the purpose of arguing, instead of for the purpose of getting closer to the truth...
If you look at a broader historical picture, then do you happen to know that there was a Spring of Nations around 1848 in Europe? Just look that up...A little more knowledge about the truth won't do you harm -- and, the Spring of Nations is not a joke, it is a historic fact...==============================
If you have more counter-arguments, please list them below...I will try to come back to address them later when I find some more time...thanks...
Well, I noticed there had been a pattern for my multiple posts on this topic that, for several times, each time when a post was downvoted, it was double downvoted...
So either it was a very synchronized move by several independent minds, or more likely, it was from a same mind who operates several accounts...
Edit 1:
I personally would not mind at all that any of my posts has been downvoted -- and if the person would like to provide any reasoning for his downvoting, then that would be better...After all, the whole point is not to win over your opponent but to find some thing that is closer to the truth and justice -- if there is any...
But manipulating the visibility of other people's words by casting multiple downvotes by a same individual is sheer disgusting and does not make any sense to prove any point...as if that is a way of finding out truth and justice, then truth and justice would be equivalent to registering and manipulating more accounts than your opponents'...this reduces the human talent of reasoning to a series of steps of mechanical movement...it is a waste of his own life, as well as his audience's time...
And additionally, modern archeologists don't believe the workers constructing the pyramids were slaves as such. They were citizens working for the state. In some theories, the arrangement is arguably a form of slavery, but I think we'd usually call the arrangement serfdom, and consider it differently in a historical context.
And I downvoted your subsequent posts because I always downvote people complaining about downvotes. It's offtopic, and usually pointless.
Well, as I previously stated, that there were multiple concurrent downvotings cast to my multiple posts on this topic, all in a short period of time, and then there weren't many downvotings afterwards...this well synchronized pattern, occurring multiple times, would make one to think, there is a certain level of dependencies behind these actions (and in short, from a statistical point of view, a normal distribution can be normal only because its data are independent -- and by standard normal distribution, we could maximize our information output -- and I thought that is the goal of this forum)...
There had been known information manipulation effected by the Chinese government over many information outlets even outside that country -- so combined with my previously stated observation, I have enough reason to doubt that the coordinated downvoting is a manipulated result...even if there is only one downvote from you -- as there are more than two downvotings, without giving a single word of counter-argument, until your post....
As for the second point, either "slavery" or "serfdom" is only a term, used to describe the situation of severe economic inequality in a society...and this inequality, and information manipulation are my argument points -- actually, I am more interested in the current situation in China than that in the ancient Egypt...
As for the third point,
do you have more hard evidences? In an academic setting, we always try to compose novel theories -- they may be correct, and they may be wrong...I just feel we should have more evidences in order to prove any point have a long lasting truth in it, but not just by a single study...Lastly, it's okay for you to downvote my post about the fact that my posts were downvoated...even if you are going to downvote that based on the sole reason that you took it for complaining or so, I am still going to voice out my observation there...
The latter seems unlikely. You can't downvote until you've accumulated 500 karma (might even be higher now).
That means that in order for someone you replied to downvote you twice, they'd need two separate 500+ karma accounts in addition to their main account (which they wouldn't be able to use to downvote you from).
That's a lot of work just to be petty in the case someone online disagrees with you.
If multiple posts of yours are receiving multiple downvotes, then some reflection might be in order before casting aspersions elsewhere, because it's likely the posts that are problematic.
(And complaining about downvotes is almost guaranteed to get you further downvotes).
But for the reason that I stated in my previous two posts, I feel I have some reason to doubt this could be an act of information manipulation from personnel funded by the Chinese government especially for that purpose...For instance, some of those manipulations are described in,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party
and
https://gking.harvard.edu/files/gking/files/50c.pdf
and if there were indeed government resources behind this, multiple accounts that each has 500 karma points are nothing...
And if that was indeed the case you would also expect other replies critical of China and the Chinese government to be downvoted to a similar degree, and yet that has not happened in this thread. Why single you out in particular?
I was trying to state my observation on a downvoting pattern and some of my past readings...I am not asserting that the information manipulation here is a sure fact -- to prove that would require some analysis on a global set of data...
But if you only look at one instance, with a small set of data, and make a statement such as "why single you out in particular?", then perhaps you could ask similar questions for any jailed politic dissident in that country, like, "Xiaobo is a criminal; and why single him out in particular?"
I just don't think there is enough evidence here to reasonably kill the doubt that there could be a possibility that certain information has been manipulated for certain government's political ends...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14743104 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14741623
And yet they don't appear to have been downvoted.
It just seems like you are creating a rather complex theory to explain the reason for your downvotes, rather than accept the more likely reason that you just made a low quality post.
Aren't you creating a theory to justify your own view of the world and then fit me -- not just my posts -- into that frame? And then verify that theory with a small local data set...by all means, if you want to continue with that method of reasoning and that kind of mindset, it would be okay with me...
I'd argue that GFW created millions of experienced software engineers for China. It is the assets required for such a developing country. If the market was dominated by Google/Twitter/Fb, how many of them are willing to have their core R&D positions in China? Let's make it no mistake - as a Chinese national, the company need to get your US export license to work on any project that involves stuff like encryption or high performance computing. That export license takes ages to get and there is no guarantee to get it. To send you to the US for meetings/training, you'd be subject to the Mantis Check managed by FBI, it can take anywhere between a few months to a few years to get a 12 months US short term visa.
Now also consider how those companies do their taxes in foreign countries. How much they are going to contribute to the local economy? Just look at how other free countries are attacking their practices.
http://www.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/australia-now-off...
If you consider all these, it will be clear that Chinese were pushed to the corner to defend the chance/right to develop their country/industry. For me, it is really a choice on whether to kill China's Internet industry or not. Chinese didn't kill it, they kicked out Google/Twitter/Fb etc and build their own Baidu/Alibaba/Tencent/JD/Didi/360, that is all.
China's GDP growth has been high for 40 years. There's no possible way that the GFW created this, given that it wasn't around until about halfway through this period. Even if you say that it somehow doesn't count until the 90s, it still doesn't line up, since the GFW started out as purely political censorship and they weren't wholesale blocking foreign competitors until well into the 2000s.
I further pointed out that GFW ensured that all core Internet infrastructures used in China is designed/developed in China, that led to the creation of a Dev community with millions of experienced engineers. Do you believe that such a professional community is a huge asset for a developing country?
If you intend to give credit to the GWF for that particular thing, then by all means do so. But that is not at all what I got from your original comment, nor your first reply.
The economic development in the last decade can be safely regarded as the most dramatic period in history, it added ~40% of US GDP in that period. The Internet sector is of course one of the major driving forces for that.
> If you intend to give credit to the GWF for that particular thing, then by all means do so. But that is not at all what I got from your original comment, nor your first reply.
Sorry to get you confused but it is pretty clear to me that 1) GFW is being built/maintained as a tool for protectionism agendas, 2) it blocked most western Internet services to allow Chinese Internet sector to grow faster in the last decade, 3) with such help from the GFW, the Chinese Internet sector managed to get to where it is now and helped to fuel the economic growth in that period.
At one point, I was told their plan was to use Google Translate (through a VPN) for Mandarin-English translation, at which point "tensorflow" would come in and do some magic.
Needless to say, I roadrunner-ed out of there.
That will stop them evil terrorists.
I recommend watching a movie called The Lives of Others, to those who don't understand or agree. It should be available on either Netflix or Amazon, or if all else fails, the Pirate Bay.
This highlights another issue that makes internet access in China inconvenient: Many websites flag Chinese IP addresses by default, presumably because they couldn't handle the spam otherwise.
After a quick read it's apparent that even the most sophisticated defences are going to be open to the one endpoint having loads of data against it. It would need lots of different "real" IP connections and my guess peer to peer would be difficult too.
Statistics and machine learning will always be good enough to evade attempts I can think of here.
https://torguard.net/stealth-vpn.php
An https proxy would work for that.
This is all academic because blocking VPN traffic is simple.
See a lot of traffic to the same ip? If yes, then block.
UDP VPNs do fail at random right now, I guess GFW people arrived at the point when they can't do anything about obfuscated and replay attack protected endpoints other than blocking all UDP traffic at random
gotta love when people don't say this about china right away here, but talk about building your product inside a platform owned by fb or apple and you get the warnings instantly.
also, this is a good time to remember everyone to at least run a 1mbps tor node at home. costs nothing.