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I think companies across the world should start investing in lobbying efforts to block Google and other American services in their country wherever possible.

Chinese people today do not rely on Google or Amazon so much. Partly because of government policies and mostly because they do not understand English.

Gmail was heavily used by the young educated class. It might not be as fast as QQ mail, but they didn't have to worry about the government (well, their government) spying on them. Otherwise in China there is not even an expectation of privacy, even a small time local government thug can get access to your email.

If the CCP wants to close China from the world, these are great strategies for doing that. Things have definitely slid backwards since 2008.

> If the CCP wants to close China from the world, these are great strategies for doing that.

It's odd, in many ways, that the two biggest cultures have such a magnitude of separation from each other, a gulf bridged by so few aside from immigrants in either direction. Nothing to ensure a clean partition of a social graph like making it impossible to communicate over distance (coupled with physical borders providing barriers to communication in person).

Gmail is now very heavily used in foreign trade in China, by completely blocking it they just necessitated Chinese companies buying VPNs that would never have felt the need before.

As a side note this does not really effect foreigners here since all of use pretty much use VPNs full time.