The issue is that Google's mail servers can't communicate with servers within China, so any user of a Chinese mail service will not be able to send mail to Gmail users (and vice versa). If you are within China using a VPN to access Gmail, Google still can't send emails back in to Chinese machines.
Ah. Seems dumb of them. There are millions of Chinese people all around the world that will be trying to email their family back home. Why block just one email provider? Why try to segregate yourself from the world's email network? It isn't even going to work because what every Chinese person will do is get a tunnel to sign up for the non-Chinese email service (maybe even Gmail!) and it will just further push people to use encryption.
If the Chinese government were shrewd, they would do what the American government does: make using American servers as easy as possible then spy on the contents.
Why block one email provider? Because China isn't a fan of Google. Yes they will be cut off from the world. But if you want to communicate with the Chinese, you will simply use something other than Gmail.
By the way, how did you figure out that network was blocked? Is there a looking-glass-alike I can use to check?
The reason I ask is because that particular network you mentioned is only one of dozens that Google serves up as the A record for gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com. From my location, it's on 74.125.25.26 instead. And the MX for Google Apps hosted domain customers (including google.com itself) is aspmx.l.google.com, which (again from this location) is 173.194.79.27 or 74.125.28.26 or 74.125.20.27 or one of dozens of other IPs.
No, but they are required for sending email to Gmail. And an email provider may misscharacterize a message as spam because it's lacking.
Saying that they "Blocked Gmail" has an intuitive meaning that they blocked the HTTP interface to it, but they also blocked a part of the SMTP interface.
> No, but they are required for sending email to Gmail
Unless the user is using a web-based email application, like Yahoo Mail, who can route their mail however they want. This would seem to hurt Chinese email providers more than anyone else.
Not surprising considering the tricks they've been pulling of late. What can be said here? The people have chosen an autocratic government and often, without me even provoking them, will tell me how superior is is to western values, the same way Russians will also do. As an international traveler and sometimes international worker, this is fairly typical stuff. I see this kind of thing on VK and Facebook all the time. Everytime some autocratic regime cracks down the people go, "Please more sir! We dont need the Western pigs and their decadent values!" They buy into the anti-Western narrative pretty deeply.
My personal take is that there's a great war for democracy going on right now and the final lines are being drawn. The weaker autocrats have fallen (mideast, Ukraine, etc) and the stronger ones are falling (Syria) but the strongest have double-down on oppression (China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, etc). I think this political dynamic will be the defining narrative for quite some time.
I also think a balkanazation of the internet is slowly happening. China is certainly doing it and Russia might follow. I personally don't have a big problem with this. Probably means less malware and cyberattacks for everyone. I think its obvious that easy access to information isn't this revolutionary thing, at least in autocratic regimes. People just seem to prefer state controlled media or narratives that fit in with their biases. Once China sets the precedent others will follow, especially if there's zero economic fallout from it.
"The people have chosen an autocratic government" - saying so is so unfair to us. Maybe people like me who desire for an unblocked Internet is a minority (when compared to the population in this country), but people who desire for safe milk and food, clean water and fresh air for their babies are not!
But on the other hand, I must say that your observations described in your first paragraph are correct. Take the recent Hong Kong protest for an example, almost all people I know, including the highly educated people, are "tricked" by the censored local newspaper and are not on the same side of the HK people, and that made me sad and irritated...
Let's say you are sitting in your office for 8 hours. In one case you could leave but probably won't - in the other case your boss puts a lock on your door for those 8 hours. Would that make a difference to you?
Poor analogy. And I don't think there needs to be an analogy; the issue is already quite simple.
The USA's political system is substantially less free than many other nations. In turn, China is substantially less free than the US. Whether equating the two is really hyperbolic is debatable - functionally speaking, vested interests are allowed to run unchecked in both countries.
The main difference really lies in the source of power. In China, the Party runs the show and corporations fall into line. In the US it's the opposite, where corporations hold sway over the white house.
China at least has aspirations to lift the living standards of all its citizens. It's not easy but they're getting there - compare China with India for instance. Can't say the same for the US.
> In China, the Party runs the show and corporations fall into line.
The corporations can always bribe into the party, and many of the corporations are owned by princelings (or say Wen Jiaobao mom's jewelry empire that got NYT blocked). I would say that China is much worse in that regard.
> China at least has aspirations to lift the living standards of all its citizens.
Income inequality is only getting worse, not better. All boats are lifting right now, just those with guangxi get lifted much faster, while those at the bottom barely keep pace with inflation. If the economy falters this year, it could get very interesting.
> Take the recent Hong Kong protest for an example, almost all people I know, including the highly educated people, are "tricked" by the censored local newspaper and are not on the same side of the HK people, and that made me sad and irritated
As I understood it, the HK protestors undermined their own support within China with their racism and condescension toward mainland Chinese and the perception* that they never protested autocratic British rule. If I were a Chinese citizen, even if I wanted the same things as the HK protestors, I wouldn't support them out of self-respect.
*I say perception to give HK the benefit of the doubt. A quick Googling didn't yield anything except an unhelpful Quora answer.
For those russians, I think it's more the general trend that people think whatever country / culture they've grown up in is the best. The french think they are the best people, the british think they're the best deep down inside, chinese think they're the best, americans think they're better than everyone, and the canadians think they're better than the americans. The mexicans are proud to be mexican, the malaysians are proud to be malaysian and so on. Everyone thinks they are the best in some way, even if they think all of the gringos have a lot of cash and you can't breathe the air in beijing.
The middle class think they're better than the lower and upper class, and the lower class think they're better than the rest. SF thinks it's better than NYC and those finance wonks with our software industry, NYC thinks it better than the rest of the world, and DC thinks I'm the center of power here!
My city's sports team is the best sports team, and screw my city's rivals! Xbox vs Playstation, this vs that. Those scary islamic people vs. my secular atheism or mormonism.
It's the human tribalism instinct, and it's turtles all the way down.
>> People just seem to prefer state controlled media or narratives that fit in with their biases
Except when they don't. For example, it is not unreasonable to say that Putin lost the presidential elections in many regions (recall news stories where they showed 150% of the vote). Most importantly this 'perceived' popularity leads to people not turning out to vote, making it a self fulfilling prophecy. Indeed, the basis for Putin's universal popularity is 'precieved' popularity.
Many Chinese support their cultural superiority BUT many will quickly point out problems with their government and the need for reform.
The population that genuinely supports autocratic systems in Russia and China are in the minority, the rest are dis-disorganized, demoralized and confused but they are also in the majority. That why China runs their firewall.
>> I personally don't have a big problem with this. Probably means less malware and cyberattacks for everyone.
The internet has a cultural program of uniting humanity which fosters understanding leading to practical things like trade and a less tit-for-tat aggression.
I've spoken to quite a few Russian tourists that were very vocal in their support for Putin. I'm sure he has his critics too but there are definitely people drinking the kool-aid.
What's wrong with people supporting a unpopular-with-the-west politician? There are plenty of people willing to give their lives for some silly hollywood celebrity!
Even one county with 100% votes for Obama is a sign of fraud.
You are hooked on simple journalistic reporting mistake and this hook does not do good for you reasoning.
To be clear, I think that Western people through all their hiatory enjoed a wast energy surplus. There were reports by early US settlers about buffalo herds that was to ride around in a day! The same is true for Europe.
This means where westerners can get away with some freedom, russians have to be very tight in their energy budget. For China it is about same - small group rules huge and diverse population and has to schedule resources mindfully. The situation hasn't changed since forever.
If you want to help Russia and/or China, open your IP to them. Take profits from not-energy-constrained West, help energy constrained East.
Sun energy in heat form is accesible for everyone. Oil require substantial investment.
Also keep in mind that all this is historical and that even replacing all people in bureacratic machine will make the dame machine to rwappear. E.g., government of energy/resource constrained country will be prwtty much same as previous. Orherwise many people will die.
If you can evict a person to streets at SF, you cannot do so anywhere in Russia. Rhere's not enough sun light. In China it is the same, except evicted person cannot use land, it is occupied.
As a russian/chinese government official you have to behave differently. You either will punish strongly to prevent bad behavioe, or you will prevent bad behaviour by other means.
And remember, if by some magic you made into chinese govt, you will start to behave more or less same as as current one. Just because gpvt reproduce themselves in same circumstances and for same goals.
We had very different governments in Germany in the last 200 years (Kleinstaaterei, Empire, Weimar Republic, Nazis, Communists, Social Democracy). Conditions didn't change that much in the last 100 years.
I think you understand different values to be important than a Chinese does. A Chinese may not care about open internet as much as you do. (Though even that is for different reasons than you outlined. ie-not so much because of 'decadent values' as much as because the average Chinese believes the West uses the internet and Western news media outlets to 'keep China down'. It's more for nationalistic reasons than for values reasons.) But to say that, therefore, people in China want more oppression... is a bit of a stretch. They just see the open internet as a tool of Western oppression, and they say, "Good. The government is protecting me from it."
Now on other issues, Chinese are also demanding to be protected. From things like corruption. However, because of the way things work in China... this desire to be protected from corruption, at times, actually ends up strengthening the central government as well. This is because the people who are normally... say... appropriating land illegally... are local officials. The local people, on the other hand, know that if they protest long enough, and loud enough, that Beijing will come. At which point things will go in a decidedly bad fashion for the local bosses. So Beijing comes off as their 'savior' in a lot of these cases as well.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, I really think Chinese are looking at the problems they have from a different perspective than you do. From their perspective... Beijing is a help with a lot of their issues... not a hindrance or the cause. From their perspective, oppression hasn't 'doubled down', Beijing is ALLEVIATING a lot of oppression. Getting a better understanding of how Chinese people feel about things... in addition to an understanding of which issues they believe Beijing to be the cause of, might go a long way towards alleviating your frustrations.
Beijing routinely sends it's military to remote regions and kills thousands of people (usually Muslims) and it never hits the world news.
Beijing also prevents information (as well as people) flowing from one part of the country to another, both physically and digitally, to prevent outbreaks (typically against the government).
These are just two examples. Please tell me how Beijing is alleviating oppression.
The dramatic lowering of the number of people living in poverty in China is one of the world's greatest recent achievements. The rise of China has delivered a lot to the world, and even more to China. It's not without problems, but those in turn are solveable in time.
There are rational reasons to prefer authoritative government, especially in changing countries, especially without a tradition of democracy. I have no idea why GMail was censored, but I´m assuming it has to do with heightened security protocol. It is likely that some people in China used the service for nefarious purposes (local official corruption is probable) and that the authorities wanted to keep opposable proof, in order be able to show to increasingly disgruntled citizenry that the rule of law can work -- as opposed to the often preferred option of social-media fuelled lynching.
My point is not that banning GMail is good, but that you are judging an institution without knowing their intent. They could be wrong, but not for the reason that you do not give them.
I certainly agree on the balkanisation, though. Ebbs and flows, I hope.
As for your more general point: Western values are great in Western countries; Western inequality in a country with red envelopes and little over-sight of officials is less ideal. Western alcohol is fun in a fancy restaurant with a French ceremonial Maitre d´ that frowns on excess; it is less ideal in a country without a tradition for moderation. The subsequent lash out can be amusing where a hen party ends trying to act sober and cute in front of a jaded cop; it is far less so to see your touchy-feely employer come home drunk in a country where domestic employment is akin to servitude. I'm obviously exaggerating, but Westernisation (and simultaneous but unrelated issues, like working class disempowerment) has left many people wondering, and they found reasons to doubt.
If you are a traveller who mainly faces empowered businessmen , it is difficult to conceive good examples of this -- but many stories would make you pause. Vice.com (has a very criticisable editorial line, but) offers a unique look in many such examples: I remember a couple about plastic surgery that were very telling (and unexpected for people more used to judging people´s coding style on a screen than their physique on a dance floor), one in Korea the other in the Caribbean. International style magazine has lead Koreans to go under the knife and unreasonable amount of time to look more Westerners: nothing to do with SMTP in theory, but enough to let family members amalgamate Yahoo! editorial choices and their shame over a daughter´s botched operation. I have no idea what aspect of Western world leads women in the Central America to inject motor oil in their… Well, try to look for that episode if you care and care stand far more than gore (it is incredibly gross) but in it, you'll hear people accuse International standards and social media a lot. It is sad for Westerners living in an Emirate when that only bar where you can kiss in public without being scorned gets closed for `indecency´ but I suspect there are more nefarious things that have happened there than diplomats remembering their honeymoon in Paris. My experience is pushing on "What do you mean by corrupt Western values?" doesn't usually lead to a detailed description of a working democracy.
The claim that democracy and "Western values" would not work well in China due to cultural reasons is weakened by the fact that it seems to be doing fine in Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan, which have very similar cultural backgrounds.
I am not familiar with a millenia-old tradition of directly paying cash to magistrate and officials in either Korea or Japan. Taiwan native population makes a small portion of the contemporary population: the island occupants are mostly descendants from expatriate Chinese democrats (who rejected that tradition and many others). All are also countries that have started democratic transition several decades before China (and that argument of three decades to transition is heard a lot more than the presumed contempt OC mention). That discussion should certainly include a discussion on rural vs. coastal China too -- but that would be further beyond my depth.
More importantly, my point was that "claim" is very far from a single, consistent argument about how 'Asia' works (I do not think that 'Asia' is really a consistent entity). It's more a convenient accretion of reaction to local experiences, often negatives. Western values work fine say, on Pacific islands that have had an incredibly different culture.
So freedom, open society or democracy wont work in China because... Chinese people are inherently alcoholic, corrupt and sexually abusive to their employees?
The honest truth is liberal democracies do not come to fruition in vacuum, Elections are necessary but not sufficient condition for a functioning democracy. Afghanistan has multiple elections, Ukraine has elections, Iraq has elections, what is the state of affairs in these countries. There are subtle and messier parts in Democracy and every society cannot support it given their historical context - most societies have to evolve to certain point of maturity for democracy to take root and more years of practice of it to have it to work as intended.
It just sounds like excuses - which democratic country resolved all (or any?) of their problems with gender inequality, violence, alcohol, corruption etc. before instituting democracy?
In any case, Gmail is just one of many email tools - if Chinese people are so culturally unprepared to deal with Gmail, how are they culturally prepared to deal with QQ Mail, or Weibo/Weixin for that matter? This is just further censorship of a tool either for economic/protectionist reasons, or because it protects the CCP's hold on power. I'd struggle to see this as part of any plan to gradually implement democracy or as part of any uniquely 'Chinese' democratic development.
Yes! I do know about this! One of the things Mao did which wasn't so bad was bring women into the workplace and breakdown some of the traditional gender barriers in the workplace.
I also know about the hugely chauvanistic social culture, the very traditional "women cook, clean and look after kids, men go out and work" family culture that exists in most places, the huge amount of undocumented domestic violence, a massive prostitution industry and a very weak legal framework through which women can seek redress for pay imbalance, domestic/sexual abuse etc. I also know that there's zero paternity leave, and typically only 3-4 months maternity pay for women, a long history of forced abortions and until 2003 women had to specifically ask permission from their (usually male) boss before they could get married! So yeah, I do know a bit about China's "gender equality" :)
There should be more asians on HN, maybe I will create a version of HN specially for Asians, the amount of western anti-chinese vitriol is disgusting, I just gave you an upload, good luck.
I am not sure how blocking gmail has anything to do with democracy and "western values".
OTOH the "western values" on the Internet as we've recently observed include total worldwide surveillance, hacking everything at will, manipulation of social networks and so on, so maybe your "democratic" high horse is not so high after all.
The sentiment that access to Google services doesn't matter because there are sufficient Chinese replacements is absolutely wrong. The Chinese government is handicapping its tech labor development by blocking Google.
I teach a basic web development workshop to university and vocational school students. One of the things we teach is how to look up things for youself on the internet. (Is that a cry of disbelief I hear? You can't imagine how confused I was before we specifically modeled and taught this.) Baidu search results, when it comes to searching for technical answers, are really lame. Google's search results are better, mostly because they tap heavily into the stackexchange network. It's disappointing and frustrating to try to encourage students to search for things via Baidu because the answers to their questions are so difficult to find. I've had students tell me that they turn on a VPN in order to access Google because those search results are that much better.
And it's not just a problem with having poor search results, but blocking the actual sites that have information is mind-boggling to me. I /know/ that China can do finer grain filtering than on a per-domain basis; I've seen specific articles blocked on wikipedia while wikipedia itself remained accessible.
Baidu's search results are basically unusable compared to Google's. The only reason it thrives is it's one of the only few options in the country. Another thing, given the ruling party's organization structure and its way of execution/management, a rough cut(I mean 一刀切 in Chinese) style is exactly what you can find in almost all the things they do. A fine-grained approach can hardly be expected in this case. Not to mention there is a lack of feedback mechanism of this demand for decision makers.
Ironically though, if there was to be no GFW in China, at least half of the web tech sector would disappear. Startups are in a weird place of suffering the most but also benefiting the most from the GFW.
i agree that as a software developer, google is an essential tool, it goes where sometimes stackoverflow doesn't go, but there are true alternatives that aren't local like yahoo, bing, duckduckgo, these are all foreign and work more or less uninhibited, it's just that these companies actually follow local protocol which google outright told the chinese government to fuck off.
If I were the chinese government, I would do what the US do: Declare loudly the importance of free speech, human rights etc. while infecting every server with trojans, using the cheap human resource to clickfarm positive wikipedia articles, use machine learning and neural network to recognize dissident patterns on the internet and target them specifically, spy on the population while condamning other countries for citizen surveillance, and most importantly, scream as loudly as you can about how crucial human right is while secretly spending $$$ on extraordinary rendition.
Travelling in China right now. No Google services work but Gmail via SMTP on my iPhone seems fine. I'm not confident all emails go through though. Heading to Hong Kong tonight so not sure if that will be different.
Using VPN does open everything but obviously becomes slower. It's not only Google though, all social media.
Speaking to locals they don't care. There is an alternative for everything and they are better suited to Chinese culture too.
>There is an alternative for everything and they are better suited to Chinese culture too.
Well good for them, either way with this policy the Chinese government enforces, I don't think China will be able to compete internationally in the software industry.
China is such a massive place that Chinese players in particular don't need to compete outside china. Two of the largest social networks, QZone and Sina Weibo at >645,000,000 and >500,000,000 users respectively are at the level where they're only smaller than facebook and they're used almost exclusively in one country.
You don't need to compete internationally when you can get that kind of userbase domestically, and the Great Firewall is absolutely and to some extent intentionally a big part of that.
Every Chinese programmer I know, and also all the technical people such as network admins, use a VPN routinely and openly now. That was not the case two years ago, when more Google services worked.
> I don't think China will be able to compete internationally in the software industry.
That is a very self-centered point of view, in recent european TED talks there were speakers like Mikko Hypponen from F-Secure, that there should be "european" versions of Google, Facebook, so we can avoid all the dragnet datamining etc. unethical web development solutions and NSA spying that somehow pass in the US.
If such products are created and succeed, it will be because they competed well with their American counterparts. The equivalent Chinese products don't face any competition at all.
To be fair, those products should be blocked in every country. I realize what the PRC is doing: blocking successful foreign corporations, then when they have sufficiently copied / provided for the local market, they expand. Quite duplicitous and I hope it fails miserably, no offense. I feel that the US government might be hesitant to allow Chinese companies, protected by the PRC, access to sensitive information on its citizens.
Point of fact, there is a lot of competition between companies inside of China. In many instances, there is more competition inside China than there is in the US.
So it would have nothing to do with all the legal quagmires the EU is currently trying to drag (e.g.) Google through, such as News in Spain, antitrust lawsuits, right-to-be-forgotten?
My understanding is the locals mostly want to earn good money and have a reasonable life. And it's dangerous to care about the Greate Firewall. So they prefer to look the other way.
Of course, this way it's only going to get worse over time.
Are you using a non-Chinese SIM? In my past travels to China I was able to access Facebook and everything else as long as I was roaming on my AT&T SIM and paying gratuitous roaming fees.
We do care. The problem is: What can we do? Using technical method to get through GFW? Well, it works now but technically, Chinese government controls all Internet facility and they do not even care to block thousands of IPs, even if it means block the whole Internet (It happened in Xinjiang and Tibet.) Moreover, ISPs constantly throttle the international data which means connecting to a server outside GFW may be very slow or even randomly disconnected. In short, any technical solution does not work on a government who controls the country's Internet facilities and does not care to pull the plug. Other solutions? You cannot turn to traditional media like newspapers and TVs, because they are, as well, controlled by the government, which is in turn controlled by a single party. There's also no way to make any meaningful non-violence political influence. The government is not voted by the people so they just don't care whatever their people say. The only possible way is to use violence, but we do not have guns.
I agree with most of what you said. However, violence can only break the status quo. It does not necessarily lead to a better place, even we do not count the expected ugly process before that. The best ruling party can do is to strengthen the current deadlock. Yes, it is a deadlock. Given our lifespan, there is little light I can see. When the cheap labor margin exhausted, the end game begins. As natives, we know best that what competitive advantages we left except cheap labor. Oh, someone must point out the dynamic domestic market. By that time, it should be pretty much dead already. Those big market caps will totally gone.
Interestingly, "fighting for your rights" seems to be one of those things that works only when a small minority is doing the fighting. For instance, the American revolution was instigated and conducted by a few discontented landholders, without seeking permission or widespread acceptance from the broader population. If the means for widespread democratic input had existed in the years leading up to 1776, would Washington have been able to mobilize successfully? Or would the mainstream media have been co-opted by the British to proclaim him a "radical dissident" or a "terrorist," hopelessly marginalizing the revolutionaries?
That's the problem that any would-be Chinese or Russian revolutionary faces. Earlier revolutions could be conducted with the involvement of only 10-15% of the population, but these days, you can't do much to change things even with 80% of the population behind you.
Just let you know that weight for English as a lesson for students for a long time has been reduced in the curriculum these years. I hated learning English when I was a student. But without it, you have less access to the information and knowledge. It's all about controlling what's in people's mind and feed them with some other stimulations. Intellectually oppressed? I think its priority among average people, even in the developed nations, is not that high.
The Chinese have never really had freedom, so they've nothing to compare it to. Even if they did, people are doing well over there right now. Any realistic attempt at political change insitgated from outside the political elite would introduce instability and risk for uncertain benefits. As long as China is economically improving there's no real impetus for change. The only protests you get are from those small minorities that are losing out, and that tends to be temporary and/or local instances that are disconnected from one another.
That kind of "rationale" for not having democracy in Taiwan used to be convincing, until finally enough people there were fed up with not having freedom and protested in unison to gain freedom. For that matter, that kind of "rationale" used to be convincing in east Germany, until people there realized that if they acted in unison they could improve their lives still more by gaining freedom. I'm not sure when enough of the masses in China will act in unison at the same time to change the system, and for sure the current ruling Communist Party of China tries to prevent any such united action, but I wouldn't characterize people dissatisfied with the current system as a "small minority," as they probably already make up a majority of the rural population, which in turn is a majority of the population of the whole country.
Sure. Of course the situation could change. I hope it does. But right now people do not care enough to do anything about it, just like people before those other revolutions didn't (yet) care enough. When will that change though, tomorrow? Next year? Next decade? I have no idea, all I can do is relate what I know of the situation over there as I have experienced it.
Power of any government starts with popular support. If you could convince just one fellow countryman that more freedom would make his live better, would make him better, that will be one less pillar for the oppression, and one more for the freedom. It's a daunting task, but it's the only reliable way - persuasion. I wouldn't fault you for giving up and moving elsewhere, just know that there is an option before you do.
"They don't care??!!" There are 1.3 billion Chinese and half of them use the Internet, how many locals you have spoken with? I live in China and am in the IT industry, I know there are a lot people quit using Gmail because the ban, not to say Google Search.
What do citizens in China think of this? When Google Search was effectively banned, some scientists said that they depended on Google Scholar and Google Books, services which were also affected by the ban. Are Baidu and similar services really an effective replacement?
I'm also wondering what would happen if the U.S. takes this to the World Trade Organization. Arbitrarily blocking some company's services could well be interpreted as unfair trade practices. And a more aggressive U.S. government, perhaps with a more protectionist president in 2016, might well decide to retaliate.
Most are aware of it, and for a lot of things there simply aren't good replacements. Baidu is pretty much a poor clone of Google and definitely doesn't work as well (even for Chinese language searches).
At the same time though, Chinese people are fairly used to censorship. It's pervasive at every level in China, so much so that it can sometimes be difficult to see.
I think there is a stymying effect here, but there is no way that the Communist Party will give up censorship of the internet over nothing.
There might be at least some possibility that using the WTO could help this. It did have an effect on the rare earth trade when China was restricting rare earth exports [1]. I suspect China would fight _far_ harder against this though.
Thanks to GFW, many of my friends learned the usage of VPN/SSH/NAT/hosts at a very early age, which benefits a lot when taking computer network course. (>﹏<.)
How exactly do you deter a government that rolls tanks against its own citizens? I really don't think there's a democratic reform avenue here. People will deal with it, and largely accept it due to their anti-western attitudes. The Communist Party sees citizens as their subjects and will put them in line as need be. Its not a democracy.
Government is (usually) made of people. These people all want different things. This is as true as the Chinese government as it is of the US government.
A litany of complaints against the Chinese government can go on and on and on, but it's not (anymore) a single person dictatorship, nor is it an obvious kleptocracy despite robust corruption. Its claim of being a government for and by the people stands up to scrutiny, even if its methods and outcomes are oppressive and aren't democratic.
> rolls tanks against its own citizens
The same way you influence the other one that deploys military-grade/style equipment against its people[1], by attempting to influence members of that government.
Are you a foreigner or are you Chinese? I'm curious as I naively assumed that due to the unrest\resistance that even tourism in Urumqi was difficult to do legally, and therefore residence\work would be out of the question or nigh on impossible
Perhaps we are an edge case, but this has a potentially significant impact to certain businesses, namingly those that are Google Apps customers and rely on gmail to get work done. They'll be routing all web traffic over their own network via HK or Singapore, but...
That doesn't help employees who need Mobile email access. As of now, companies can't count on remote access to corporate gmail by Chinese employees. We have about 2500 Chinese employees with sanctioned BYOD phones - it's a huge problem!
We're going to be running into the same problem as we're planning to roll out thousands of new Gmail & other google app accounts over the next couple of months.
Has Google made any statement about whether these will be operable or not?
Chinese Gmail user here. Now the easiest way to access Gmail is via Mailbox. No kidding. It works on my android phone and Macbook, and should do as well on iPhone. The first time of use requires a proxy, but afterwards it is okay without any. My guess is email information is partially saved on Dropbox servers by Mailbox. I don't know for how long Mailbox would continue to work though. when it doesn't work, I will have to use a SSH tunnel every time checking emails.
I have friends and family who are Chinese. Although it is not a universal ttuth, the fact is that many Chinese see the west only as something to be exploited, and do not wish to play by the same rules. This applies to individuals who have come here to work, not just the government or Chinese businessmen. The sentiment is that China was exploited inygr past, and now it is time for payback. One deals with China and Chinese without this backgroud at one's peril.
There is some of that, but it isn't "getting back." Its like going to Italy and getting ripped off as a tourist; there are plenty of people looking around for an opportunity for a quick buck on the gullible, Foreigner or Chinese. Then couple that with poor rule of law that make scams and unfair exploitation feasible, and you have China (as opposed to say Singapore, which is mostly Chinese but rule of law is strong and people are less hungry for a quick buck).
I have only been to HK and Macau but never to the China mainland. Pardon my ignorance, but why does the Chinese government bother to censor the Internet? Are the people in China not happy with the progress that has occurred over the past few decades? Is the government really that concerned with their populace discussing politics or sensitive issues openly? Do Chinese provinces consider themselves to be separate and distinct or is it more like US states where the differences are superficial and the division is unimportant?
It seems to me the US doesn't have much leverage regarding this particular issue. We would be best served working harder towards more affordable and flexible manufacturing automation so we can be more self-reliant.
I think the Chinese government works more like a gang than the kind of government you are familiar with. The only politically correct thing is to maintain the ruling, and the real motivations are nothing uncommon: power and money, and most of the time the latter.
The great firewall project is a big business for a lot of people (e.g., billions dollars business if not much more). Hardware providers look for the deals. Professors in universities look for funds (for themselves and for their students). And the biggest cut would be bribes for officials and commissions for pimps. The worst part is this business is sort of under table and there is not much control.
All these people want this business to stay and grow under the name of glorious "reasons", and there is just zero motive for people to get in its way.
To add to what others said, the Chinese government is a bit obsessed with the Soviet collapse, which many in the Chinese system see as having been causes by liberalizing too quickly. Gorbachev allowed freedom of speech and the Union disintegrated soon after, and that was before we had communication force multipliers like the Internet.
It's not necessarily completely self serving; many Chinese leaders do have their people's interests at heart. (Not all do, of course.) It's easy to argue that the many of the former Soviet republics are doing much worse now than they were in 1989.
To answer your questions:
Chinese government obviously bothers and is very concerned, for many cultural and historical reasons that cannot be easily summarized.
Provinces do not have so much power. It's completely different from US. China has been a centralized country since ancient time and the communist party is really good at executing the decision of the central government.
So if I want to start an email conversation with a vendor about some work I might need, they can't correspond with me because I'm on GMail? And this makes sense to the Chinese?
But on the bright side, looks like China will begin a struggle to stop "organ harvesting", a euphemism if I've ever seen one. (Not that the effort is forecast to be successful.)
From a meta narrative, it's interesting that there was a great push for centralization of everything, which Google benefited from. Now, due to political realities, we may be seeing another huge push for localization, even if it means owning one's own cloud server somewhere that one can VPN into.
What would happen if everybody added random "free tibet human rights xinjiang" triggers to their web pages? Or even better, randomly embed real snippets from organizations that fight for human rights in China.
You misjudge the nature of Chinese political control; awareness of human rights organizations is not the issue.
Apart from a vocal minority of patriots, most people are quite aware of the lack of democratic freedoms, crackdowns of dissidence, or restrictions on speech. But most people are very satisfied with the prosperity of the status quo. Case in point: in response to the very public Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong, the Mainland Chinese response was either "meh" or that Hong Kong people were overly optimistic that the Chinese government would allow universal suffrage in Hong Kong. Source: HK national.
I like this idea. Unfortunately the small cost to each individual site operator is too great for their own motivation - despite the value it might add. I guess that value would be more intelligent filtering which may actually be a good thing. A lot of innocent content gets blocked.
It won't cause everything to get blocked - if they were going to block everything, they could have done that already.
Chinese government once blocked the download page of the python website (python.org), when they released python version 2.6.4. It is widely believed that it's because the version number triggered that[1].
Python website has since added another download link written in Chinese on their website.
The idea of putting "Tibet" and "human rights" close to each other doesn't look very promising to me based on some historic observations of pre-China Tibet lifestyle http://masterok.livejournal.com/1713489.html (sorry for russian, but hopefully it is pretty simple for automatic translation)
Completely agree. Always the same excuse - bring up the past to defend the present. More than 125 Tibetans have set themselves on fire since March 2011[1], including three in the past week [2] (37-yr-old monk, 20-yr-old woman, and a 34-yr-old man) to protest against this repressive Chinese occupation. As a Tibetan, the past protests and these self-immolations are heart-wrenching and at the Toronto vigil this past weekend, there were people in tears. It's just hard.
We live in this amazing world and yet we have all these geopolitical issues (Eastern Europe, Middle East, Tibet, Kashmir, etc.) caused by various factors we vehemently believe/oppose (we humans have an brilliant capacity to rationalize any of our actions/beliefs). This past summer, I traveled across Kashmir with my two high school friends to visit the areas where the Indo-Pakistani[3] and Sino-Indian[4] wars took place. The landscape was beautiful, especially in the Ladakh regions. But overall, these regions are occupied by villages and small towns dwarfed by the huge military bases. Why can't these local people live by themselves without the fear of another war? Most of you already know, it's the same textbook example: a new ruler comes in town, finds the need to distract/rally his or her country - what better than a war (this "war" could be extended to politics/tech/biz, not just the old Roman wars)? History is littered with the similar plots and it works every single time.
Sometimes, I wonder if an ET contact would be good for our world so we could put down our differences and realize we are all in this together so we could take care of each other, our neighbors, and our amazing planet! Also, solving Fermi's paradox [5] would be icing on the cake!
This is not an excuse for China's violation of natural human rights. I'm just putting some attention to idea that Tibet is probably not the most terrified-by-China territory, rather the other way round.
The other way around? What other way around? People in China are terrified by Tibet, because of Tibet's historic human rights violations? Like the Chinese are scared that Tibet might invade and take over China? Really?
I mean, I suppose Americans are terrified of the Pakistani children their military is killing with drones too.
Human rights are a luxury of stable, developed countries. If autocratic governments are too liberal with them, they can lose their power, and that can end up worse than all the human rights problems put together (ie civil war). See Iraq or Syria for example.
Not a requirement. Eg USA didn't have them half a century ago despite being mostly developed (I understand some parts are still a bit wild west), and fairly stable (probably not really going to be taken over by communism).
While this is undoubtably an aggressive move by China I can't help but doubt that the impact will be very large. By now most Chinese users of googles services are using VPNs so this really only affects the lowest common denominator of Chinese users
Using VPNs are becoming increasingly difficult too. All the large VPN services are blocked here; OpenVPN doesn't work; the only option left is to use unknown services which are not guaranteed to be genuine.
i didn't rtfa, but this is nothing new, i've been in shanghai since 2007, afaik, google services (including gmail) have been hard to access, it was really after eric schmidt put the assault on china by making things public (circa 2010) that things started to get to really bad. from memory, 50% of the time, google services (search, gmail, apis, compute engine, office apps, etc) would not work back in 2007, in 2010 probably 80% of access would fail, and recently in the past year and a half, it's been almost 99% to now 100%.
i've already started a backup strategy long ago (about 8 months ago) as the frustration was just started to drive me crazy, I migrated all my services to either local equivalents or microsoft (outlook.com), but there's only a matter of time before those perhaps also get blocked.
of similar relation, ever since the snowden leaks, it seems that china has started looking to ban or outright limit foreign technology services used by the china government which is basically almost like everything, the nickname is qu ioe, qu which stands for out/oust, ioe stands for ibm, oracle, and emc.
note that vpn still seems to work, and if you're traveling on a roaming mobile service, you can still access google services (and others like facebook, twitter, youtube), but if you're plugging into the hotel wifi without vpn, good f'ing luck. note that i also work at a foreign national software company in china, the office can access these services uninhibited since we have an mpls to the main office in the valley.
if you're living in china and dependent on foreign services/apis like google then it's really hard because you must have vpn or some equivalent. i suggest even using a jumpbox.
Gmail blocked shocked me a lot. I was optimistic about the future of China's speech environment by new Chairman Xi's comming, but from he got the power, the condition is not changed, still bad, and even worse. The internet block is more aggressive and now the gmail is blocked. This is my baseline because email is very individual services. I think it's time to think about immigrating abroad.
"The problems with Gmail access this time may be caused by the China side, by Google itself or a combination of the two. But Western media pointed the finger at Chinese authorities immediately, accusing them of strengthening its cyber censorship. This is far too simple a hypothesis. It should be noted that Google voluntarily quit the mainland market in 2010. The issue at heart is to what extent Google is willing to obey Chinese law, on which China's attitude is steadfast."
"In this sense, it's dubious that China "blocked" Gmail simply over security concerns. Since both Google and China haven't given an explanation and meanwhile Gmail is a technically complex system, there may be some puzzling reasons behind the incident.
"If the China side indeed blocked Gmail, the decision must have been prompted by newly emerged security reasons. If that is the case, Gmail users need to accept the reality of Gmail being suspended in China. But we hope it is not the case."
Curiously, the English version is missing the following two paragraphs:
"中美围绕互联网既有合作，亦有摩擦，双方的相互适应过程仍在继续。由于中美关系庞大而复杂，互联网问题只是其中一部分，外部变数的影响也是存在的。"(Third to last paragraph)
My translation: In regards to the Internet, China and the US both cooperate and experience some frictions, so the mutual adaptation process of the two sides continues. Due to the complexity of the Sino-US relationship, Internet issues are only a part of it, and there also exist other external variables.
My translation: Whether Gmail's "losing contact" is caused by Google or China, or a combination thereof, users should just go with the flow, and be prepared with other backup plans. China's development process has been met with countless stumbles and other interludes, so this story doesn't really matter in the end.
Any HN'rs who live in China use Fastmail? Can you share your experience?
I'm thinking of switching over but my primary concern is whether Fastmail encounters similar problems to Gmail. (You might recommend using a VPN all the time, but that doesn't always work for me).
Slightly OT, but I'm going to travel through China in a couple days and before reading this thread I thought I could get away with my VPN (hosted on my Digital Ocean VPS) plus eventually Tor, but now I'm not quite sure anymore.
VPN is roughly ok as long as your IP address is not in the blacklist. But it could be unstable. The GFW may drop your connections from time to time.
I am not sure about Tor but I believe it probably doesn't work any more. Private VPN/shadowsocks is now the majority I think.
Shadowsocks is (arguably) easier to use for ordinary people and better informed. Most people don't even have command line experience before. After all this is one problem limited in one country which couldn't be freely discussed so choices may not be "optimal" in some sense.
Ah thanks. So it doesn't actually offer additional functionality, then?
The best tool I've ever used was https://github.com/apenwarr/sshuttle , because it was far lower level than a proxy. Unfortunately, it's super unstable on modern OSX versions.
Not quite the same as what you're proposing but here's what I did. My parents were living in china for a few years and I set them up with a squid server on ec2 tokyo region micro instance with a script that would create a ssh tunnel to it and configured the browser to use it. Little hacky but it worked fine.
I've been living in China for over 4 months now, using a simple VPN I setup on Digital Ocean has been the most stable (tunnel stays open for as long as the internet connection is available)
Tor is semi-blocked here, you won't be able to establish a connection to the network without a tunnel.
VPN most likely will work if your server IP is not banned. Tor used to work but was not working last time (one ore two months ago) I tried again. Prepare a SSH tunnel as a backup solution.
this is so stupid. we are a startup team from China using Google's Apps service. So far most of mainstream mail provider like 163.com and qq.com can still exchange email with gmail. But without VPN we can't send/receive mails from mobile.
1) Since China effectively blocked most of Google's services (and uses Google's mobile operating system for free and makes a ton of money off it - look at Xiaomi), Isn't it basically that China was able to rob Google, and doesn't suffer any consequences from it?
2) Also most US websites are blocked in China (Google, Facebook, Dropbox, Youtube, Twitter, Wikipedia, NYTimes, the list goes on and on...) Why is it that the US government doesn't take any action against that, where as China is freely dumping cheap manufactured products that are made in factories that violate human rights?
Its already happening in the form of non-unilateral trade policies. China is able to do what it wants in the US, but US companies are de-facto required to make vast contributions of intellectual property to do business in China.
This is likely because of Google's agreement with the US government to provide access to Chinese emails to officials as part of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, and the Chinese hacking of the access systems put in place by Google for law enforcement to collect a list of active surveillance targets.
It's fairly interesting to contrast the reaction here with that whenever Uber is involved. Google violate laws in China, but apparently that's to be encouraged, yet if Uber do the same in a nice supposed liberal democracy they are to be criticised?
As it stands end users are reduced to pawns in the emerging power struggle between governments and multinationals.
What law did Google break that caused gmail to be shut down? According to the article the Chinese government denies doing anything.
I also don't think you understand HN very well. What is supported is not supported on grounds of legality but on what is viewed as good for people as a whole. "What is legal is what is right and what is right is what is legal" is the antithesis of how most hackers think.
The "Great Firewall" in China has over 600 million active Internet users. That's double the population of the United States. Baidu is the dominating search engine, there are replacement services for Twitter, Facebook, and others. Their IM "Wechat" has over 300 million active users alone.
In all reality, Google, Facebook, and others would _love_ to have even the smallest presence in China to get access to that user base. It's a gold mine just waiting to be cracked. Until they are, it will be referred to as "The Great Firewall", when in reality, Chinese internet users probably aren't really missing a lot, outside of politically charged sites, perhaps.
I don't think it's fair to say that Chinese users aren't missing a lot. At the end of the day, a small number of users are responsible for the overwhelming majority of quality content created and discovered (authorship and curation). Those users more often than not rely on high quality content irrespective of national origin. When you cut off that access for those people, it's certain to limit the quality, breadth and depth of what they create and share with their peers in China.
I expect this to be especially true with Twitter, which is often a very valuable back channel for many communities of interest (for example, a lot of prominent engineers in several programming language communities use Twitter as a way to share novel ideas and libraries).
When you cut off Chinese users from these sites, you cut them off from a lot more than just inconvenient political content.
China has more Internet users than most countries have for a population. It has a cornucopia of content and services that would rival the "free Internet" you and I enjoy. It's hardly a digital vacuum mainstream media would like you to believe. It's no North Korea.
Sure, there are social and political issues, but most Chinese Internet users are very happy with what's available to them. The reality is, there are two "Internets", and China's Internet is a very large one.
This means China now risks becoming isolated in global email network, not just "access" to Gmail.
And no, your VPN/SSH/whatever_tunnel won't work if all of the MX servers are blocked.