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Comment by VeronicaJJ123 | Hacker News Reader

I recently met Chinese Commissioner at a party and he told me that the political class thinks of censorship as a weakness in their society and is fully aware that it is going to hit them badly.

He was like the censorship is more driven by vested and corrupt interests more than competence of the communist party.

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It could, but in a way it's currently acting like import tariffs but for the Internet. It's making it easier to create and run a local clone of an international company than to import the international company's services to use locally.

So if or when censorship goes down, it will be Chinese companies that will be more powerful on the Internet, not western ones.

BS. China ends up paying huge cost for this censorship which the government too acknowledges. Youtube sensations are softpowers. A kid can learn million skills by visiting youtube. If you don't have that you have a backward society. China is wasting useful capital on reinventing the wheel that could have gone into building something even greater.

(Do we really save $10 by cutting our own hair at home?)

Yes you could argue that China is paying a higher cost now, but their goal is to protect and nurture their own industries so that those industries can dominate the world later on.

It's like South Korea in the 1960's and later from what I've read. The government invested and subsidised (i.e. protected) their young growing industries so that they could grow to be competitive on the global market.

The USA did likewise when it was young, with tariffs on imported goods, blatant copying of intellectual property, etc.

I think it depends on the type of censorship and what the purpose is. Just look at the colonial mentality of neighboring countries, where simply being from "the West" gives you huge perks.

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