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Comment by darawk | Hacker News Reader

This is kind of a weird problem though. It seems like the equilibrium effect of not obeying Chinese laws will be that the companies are simply excluded from the Chinese market. I'm not sure how that really helps anyone. It feels like a moral victory, but i'm not sure that it actually helps anyone. It seems like the right approach might be to comply as minimally and poorly as you can get away with, while steadily trying to liberalize China through foreign exposure.

It's a tough call, though. It's not a decision I would want to have to make, that's for sure.

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That sounds nice in theory, but it doesn’t work that way in practice. You just end up corrupting your own principles in the end.

I think the best approach would be to try to support users by making it easier for them to get access in spite of the great firewall.

> That sounds nice in theory, but it doesn’t work that way in practice. You just end up corrupting your own principles in the end.

Maybe. But if you don't do it, a Chinese company will just clone your product, and they will be substantially more beholden to the Chinese government than you.

That line of thinking plays right into their game. A perfect way to rationalize compliance. But it’s based on the misguided concept that somehow access to American software services will push American values on the Chinese people. All the while, compliance with their censorship demands prevents that from actually happening.

The only way to play the game is to refuse their rules. So what if they clone your software? Let them.

Yes but that Chinese company won’t be able to censor the other ~7 Billion people on Earth.

Trying to steadily liberalize China through foreign exposure is extremely unrealistic. They have an iron grip on all information flow.

The decision to cater to China’s demands is a decision for profit. They need to be excluded from the world internet economy instead of embraced. We have to play their game in reverse. They are huge, but the rest of the world is larger still. We have the power to make this happen if we are willing to stick to our values over profit.

> They have an iron grip on all information flow.

That's not true. Every other and their mother has a VPN, only that they don't care nearly as much about what you care in this case.

>It seems like the right approach might be to comply as minimally and poorly as you can get away with, while steadily trying to liberalize China through foreign exposure.

I'm assuming this is a joke, because this has been the strategy of the West since Nixon first went to China. And the exact opposite has happened. They engage in a kind of neo-mercantilism, and we basically pretend that if they just open their markets up a little bit more they're one more step toward liberal democracy.

Although your opinion seems reasonable, I disagree based on my experience growing up in a communist country. The problem is that there is some weird moral feedback loop; each little steep towards complying with something problematic makes you change, you rationalize it and this makes you more likely to walk further in that direction. The concept you describe, comply and liberalize... I never observed it in reality. People do not change the system from within for the better. The system changes people trying to compromise for the worse.

This. Also we should remember that companies are not a hive mind but are made up with individuals. Employees who want to take a stand will tend to be pushed out by those who are willing to compromise, as the latter would have better results to show of.

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