I don't have to imagine. I'm a Chinese living in US. I use Wechat to video chat with my parents who live in China every week. In the past a couple weeks I have been trying to convince my dad to find a backup plan. Apparently anything owned by Facebook isn't an option. I don't know if Signal is an option but he won't try anyway. Telegram isn't an option. Snap isn't an option. So we went back to good old Skype. Guess what, there isn't Google play store in China. The Huawei app store (my dad uses a Huawei phone) doesn't have Skype in it. He managed to find the Chinese Skype website, operated by a company that isn't Miscrosoft but MS's partner in China, to download the APK, then his Huawei phone rejected to install it, because the APK isn't blessed by some Huawei security thingy.

We eventually settled down to use QQ which is also owned by Tencent. He also mentioned we could use this Tencent business meeting app, or that Alibaba business meeting app (dingding), but at that point i rejused. I was quite fed up after he couldn't to install Skepe on his phone. I think MS is one of the US companies that's so willing to bend over to most requests from Chinese gov but they are still treated like crap. If Trump bans QQ as well then I will just call my parents with the good old international telephone call. These Chinese tech co isn't gonna get another weekly active user just like that.

I even thought about setting up my own Jitsi server and let them just Jitsi to it, then i thought it must be even harder than installing Skype. VPN isn't an option. Any other way to circumvent the GFW will be too complicated for them. They will all be too low bandwidth to video chat anyway. Plus, illegal. You can find cases where individuals got punished because they use VPN. The government even lists them on a website. They ain't hiding or sugar-coating this crap no more.

So after this process, if you ask me, a Chinese living overseas, which side I'm gonna blame for how we got here, guess what, it won't be the US gov.

(Also this is from a burner account because I don't want nobody to knock on my parents door for this post.)