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Comment by yorwba | Hacker News Reader

Their US equivalents would be

https://www.rfa.org/mandarin/

https://www.voachinese.com/

Those are government-sponsored, explicitly foreign-facing (the language is a big hint) mouthpieces that are about as representative of "US news" as the sites you link are representative of "Chinese news" (i.e. barely).

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All those sites are blocked in China. Even hackersnews is blocked.

Check: http://www.chinafirewalltest.com

Sure, the web sites are blocked, but radio waves couldn't be. And traditionally there were always enough radio stations carefully built and sufficiently financed to cover the target areas.

RFA:

https://www.rfa.org/about/info/frequencies.html

VOA:

https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...

A nice example of what one U.S. journalist knew regarding the coverage of North Korea in 2013:

https://www.northkoreatech.org/2013/04/11/us-wants-voa-rfa-t...

I know, just like https://cn.ft.com/ and https://cn.nytimes.com/ (which are more likely to be worth reading, although not at the same level as the English originals), but the blocks can be circumvented by sufficiently motivated individuals. And I think there are more of those in China than there are sufficiently motivated individuals in the US circumventing the language barrier to read https://www.caixin.com/ or any of the magazines published by http://boyamedia.com/ . (Of course those aren't representative of "Chinese news" either, most of which probably consists of clickbait blogspam.)

> ...but the blocks can be circumvented by sufficiently motivated individuals.

As I understand it, using a VPN to get past the firewall is a crime for Chinese nationals. And the govt is constantly blocking them anyway as they find them.

Marijuana is illegal as well, that doesn't change the fact that lots of people are smoking it anyway.

So Chinese people can watch foreign news, if they are willing to break Chinese law?

> Those are government-sponsored, explicitly foreign-facing (the language is a big hint) mouthpieces

Of course they are. Can you point to any mainland Chinese news outlets which are not effectively controlled by the CCP?

If not, it follows that a foreigner reading or watching this stuff gets a pretty good idea of what mainland Chinese are being fed by their news media.

RFA is the mouthpiece of the CIA.

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