Steam has been banned in China
thegamer.com
thegamer.com
Most Chinese Steam users have historically been using the global service instead, as this Chinese version of Steam has only been available since February 2021.
Really makes you want to visit and see how this actually works for yourself. The more I read about China, the more unbelievably contradictive it gets.
The Beijing ones were the most sophisticated
If Steam had a working 'global service' then it almost certainly used local datacenters as proxy. But AFAIK PC gaming is pretty much seen as a niche for computer nerds though (apart from E-Sports), gaming mostly happens on mobile phones.
We connected a fibre tester, and nothing was coming out on hk side. We tried connecting to google.com, and to our surprise this "physical" link was also censored.
Then the cableman basically says, use this link, and VPN over it. The speed was quite good still.
As this was about five years ago, the situation may well have changed, but at the time exemptions definitely were possible.
Also, keep in mind yours is but one experience out of many.
Saying that both are bad and so nobody can be blamed is a bad faith argument.
Fixed it for you.
I would change to directly from the CCP, because there is no independent free press in China at any meaningful scale.
Not only does a lot of their media get big readership online here, People's Daily and others.
Also does anyone know how much SCMP's independence has eroded now? I don't know that much on that one but it still gets placements in news aggregators for example as if it were the NyTimes.
CCP also pays for reach, spending millions to get their content in the large US based media like WaPo. Most people don't realize they are reading an ad, not an actual article by a WaPo reporter.
Though maybe funnily on the opposite end, a CCP persecuted group Falun Gong owns the Epoch Times, which has grown huge too. In the past few years they have been one of the top sources of social media/fb links. A lot of it is just meme & engage bait. but it's still interesting to think about.
Russia Today too ;)
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/dec/07/china-plan-for-... https://freedomhouse.org/report/special-report/2020/beijings... https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/ccp-buys-med...
By in the “West” what do you mean? US? North America? Any place but China?
I was there in 2016, and besides the usual, like Google, Netflix, Facebook or Twitter, most western sites seemed to work, just very, very slow for some reason.
Also, some high end hotels did provide unfettered access to the Internet for some reason, so I guess anyone could go there and browse Facebook for the price of an expensive coffee.
Practically everybody who is knowledgeable with computers uses a VPN - restrictions are only for "the plebs"
Skype worked ok, but text chat only. Images never arrived.
I’m wondering if foreign SIM cards are not subjected to filtering.
iirc it really just depended on where you were... Sometimes Fi let me break through the GFW, but it definitely did not in Beijing.
In fact, I built a tool to specifically circumvent this: https://github.com/nneonneo/iOS-SOCKS-Server. It provides a SOCKS proxy through which you can tunnel any TCP connection, and have the connection appear to originate from your phone (and thus not be subject to the tethering rate limit). I used this when I was in China recently (2019).
Over the years, I came to understand that contradictions are almost always just false assumptions.
For a country governed by a so called “communist” party, there are glaring inequalities. If we limit ourselves to free Internet usage, it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people would only be able to consume government approved content, whereas elites could have access to anything.
How does having "a communist" party imply that there would be no inequalities? Especially given that merely a few decades ago China was poor like hell and everyone outsourced all the cheap labor there?
> it’s clear that the system is designed so poor or uneducated people
Isn't education in China largely sponsored by government?
That's not by design, that's just the virtue of human ingenuity. Give us something we ain't supposed to do, and people will invest a lot of effort to still make it work.
Case in point; For a while Germany wanted to put Internet filters in place, based on DNS blocks [0]
Trivial to circumvent for anybody remotely familiar with networking, yet seemingly impossible for the vast majority of people who have no expertise in the field.
Was it designed like that to lock out the poor, uneducated, Germans?
Exactly that. It took me >30 minutes just load my emails - if I found a spot where the VPN would connect at all. Basically I needed two coffees. One for the time to load the email, and the 2nd coffee to wait while my repliess were sending.
At the same time, access to Chinese websites was super-fast.
The I changed the strategy to create a VM in azure and it was never blocked for years, the only down time was M$ trying to save me some credit by automatically shutting it down as the load of the VM had always been almost 0%.
Steam is one of the few popular international services that escaped getting blocked by the Great Firewall, despite hosting content that the Chinese government ostensibly considers illegal or inappropriate. There have been a lot of articles about how Chinese indie game developers were using Steam as a loophole to sell their games without getting the official government approval to sell games inside China. It's never been clear why Steam was an exception to the blocks, but that's par for the course. The government never explains to the people why something gets blocked, sites just suddenly stop working from one day to the next and the people are expected to accept it and move on.
The internet blocks are set up by the internet providers in the country, so somebody must know what's going on, but - like many things that happen in China - the people just need to guess the reasoning by reading between the lines of impenetrable Party literature or relying on supposedly independent editorials in the tabloid newspapers.
So nobody knows for sure, but people have deduced that there are several reasons that the government blocks websites. One is as a "punishment" for a foreign company, because that company published content that insulted or offended some officials in the government. Another is if the foreign company is specifically and deliberately producing content aimed at Chinese-speakers that discusses topics the Chinese government does not want Chinese people to discuss freely (June 4/Tiananmen massacre, Hong Kong autonomy, alternative governing models that do not include the the Party at the core etc). Another one might be if the foreign company refuses to allow the Chinese government to install their surveillance hooks. But I think perhaps more relevant to the case of Steam is economic protectionism - the Chinese government tends to block foreign services that could compete with Chinese companies, so that Chinese companies can become dominant in the space.
The thing with Steam is that there wasn't really a local alternative with a wide enough catalog of games that it would please the middle class/educated/moneyed gamer in the country, so that's probably why Steam was quietly allowed to continue for so long. A few years ago Valve announced a partnership with Perfect World (local media company) to produce a Chinese version of Steam, but for whatever reason it took ages to come out. Now that it is out, and presumably up and running (I don't know since I don't live in China any more), the government has no incentive to allow people to buy from the international version, so that is probably why it now got blocked.
As usual, Chinese government only block in one direction - every day, every month, every year there are more and more things blocked. Eventually even though technically people in China are still able to visit most of the internet outside of China, the sites that are the most popular in China will all be owned by Chinese companies (or partnerships) and exist completely inside the monitoring and self-censorship bubble of the Chinese cultural sphere. So it's not like people in China don't have the opportunity to see other content, it's just that those other sources are very far outside the mainstream and not frequently accessed by the average person. If it did become popular, that's when the government would make a move.
A censor find something matching a keyword, and he gets CNY 0.5. That's the whole story to it.
That being said, if you go then please try to walk into a random hotel/apartment you see on the street to try to book a room.. then you'll discover that 9/10 hotels/apartments won't allow foreigners to live there. I lived in China for more than a year before I realized this was the case, and I have on multiple occasions even been kicked out of friends/partners apartment because someone told the landlord there was a foreigner in the building (or maybe they saw through the surveillance camera).
That said, definitely in the case of hotels there are loads of hotels it seems there is a legal aspect as well. If you lived in China you might be familiar with the long and boring process of registration with the police every time you move house. Sometimes you even have to register at more than one place because you moved into a different urban area. According to the law, all foreigners must do this everywhere they go in China, including tourists who are on holiday. It wouldn't be very efficient to make tourists spend a couple hours at the police station every time they checked into a hotel, so some hotels have some arrangement with the local police to do this on their guests' behalf behind the scenes. Most tourists nowadays don't even know that they have been registered with the police everywhere they travel. But smaller hotels don't provide that service. I have successfully blagged my way into staying at one smaller hotel by assuring them i would visit the local police myself to register, but a lot of them don't want the hassle or (perhaps) attention from the local authorities, so they just ban foreigners.
When I left China it was during the pandemic, and pretty much no hotels at all would allow foreigners to stay. This was xenophobia, pure and simple. There were a few times I had to first visit the police station and ask the police where I could stay, because hotel after hotel after hotel refused me, despite my green health code, valid visa and so on.
Also I was always greeted with utter friendliness, so I don't get the everybody's xenophobic aspect. I do speak some (very basic) Mandarin though so maybe that helps with how you're treated.
It is true that people in China tend to be fairly polite, although when it blows up it tends to go straight to 11. (I saw a lot of this happening between police and residents during the coronavirus lockdowns.) But just because people are polite, don't assume that means they're not bigots. In some parts of the country, particularly amongst more affluent people, there is a sort of attitude that foreigners should be treated with kid gloves, which is thoroughly degrading.
Needless to say, I loved it.
Also, I don't know what makes you think that Chengdu is off the beaten path - it's a massive tourist destination, in particular because of its panda reserve, presumed proximity to Tibet and the global renown of Sichuan cuisine (home of mapo tofu, hotpot etc).
Thirdly, this coddling of foreigners is exactly the kind of racist behavior that I find to be degrading. It might feel superficially nice to be treated like you are special or unique, but really it means you are not being treated with respect. They are treating you like a child, or a curiosity. If you visit some of the indigenous communities of China then you will often see the Han majority treat the ethnic minorities in the same way, as if they are just props for photos or some kind of weird creatures to be gawked at. It's gross, imo.
It’s definitely taken too far sometimes though.
Try go to the country side to see the real China.
For the racism part, I wouldn't say that signs with "no foreigners" in shops are common, but I have seen them a couple of times during my 5 year stay in China.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
Western expats in East Asia tend to be quite polarized about their country of residence, and expats in poorer countries even more so. Over time, the tint of novelty wears off and the warts begin to stand out. Poorer countries have more warts.
For folks like myself who are extra sensitive, the negatives get an outsized representation, while the positives and neutrals get filtered out. It took me years of to develop the habits to compensate. I'm far from where I'd like to be, but I'm learning to accept that as well.
This is especially true in places of higher density. If you encounter 1 bad apple in a place of 100 people, vs 10 bad apples of 1000 people, the ratio is the same, but subjectively the latter feels ten times worse. It’s the price you pay for living the city life.
And when you have an under-stimulated career, the idle mind becomes the devil's playground.
We let collective narratives plays a greater role in colouring our opinions (as opposite to direct experience) than we'd like to admit. In this day and age, I don't think it's especially controversial to say that we get more dopamine hits from internet discussions than having a stroll down the street. Ultimately, unless we consciously intervene, the chemicals get to decide what we let ruminate in the back of our minds.
The idiosyncrasies you used to brush off or find amusing are now small but cumulative signs of impending doom. What we get right in direction we get wrong in magnitude. The sprinkles of verifiable truth can often as easily fuel our biases as they moderate them.
It seems to get worse every year also. My first visit in 1999, foreigners were quite welcomed. Then it simply got more mundane from there. My visit twas chengdu in 2006 was fairly like you stated though.
Most people are still ok, but some fraction of the population has a mixture of fear and hatred of foreigners. They think foreigners are dangerous because we bring the virus. Far fewer places accept foreigners than before.
I love my life and my friends here, but walking down the street in a village and having a guy wearing an official-looking coat scream at you to “fuck off” has a way of souring one’s mood.
Edit: to be clear, I'm not trying to deny your own experience or making any accusations here. I'm just presenting the other side and clarifying that I don't feel it's a universal experience.
The era of Northern Europeans ("whites") dominating the globe is over forever, so no need to beat yourself up about it. Just letting you know that this extreme narrative is quite bizarre to non-Americans.
I remember this sales guy who always made it a point to tell every woman he talked to that he did Peace Corps in Africa and how it changed him working with Africans. Like, you could've just volunteered somewhere on the south side of the city if you really wanted to help some African folk.
Africa won't want for charitable aid labor in spite of this sentiment, it just can field those grunt work jobs from people who're, you know, from the area itself rather than Western tourists looking for a story to tell or a CV to pad.
This, in my experience, is simply not true.
There is a value in going to different places, changing every variable there is to your life except yourself.
When you are somewhere you've never been to, where you know nobody, where the food, language and customs are all different, then you can find out which parts of yourself stay, who you are and what you are capable of. That has value.
And even if you do fall through the tourism system and find yourself elbow to elbow with a native, the thought that you as a foreigner will unlock their culture in handful of days when most natural born members of a group will be learning their own eccentricities to the day they die is one of the more disgusting flavors of arrogance.
https://www.lostlaowai.com/blog/china-stuff/china-travel/for...
So many foreigners/laowai spread the same misinformation. You can stay, if you have sufficient Chinese/Mandarin, you can explain the above and it works. If you have a good friend explain, it also works. Most say the same thing as you "kicked out" "not allowed" or "rascism".
Not true at all, - at some hotels where I stayed I was really the first foreigner to ever pass through. (I wasn't staying in typical Shanghai places for example, more north and more west.)
Not an issue at all, explained, showed, registered, done.
In China you either need to go through an agency that have something similar to "The Negro Motorist Green Book" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_Motorist_Green_Book), or you need to speak Chinese, convince the reception that they don't need a certificate they believe they're legally required to have, convince the reception to call the owner who will no doubt repeat a foreigner is not allowed, then you need to contact the police to convince the owner, if the police agree that a certificate is required then you need to convince the police that they don't know their own laws, convince them to call the Provincial Foreign Affairs Bureau.. that's what the person in your blogpost has been doing. She even told the police to give her their badge numbers so she could file an official complaint. That person is certainly living on the edge.
Even if it's technically legal, then surely the end result will be the same - 9/10 hotels and apartments will refuse foreigners (for the apartments I rented then everything was done on paper, I doubt they have the booking system mentioned in the blogpost - not sure if all hotels use the same since I have never walked behind the desk and looked at their computer.. and they probably wouldn't allow it if I asked) because who in their right mind want to spend several hours and likely get the police involved just so they can rent a room for 200rmb.
If you go off the beaten path or less than 4 stars hotels, then that.
And not unique just in China, Japan will do it too with some places - granted mostly it's love hotels which is ironic cause they're not supposed to know whose checking in, no passport is required, but many a foreigner can't read Kanji or talk.
There are nearly 200 countries on this planet, in that context your claim sounds more like quite the generalization, on your part, rather than an actual fact.
edit; Wow, never would have thought that stating a simple fact could be controversial on HN.
What is going on in these comments? People acting like everybody is American/Canadian, and as if the whole world is all the same, but only China is some weird outlier, smh
Particularly this;
> when you're not willing to risk your life to understand and uncover the parts the government doesn't want you to see
Just reads like FUD, it's not China that locks up people at the highest rate on the planet. That "feat" is reserved to a country were nobody would say "don't visit there you might die!" even tho the chance for that to happen there is much more likely than in China or NK, where most police don't even carry guns.
It's a shame though, I always wanted to see China.
Of course, it does feel a bit suspicious when you say something mildly critical of the government online or during a meal with friends and then "mysteriously" the next day your VPN stops working, but it's just as likely that it could be coincidence and you're reading too much into it. But that's exactly how things are supposed to work in an authoritarian regime. Most of the time the government isn't explicitly watching over everyone, but because the legal system is deliberately opaque, everyone maintains a tiny bit of fear inside them that maybe they could be being watched, or that there might be a secret police just around the corner, so they self-censor and limit their behaviors just in case.
So, you're right that you might have anxiety the whole trip, but arguably that means you're getting to experience the "real China". Living under a constant chilling effect[0] is probably worse for locals than foreigners. At least as a foreigner you can leave when the pressure gets too much. Most locals don't have that privilege.
Who were only locked up after Canada locked up a Chinese citizen at the request of the US.
Weirdly enough, that is framed in a completely different context than China's response to it.
So let's just ignore the context of why and how that happened, or what kind of anxiety that translates to for Chinese people visiting countries like Canada or the US?
I mean, who there started arresting other nations nationals as geopolitical gambling chips? It wasn't China, it was Canada at the command of the US.
> I just don't see how I could go there and not have anxiety for the whole trip.
As a German national, I don't see how or why that should affect me. Can you please expand on your reasoning there?
You should assume that you get a bugged room too.
Russians did it in the 80s, even easier now.
The rooms aren’t bugged. Most foreigners aren’t that special. Maybe they will big some special hotel that gets lots of diplomats? But most of us won’t stay in those.
I was reading a reply by a guy who counter-commented on this, a bunch of links of people on YouTube walking around this same area and not seeing anything like this.
Then went to comment, and it says "flagged" and was deleted, in under 10 minutes.
I don't really care about politics or China at all, but that is some spooky-tier censorship here on HN. Wtf is going on here?
Here's one of the links I followed:
https://news.ycombinator.com/reply?id=29684814
> I don’t think any political entity has any interest in controlling what individuals post on a tiny website like HN.
The comment boiled down to:
"VICE isn't what I'd call the most reputable/unbiased source. I'd encourage everyone to do their own research/make their own decision. Here are a bunch of links of people walking around the same area, and it looks nothing like what is cut together from that VICE episode."
I just wanted to call out this very odd behavior. I don't see HN as a place where people who speak objectively + respectfully get silenced, generally.
So using the razor, I think we can conclude what happened.
User makes a new throwaway account to spread easily disproved information
Other users downvote the misinformation
HN autoflags the comment to protect against preceived-spam.
Although you are right to question what you see. It is never wrong to take a second to ask “what’s going on here?”
Or to put it another way with a much more mild example, you can make a video full of happy black folks in some of the most backwards racist oppressive parts of the US. The existence of happy people does not negate the oppression they continue to endure.
I have no idea. I've never been to China. It could be really bad, exactly the way the video makes it out to be. The video could be dramatized, and not representative of the situation as a whole.
I'm not sure I would believe things that China told me about the US
By the same logic, I'm not sure I believe all the things that US/US-allied media tell me about China
Without access to verifiably unbiased information (which is difficult in an age where nations have entire agencies dedicated to misinformation for political purposes) it's something that's hard for me to form an objective opinion on. And I'm not that invested in it to want to form an opinion.
I just wanted to point out this odd behavior that I've not seen much of on here.
There is heavy tracking and surveillance in China [1], especially in Xinjiang [2][3].
Hence any reporting of Xinjiang, including the YouTube links you mentioned and posted, have selection bias.
That is, unfavorable reports or videos are censored, while favorable videos are selected, if not outright sponsored as part of large-scale online disinformation campaigns [5][6].
=====
The tracking and surveillance of reporters in Xinjiang, where journalists are tracked and have photos deleted for no reasons [2]:
I was in Kashgar to report on how the Chinese authorities had turned to technology to cement their control of the Xinjiang territory, a region in the west of the country. Foreign journalists who travel there are tracked. I became one of the watched.
[...snipped...]
Another time, a police officer stopped us close to our hotel. Inspecting Chris’s photos, he deleted a shot of a camel. When Chris asked why that photo was deleted, the man turned to Chris and said, “In China, there are no whys.”.
The tracking and surveillance of reporters in general, using the pandemic as an excuse and using visas for control [3]:
Several foreign and domestic journalists were forced to abandon stories after being told "to leave or be quarantined on the spot," the report highlighted. Press credentials were commonly canceled by Beijing officials and embassies were routinely tasked with trying to renew revoked visas from journalists. The report said foreign journalists were used as "pawns" in China's international diplomatic disputes.
The sponsorship of favorable YouTube and other social media videos, also covering ethnic mintorities [5]:
The Barretts are part of a crop of new social media personalities who paint cheery portraits of life as foreigners in China — and also hit back at criticisms of Beijing’s authoritarian governance, its policies toward ethnic minorities and its handling of the coronavirus.
[...snipped...]
State-run news outlets and local governments have organized and funded pro-Beijing influencers’ travel, according to government documents and the creators themselves. They have paid or offered to pay the creators. They have generated lucrative traffic for the influencers by sharing videos with millions of followers on YouTube, Twitter and Facebook.
[...snipped...]
His videos do not mention the internal government documents, firsthand testimonials and visits by journalists that indicate that the Chinese authorities have held hundreds of thousands of Xinjiang’s Muslims in re-education camps.
They also do not mention his and his family’s business ties to the Chinese state.
> Hey what sort of bullshit is this HN?
This sort of bullshit (sponsored videos) should not be promoted on HN, which may fuel the disinformation campaigns [5][6].
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/nov/29/china-province... "Chinese province targets journalists and students in planned surveillance system"
[2]: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/16/insider/china-xinjiang-re... "Being Tracked While Reporting in China, Where ‘There Are No Whys’"
[3]: https://www.newsweek.com/china-harassing-intimidating-journa... "China Harassing, Intimidating Journalists With Surveillance Built to Curb COVID-19"
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/12/13/technology/ch... "How Beijing Influences the Influencers"
[5]: https://web.archive.org/web/20211224143113/https://www.nytim... "How Beijing Influences the Influencers"
[6]: https://miburo.substack.com/p/cotton-the-act "Cotton the Act: Large-Scale Network of CCP-aligned Facebook Accounts Deny Mass Atrocity in China's Xinjiang Province"
Edits: added more links.
> This sort of bullshit (sponsored videos) should not be promoted on HN.
The original commenter says "China is X way".
Someone responds and says "China is Y way."
Everyone ought to be able to upvote/downvote, and argue + discuss to their hearts content.
I have no horse in this race, but I would have expected the person to just get downvoted into oblivion or responded to with posts like yours, containing responding counter-arguments/links, if the majority of people disagree with or hold contrary evidence to.
My reaction was less to do it about it being anything specifically related to China, and more about the principle/premise of the matter.
It could equally have been "Person 1 says eggs are bad for you, Person 2 says eggs are good for you." and I would have had the same reaction.
Some things shouldn't be up for debate and calling doubt on reality is a weapon used by those who have political stakes.
China is a tough one too because as we saw on a top HN post from a few days ago we know the CCP has a large, active operation to comment and engage in online forums to sway opinion.
Article gave examples of typical straw man, whataboutism, handy wavy redirection.
The kind of comments exactly like what got flagged.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661475 "Spamouflage: CCP-Aligned Disinformation Campaign on Facebook Twitter YouTube"
There have been a few over the years. One I remember talked about a gamified app which is like so innovative and sad at the same time
I'm personally opposed to the idea of visiting certain countries, such as USA since they searched phones at the border and you could be treated like a criminal based on who knows what.
You can't even compare the USA and China; China is objectively less free and more repressive.
I was also part of an Obama administration sponsored group of Americans sent to China for an entrepreneurship exchange trip and I think more Americans should be sent to China to learn about it rather than reading biased second hand accounts over the internet. While it was a guided and escorted tour, we were also allowed to freely wander the cities in some of the evenings. It would go a long way to ease tensions and reduce enmity between the two nations if there was more genuine cultural interaction instead of spooky observations from afar. People tend to exaggerate and boogeyman what they don’t know and understand.
But I agree, for any random foreigner the government is not competent enough to surveil him/her and much less motivated to do so. The fact is any given foreigner is not actually that important...
Japan had a similar problem being previously not very rich (they invented kotatsu for that reason).
Even if “every step is observed” is exaggerated, the surveillance system in China is pretty extensive: it can target journalists and international students among other “suspicious people”, and can compile individual files on such persons using 3,000 facial recognition cameras (in a single province) that connect to various national and regional databases. [1]
And this surveillance system is part of the bigger tracking program, which the Chinese authority has used to harass and intimidate journalists [2] (see this comment for more [3]).
And according to the memoir “A Promised Land”, even Obama and his staff were worried about Chinese surveillance during their stay at the Beijing hotel (see this review [4] or this summary [5]):
“To make calls involving national security matters from the hotel, I had to go to a suite down the hall fitted with a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) — a big blue tent plopped down in the middle of the room that hummed with an eerie, psychedelic buzz designed to block any nearby listening devices. Some members of our team dressed and even showered in the dark to avoid the hidden cameras we could assume had been strategically placed in every room. (Marvin, on the other hand, said he made a point of walking around his room naked and with the lights on — whether out of pride or in protest wasn’t entirely clear.)” [4]
[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-chinese-provinc... "EXCLUSIVE Chinese province targets journalists, foreign students with planned new surveillance system"
[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/china-harassing-intimidating-journa... "China Harassing, Intimidating Journalists With Surveillance Built to Curb COVID-19"
[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685703
[4]: https://georgetoparis.medium.com/obamas-a-promised-land-on-c... "Obama’s “A Promised Land”, on China"
[5]: https://www.bannedbook.org/en/bnews/baitai/20201121/1434392.... "Obama recalls his first visit to China and was under surveillance"
Countries spy on foreign visitors. Friendship trips are carefully planned to show none of the underside of a society. China is one of the most oppressive regimes out there - see the detention of Jack Ma, who was five years ago one of their most celebrated businessmen.
The naïveté is not understanding that China’s problems is not so much they are evil masterminds rather than just incompetent bureaucrats. The takeaway from the trip is that 90% of what they expose to the outside world is a facade to save face for their own politicians, not that they are competent super spies.
They may have spied on us, but we’d have not much value being spied upon. If spying is somehow the benchmark of authoritarian regimes then the US and Israel probably lead the pack of these types of regimes.
Secondly, just because you disagree with government policies doesn’t make it some evil regime. You cited Jack Ma but he is still out and about.
We’ve seen enough already.
https://www.ceicdata.com/en/china/starrated-hotel-operation/... claim there are 10 million hotels in China - what percentage do you reckon are included in the international hotel booking apps? My guess would be less than 0.5%. That's why you need to walk into the random hotels/apartments you see on the street if you want to verify the reality of the situation. For you specifically then it might be difficult since you're ethnically Chinese, so while you might encounter some discrimination and exclusion from society (if you don't have a national id card) then it certainly won't be comparable to what white and especially black people experience while living in China. In my experience then the 9/10 number is not an exaggeration at all but if you asked other westerners who visited China then they will likely give different numbers based on their price range, location, booking method, etc.
I also think you greatly exaggerate how much you actually learn about another country by going there for a short trip. Even the most brutal regimes can look like a wonderful paradise, e.g. see the national day celebration in 1959 which took place at a time where tens of millions of people were dying of starvation (https://youtu.be/M-XQSffVpfY?t=43).
Most 4-5 star hotels are still dirt cheap in China. We’ve stayed in budget hotels (by Chinese standards) in non first-tier cities with no problem.
I’d say if you got turned away it’d be some combination of obviously looking like a foreigner (in which you could get them reported for some infractions) and not being licensed to accept foreigners.
I remember getting 300KB/sec at the best of times to overseas sites. VPNs didn’t really make a difference for speed (I believe I had poor routing on top of that), but I could use WG and SS to maintain access to blocked content for weeks on end.
The end result is that internet users are corralled into domestic services where the CCP can flex its power. If anything overseas continues to be too anti-government then it cops a more concrete block.
As also mentioned, the educated class might get VPN access but Joe Bloggs on the street won’t know how to. Also, it’s hard to get a VPN from within China, but once set up with one you can relatively easily keep using it.
The GF doesn't care about 100% accuracy either. They won't always perfectly ban stuff. But they will hinder it often enough to make some "banned" service effectively useless inside China.
In general, when it comes to other countries, I think visiting them when possible and talking with the people there when you can is often eye-opening and can reveal personal biases you didn't realize you had. To give another example, speaking with people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc made me realize that many of the assumptions I had (adopted from the traditional "common sense" American narrative) were overly simplistic or just plain wrong.
> lived there
China is fast devolving into dicatorship's way of life. 2+ years away is along time.
> keep in contact with many friends
Those friends are afraid to say anything negative to a foreigner living outside the guo on a platform closely watched by the government
> consume a lot of TV and podcasts from there
Government approved safe and patriotic contents
You have to be a native citizen who is living there 10+ years to understand
It’s not really weird: most Chinese prefer the best choices possible, and if it isn’t blocked (and often even it is) they will use the service if t has more than a watered down local version. The government blocks internet global services via the great firewall because otherwise they would get used in China (and also makes jumping the wall annoying because otherwise more people would jump it).
- You cannot travel abroad (no passport issued for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad)
- You cannot go beyond China's intranet legally (VPN is technically illegal in China). VPN services keep getting slowed/banned.
- You cannot transfer much money out of country legally (50k limit a year, but you end up going to bank 10+ times just to be able to transfer 10k)
- You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally
- You have very little rights as LGBT
- You have to work 9-9-6. Which is why many citizens are lying flat (not working/pursuing marriage)
- You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list
- You should not get rich (1/3 of billionaires have died or disappeared). The state discourages showing off wealth
- You have little recourse as a woman who is abused by men in power
- You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold
- Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship
终究怀揣的不安，是愈来愈近的丧钟声
None of the government/public workers are working that schedule. Or someone who finds a job in the private companies who aren't insane.
> You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold.
Speaking from anecdotal experience, my parent has been subjugated to none in 2021 because they were not living in an affected location. Mass covid testing are only carried out where there are outbreaks.
> You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list
Might apply to your personal case? I don't know even one person who are constantly invited to police station for tea, despite having hundreds of friends in China.
> You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally
Except that everyone does, and I'm not aware of any prosecutions. Also, Spiderman, BTS, squid game does not even touch laws, they just haven't been screened in cinemas, you can still get them from different sources (which often means piracy in China).
> Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship
We'll see then. The rhetoric have been around for decades.
Some of what you said is true to a degree, but you are painting it in a very biased fashion. China has a lot of flaws, but what you said certainly does not apply to an 'average' Chinese citizen. In fact, all of these combined are almost impossible to happen to a single Chinese citizen, average or not.
I did not say anything like that. Why are you setting up a strawman when you can easily go and refute/debate any language in my previous comment? Do you have any disagreement with any specific things I have said? Please be specific.
As for the play-time restrictions —- how is it much different from drinking age restrictions that are pretty ubiquitous around the world?
Oddly enough, on my first trip to China in 1999, everyone was still expected to work Saturdays. The change to getting Saturday off is relatively recent…maybe 15 or so years ago?
> Except that everyone does, and I'm not aware of any prosecutions. Also, Spiderman, BTS, squid game does not even touch laws, they just haven't been screened in cinemas, you can still get them from different sources (which often means piracy in China).
“Rule by law”, as opposed to “rule of law”, means laws are arbitrarily enforced according to the whims of the party. So they aren’t going to prosecute you for watching banned media…until they want to get you for something (and in that case, they’ll find something).
Also, do you have anything to refute my comment?
Unfortunately the rest aren’t willing or able to do anything about the genocide cheerleader squad.
My wife is Chinese and we have a Chinese friend here in the UK we have to be careful what we say to. She gets upset if anything critical of the Chinese government comes up, because she “loves China”. We love China too, just not the communist party.
I lived in singapore for 10 years until recently moving to Taiwan, this is basically the view of everyone from China I met. “I love China but I hate the government, that’s why I left”
It’s a shame because the actions of the CCP are making people blame Chinese people. But the majority of people from China that I’ve met are awesome.
a. Left China b. Are talking to a foreigner about politics
CCP maintains considerable support among the mainland population.
This is a weird form of racism I see from a lot of people coming from a Chinese perspective, and it's very arrogant and abrasive.
When a Chinese person is outside of China, they are the foreigner. Walking around the U.S. and calling people laowai is really a... questionable choice.
He laughed and thought it was funny
I don’t doubt that the CCP maintains considerable support, but considering they control the media, that’s less impressive than you think it is.
How much of that is genuine support vs saying the party line to avoid persecution?
Just a cursory reading of the comments in any topic about China will show you that their western counterparts are alive and kicking here
Shit like this is almost exclusively a Chinese activity https://www.propublica.org/article/purdue-president-condemns...
You can find countless examples of groups of Chinese people engaging in downright horrible behavior like this, good luck finding many western counterparts.
Where are the western nationalists SWATting families of people who dare to say critical things of their governments?
Nobody will send the secret police to harass my family if I dare to criticize my government, but if I was Chinese they certainly would.
I’m sure it would be possible to indoctrinate westerners to behave in a similar way, but the fact remains that currently it’s the Chinese who are uniquely indoctrinated.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
https://theintercept.com/2014/09/25/managing-nightmare-cia-m...
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-...
https://www.vox.com/the-big-idea/2016/11/5/13533838/history-...
Do you have articles about similar things happening in China by Chinese media?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jul/27/former-intelli...
I can read about it, that does not make it even 0.0001% better.
Since you asked:
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3160705/year-chin...
The problem with most westerners is that they just simply dont understand China. Just read this, relax, it is from Harvard, not from Xi's wumao army
https://hbr.org/2021/05/what-the-west-gets-wrong-about-china
Grasping at straws, no?
I only get paid 50 cents by the yellow menace and I am not a rapper.
The party is paying people (quite well) to defend China online. It's another kind of misinformation campaign.
...that is what people generally do on the internet, when they disagree.
oh come on. we criticise China because it’s whole political system, that was set up very recently btw, fights against basic rights we take for granted in the West. not because of what the romans or european empires did hundreds of years ago, but because of what China is doing right now.
Well yeah, isn't that precisely what's being criticised?
Also not all the evil in the world was created by the West.
What I'm saying is that if we truly have China's, or namely humanity's best interests at heart when we criticise China, then we could profoundly increase our effectiveness if we demonstrated even just a basic understanding of context. Namely that the West is defined by its colonialism — its power and influence comes from exploitation of more than half the world.
To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.
We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.
in reality, humanity has been at war for millennia. the chinese have been at war with all their neighbours for centuries. slavery has been the status-quo until 200 years ago.
you are also assuming just because some politician is immoral than people will also be immoral. this is false.
does this have anything to do with how the chinese government treats its citizens in the present? not at all
But I think you are completely missing my point.
I don't believe the West actually wants to improve the world. It wants so much power that it can avoid looking at its own past, and present for that matter.
I don't think you are having a positive influence here.
I finally understood that your example related to self-consistency and that Boris' binges are not the definition of colonialism, so my suggestion about influence should be discarded.
Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend China from the biased Western media, despite all the real world evidence painting a very clear and unbiased picture.
I think that generally western news have a tendency to misrepresent countries that are culturally different.
E.g. as a Russian, reading western news about Russia makes me think that journalist play a broken telephone game, misrepresenting marginal stuff as some kind of insane norm, in a completely unnuanced way, without any context.
I wouldn't be surprised if the same was for China. Probably even worse, as verification is even less accessible.
Dramatic news get clicks and there is no accountability for spicing them up. I guess, in the age of AI-delivered clickbait media, the old saying "Don't believe everything you read in the papers" was never as true.
What? Why? How? Where does this extreme binary logic come from? When have I said that he should "trust propaganda from the authoritarian Chinese government"? When have I said that "I trust the propaganda from the authoritarian Russian government"?
You don't need any "propaganda" to leave the house and live a life. I have all the empirical evidence I need to competently state "well, that's not how it works IRL" when I see some weird journalism full of factual errors and false assumptions.
Why are you acting as there is no personal experience?
To give an example, if a government truly wants people to wear masks and socially isolate, then the prime minister (Boris Johnson of the UK in this case), should not throw private parties.
We can argue about whether what the West did was net good or bad, but I don't think we can argue about whether the effectiveness of one's words are diminished by acts that are contrary to those words.
The CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! And lying about it! Why is it even worth discussing the context of Western colonialism when there's a true and honest legal genocide being performed at the hands of the government? This argument is no different than saying that if we just understood the context of Germany's situation in the 1930s better, perhaps we wouldn't criticize the Nazi regime as strongly. There are some acts which transcend cultural context because of how barbaric they are, and in my opinion, what's happening with the Uighur peoples is beyond forgiveness.
Yes, the CCP are quite literally ethnically cleansing their own citizens! But also yes, the entirety of the Americas and Australia are already ethnically cleansed. The West has set the precedent. We simply have no power to, as much as it's the ethically correct thing to do, admonish China.
The series of high resolution pictures of me throughout the streets, hotels, places I was during my time there - these all appeared on the screens used by the guards as I was being scanned to leave the country.
So yes, I have been to China, I can place China on a map, and it is the most terrifying reincarnation of Nazi Germany - being defended by people who will say "we didn't know any better" after the concentration camps are freed.
Oh, good to know that. I didn't know prisoners could left Nazi Germany just like that, only getting a scan. I had a completely different idea of that regime.
The prisoners in the Xinjiang labor camps sure can't leave. You're making a false comparison, intentionally or not.
But you _are_ being paid by the CCP?
HN may be one of the best places for discussion on the internet, with some of the best moderators, but even here, you get people who aren't interested in having civil discussions.
I am criticising her because I want her to be effective at her job. Not because I disagree with her about our team's laziness.
Human life has value. It's not effective value or an estimate of value. It is absolute.
I do agree with your point and I am not a believer in the law of the excluded middle.
Perhaps when dictators start doing things like rounding up undesirables into camps and pushing ideological uniformity at the point of a gun the reasonable response is to condemn the behavior? It doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboots, it's despicable to appease, condone, or enable the ones stepping on the throats of human beings.
The problem isn't about who did what, the problem is the idea that horrors can only possibly happen outside the borders of the nation to which I belong.
Why stop abstraction there? You should continue on with all humans, then all life... that would be logical; this isn't.
In general history as it is taught is almost a total loss for how biased it is, meaning that since we dropped the ball on writing it down we are doomed to repeat it until we do. So far we have only been playing at historical account, because the truth undermines national borders. But this is a global issue.
Why do you say this is historically unprecedented? China has been imperialist since its beginning, and continues its imperialism with Hong Kong, South china sea, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Myanmar ...
What 'historically unprecedented imperial past' are you referring to that isn't preceded by China's?
No, it doesn't, unless by “ruler” you mean the metropolitan state.
BTW, not to dismiss the other countries from your list, but you should really understand the history of Hong Kong, specifically the Opium Wars. The British took it when the Chinese refused to continue buying their opium.
Personally, my wife is Taiwanese so I'm extremely concerned about China in a very concrete way. I'm not sure the people who advertise themselves as "pro-China" really have a sense of what's going on.
I'm reading some minor disagreements. Is this activism in your worldview?
Still, there is a double standard regarding China vs the Western World. While China gets (IMHO deserved) criticism for their territorial claims and human right abuse, the Iraq War (over 400k deaths) was "business as usual".
The same goes with anti-pandemic restrictions - when it happens in China, it's an authoritarian rule. When in the West - it's social responsibility. When China started vaccinating children, I saw an article with "child soldiers" and a photo of a crying kid. The same action in the West had a picture of a smiling kid, and a more welcoming title.
Or even when it comes to pollution and worker's rights, the West is hypocritical. Blames China, while happily outsources most heavy industry there, due to lower costs. (When was the last time you bought some electronics and there were not "Manufactured in PRL"?)
Submit a link of the US' latest atrocity to HN. A world of tolerance allows and accepts the stories of violence perpetrated by all actors. The reason you are seeing so many related to China is we have some new flagrant human rights abuse happening from the CCP every week, sometimes multiple times a week, that's why you see so many of these stories percolate to the top. Just two days ago, the CCP tore down the statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre in Hong Kong. [1]
This is the screaming of the machine doing its work of control, every day of every week. The memories of them will be inhaled whole and exhaled as dust, a phantom of a thing that never truly existed.
What makes the comment a wrong way to discuss? Is it a bad form of comparison for some reason?
If you have uncovered stuff few people know, please share. Then finding comparisons is more insightful.
But it was the past and it’s settled. China is happening now.
But they key difference is that you won’t really see anyone downplaying them or outright denying their existence.
Pro-CCP people are posting comments on the Internet to try to convince western people.
Pro-Russia people are paying celebrities of western countries to promote their culture, they are also creating news networks in the west to do the same.
USA is using the global western culture (Hollywood, singers...) to promote their agenda.
Since we're talking about torture, in the last two decades, the USA produced dozen of films or TV shows where torture is depicted as a necessary evil for the good guy to win over the bad guys. Just look at Jack Bauer. They don't need to go an Twitter saying "no, that's not what happens, we're the good guys, see...", because in the mind of (almost) everyone, it's already accepted, since they saw a good guy doing it in a movie.
The propaganda machine from CCP is just not as evolved as the USA's, they are trying to catch up. But all in all, it's a same. It's just more obvious for the CCP guys because they haven't the right tools yet. But given how they are investing in cultural services, I'm sure they will soon be better at it and we won't have those kind of discussion anymore. It will not be "propaganda", but just people arguing against each other on topics on which their favorite state has different opinion.
It’s possible to criticize China on its own merits without somehow excusing anyone else.
I’d happily pay more for goods from manufacturers saying they avoid China. Hopefully this will be easier and cheaper in coming years.
That said, I’ve seen a lot of pro ccp posts in the last few months. If we hypothetically say there are state manipulators on hn becoming active, what is the most mature way to respond to the situation?
edit: long way of me saying, I don’t think anyone that defends china should automatically be labeled ccp propaganda.
The major problem I see, is that every major power uses propaganda to their benefit, yet even highly intelligent people often don't see the propaganda of their native (or chosen) home.
I see the propaganda of China, Russia as well as the one of the US and Europe.
There are no white, selfless knights around. There never were.
Does that mean that nothing matters, that (subjective) morale suddenly is meaningless?
Of course it doesn't!
But it puts "them vs us" into perspective.
Humans are humans and act like humans all around the world.
Comparing China’s bad behavior to the bad behavior of the West is a false equivalence on every aspect. It is clear that the West also has (or had) bad behavior, but bringing it up is a form of whataboutism to distract from the much worse behavior happening right now in China.
All this whataboutism talk is besides the point.
I am not saying what China is doing is right, I am saying that others are equally worse and we should deal with that TOO.
And yes, the US invading foreign soil is equally bad.
So I would rather pretend to believe in Western progaganda than Chinese propaganda.
„Humans are humans“ is dangerously naive in a world full of thug nations.
The spread of civilization and the establishment of the modern nation states was rarely peaceful, neither in the West, nor in the East, and in many cases required cultural assimilation. It is disingeneous to pretend it was otherwise.
On the other hand, such a record of atrocities committed by the CCP is not taught in Chinese schools. The Hundred Flowers Campaign, the reconstitution of Tibet and the sending of its natives to work camps by the half million have been erased from the record.
Never heard of this event. Mind to provide a link with more details?
> The report, authored by Adrian Zenz, an independent Tibet and Xinjiang researcher, says that 500,000 people, mostly subsistence farmers and herders, were trained in the first seven months of 2020 and authorities have set quotas for the mass transfer of those workers within Tibet and to other parts of China.
One thing I hate about mainstream media reporting is that they never link to the source material.
Just from the above description, I cannot see that these people are forced in anyway. And deriving such numbers from public Chinese government documents is not accurate either, as certain words can be easily misunderstood given the sinophobia sentiment nowadays.
Looking from the outside this just looks like pulling up the ladder. "Oh we did kill them off but that was years ago. These other countries, though..."
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/07/09/889562040/supreme-court-rules...
Your argument, at face value, offers little in the way of solutions. On the contrary, you make an enemy of my argument. Do you seek to apologize for the new makers of genocide today? Or what is the purpose of your comment?
Much as the Buddha focused on present action as a tool for change, that is what we must do now, collectively, so we do not repeat the atrocities of yesterday today.
You even have politicians like Elizabeth Warren overblowing their native ancestry to gain an advantage.
Western Europe and the US, while they have done some shit in the past, can't really be compared. At least in these countries, people are allowed to discuss these things, protest, vote out politicians whose views they disagree with. China meanwhile, is cracking down on free speech and democracy in Hong Kong.
Of course, the government at the time was not Chinese, and the Emperor pursued this course over the objections of his Chinese advisors...
This is a huge false equivalence.
You won't see Chinese citizens publicly in favor of US/Europe but you will damn well see it the other way around.
E.g., some of my coworkers genuinely think it is ok for China to ban Western companies in the name of harmony but the US introducing the slightest of regulations is seen as fascism.
A discussion like this can't happen inside China on a popular platform.
TikTok is allowed unabated in the US. Twitter is blocked in China.
This sort of false equivalency discussion is getting really annoying. Even Hacker News is partly blocked in China.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20600787
If the US follows China's policies symmetrically, a ton more companies would be blacklisted.
Wouldn't be a bad choice, regardless of what happens with Steam.
> Wouldn't be a bad choice, regardless of what happens with Steam.
I can't tell if this is an ideological thing or not. There's a lot of states out there to vehemently dislike. But it's always this creepy strain of cold war torch-bearing that is so many people's pet cause. For the record, I think almost all states are on the exact same level of hateable, as a concept.
If you have an axe to grind be advised to make sure it’s targeted at the right people.
Are they controlled by aliens from the space? The government people come from the people, it’s same culture/mentality.
You can make whole CCP government disappear and new wave of similar people will replace them setting same rules.
Looks like it's a DNS attack, not a ban.
FFS, get it right the first time. Initial impressions went from:
* "Oh really? Not likely but okay..", clicks thread
* Fast-reads comments top to bottom "fuck, what is this.."
* Reads actual article, "God damnit."
Whilst Epic seems to be fighting the good fight, I've thought it was very odd that they were putting so much on the line in their Google & Apple battles. Now I have to wonder if Tencent endorsed those legal battles with some more ambitious goal in mind.
Wouldnt be surprised that tencent actually was the key player that pushed epic to open source their unreal engine so that the US can't block the unreal engine code base from being exported to China.
The Chinese government does actually know the difference between real productive forces and the stock market. It would be really weird for a socialist government to not know the theoretic works of Marx, lenin and stalin.
Every business that goes into China gets it's IP stolen, it's new business entities stolen, etc. Why would anyone want to do business there period?
I do no business with anyone or any company in China with my company.
That...seems to be giving him too much credit. Not saying that China under Xi isn't a nightmare dictatorship, just that if it is, he either didn't make it that way or didn't have far to go to get there.
> Every business that goes into China gets it's IP stolen, it's new business entities stolen, etc.
That description has been being made of China longer than Xi has been in power, probably from a few days after the initial euphoria of Communist China opening up to Western business wore off.
People forget china’s rollercoaster with liberalization in recent history, with China opening up dramatically in the late 80s before a huge pullback due to Tiananmen Square, there was also a movement in the late 70s that gained a lot of traction before being quashed. The pullback after the 2008 olympics has just lasted longer than the previous ones.
I am asking because, putting China aside, other countries seem to be headed in a similar direction if are not outright copying what China's been doing during the last years.
Got an one-word response:
"Winnienet".
Could not phrase it better.
How can effeminate men be anti-chinese?
The constant attacks against India.
Daily sending war planes into Taiwan's air defense zone.
Using armed fishing vessels to militarily attack the Philippines.
Raiding the fishing grounds of poor countries by turning off transponders and sending hundreds of fishing vessels into their national waters at night.
Destroying world heritage nature reserves to steal fish.
And don't get me started about the crimes the Chinese Communists are doing to the Chinese people...
I hope this clears up the confusion. There is no selectivity here.
This is incoherent.
You have no idea how many of social liberties you take for granted were strongarmed by governments/judiciary. Also how many liberties were taken from you by majority of citizens. So be careful what you wish for.
You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.
How dense and gullible do you have to be?
Do people keep forgetting they’re dealing with an authoritarian dictatorship?
ANYTHING is on the table, nothing should come as a surprise.
Divest from China and diversify manufacturing sources, otherwise we will wake up one day imprisoned, and „the move will come as a surprise“
> ANYTHING is on the table, nothing should come as a surprise.
That does not follow from the first part. People and politics can, at large, still be predictable independent of the political organization.
This is, fwig, the instability that a republic is meant to fix.
Not surprising really considering how hard it is to publish a game in China to begin with -- you basically have to have a local company representing you, and they usually take 80-90% of your profits, that's on top of the the 30% share that stores take, and go through an extensive bureaucratic process, with various forms of censorship of course, and even then there is no guarantee that you will be allowed to publish.
China tries and succeeds at playing the globalization game in a way that everyone else ends up dependent on them, but not the other way around. And the global corporations are stampeding over each others heads to betray all the principles there still are in the west for that sweet sweet access to the giant Chinese market, for the time being they are still allowed to that is.
Who is this aimed at?
Major brands (apple, tesla, disney, etc.) are not going to divest from China. China is a big part of their future market, they hope. They're going to invest wherever their market is. Obviously they know that this comes with strings and risks attached. They will get sideswiped with rules, punitive or otherwise.
Authoritarian government action is just a risk, like any other risk. Apple might also lose their popularity. Disney might get There could be an economic downturn. These are all risks, and companies take risks. The reward is worth the risk, evidently.
On the manufacturing side... there probably aren't as many surprises in the cards. Whatever qualms are to be had were had decades ago.
On a side note, China is proof that 99% of chamber of commerce-ish "warnings" are nonsense. Investment goes wherever the market is, whatever the rules. The ccp could decree that all iphones must be red and starred as of next week. Apple would make red starred iphones, and Cook would make a public statement praising the wisdom of this regulation.
Diversification is already happening - 20,000 foreign companies have left China in the last 4 years. Samsung, LG, GoPro, etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk6lkW4A7Ec
> China is a big part of their future market
The Unemployed and semi-unemployed might reach 300M+ people in China. Chinese consumer market is slowing down big time - Lost decades just like Japan
Or they want the population to use some domestic platform, I am not sure, but even the Google ban has some legitimacy perhaps, when considering the amount of misleading news articles.
China does propaganda, the US outlets lie selectively according to their bias.
And such things can and will lead to having Trump elected with his maga disciples.
I think both are equally bad, just different.
To quote HN user stale2002: Tit for tat reciprocity is the basis of most modern trade relations.
It is also a basis of the most bloody and destructive wars in the world. Are you hoping that this time US wins again?
Opening your nation to trade, while the other does not, and does things like subsidize their companies to put yours out of business, is not good.
The US should probably play tit-for-tat and ban an arbitrary Chinese company for every US company banned by China.
That way, China understands at least the repressions.
Of course, that policy might not work, as it would just spiral up into a big 'ban fest', but you get the idea.
Banning games is a funny thing, people like games. People are going to be upset.
When people are playing games, they are not agitating.
When people are bored, they think about things like politics.
I just wished you and Europe where as good as your PR, I really and genuinely do
Just look at Intel right now, apologizing for not using slave labour...
Why are you dragging USA into this again?
Also, the problems you describe don't affect all of the western world. And I would like to add, based on talking to a few chinese friends, those things are a problem in China as well. Competition in particular is quite brutal from kindergarten onwards there.
Trade is a serious issue, it has consequences.
If China banned most US companies, the US would have to ban most Chinese companies.
And in time others rise, sometimes in the same region.
China will fall too, at some point.
Memento mori, amor fati!
Because that seems like the current MO.
I would guess that China doesn't have any big enough economic advantage of allowing steam, so maybe steam is not that really big that people think.
Not to mention Valve takes a large cut of game sales so China has pretty good reasons to block it.
Aren't PC game sales a big stagnant? And on all those sales, Steam seems to be interesting for indie and niches games, not for big AAA games, since those AAA games often have their own online platform.
I looked some numbers some time ago, and to me it seems that the PC game market is not really profitable anymore.
And honestly, China might also increase its game profits by banning steam. When you can legally push a product out to make more money, you do it. China doesn't care about liberal economics.
Otherwise why limit children to 3 hours per week of gaming? Why ban images of “effeminate men”?
To me, China seems to be preparing.
This is a really interesting perspective. If China is trying to masculinize its teenage male population, we could see it engage in conflict as soon as these teenagers grow into adults at their physical prime, 6-8 years from now.
I think it's entirely likely that China will attempt to annex Taiwan within the next 10 years.
I think we will also see China be one of the first countries to engage in large-scale cyberwarfare alongside any physical conflict, e.g. DOS'ing civilian communications.
Couple that with the treatment China received in the Opium Wars, Rape of Nanking, etc.
I type on computers for a living so take it with a grain of salt. But it seems to me China was on top technologically for thousands of years. Then they suffered humiliations for hundreds of years. And I think they’re done with that.