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Comment by zhte415 | Hacker News Reader

What stops meaningful visits from visitors within China to sites hosted outside of China today is, thanks to the prevalence of CDNs, the CDN.

Need a font? Google fonts? Blocked.

Need a picture? Instagram? Blocked.

Need a video? Youtube? Blocked.

Need a CSS sheet? Use a CDN? Blocked or really slow.

Visiting a text-based website hosted outside of China [from within China] is usually pretty good. No VPN necessary.

CDNs are a Firewall quick-kill, a lazy-kill. If you host a site outside China, that you'd like to be visible within China, self-host anything you'd otherwise think about off-loading to a CDN. That makes the need for a VPN for your audience redundant.

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I imagine the things you list are, to the CCP, a feature and not a bug. The harder it is for Chinese to leave the censorship bubble the better. I imagine the end-game for China is a completely cut off internet. Once they have enough domestic services it'll be safe to do. They're just not there yet.

My organization was forced to deploy a server in China with specialized content for the Chinese. That server and its content is under the CCP's censorship and control, and being an autocratic non-democratic government means that chances of reform are virtually nill. We're allowed, by the good graces of the CCP, to have a presence in China that they control. This is their end game. Controlled foreign sites hosted locally and international internet either completely cut off or just allowed for certain companies and elites.

Autocracy and freedom of information just don't work. The Chinese people, who are very nationalist, have chosen the former and are quite proud of it, often citing the "decadent west" as something they don't want to become and using the word "democracy" as an insult. Let's stop acting surprised about censorship in China. Some people prefer to be ruled by an iron fist.

Another feature (for the CCP) of disconnecting from the Internet-at-large (and recreating whatever they want within a walled garden) is that then they can work on making the rest of the Internet dangerous or unusable for other countries [1].

With enough support from non-Chinese providers (think: Apple, Cisco, Google, etc), the transition could be entirely smooth to completely disconnect (even to the point where Apple and it's ecosystem are effective replaced by Xiaomi/Huawei at hardware/devices level).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8931827

It's not just autocracy. The US government is quite aggressive in shutting down websites that spread information it doesn't like. They also sometimes go further and arrest and imprison the operators. Examples include gambling, piracy and drug trading sites.

While true in a literal sense, it's an insane exercise in false equivalence to compare US censorship practices with the PRCs. You will not see political speech treated as if it were a physical threat here.

Some people need to believe that the West is just as bad as China, reality be damned.

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