China blocks VPNs

[DADY]

Recently China blocked the remaining VPNs that were left. The last National People's Congress, they blocked google. What are the risks for China if they didn't block the remaining VPNs? How has blocking google made China safer? By blocking google, China has indirectly blocked thousands of other western websites that rely on google to load.

 

[Tom M]

Recently China blocked the remaining VPNs that were left. The last National People's Congress, they blocked google. What are the risks for China if they didn't block the remaining VPNs? How has blocking google made China safer? By blocking google, China has indirectly blocked thousands of other western websites that rely on google to load.

If true, it's indeed a great news.

 

[Khitan Nomad]

I'm currently in China visiting friends and my VPN 启点加速器 (qidianast -- here's the link if anyone is curious... just add a d0t com at the end. I can't share links) still works flawlessly. Getting 1080p on YouTube and it cost only about 4USD a month. Other overpriced VPNs expats in China use, costing 30+ dollars a month, like Astrill or ExpressVPN still works from what I've heard. In fact there's an entire reddit-like community on tieba sharing links to VPNs which funnily enough aren't even blocked. So really nothing has changed other than searching "VPM" or "VNP" instead of "VPN on baidu to yield meaningful results. I've lived in China in the past for several years and this sort of mass VPN "banning" has happened before and during those periods, a good number of Chinese VPNs were shut down but incidentally a fair number of those Chinese VPN services would successfully evade the ban hammer by moving around and changing their company's names or something. The remaining services might even slightly jack up the price. Western VPNs on the other hand would just experience sluggish speed for a month or two.

But after awhile the ban-wave would dissipate and a Dozen or so Chinese VPNs would be replaced. I recall Western news sites kept writing articles about "China has blocked VPN" as far back as 2006 even though VPN were officially "blocked" since the great fire wall was launched back in the 90s. So I guess China will continue to "block" VPNs in the future and likewise Western news sites will write the same thing for the dozen or so times and people having never lived in China or remained in an Expat bubble and having no understanding of China's society, internet culture and economy would also continue to make threads like this.

FYI google has been banned in China since 2009 ( close to a decade) and since then, China's domestic search engine, Baidu, has completely taken over. The last People's National Congress didn't block anything specifically, just heightened control or at least that's what they claim since VPNs still work regardless.

You don't need google to access Western sites you can do it via Baidu... or other not as good search engines like Yahoo or Bing which aren't blocked. China's censorship when compared to Arab countries like the UAE has always been half assed. I mean you can search "Blonde Woman" on Baidu and it will bring you links to **** sites - some of the keywords even show you the thumbnail of the **** video for God sakes. Isn't **** suppose to be banned? lmao. South Korea does a far better job at censoring **** because unlike China, where vague searches might take you to some relatively lesser known **** sites, South Korea outright bans any keywords and takes you to a government notice page, giving you a stern warning - at least that what I think it says, I can't read Korean, but it looks pretty intimidating.

I've always theorized the reasoning for China's internet censorship laws is for the most part to help native Chinese sites/apps like Qiyi, YouKu, weibo, wechat, netease music, baidu and taobao to thrive. Do you see any other countries with their own netflix, spotify, twitter, instagram, youtube, amazon, whatsapp or whatever that are collectively making hundreds of billions if not a trillion dollars, contributing to their respective countries economy? Other than China no other countries have produced successful native sites on the scale of their American counterpart if at all. Maybe a few countries like Russia with Yandex or South Korea with navier or Japan with Line, but other than those relatively small companies, American stuff overshadows absolutely everything else. Native fledgling companies cannot compete with juggernauts like YouTube, Facebook or Netflix unless they block them completely which China has done. And now China having their own juggernaut sites, are now slowly seeping into neighbouring countries like Russia and Kazakhstan, slowly taking away market shares from American companies.

And as for the political reasoning, well just take a look at Reddit and see the mess people have organized like the Charlottesville riot and other identity politics stuff. From the viewpoint of the CCP, those kinds of stuff can happen on a much wider scale in China and being a developing nation that just a generation and half ago experienced one of the biggest nationwide turmoil in history, it could potentially impede China's progress significantly.

Now I don't agree with that line of thinking but I don't completely blame them either. The current leadership of the CCP are all born in the 60s 50s and even 40s and 30s. These old guards have went through hell and probably in their mind it's better to be safe than sorry. I reckon once the younger generations takes over in the coming decades (the folks born in the 80s and 90s) they will probably lift the censorship or at the least relax them a lot. And by then Chinese social media and e-commerce sites would probably be global. Rather than China worrying about American companies taken territory, I think in the future, it's America that should be worry about something like Alipay coming over to America and other Chinese companies stealing market share.

Anyways that's just my long semi rant that probably no one is going to read lol.

 

[qwerrty]

You don't need google to access Western sites you can do it via Baidu... or other not as good search engines like Yahoo or Bing which aren't blocked. China's censorship when compared to Arab countries like the UAE has always been half assed. I mean you can search "Blonde Woman" on Baidu and it will bring you links to **** sites - some of the keywords even show you the thumbnail of the **** video for God sakes. Isn't **** suppose to be banned?

i can confirm that is true. lol. baidu seems to do well at blocking chinese keywords only. if you search for p0rn in other languages on baidu, the result links might even more deeper than what google gives you because they don't have copyright indexing blabla law like in the states..

 

[beijingwalker]

mine works perfect fine.

 

[DADY]

I'm currently in China visiting friends and my VPN 启点加速器 (qidianast -- here's the link if anyone is curious... just add a d0t com at the end. I can't share links) still works flawlessly. Getting 1080p on YouTube and it cost only about 4USD a month. Other overpriced VPNs expats in China use, costing 30+ dollars a month, like Astrill or ExpressVPN still works from what I've heard. In fact there's an entire reddit-like community on tieba sharing links to VPNs which funnily enough aren't even blocked. So really nothing has changed other than searching "VPM" or "VNP" instead of "VPN on baidu to yield meaningful results. I've lived in China in the past for several years and this sort of mass VPN "banning" has happened before and during those periods, a good number of Chinese VPNs were shut down but incidentally a fair number of those Chinese VPN services would successfully evade the ban hammer by moving around and changing their company's names or something. The remaining services might even slightly jack up the price. Western VPNs on the other hand would just experience sluggish speed for a month or two.

But after awhile the ban-wave would dissipate and a Dozen or so Chinese VPNs would be replaced. I recall Western news sites kept writing articles about "China has blocked VPN" as far back as 2006 even though VPN were officially "blocked" since the great fire wall was launched back in the 90s. So I guess China will continue to "block" VPNs in the future and likewise Western news sites will write the same thing for the dozen or so times and people having never lived in China or remained in an Expat bubble and having no understanding of China's society, internet culture and economy would also continue to make threads like this.

FYI google has been banned in China since 2009 ( close to a decade) and since then, China's domestic search engine, Baidu, has completely taken over. The last People's National Congress didn't block anything specifically, just heightened control or at least that's what they claim since VPNs still work regardless.

You don't need google to access Western sites you can do it via Baidu... or other not as good search engines like Yahoo or Bing which aren't blocked. China's censorship when compared to Arab countries like the UAE has always been half assed. I mean you can search "Blonde Woman" on Baidu and it will bring you links to **** sites - some of the keywords even show you the thumbnail of the **** video for God sakes. Isn't **** suppose to be banned? lmao. South Korea does a far better job at censoring **** because unlike China, where vague searches might take you to some relatively lesser known **** sites, South Korea outright bans any keywords and takes you to a government notice page, giving you a stern warning - at least that what I think it says, I can't read Korean, but it looks pretty intimidating.

I've always theorized the reasoning for China's internet censorship laws is for the most part to help native Chinese sites/apps like Qiyi, YouKu, weibo, wechat, netease music, baidu and taobao to thrive. Do you see any other countries with their own netflix, spotify, twitter, instagram, youtube, amazon, whatsapp or whatever that are collectively making hundreds of billions if not a trillion dollars, contributing to their respective countries economy? Other than China no other countries have produced successful native sites on the scale of their American counterpart if at all. Maybe a few countries like Russia with Yandex or South Korea with navier or Japan with Line, but other than those relatively small companies, American stuff overshadows absolutely everything else. Native fledgling companies cannot compete with juggernauts like YouTube, Facebook or Netflix unless they block them completely which China has done. And now China having their own juggernaut sites, are now slowly seeping into neighbouring countries like Russia and Kazakhstan, slowly taking away market shares from American companies.

And as for the political reasoning, well just take a look at Reddit and see the mess people have organized like the Charlottesville riot and other identity politics stuff. From the viewpoint of the CCP, those kinds of stuff can happen on a much wider scale in China and being a developing nation that just a generation and half ago experienced one of the biggest nationwide turmoil in history, it could potentially impede China's progress significantly.

Now I don't agree with that line of thinking but I don't completely blame them either. The current leadership of the CCP are all born in the 60s 50s and even 40s and 30s. These old guards have went through hell and probably in their mind it's better to be safe than sorry. I reckon once the younger generations takes over in the coming decades (the folks born in the 80s and 90s) they will probably lift the censorship or at the least relax them a lot. And by then Chinese social media and e-commerce sites would probably be global. Rather than China worrying about American companies taken territory, I think in the future, it's America that should be worry about something like Alipay coming over to America and other Chinese companies stealing market share.

Anyways that's just my long semi rant that probably no one is going to read lol.

Your logic is that China is blocking google, so baidu can thrive, etc, so why not block iphones from being sold so that Huawei can thrive? Why not block hondas from being sold so geelys can thrive? Why allow nikes to be sold when Lining's can prosper? There has to be a security element to this blockage of VPN, and western sites.

 

[Mista]

I'm currently in China visiting friends and my VPN 启点加速器 (qidianast -- here's the link if anyone is curious... just add a d0t com at the end. I can't share links) still works flawlessly. Getting 1080p on YouTube and it cost only about 4USD a month. Other overpriced VPNs expats in China use, costing 30+ dollars a month, like Astrill or ExpressVPN still works from what I've heard. In fact there's an entire reddit-like community on tieba sharing links to VPNs which funnily enough aren't even blocked. So really nothing has changed other than searching "VPM" or "VNP" instead of "VPN on baidu to yield meaningful results. I've lived in China in the past for several years and this sort of mass VPN "banning" has happened before and during those periods, a good number of Chinese VPNs were shut down but incidentally a fair number of those Chinese VPN services would successfully evade the ban hammer by moving around and changing their company's names or something. The remaining services might even slightly jack up the price. Western VPNs on the other hand would just experience sluggish speed for a month or two.

But after awhile the ban-wave would dissipate and a Dozen or so Chinese VPNs would be replaced. I recall Western news sites kept writing articles about "China has blocked VPN" as far back as 2006 even though VPN were officially "blocked" since the great fire wall was launched back in the 90s. So I guess China will continue to "block" VPNs in the future and likewise Western news sites will write the same thing for the dozen or so times and people having never lived in China or remained in an Expat bubble and having no understanding of China's society, internet culture and economy would also continue to make threads like this.

FYI google has been banned in China since 2009 ( close to a decade) and since then, China's domestic search engine, Baidu, has completely taken over. The last People's National Congress didn't block anything specifically, just heightened control or at least that's what they claim since VPNs still work regardless.

You don't need google to access Western sites you can do it via Baidu... or other not as good search engines like Yahoo or Bing which aren't blocked. China's censorship when compared to Arab countries like the UAE has always been half assed. I mean you can search "Blonde Woman" on Baidu and it will bring you links to **** sites - some of the keywords even show you the thumbnail of the **** video for God sakes. Isn't **** suppose to be banned? lmao. South Korea does a far better job at censoring **** because unlike China, where vague searches might take you to some relatively lesser known **** sites, South Korea outright bans any keywords and takes you to a government notice page, giving you a stern warning - at least that what I think it says, I can't read Korean, but it looks pretty intimidating.

I've always theorized the reasoning for China's internet censorship laws is for the most part to help native Chinese sites/apps like Qiyi, YouKu, weibo, wechat, netease music, baidu and taobao to thrive. Do you see any other countries with their own netflix, spotify, twitter, instagram, youtube, amazon, whatsapp or whatever that are collectively making hundreds of billions if not a trillion dollars, contributing to their respective countries economy? Other than China no other countries have produced successful native sites on the scale of their American counterpart if at all. Maybe a few countries like Russia with Yandex or South Korea with navier or Japan with Line, but other than those relatively small companies, American stuff overshadows absolutely everything else. Native fledgling companies cannot compete with juggernauts like YouTube, Facebook or Netflix unless they block them completely which China has done. And now China having their own juggernaut sites, are now slowly seeping into neighbouring countries like Russia and Kazakhstan, slowly taking away market shares from American companies.

And as for the political reasoning, well just take a look at Reddit and see the mess people have organized like the Charlottesville riot and other identity politics stuff. From the viewpoint of the CCP, those kinds of stuff can happen on a much wider scale in China and being a developing nation that just a generation and half ago experienced one of the biggest nationwide turmoil in history, it could potentially impede China's progress significantly.

Now I don't agree with that line of thinking but I don't completely blame them either. The current leadership of the CCP are all born in the 60s 50s and even 40s and 30s. These old guards have went through hell and probably in their mind it's better to be safe than sorry. I reckon once the younger generations takes over in the coming decades (the folks born in the 80s and 90s) they will probably lift the censorship or at the least relax them a lot. And by then Chinese social media and e-commerce sites would probably be global. Rather than China worrying about American companies taken territory, I think in the future, it's America that should be worry about something like Alipay coming over to America and other Chinese companies stealing market share.

Anyways that's just my long semi rant that probably no one is going to read lol.

Thanks for the good read.

But influence from China can only come when there's contact with the rest of the world. So what if you have a very good video but if the rest of the world don't know about it? I mean China is one of the most important country in the world and yet the rest of the world don't know much of about the Chinese culture. Yet K-pop and Japanese anime have a huge international following and there is a huge amount of Weaboos in the West.

Instead of looking how YouTube will influence China, why not look at how China will influence YouTube and use it as a platform to influence the rest of the world? Imagine some of the top trending videos or music on YouTube are Chinese thanks to the huge amount of internet users in China. There will definitely be people curious about it and take a peek. That's how cultural influence starts.

But Chinese is not even as influential as Russian or Portuguese on YouTube now.

https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-top-10-languages-used-on-YouTube