Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen unless I'm mistaken.
And for a "middle class" of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be practical. Accessible, but only if you're willing to wait a minute. A brilliant political play, because it's hard to pin a charge oppression on anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will access it.
The side-effect was definitely not accidental. China has blocked the major company in every internet industry (social networks, search engines, video streaming, etc.), and as a result domestic products are booming. Now these domestic products are starting to expand internationally with the revenue they get from the artificial Chinese market.
Korea did something something similar with its Chaebols' (Hyundai, Samsung, or other large Korean companies in countless industries) in the 80s. It had protectionist policies that let the Korean companies charge outrageous prices domestically, and used that revenue to become very competitive internationally. And it worked.
You're making a bad assumption - that because protectionism resulted in a flourishing Internet economy, that it wouldn't have happened without protectionism. Imagine what kind of Internet economy we'd have in China without this dumb firewall and protectionist policies in place - Baidu might actually be a global rival to Google instead of the piece of crap it is :) Global consumers might be happily buying from Taobao instead of the piece of crap that Amazon is :)
I completely agree with you. On a related note: The Great Firewall is rather easy to get around, but that's the point. That tiny inconvenience sates the nonconformists while making the vast majority of people simply give up.[1] The same goes for jailbreaking one's phone or switching operating systems. Heck, many people can't even be bothered to check "organ donor" on their drivers license.
I'm pretty sure the language barrier and a massive internal market do most of the heavy lifting here. Look at Yandex.
The Great Firewall is a wash at best. It protects local companies from international competition but it's part of a policy that makes foreigners trust Chinese products much less and will hurt their adoption.
While we may pay lip service to the web as "open" and "international", it's pretty western and particularly US dominated. From basic infrastructure like core domain names, to standards bodies like the W3C and IEEE, to the big companies like Google, Facebook, Ebay, PayPal, Anazon, Apple and co.
Even sites like Wikipedia, supposedly available to anyone to edit, are pretty much dominated by specific points of view and ideas (even if sometimes those who held those like to think that those ideas are or should be universal and/or neutral).
Neither economically, nor culturally does it make sense for a nation the size of China (or even for EU, but I digres) to participate in such a web. They are not some pushover country that was created a century ago. They have their own, millenia old, civilization. It's not like they are isolated by doing the firewall thing either. They get all the good (and the crap) we get in large does anyway, from the Kardasians to Jackson Pollock.
Think experiment: if the internet was mostly run and dominated by USSR, including a "neutral" Commipedia full of USSR points of view and material, would the US adopt it? Or would they build their own counterpart?
I don't think a brilliant move, even economically, can be called in this case. When the upper class/inner circle saw the money in this field, it's the first thing they were willing to do. If this kind of action can be called that way. We can easily find mountain-high pile of cases that we can call brilliant in the ruling party's history. Yes, economically grabbing people ruled by it. Take any amount when it wants to.
"I think the Great Firewall has been a brilliant economic move in retrospect. "
In the short term yes, but as China is "opened up" more to the western world, this separation and state sponsorship will hurt international growth for domestic Chinese companies.
Many in the "middle" ground will operate as they always did, but if you're a big Chinese tech company looking to expand around the world- this will hurt potential partnerships and foreign investment.
> blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen
I'm not sure I follow. It's not like there's a huge demand to do business with local Chinese nationals. There's opportunity, sure, there's always opportunity, but don't confuse that with demand. Unfortunately, very few businesses outside of China could even compete with domestic companies anyways. They're literally working for pennies on the dollar. That's also ignoring the cultural and language barriers, not to mention governmental red-tape you would have to go through.
It would be like me trying to set up an customer service business here in Maine and trying to sell my services to a lower-middle sized company in India. I wouldn't be able to compete with local Indian companies since their overhead and costs are significantly less than mine. Obviously there are exceptions depending on the industry, but they are just that, exceptions.
Most definitely not an accident. China throttles every successful foreign internet startup. They prefer the economic benefit confers to Chinese, and political control remains in China - for obvious reasons.
Of course there are many factors in North Korea's status as a failed state, but if protectionism is such the brilliant move, then why isn't North Korea more successful.
I wonder if someone might challenge China on this at the WTO. It could perhaps be seen as a backhanded tariff. As you say it's acted like one for their domestic internet businesses.
I think that, from the economic perspective, it's just a form of protectionism. You help local producers at the expense of consumers. Few benefit at the expense of many.
"We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using “collateral freedom” hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China being integrated with the global internet."
If they "understood the value" of that, these shenanigans wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
If you think about it from a purely practical standpoint, it would make sense for all countries to block the any CDN that isn't on their soil. Local companies make more money hosting websites, less traffic on the pipes coming into the country, and better control over what is censored.
I'm currently in China. VPNs are very common and popular here. Many work very poorly unfortunately (Private Internet Access included). Astrill appears to be the most popular and best performing. A few high-end hotels that I've stayed at route all traffic through a VPN to cater to their Western audience.
Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in businesses dealing with the West.
The vast, vast majority, though, of the Chinese internet population do not use VPNs, nor will they when most of what they want/need is available on domestic sites. The slice of the population that deals with the West is tiny, and comparatively unlikely to cause problems. The chilling effect that just needing a VPN has on exploration of accurate foreign information about China and what's happening in the country is substantial and intended.
Most non-Chinese IP websites are not blocked but traffic gets slowed down by factor 40. I have an offshore webserver. A ping suggests a 50% packet loss.
Often you can access foreign websites. At least sometimes. Some days even gmail does work. Everything works sometimes or a little bit and or is unbelievable slow.
What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it. Facebook and Google were most of the time not working, even with the proxy. Maybe the 50% packet loss makes their websites non functional.
I just bought Astill VPN and for now I must say they are doing a tremendous job.
This likely caused by the limited peering arrangements of your host. I rent ~10 virtual private servers outside China, and ping times vary between 90ms ('best' provider) to 500ms ('worst' provider). Packet loss varies over time, but has never been an issue with > half of the providers.
> What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it.
Were you using an HTTP proxy (e.g. forwarding a local port to squid running on your VPS) or a SOCKS proxy (just using the SSH command to act as a socks proxy)? If the latter, then your DNS queries would still be resolved locally (probably by your ISP's DNS server and, even if using an external DNS server, subject to MITM).
> What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it.
There's two possibilities that I can see; you were letting your DNS requests leak and they were being poisoned, or they were doing a direct MITM hijack of your SSH session. Neither is particularly comforting, but it's fairly easy to work out which if either is going on.
There are a number of ways to help people in China gain access to the open Internet. One easy way to help is to setup an obfsproxy bridge to alleviate the shortage.[1] The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2 account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page[2]. It took me just a couple of minutes to install my free EC2 account. Another option is to donate money to pay for the bandwidth that Tor relay and exit nodes require.[3]
NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge.
Inevitable. As people start using other services to get around the wall, those services will be blocked no matter how popular they are. Given what we've seen of Xi so far, I guess Chinese internet will probably be mostly cutoff from the rest of the world by the end of his term.
Yes. But I think it could be way sooner than most of Chinese can be aware of. Consensus among average people in China seems in favor of Xi now. Someone is just picking up the organization's old-fashion tricks and copying them and hoping all of them work as expected since those are all that they know. When the energy begins to loose, everything could turn up-side-down shortly. It has not started yet. Everybody needs a huge stable market now. Perhaps leader can get what he wants in the end.
When I was living in Beijing some month ago the bad Internet really upset me. Almost every international connection was quite slow. A lot of pages took minutes to load because so many sites use Google hosted fonts, js libraries or API. These requests took about a minute to timeout and finally the browser could start to render the page (e.g using a default font). Most vpns are like described often slow, so also no solution. I then wrote a chrome plugin to filter all requests to Google hosted libraries and rerouted them to a Chinese service which mirrors Google hosted libraries. This really improved my surfing experience.
I'm really surprised that so many people are still just talking about it in an economic prospective. I'm not talking about Human Rights or Freedom because the government don't event accept them. I just want to surf the Internet.
Currently it works well because we get more and more tools to deal with GFW, but do you know how frustrating it is in the early days of the Internet in China that you spent nearly half of your life just to solve "networking issues"?
Put yourself in others' shoes for a moment please.
I've often thought one could make an economic argument against filtering. But for that to work, those in charge need to care about the losses. I think of it like those Mastercard ads https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw
"Losses due to filtering: X yuan. The illusion of control: Priceless. Some sites we like, for everything else there's the GFW."
China should block itself from the internet instead. I am running several servers and getting the most useless/annoying bot/malware traffic from China. Even that I had to block everything that comes from them.
I was about to ask, "Anyone know the significance of the part-way filled red-links?"
Did an inspect element/hover over the links and it shows the percentage that the site is blocked, which seems to be the same as the proportion of the link background that is red. Pretty neat use of styling.
My former room mates were from China and I was really surprised to learn that they supported the Great Firewall. They didn't seem to have any issues with it and even thought it was for the greater good.
I think the easiest way to undermine China right now is to trick them into further limiting it's own connectivity with the global internet by banking on their zeal for censorship and their itchy trigger finger.
Not that I'm advocating this as a strategy, it's more of a warning. China has enemies, and those enemies can do a lot of damage feeding the fire that drives it's governments oppressive policies. And they can do it practically for free.
b) open up your wallet and pay someone else to do it, while
c) accepting greatly decreased web reliability and bandwidth and
d) preparing for enormous legal and polictical shenanigans of upsetting the status quo of traffic monitoring and the shape of telecommunications bandwidth.
Does anyone know if Cache Databases are blocked? I made a chrome extension called WebCache that views the cached version of a webpage which would be helpful if Google Cache, Wayback Machine, or Coral CDN isn't blocked. Here is the source: https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache
Edgecast customers include some very popular websites, which are certainly used by consumers and businesses in China. So it's definitely a problem for China. Now, whether the Chinese government gives a fuck is indeed another matter. I'm sure they can browse whatever they want.
I don't think anyone is desperate enough to rely on VPN to access the websites of technology giants already blocked or soon to be blocked by China, as greatfire.org is also mirrored Akamai and CloudFlare. What will more likely happen is that those large technology companies will just realize not to invest too much money into countries hostile towards them, like China.
Personally I have to thank the great firewall for blocking Facebook and Twitter so that I would not waste my time on these nonsenses. For serious problems I do not mind find a way to access google, but I would not do it to try to access Facebook especially when none of my friends are there.
[+] [-] eob|11 years ago|reply
And for a "middle class" of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be practical. Accessible, but only if you're willing to wait a minute. A brilliant political play, because it's hard to pin a charge oppression on anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will access it.
[+] [-] maged|11 years ago|reply
Korea did something something similar with its Chaebols' (Hyundai, Samsung, or other large Korean companies in countless industries) in the 80s. It had protectionist policies that let the Korean companies charge outrageous prices domestically, and used that revenue to become very competitive internationally. And it worked.
[+] [-] westiseast|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chroma|11 years ago|reply
1. http://lesswrong.com/lw/f1/beware_trivial_inconveniences/
[+] [-] spindritf|11 years ago|reply
The Great Firewall is a wash at best. It protects local companies from international competition but it's part of a policy that makes foreigners trust Chinese products much less and will hurt their adoption.
[+] [-] coldtea|11 years ago|reply
Even sites like Wikipedia, supposedly available to anyone to edit, are pretty much dominated by specific points of view and ideas (even if sometimes those who held those like to think that those ideas are or should be universal and/or neutral).
Neither economically, nor culturally does it make sense for a nation the size of China (or even for EU, but I digres) to participate in such a web. They are not some pushover country that was created a century ago. They have their own, millenia old, civilization. It's not like they are isolated by doing the firewall thing either. They get all the good (and the crap) we get in large does anyway, from the Kardasians to Jackson Pollock.
Think experiment: if the internet was mostly run and dominated by USSR, including a "neutral" Commipedia full of USSR points of view and material, would the US adopt it? Or would they build their own counterpart?
[+] [-] LiweiZ|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josefresco|11 years ago|reply
In the short term yes, but as China is "opened up" more to the western world, this separation and state sponsorship will hurt international growth for domestic Chinese companies.
Many in the "middle" ground will operate as they always did, but if you're a big Chinese tech company looking to expand around the world- this will hurt potential partnerships and foreign investment.
[+] [-] mahranch|11 years ago|reply
I'm not sure I follow. It's not like there's a huge demand to do business with local Chinese nationals. There's opportunity, sure, there's always opportunity, but don't confuse that with demand. Unfortunately, very few businesses outside of China could even compete with domestic companies anyways. They're literally working for pennies on the dollar. That's also ignoring the cultural and language barriers, not to mention governmental red-tape you would have to go through.
It would be like me trying to set up an customer service business here in Maine and trying to sell my services to a lower-middle sized company in India. I wouldn't be able to compete with local Indian companies since their overhead and costs are significantly less than mine. Obviously there are exceptions depending on the industry, but they are just that, exceptions.
[+] [-] crystaln|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] josephjrobison|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gph|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] grn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edwinyzh|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|11 years ago|reply
If they "understood the value" of that, these shenanigans wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.
[+] [-] 13|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tbenst|11 years ago|reply
Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in businesses dealing with the West.
[+] [-] greyone|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] biesnecker|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tiatia|11 years ago|reply
Most non-Chinese IP websites are not blocked but traffic gets slowed down by factor 40. I have an offshore webserver. A ping suggests a 50% packet loss.
Often you can access foreign websites. At least sometimes. Some days even gmail does work. Everything works sometimes or a little bit and or is unbelievable slow.
What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it. Facebook and Google were most of the time not working, even with the proxy. Maybe the 50% packet loss makes their websites non functional.
I just bought Astill VPN and for now I must say they are doing a tremendous job.
[+] [-] rahimnathwani|11 years ago|reply
This likely caused by the limited peering arrangements of your host. I rent ~10 virtual private servers outside China, and ping times vary between 90ms ('best' provider) to 500ms ('worst' provider). Packet loss varies over time, but has never been an issue with > half of the providers.
> What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be able to sniff on it.
Were you using an HTTP proxy (e.g. forwarding a local port to squid running on your VPS) or a SOCKS proxy (just using the SSH command to act as a socks proxy)? If the latter, then your DNS queries would still be resolved locally (probably by your ISP's DNS server and, even if using an external DNS server, subject to MITM).
[+] [-] 13|11 years ago|reply
There's two possibilities that I can see; you were letting your DNS requests leak and they were being poisoned, or they were doing a direct MITM hijack of your SSH session. Neither is particularly comforting, but it's fairly easy to work out which if either is going on.
[+] [-] mcbridematt|11 years ago|reply
Things like custom protocol handshakes will give the underlying application away. It doesn't matter if the traffic itself is encrypted.
[+] [-] bostan|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lbenes|11 years ago|reply
NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network. The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge.
[1] http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-ca...
[2] https://cloud.torproject.org/
[3] https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-...
[+] [-] seanmcdirmid|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] LiweiZ|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] apli|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sorpaas|11 years ago|reply
Currently it works well because we get more and more tools to deal with GFW, but do you know how frustrating it is in the early days of the Internet in China that you spent nearly half of your life just to solve "networking issues"?
Put yourself in others' shoes for a moment please.
[+] [-] bnomis|11 years ago|reply
"Losses due to filtering: X yuan. The illusion of control: Priceless. Some sites we like, for everything else there's the GFW."
[+] [-] jackvalentine|11 years ago|reply
Protection from the west by the great firewall has made Chinese services flourish.
Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been practically destroyed by foreign competitors.
[+] [-] est|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Timucin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] spdustin|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] canadev|11 years ago|reply
Did an inspect element/hover over the links and it shows the percentage that the site is blocked, which seems to be the same as the proportion of the link background that is red. Pretty neat use of styling.
[+] [-] Kiro|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomelders|11 years ago|reply
Not that I'm advocating this as a strategy, it's more of a warning. China has enemies, and those enemies can do a lot of damage feeding the fire that drives it's governments oppressive policies. And they can do it practically for free.
[+] [-] known|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] altcognito|11 years ago|reply
https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html
[+] [-] treffolk|11 years ago|reply
a) start re-developing, or
b) open up your wallet and pay someone else to do it, while
c) accepting greatly decreased web reliability and bandwidth and
d) preparing for enormous legal and polictical shenanigans of upsetting the status quo of traffic monitoring and the shape of telecommunications bandwidth.
[+] [-] dbz|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] est|11 years ago|reply
I think this only cause problems for edgecast customers, and China doesn't give the slightest fuck.
And for those people who does want to see those "collateral freedom" mirrored content, they already have their own private circumventing methods.
[+] [-] tempestn|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmt|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] roylez|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] askinakhan|11 years ago|reply