I've been told that the great firewall is actually more about protectionism than censorship. They know they can't really contain information, but they can block or degrade foreign services to favor their own. Of course this does serve a state censorship and surveillance agenda indirectly since home grown services can be more easily controlled.
As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he's one of the few candidates raising the issue of how unfair our trade relations are with China. The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.
Europe has done pretty much everything the US wants, from spying on our citizens to foreign companies paying little to no tax. All you hear these days is how lame Europe is because we don't have a Facebook and how we should all move to the overpriced small town of SV. China doesn't only have a Facebook, it has a Google, an Amazon and an Uber. Which are in many ways surpassing their US counterparts. Since when was trade ever fair? I think the bigger thing here is just that China isn't in the US sphere of influence in terms of politics, but also in terms of culture and it's treating them quite well.
They have a Google in terms of making money, they don't have a Google in terms of usefulness. The search engines in China are unusable; my Chinese colleagues are far less efficient than we are because of it. When i'm sitting next to them with my SSH lynx to Google, I find answers fast which they cannot. Baidu is just only bought links (inherently bad quality) and Bing is, well, just a really bad search engine. That's not only me though; my wife and I are learning Chinese and we use songs, tv shows and movies a lot for that; when we ask 'can we use X' to the teacher (who is in Hangzhou) she always answers 'I searched but cannot find it' while the first hits on Google are it it including a video on Youtube (not in China) or Tudou (in China). Not because it's banned but because the search doesn't work.
Besides that you are right; especially things they do better; they have Facebook but the messenger (Wechat) is really were it is at; I use Wechat now instead of Messenger and it is superior even when you are not in China. Mainly because it just always 'works' and it's always fast unlike Messenger. Didi is better than Uber in many ways especially for the Chinese; for foreigners it's fine but Uber is more convenient for us as support is in English and most drivers for Uber speak a bit (enough) of English in China while the Didi ones speak no English at all usually.
Bing is not that bad as far as useful dev results go. I still use google at work (I'm an MS China employee) but Bing is perfectly reasonable at home, especially compared to the huge pile of crap that Baidu is.
Didi is great if you can speak a bit of Chinese. I've had a decade of perfecting my taxi driver Chinese though (since I seem to only use Chinese to talk to taxi drivers these days). YouTube is still way better than youku/tudou for content discovery...they have no "popular now" for non Chinese content.
I have in China and it's not compared to Google. My colleagues there are missing a ton of efficiency because of it. When I switch on the VPN (which mostly does not actually work otherwise it would stay on) and use Google, we work far faster and more efficient. I can even find datasheets which are only in Chinese faster on Google than they can on Bing.
I'm a researcher, Google still has benefits in that area. For dev, Bing brings up about the same information that Google does. And it is hard to tell the difference these days.
I also resent not being able to use google at home, so I like using it at work.
> And it is hard to tell the difference these days.
For dev results or? Because that's simply not true. Try finding things like knitting/wool shops in Shanghai on the Chinese Bing and on Google. You won't be getting any knitting done if you use Bing; all the hits you get there are closed many many years ago. There are many other examples from daily life which we encounter when in China; we're going there in a few weeks again and i'll jot down the differences then; there is an awful lot which you simply cannot find in Bing while it's in the top hits in Google. We might search for different things but 'hard to tell the difference' is really just weird to say.
Thanks for the interesting observations. No surprises.
In my experience, wechat is a spam monster - too many useless notifications and missing useful features like easy OTT voice calls and read receipts. I find iMessage and whatsapp (I use both hourly) vastly superior.
How old is your uber/didi experience? I find both now to be mostly useless to non-chinese. I tried to get an uber to the airport in Beijing last week and would you believe there is no POI in english for "airport". Search comes up empty. This seems recent, it wasn't an issue last year when I was travelling there frequently. I agree, if you do get a valid destination the uberx drivers have enough english to find you and get you where you are going. People's uber on the other hand... its good for entertainment...
This was a few weeks ago. It is worse than last year but I use a lot of mapping apps to figure out which characters to use. If that does not help me I usually just ask someone on the street.
Uber/didi are still technically illegal for China airport pickup, and operate in a very legal grey zone, it makes sense that the software would lack that POI artificially. There are ways around it, but local knowledge, at least some Chinese skills, is needed to get around it.
The taxi queue at BJS is quite reasonable most of the time, so I don't bother with didi.
But this is why doing biz can be hard in China, so many business models operate in grey zones while the government lets them go on while swinging a huge axe over their head. As another example, did you know electric tricycles are illegal throughout the entire country? And China's whole new goods delivery businesses are built around these....
In Shanghai, using Uber's carpooling feature it is much cheaper to take Uber than Didi. I have had quite a few rides (with 2-3 other people riding with) that were cheaper than it would have cost to take the subway. I'm not sure Didi has the algorithms ready to do this yet. I should say I haven't tried Didi in a few months, it may have improved since the last time I used it.
The weather is also pretty nice in the South Bay (over 300 days of sunshine according to Wikipedia for San Jose). San Francisco technically gets a lot of sun, but anecdotally they get a lot of fog and shade as well, especially in certain areas of the city. There are other benefits to Left Coast living as well, but the rent is indeed high.
Excellent point. The net beneficiaries of 'free trade' rarely have cause to question the policies that have given them great returns. The last 200 years of Chinese history is describes very clearly the impact of the imposition of free trading principles, where the freedom to say 'no' to free trade (of opium) was overturned at the barrel of a gun. To this day, China refers to the 'century of humiliation' and is hyper conscious of being the unequal trading partner of the Western world ever again.
China will no doubt have also learnt from the speed of economic development of the original Asian Tigers (S.Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, Japan) whose post WWII protectionist policies allowed domestic manufacturers the time to grow, compete, and in some case super cede with more mature foreign businesses when the time to open up finally came. We would not have Samsung, LG, Sony or Nintendo today if those governments did not protect their own industries from German, Italian, UK and US electronics manufacturers of that era.
It seems that China is one of the few countries to apply these lessons to the internet era, and has the political control and consumer base to make it work.
Whatever the personal agendas involved, it's a fascinating experiment. Perversely, it might even lead to a greater consumer choice in the end - sign up to WeChat, use Baidu - with innovation cycling faster due to the eco-system wide competition created by the firewall
Yes, I think I would agree. I would draw a difference between protectionism vs isolationism though. Protectionism is more like a temporary ringfence of strategic industries you want to nurture - the long game is always to unleash them into the competitive free market when they are fit for that competition. Perhaps that is indeed the real reason for the firewall - a plan, ridiculously long term plan - to conquer the world with domestically cultivated innovation
> As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he's one of the few candidates raising the issue of how unfair our trade relations are with China. The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.
Does the US have a reputation for protectionism? From a domestic point of view it seems like everything outside of steel and farming has been opened up
Auto industry. US/Canada have their own standards different from the UN standards the rest of the world adopts. Very few European cars are sold in NA beside a few high-end models.
Interesting point, but to be fair China is not the only one to find ways to implement protectionism. The F35 program or even Nasa contracting SpaceX could be seen as examples of the US implementing some level of protectionism.
Every nation has protectionism. Every single one. What's important is the degree of protectionism. So pointing out examples of a nation engaging in protectionism contributes little to the discussion unless you compare it to other nations.
The US complaining about China's protectionism is hypocritical. Let's talk about America's farm subsidies. How is that not competing unfairly? It leads to American agricultural produce being dumped on foreign markets at subsidized prices, destroying entire countries' agricultural base. What would you say is the degree of protectionism here?
Farm subsidies is not only about business, it's about national security: you subside food industry so that when you suddenly find yourself in the big war with trade routes cut, your population doesn't starve.
I'm not saying that these subsidies are necessary; I'm just saying that they should be analyzed with a different framework.
That's true but even more so when applied to the computer network. Nowadays, in case of a war, closing emails or zombying all Windows pcs could do more harm than food supplies.
And that's why for countries who aren't US closest allies it makes total sense to base military infrastructure on open-source operating systems and software (because let's be honest, Russian or Chinese military most likely won't be able to produce their own modern OS of comparable quality from scratch).
However, software and hardware on one hard, and internet on another, aren't the same thing: I don't see how one can seriously make the same argument in favor of great chinese firewall. It's only effective against general population, and doesn't seriously negate any cyber-threats, as far as I understand.
Why only military infrastructure? Image a war between, say the USA and Russia, and imagine that the USA manages to shut down or cripple all Windows machines in Russia, this will probably put the enemy on the kneels, even more than weeks of airstrikes. And it may also be better PR as it do not directly "kill" anyone. I have always thought that Microsoft holding 95% of PCs in the world is extremely dangerous, and can't get why American, with their admirable foundness of personal freedom and security, do not decide to put a stop to this anomaly. (Imagine, if 95% of world's oil was provided by one company?)
Because unlike oil, computers running on different OS create difficulties for users and developers. Apart from the point of national security, I think it's reasonable to assume that in an alternative world, where 20 operating systems competed on desktop market with more-or-less equal market shares, everybody would suffer from neverending compatibility problems, we would have worse applications, a lot of businesses would never succeed and a lot less value would be created in IT industry overall.
Hell, we don't even have to imagine — remember testing JS on every browser around 2007?
20 different operating systems would have shown the necessity of a common open protocol for the filesystem being it, and would have given much more space to creativity on the computer.
Being self sufficient for war and producing excess agriculture product and dumping it on foreign markets are two completely different things.
And two can play at that game - china can make the same 'national security' nonsense argument about information espionage when it comes to the internet.
And in the modern world - the internet is more useful then food for a nation state - america can lose 30 million people and still win a total war as long as its nukes are functional.
I thought the implicit comparison to any country was obvious and well known - maybe not to Americans[1]. Can you think of any country that practices protectionism on agriculture at the same level as the US?
1. I would have thought post-"corn-syrup-gate" more Americans would at least know corn is heavily subsidized.
Yes, that's my point. Not every one agrees with this and GGP's comment doesn't mention this fact.
So pointing out examples [..] contributes little to the discussion.
It adds examples of US protectionism so you can compare them with the ones from China that were mentioned before. Hopefully, this contributes to a more objective point of view. Why do I need to justify this?
Because China's space program and defense industry are protected as well. So if we're really going to try to decide whether China or the US are more protectionist than the other, in that comparison the examples cancel each other out. All you've done is add examples to both sides of the balance beam.
And we're still left with examples of Chinese internet industry protectionism.
SpaceX has better and cheaper rockets. I don't think they are exceptionally profiting from a "buy American" effect.
For the F-35 program, it contains a lot of technology which can't be found anywhere else in the world, and much of that technology was funded by the US government. For all the ridicule the project got, the corresponding projects in Russia and China are even worse off... If anything, the F-35 program is overpriced because there are no reasonable adversaries.
They could be, but I'd say that wanting to produce your own fighters (especially for a large military like ours) is reasonable. We're not complaining that the Chinese don't want to buy the F-35.
Isn't SpaceX substantially cheaper than any other alternative at this point?
Chinese social media and search platforms employee loads of people to only censor information. If any of the Western companies tried to match the level of censorship required it would dramatically increase costs of operation. If Facebook or Google agreed to censor their content to the degree that Chinese companies do, I believe they could operate in China. Google and Facebook claim to be morally opposed to censoring information, but it's unclear to me if this is really the case, or if spending the money required to self-censor is the impetus behind their "moral actions." Obviously if China got rid of the censoring then the market would be much more attractive from a profit-based view.
At the same time, if Facebook entered China today I don't know how many people would convert to using it like people from other countries do. WeChat is a really powerful player and a lot of recent Facebook Messenger features are basically pulled straight from WeChat.
Same with Youtube and Vimeo - Youku and PPTV are basically Youtube, Netflix, and HBO combined in one. Chinese users can watch Netflix and HBO shows for free via Youku and PPTV's license deals with Western content producers. Plus Chinese users watch much less user-generated content online, unless it is live-streaming.
1. You're conveniently ignoring the fact that Google did self-censor from 2005 to 2009. So the idea that it's "too expensive" being the reason is just FUD. Unsubstantiated speculation.
2. The question about whether or not Facebook/Google will succeed today is more misdirection. The real question is whether Google would have succeeded 11 years ago, and whether Facebook would have succeeded 7-8 years ago, because that's when they would have entered the market.
I don't think that fact disputes my argument. Let's consider a few assumptions to try to see a more well-rounded view of the firewall problem. Consider for a moment that all domestic firms must comply with self-censorship or be forced offline (see Papi Jiang's recent problems with cursing in her programming and being forced offline). From this we can assume that censorship issues are not only an issue for foreign firms, but also a primary concern for domestic companies. If we accept these assumptions, then censorship is just a market condition in China, the same way that bad infrastructure or government instability are market conditions in some countries. The difference is that through the internet, foreign companies can escape this market condition and still compete with domestic firms. Whereas in a country with poor infrastructure all companies are subject to the market condition. Without a firewall, domestic firms would be at a severe disadvantage because foreign companies would be able to easily escape government discipline.
Now, under these assumptions we can consider the Google case. Google tried to compete under these market conditions and lost. Thus, if we accept that the firewall is a way of the Chinese government extending market conditions to force fair competition, then any argument that Google could have beaten Baidu in the Chinese market is wrong.
Of course, this assumption may not be correct, but unless you work in the Chinese internet bureau it is not possible know the motivations behind the firewall. I'm simply presenting a devil's advocate view.
> From this we can assume that censorship issues are not only an issue for foreign firms, but also a primary concern for domestic companies
This does not follow from the previous statement. Also, it doesn't refute the reality that Google was fine with self-censoring between 2005 to 2009. The self-censorship system was already implemented (because, you know, they were already self-censoring).
No, it's definitely primarily about censorship. This is a one-party rule system...the party sets all of the policies at will, and their main goal is to keep themselves in power. The economy is merely a tool for them to keep themselves in power. Censorship and control of the media is a more powerful tool to keep themselves in power. They are much more worried about information flow than they are about protecting some tiny Chinese internet companies. That's not the mentality in China -- the mentality is..."let's help the big guys."
You're misrepresenting the real situation - China is the US's 3rd largest export partner, and we export over $200B of goods, and much more in services to China per year, which is greater than the GDP of silicon valley. Trump is proposing that we stop all of that, which will lead to a depression.
> The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.
On the other hand, the west has profited quite a bit from the underdevelopment of China in the past. So I can't really blame them.
I think most economists will tell you the USA-China economic trade benefits both countries. Few will tell you it is "unfair". China get American money, and the USA get swath of cheap goods.
China's environment is ruined in the pursuit of cheap goods, which considering weren't really as cheap as China sold them for. China gets American money, which then goes back to buy America real estate just like Japan decided to do on the late 80s after investment oppurtunities started drying up at home. And we know what happened next....
Stop right there. Think of what you are doing. You are already trying to find positive values in Trump. Don't. Resist him. The whole world is in deep shit if he gets elected. Check https://twitter.com/ivan_hernandez/status/694388187284795392 as well :)
No, Trump has made many important and crucial things about USA. The matter of shoddy trade practices by China is one such thing. I guess, Trump is a right candidate for USA now given the situation of Islamist immigration and China and such things.
As much as I can't stand Trump and could never vote for him, I do think he's one of the few candidates raising the issue of how unfair our trade relations are with China. The WTO limits tariffs but the Chinese have found tons of indirect ways to implement protectionism: the great firewall, manipulating their currency, making it hard for US firms to take payments in China, etc.