I've been to a conference in mainland China. The firewall made it completely miserable (it was a tech conference). People from the west expect to be able to use Google/gmail/hangouts/github/ssh for more than 5 minute random bursts of connectivity.

You can't expect people to go to tech conferences in those garbage conditions.

DevCon2? Lots of people on /r/ethereum were upset that videos of the talks were not available for weeks afterwards because it was in Shanghai.

No, it was for developing infrastructure tooling (e.g. K8s, docker, etc), all of which was mainly hosted on github.

Sounds like it's not an uncommon problem. Frankly I think the conferences are only as successful as they are because of the volume of mainland Chinese citizens and the novelty of a trip to mainland China for people outside of the country.

That would be great for conferences if it wasn't for everything you mentioned plus high levels of govt corruption and IP theft. The lack of open Internet alone is enough that the vast majority of conferences simply cannot be held there.

It's not "China hate" when there's legitimate reasons.

In what way is Beijing a legitimate counterpoint to an American lurch toward despotism?

..like being able to use unfiltered internet?

pollution?

That only mods are 'dang and 'sctb. Are you referring to them? Or do you mean members who are downvoting? If the latter, please don't refer to them as mods.

And regardless, kindly don't resort to name calling.

Like the 20+ hours of travel to get there?

From where does it take 20 hours to get to Beijing? SFO to Beijing is just over half that.

You're already on the Pacific coast. Not everyone on the planet is.

Under optimal circumstances, not including airport time which can be considerable, flight time between New York and Shanghai is 15 hours.

Add in a few hours to check-in, clear customs, plus other nonsense and you're up to 18. Under ideal circumstances.

I'm not sure what Shanghai has to do with a discussion about travel time to Beijing. New York to Beijing is about 13-13.5 hours.

You claimed 20 hours. I'm asked 'from where' and you weren't able to answer.

I'm not suggesting Beijing is the ideal conference location, even though I live there, but there's no need to spread FUD about how it can take such a long time for a developer to reach there.

Oh, and it takes me the same time to get to SF as it takes an SF-based developer to get to Beijing. Hotels are cheaper in Beijing. Salaries are higher in SF.

A lot more people on the planet live near Beijing than near Iceland.

If you're talking about India and China, sure.

If you're talking about America and Europe? Nope.

Yes, India and China are indisputable giants but also consider Japan (still the #2 or #3 economy in the world depending on the metric), Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore—all advanced economies with extremely educated and technical populaces.

Then there's Vietnam, which is very poor but growing over 10% / year and highly educated despite the poverty. There are also hundreds of millions of people in Indonesia and Malaysia.

I was speaking not of the US or Europe but the world in general. We don't live in the Eurocentric world of 150 years ago. The center of gravity now spans the Pacific.

It will. It does not right now if you're talking about conferences. Participants are still largely from the Americas and Europe.

Also this entire argument is utterly absurd. If you're upset about brutal domestic policies the last place you should be arguing in favor of is China.

China has very sane, good government, come actually experience it and stop believing CIA lies. The firewall is a rational way to keep the US deep state out.

While I'll grant you Chinese government officials are probably more educated and experienced than your average American ones, there is no justifying the pervasive political censorship in China.

The CIA is not responsible for suppressing the Tiananmen Square incident. Stop spreading bullshit.