China doesn't actually ban American social networks, not officially at least. They just don't work for some reason due to technical issues. China has never said "we ban Facebook and Google", you just wake up one day and they aren't working anymore.

This is unfortunately a common tactic of the Chinese government (see their recent dealings with Lithuania). I do not believe a trade barrier not being explicitly stated is a barrier to bringing a WTO case though.

You haven't been there then. Google, YouTube, Twitter are all banned there. They are blocked completely. You cannot download the apps. In fact, the Google Play Store doesn't work there. They have cracked down on all VPN's now as well. We could only access western social media through a corporate network.

One side note, the United States Embassy has free Wi-Fi if you're close enough to it. You can get access to everything through it.

I lived in China for 9 years through most of the banning. I remember the day Twitter stopped working because the US embassy in Beijing was posting embarrassing AQI readings on their Twitter account (“crazy bad” for a reading that was so high they didn’t expect the label to ever be used). I was there when Facebook became blocked and when google became blocked. YouTube, however, was already blocked in 2007 when I started working there.

None of those services need apps, I never used apps to access them.

I don’t have a no YouTube and Roblox policy at my house. However, mysteriously they usually arent working. It’s a lot less contentious that way

You didn't read the parent comment right then. Let me paraphrase it:

Yes, you can't use these services in China. But unlike the US's TikTok ban, China will not officially tell everyone what they banned. It just suddenly stops working.

They banned, allowed and banned again GitHub. Without any explanation. Your parent comment is correct.

I don't remember if they announced it or not. I've been there a total of 4 times over the past 15 years.

There are these Kiosks where you get Wi-Fi Access. You scan your passport, and it gives you a username and password. It specifically states accessing prohibited internet sites is a crime.

Then you click the link, and Facebook, Twitter, Google, ... are all on the list. They're pretty in your face about it.

There are some odd things though. You can access Steam in some areas, but not in others. Internet Cafe's have signs saying Steam Games allowed, while others don't. Some will say New York Times available.

Leaving the country was much harder than entering now. We missed several flights and were in the Airport for almost 2 days before they allowed us to leave.

This last trip in February, I made the mistake of buying an Unicom SIM card. So get this, I go through US Customs, they point me over to a desk with a curtain, a guy reads my declaration document again, then walks me over to do a door, and opens it. In side is a little waiting area. I sit down, and about 10 minutes later a woman slides the glass window open and asks me for the SIM card. They already knew I had bought it when I arrived. There is no SIM card declaration on the form.

She told me I should probably destroy the phone. I don't think any of us have any idea what is going on.

I won't be returning to China. They have made it very clear they're not interested in Americans investing or visiting.

They could operate there if they submitted themselves to Chinese government censorship (aka "local laws"). Google pulled out because it refused to. Facebook really wanted to (Zuck even made a trip there to talk to Chinese officials) but ultimately decided (correctly) that doing so would greatly hurt it in the US/Europe. Same for Twitter (pre-Elon).

Another important detail that has been burried in this discussion is that in the late aughts and early 10s there was a lot of domestic political pressure against US companies building products that could facillitate Great Firewall censorship. At the time that was a bigger concern than being allowed into the Chinese market.

All the talk of a digital services trade war/import ban ignores that US tech companies were facing a de facto export ban from the US side by being prohibited from complying with Chinese regulations.

No, it should just work. I can understand having to abide by China PR laws if you have actual money transactions on the mainland but if all my customers are outside China PR and all I'm doing is making my website available to the people in China PR assuming I'm not breaking any laws, my website should be available to users in China PR.

I guess this last part is the loophole they will drive a truck through in hindsight. They will make up some nonsense or maybe even find a legitimate scam and ban Facebook based on that?

But really once they ban Facebook, we should be able to reciprocate and ban tick tack.

China isn't a rule of law country, they admit that they don't even aspire to be a rule of law country, calling it an imperialistic western ideal not compatible with eastern culture. There is no way your expectation can be satisfied.

I've heard it referred to as "rule by law" instead

If all you do is open your website to china and don't perform any transactions in the country you're gonna have a hell of a time with your business model. All of these websites rely on advertisers to make money.

You can still be breaking “public safety” and “consumer protection” laws if the CCP doesn’t like your content.

Even if China worked as a rule of law country, which they explicitly don't, what you're saying is still exactly the same as the previous commenter: you can't lawfully operate in China unless you actively monitor and censor any text you make available. If a user comments in a review on your bakery website that these cookies are so good that even Winnie the Pooh (hint hint) would like them, and you allow that review to be visible, then you are in violation of Chinese laws.

I thought you were going with "China doesn't ban American companies, American companies simply refuse to obey Chinese law".

The laws in question are becoming a subsidiary of the state, of course.

The laws don’t exist. China has a constitution that guarantees freedom of speech, assembly, press, religion, etc…so actually writing a law that censors the internet isn’t very feasible. The official class just controls the courts (no judicial review allowed) so can do whatever.

Isn't that a distinction without a difference? If the constitution isn't upheld by rule of law, what does it matter what is says?

These kinds of comments are legally ignorant. I’m always taken aback by these kinds of “but actually” comments on HN that ‘correct’ another user without any regard to how the law would be applied.

I read the persons comment differently: reading between the lines I see them saying that the Chinese government finds other ways to work around the rules in bad faith.

“Officially” is meaningless here. The blocking exists, and it is at the direction or under the control of their government.

They are yet same thing. You know, if it looks like a duck.

This is standard operating procedure for the communist party. They rarely say any kind of topics or activities are banned outright. It’s just that if you say the wrong things in the wrong place, a bunch of plainclothes police will come to your home in the middle of the night.

Indeed. And this solidifies their control, because anything may be illegal at any moment.

Perhaps the GFOC must officially support an app via allowlisting, so that it's banned unless it's allowed by inaction, which is effectively the same thing.

Most/all apps aren't banned outright, but they require VPNs to access.

I wonder: Are there any Western apps which Chinese citizens would lose social credit or are officially prohibited from using?

VPNs frequently get banned in China. I bought two major VPN services (nordvpn and one other) and they did not work when I got there. Luckily I had a backup VPN I host on Linode. It would randomly stop working though...

Outline VPN works pretty well FWIW.

I am currently in China; Outline doesn't work at all reliably.

That might be to do with going to a Digital Ocean IP, but if you can use an innocent IP, anything works. So what benefit is Outline supposedly offering?

> I wonder: Are there any Western apps which Chinese citizens would lose social credit or are officially prohibited from using?

That's not how it works. The apps are not officially banned, they are just unavailable or don't work. If they're not on the China iOS store (separate than US) then you can't install them, and if you went abroad and managed to install them, they just can't connect to the IG or whatever servers once you're back in China. Same for Android.

This doesn't seem correct. It was just in the news that Meta had to remove one of their apps from the Chinese market at the request of the Chinese gov.

That's my point, they are not officially banned, but they're just "not available in the app store" (which is effectively banned, just not under that name).

But that overt request was unusual. Most apps are simply removed as part of Apple's "compliance with local regulations".

The regulation recently changed and now requires all apps in the App Store to have a permit from the Chinese authority or be removed.

Ah interesting; I didn’t know that had changed. It looks like the gov is more open about the banning now.

Yes, China officially banned Threads and WhatsApp just a few days ago. They had Apple remove them from the App Store.

If the only way someone can use your product is flying to another country to acquire it, it's a ban. Giving it other language is supportive of Chinese government efforts to soften the reality around their unfair practices.

VPNs are unreliable and frustrating to use. They were never really solution for anyone I knew while living in China, especially for 4K video

Ouch. When I was there last 20-some years ago, high-speed interest was just becoming a thing and internet cafes were everywhere. Getting access to the outside world then was also a pain.

For Westerners, could they get GFOC-excluded commercial PoP internet connections or wireless carriers?

Perhaps in the near future, China's middle- and upper-class will insist on specific changes in policy like unfettered internet access as a bargain for not demanding democracy. With all of the advances in economic mobility and details of life outside the GFOC, there will be more asks.

> China's middle- and upper-class will insist on specific changes in policy like unfettered internet access as a bargain for not demanding democracy.

So long as the CCP delivers on economic prosperity this won't happen; people will not risk it. Those who can't handle it, and have the means, emigrate or have a plan B (i.e., their kids at a US university who can continue their career abroad; many Chinese would come to the US just to have a baby to ensure their kid had US citizenship--the US has clamped down on that). This is why the CCP's survival depends on economics.

> So long as the CCP delivers on economic prosperity this won't happen; people will not risk it.

I think the era of hockey-stick growth and development China is more or less over now, growth will continue but slow to a drip, and will face 3 threats: rising economic inequality, drying up of external joint ventures, and male-female ratio demographics imbalance. It has BRI going for it but external investments can't address domestic structural socioeconomic concerns. Xi will be blamed first because he rode economics to the top of the mountain. I'm concerned that starting a war, a common political tactic for any government system, maybe used to distract from domestic economic woes.

China has made a lot of investments into Africa and Central Asian countries, more like IMF-style loans, which give it considerable political leverage. But as to whether this translates into substantial economic advantages for China in terms of cash inflows, not just outflows, I haven't seen much to that effect.

China's housing market is its biggest problem. Most people invested their savings in second/third/etc. apartments as the stock market was notoriously unreliable (and investing abroad was very difficult). That means that a tremendous amount of middle-to-upper-class wealth is tied up in property values, creating a tremendous bubble. But the gov cannot let the bubble pop (see Evergrande, others before), as Japan did in the 90s, as that is the one thing that (in my opinion) could actually bring the CCP down.

I've tried to research details about the size of BRI and find specific projects. It's surprisingly opaque if you're used to FHWA's public disclosure of funds and projects. You could trace most hihhway funding in, say West Virginia, by pulling a few documents. I couldn't find any details on any project. I could not even find a video stream of the last year's conference. Just a keynote translation a week later.

I am suspicious that BRI might be more hot air than substance. That or world journalism is oblivious to what is supposedly the largest international infrastructure program in the world. Or Google doesn't index it.

I was there from 2007-2016, and also in 2002, but that was a dorm experience at PKU. The internet VPNs were just horrible, but the tradeoff was all the pirated video content available on Chinese video websites, so I got used to it.

2003: I went to China with 1 suitcase and came back with 2. The new one was absolutely full to the brim with pirated DVDs and fairly good quality fake LV from the "free markets". Had to chip a Sony DVD player because half of them were random regions. Back then, checking the right boxes and declaring sensible amounts on US claims declaration forms reduced probability of searches.

Did torrents work?

I remember that era fondly as the golden era of unfettered torrenting.

It can be downloaded, but the upload is limited.

Within the past week China told Apple to take several social media apps off their App Store. It’s an official ban.

And as far I know, if you go there with roaming ON with your phone, these social networks still work as well.

> And as far I know, if you go there with roaming ON with your phone, these social networks still work as well.

That's because roaming phone traffic is routed through your home carrier, through whatever telephone traffic peering agreement the phone companies have.

If a Chinese person roams to the US using a Chinese cell phone plan, it works in the other direction. So their phone is still behind the great firewall even though they're physically outside of China.

in practicality it doesnt matter because you can easily circumvent it with a VPN and nearly every single person does

It is not easy. One day your VPN stops working, and you need to ask your friends for a new recommendation, and maybe they have if theirs didn't start failing last month, and set that up and hopefully it keeps working for a while longer, maybe until your original routes around the issue. It is high friction, and was a constant pain trying to maintain a functioning satellite office behind the Great Firewall.

That was the case when I was living there, but I've read a lot of people saying that VPNs aren't nearly as effective any more.

My experiences before was that they were doing some machine learning to detect my socks proxy and slow it down eventually. Last visit I went to China a few months ago I found my Wireguard VPN running at full speed.

Either technology has improved or they stopped trying as hard, which makes sense now that the local internet economy has matured.

I was never good at VPNs. We would find one that worked, they wanted a one year subscription up front and...then they would stop working. I assume most VPNs in China are just a scam to make some shady money. Who are you going to complain to, the Chinese government?

China would try to block them so you had to find new alternatives. I used one for years that stayed up, but yes it was often frustratingly slow. You had to really make an effort, and most people aren't going to do that, and then there's the language barrier.

Every Chinese person a Westerner may talk to has a VPN, but you can't compete with Chinese-owned social media without the other 90% of the population. Also, China has been very aggressive with VPN throttling and random outages, since the pandemic.

depends on time and place. its true that now there is less dependence on foreign internet and you can now be fully decoupled from english internet with the number of domestic apps. most people only use a VPN now just to access email (e.g. gmail, university), if they even need to at all. and yeah, if youre in beijing during a congress, then VPNs will be slow. but its trivial to set up and use a VPN, even my 88 year old grandma has one.

I promise you Uyghur muslims don't all have VPNs installed on their phones. That alone will get you disappeared into a prison camp.

"Every Han Chinese of a certain background" is the more accurate reference.

If you try and operative a service that relies on frictionless access by saying your users have to fly abroad to download it, and use an illegal and increasingly spotting VPN service to access it, it's banned. You simply cannot succeed under these conditions.

this was never the case and is even less so now.

the vast majority of the population cannot easily use a VPN, especially not on their phone which many people use instead of a PC

So...what? We know they've disabled it and they know we know. We can just call it a ban.

That is as silly as argument as it is. We know what the game china played and it is not because of technology. Really someone can “hack” the technology. But if one pretend to sleep, you cannot wake them up easily.

From facebooks perspective it’s always been official

It should be openly banned on the tit-for-tat principles. The paranoid speculation towards TikTok by some media is embarrassing. Instagram is in the same class of brain-melters. Let's stop the nonsense and call this what it is: protectionism.

The US bans TikTok citing the same reasons China bans foreign social media, to avoid influence from foreign adversaries (people below says that China never official bans it, but China is inconsistent on that). It is only fair from a business perspective, but it also means that China's ideology wins over American in the end.

The China's own social media is full of posts ridiculing people like me who have believed in the American ideology, espoused the virtues of freedom of speech and rallied against the GFW. They call us naive and credulous. And I can't refute them.

When I was young, I was taught in China that China lost its superpower status after it chose to isolate itself from the rest of the world. And then it isolated itself. I was taught by the US the importance of freedom of speech. Then it ditched it. My education was a lie.

This is a really poor argument. You are equating banning one social media app with the GFW, which is obviously a huge hyperbole which has nothing to do with reality. The Great Firewall operates by checking transmission control protocol (TCP) packets for keywords or sensitive words. That is a violation of freedom of thought at the infrastructure level. As an American, you are still free to visit Chinese hosted websites and drink whatever propaganda you want. You just can't use TikTok to find it anymore.

Plus, freedom of speech is about protecting American Citizens from being censored by American Government. Banning an ungovernable, foreign owned business does not stop you from freely expressing yourself on the internet.

Your education was not a lie, but you should still get a refund on your failed education. You clearly did not learn to think critically.

>Plus, freedom of speech is about protecting American Citizens from being censored by American Government. Banning an ungovernable, foreign owned business does not stop you from freely expressing yourself on the internet.

As far as I know, tiktok's services are deployed on Oracle servers in the United States and are subject to supervision. It was banned just because it comes from China. Look how many times the CEO of Singapore was questioned if he is Chinese. Maybe the Congressman thinks Singapore is also a part of China.

> Look how many times the CEO of Singapore was questioned if he is Chinese. Maybe the Congressman thinks Singapore is also a part of China.

74% of Singaporeans are ethnically Chinese. The Congressman's questions are not unreasonable in questioning if the CEO has some ties with mainland China.

> Your education was not a lie, but you should still get a refund on your failed education. You clearly did not learn to think critically.

I read both Chinese and English, and I read both the opinions of within GFW and without. If anything, I've critically analyzed every idea from both sides. I can't fathom the hubris of someone who has ever lived on one side yet believes his truth is the ultimate truth and anyone disagreeing must not be thinking critically.

China is preparing a wat with Taiwan, just see it's military buildup the last year's.

It's ignoring international laws with neighbors, instead of using weapons, it's using water cannons against fishers and Philippines coast guard.

China is a "friend without limits" of Russia, who started a war on European soil lately.

I think it's safe to say that the west is decoupling from China.

It has nothing to do with "freedom of speech", most voters agree with that decoupling.

I have never heard of a pro China argument before from a politician party and it seems that most democracies nearby China think the same, even with the BRI initiative.

( Note: I'm not from the US)

I'm not debating that China is bad or not, or if it is an adversary to the US.

My deeply held belief is that we should allow speech from even the most hostile foreign countries. Do you know that every administration of China, starting from Qing Dynasty, resisted the idea of freedom and democracy by painting them as plots of foreign governments to destabilize China?

I am being called a sock puppet of China here, and I have been accused of being agents of US propaganda in China. That is how the future holds. Every thought deviating from mainstream is labelled as propaganda from a foreign government, ergo not subject to the protections of freedom of speech.

I'm not calling you a sock puppet of China here, your username indicated a Chinese background though.

The tracking/propaganda dangers of TikTok are unrelated to freedom of speech, as banning TikTok doesn't affect freedom of speech.

People can spread their opinion on any other app.

Note : I'm responding and sharing my opinion for the following you mentioned:

> The China's own social media is full of posts ridiculing people like me who have believed in the American ideology, espoused the virtues of freedom of speech and rallied against the GFW. They call us naive and credulous. And I can't refute them.

Here's my take on your recent comments, as a mainland Chinese who immigrated to the US 10+ years ago. There is no point arguing with other mainland Chinese online. I guess this is true for most online arguments but particularly so for debating politics with other Chinese since they are far too influenced by propaganda to be convinced otherwise. Furthermore, if you find yourself arguing with friends who can't even tell the blinding difference between Chinese censorship of the Internet (with zero transparency, against CCP's own constitution) and this legislation (passed by both houses of democratically elected representatives and signed into law by elected president), it is time to move on and make better friends. Good luck and hope I don't meet you in real life.

I say that you're not thinking critically because your arguments are very weak and you don't provide any inference or evidence to support your conclusions. It's irrelevant that "you read both Chinese and English" or that you think "you've critically analyzed every idea from both sides" if you're not using any of those in your logical argument, which you're not. In fact, it's an obvious logical fallacy to use "I have read more about this than you" as evidence that you're right.

Say what you will, but I won't be able to espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China anymore. The distinction you make isn't going to convince any one.

>Say what you will, but I won't be able to espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China anymore.

The real reason you can't "espouse the virtues of freedom of speech in China" is because they will arrest you. Let's not mince words here. The Chinese government would shoot their citizens before they would let them protest or speak their mind freely.

No, they don't arrest people for such abstract concepts. They do arrest people who tangibly threatens the government, like exposing the shenanigans of high officials, or organizing labor protests over the Internet.

Well, there you have it.

Haha, you would think that these cases count as enough evidence for the government not to have any power over speech. Nope. The Chinese people just oppose those specific cases, and in a small percentage of them, the government reversed course and then the masses are satisfied.

After those happened, they still think that the government intervention of speech is a good idea. The only problem is that a small group of officials not handling the regulating power correctly. But if they were to adopt the American model, how could they be protected from the evil influence of foreign adversaries? You know, like me, an agent of US propaganda. Or Tencent, whose major shareholders are actually not Chinese.

I really can't maintain a straight face hearing Americans repeating that same argument.

Nothing you can't do before has been affected, given that you were never able to post anything on TikTok that would be seen in China. It is not accessible in China, as Bytedance only operates Douyin there. The two systems are completely separate content-wise.

You misunderstood me. I was not talking about doing on TikTok, but on China's own social media and when conversing with other Chinese offline.

I don't follow your argument. In what way are you affected now and why? My understanding is that 1. You moved from China to the US yourself willing since some time ago and 2. There is no US equivalent of the GFW and this legislation doesn't change that.

I just don't see how this law will affect your ability to converse with others on Chinese social media.

OK, let me reword. I still can converse with others on Chinese social media, but I will have a harder time convincing them that GFW is a bad idea or that the China's government is wrong restricting speech. Because people not already convinced will point to the US banning TikTok and ask me how China's actions are different. The distinction between the two is subtle, and frankly, while the US actions do not violate the First Amendment, it does breach the underlying principles. I have no convincing argument for them.

Ok, that's more clear on what your point is. The US is not banning TikTok technically like the GFW, they are just de-platforming it so it is no longer commercially active.

This is very different from the GFW, and many orders of magnitude less restrictive.

This issue isn't about speech and censorship, but media ownership. These rules has always been in place in many Western countries precisely because of the impact it has on society (even beyond geopolitics).

> and many orders of magnitude less restrictive.

That's true, but when I had a hard time convincing them when the US were the *perfect* model of no speech restrictions, it's much harder when US is just less restrictive. They will just dismiss such difference in quantity as cultural difference, rather than different principles when China and US had qualitative differences.

Yes, I understand your point, but it is also moot, because even with the first amendment in the US, Free Speech is not absolute. There are limits to freedom - i.e. the right for you to swing your fists ends at the tip of my nose.

> as Bytedance only operates Douyin there. The two systems are completely separate content-wise.

This is what most people don't know, that TikTok itself is banned in China.

> freedom of speech

Freedom of speech applies to humans living within US borders not to entities controlled by a foreign government.

(Unless China is within US borders, freedom of speech argument doesn't stand).

If we talk about law, that is probably true. But for the principles, I don't think so.

We want freedom of speech because we can never know that our opinions are the ultimate Truth, so we need to ensure that everyone can speak their mind, and so can the real Truth be propagated and preserved. And that everyone includes foreigners and foreign governments.

Every time China's governments (including the past ones, like the Qing Dynasty) rejects the idea of freedom and democracy, it demonizes them by painting them as plots of foreign governments trying to overthrow and destablize China. So you can see why I am so wary of the argument that it is OK to silence the words if those come from a foreign government.

> But for the principles, I don't think so

Smart philosophers have studied this. You may not like the answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance

> we can never know that our opinions are the ultimate Truth

Oh yeah, but we can easily spot propaganda/bias from CCP from miles away.

For the principle of freedom of speech to survive, it can never be absolute.

> Oh yeah, but we can easily spot propaganda/bias from CCP from miles away.

The same way how the Chinese people can smell the propaganda of capitalist reactionaries.

I'm being sarcastic. You share the same school of thought with CCP.

Also, TikTok has never intolerant. CCP is quite intolerant of its own people's views, but it strictly segregates TikTok and Douyin to avoid trampling on the toes of non-Chinese. Therefore the argument of "tolerance of intolerance" isn't applicable.

> China's ideology wins over American in the end.

Influence operations aren't about "winning" or even convincing anyone anymore. It's about flooding peoples screens with untold amounts of toxic garbage.

Next level sock puppetry!

I was called a US sock puppet on Chinese social media and then a Chinese sock puppet here. I guess people everywhere are the same, doing ad hominem attacks whenever they see people having an opposite opinion.

Furthermore, TikTok itself is banned in China. The counterpart in China is Douyin, which has limitation for minors, like mandatory STEM videos and limited hours during school days.