
When Chinese students were given the uncensored internet - alanwong
https://www.inkstonenews.com/society/what-happened-when-researchers-gave-chinese-students-uncensored-internet/article/3015387
======
dougmwne
So half of the students were randomly given a free VPN connection. They were
informed that their browsing activities through the VPN would be monitored for
the study. This seems a poor study to draw conclusions about the demand for
uncensored information.

The censorship regime must have a hugely chilling effect. No-one wants to get
sent to a re-education camp or have their social credit score crater. Why
would a rational person run the risk of those consequences?

And if they were to learn the extent of their government's manipulation of
their reality, what are they supposed to do with that information? The study
says there were low rates of the participant's roommate learning censored
information. If I'd been peeking at information I knew could harm my career
and freedom, why on earth would I tell people about it?

To me, what this study is really saying is that internet censorship is not
just a technological process, it's also a social process.

~~~
admk
It is puzzling to me why foreigners would actually believe that we are somehow
inflicted by the "social credit score" and worry about being sent to a "re-
education camp" for simply circumventing the censorship.

I work in a research institute that is government-sponsored, and I can assure
you that our work relies on having access to censored foreign sites (Google,
Google Scholar, etc.), and there isn't an official way to do so and we all use
third-party or self-hosted VPNs.

All my friends and families always discuss incidents in the past history of
PRC freely, and never have to worry about being surveilled. It has recently
bothered me that the western media often see the issues in colored lenses,
have strong beliefs in anti-China sentiments and yet provide no direct
evidence relating to the claimed atrocities commited by the government. I
tried very hard to find actual direct evidence and to justify their claims
(e.g. [1]) but discovered none. The lack of evidence make those hard to
believe and would urge you to take those with a substantial grain of salt, and
not everything is abysmal in China.

Conflict of interest: I am a Chinese and I studied in the UK for 8 years.

[1]: [https://chinatribunal.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/06/China-T...](https://chinatribunal.com/wp-
content/uploads/2019/06/China-Tribunal-SUMMARY-JUDGMENT_FINAL.pdf)

~~~
jamoes
Here's some direct evidence of the atrocity that is the Tiananmen Square
massacre: [https://i.imgur.com/E3D9BuH.jpg](https://i.imgur.com/E3D9BuH.jpg).

I'm sure you've seen the infamous "tank man" picture, which provides direct
evidence that the PRC rolled tanks into Tiananmen Square. The above picture
isn't as iconic, but it shows what the PRC did with those tanks: they crushed
and killed anyone in their path.

~~~
admk
I was refering to more recent events, e.g. FLG, organ harvesting, Uighurs,
Hong Kong protests.

I am aware (as told by many, I was too young to know) that there were numerous
deaths and many more injured in that year.

~~~
jamoes
This does a a good job at showing the huge number of people protesting in Hong
Kong: [https://gfycat.com/relievedcornychrysomelid-
timelapse](https://gfycat.com/relievedcornychrysomelid-timelapse)

------
throwaway_9cc8
Throwaway because my real account can be easily linked to my real name.

Being a Chinese living in the US, thoughts:

1) Kudos for doing this experiment - one of the authors works at Peking
University and I imagine there must have been at least some pushback for him.
I hope this indicates a greater trend where academics gets free passes from
censorship but maybe not. That being said...

2) Maybe things have changed but a few years ago the GFW wasn't really a
hinderance for me browsing YouTube or Wikipedia or anything. If asked in a
survey "have you ever tried to get past the GFW" of course I would have
answered no. Of course I am a computer person, but I wonder how valid the
findings are given my anecdotal evidence.

3) There are fake news everywhere, both on pro and on anti Chinese government
news sources. One thing I have observed is that in China at least among the
educated population there's a lower level of trust in pro government news when
compared to the trust level in anti Chinese government news in the US educated
population (assuming HN is a somewhat representative subset of said
population).

4) Chinese media quality is low at least IMHO. Gossips always win over
important news, international news are not shown prominently. I would rather
read NYT or WSJ or WaPo.

5) Side comment, a lot of the comments on HN are anti Chinese government and
sometimes anti Chinese. I don't care about the former, but Chinese people are
people and anti Chinese is not cool.

~~~
anon45707
Could you give some examples of what you consider "anti-Chinese"? As a
Westerner I'm somewhat confused by this. I have a Chinese friend who moved to
the west in his early teens. We were discussing an article that was critical
of Chinese trade practices and I was surprised that he perceived the article
as "anti-Chinese". He seemed to take personal offense. I was kind of perplexed
by this reaction. I mean, in any sense that the author of the article was
"anti-Chinese", they would presumably be "pro-Hong Kongese" or "pro-
Taiwanese". So it's clearly not an ethnic/racial thing. Or is it not that
clear?

I think the conventional Western stance is that the citizens of China are
being oppressed by their authoritarian government and that they, as a whole,
would prefer to live in an open democracy like we do. You say you "don't care"
about criticism of the Chinese government. As a Westerner, I don't understand
why you're (only) indifferent about it. I mean, there were a couple million
people on the streets of Hong Kong this weekend that are presumably more than
indifferent about the Chinese government.

So help me understand your point of view. Like for example, how do you feel
about the U.S. actions against Huawei (in terms of being "anti-Chinese")?

~~~
est
> critical of Chinese trade practices and I was surprised that he perceived
> the article as "anti-Chinese".

For many Chinese, "learning" is semantically equal to "emulating". e.g.
Learning to walk, learning to write, learning everything else. It's natural
that the most advanced technological countries should influence the rest, like
the rich is supposed to fund the poor and the strong should help the weak. And
"learning" fast should be praised, like in schools. It's like a teacher shows
off its skills and told students it's forbidden for follow? Tons of Chinese
can not get the hang of this.

One more reason many Chinese people lost hope for the US during this trade
war, is because it's argued that China does not practice "rule of the law",
then Rubio introduced a bill that would nullity all Huawei patents registered
in the US. So for many people, the US laws are as manipulative as China's.
This is explosive WTF.

------
alanwong
OP and an editor of the news site (Inkstone) that published the article.

If you have any questions, please feel free to leave them in the comments.
It's getting late over here but we can answer your questions tomorrow.

For those of you interested, here's a link to the published research:
[https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171765](https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20171765)
(full text requires a subscription.)

And here's a draft of the research (PDF): [http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-
as/econ/documents/2018-fal...](http://as.nyu.edu/content/dam/nyu-
as/econ/documents/2018-fall/1984bravenewworld_draft.pdf)

~~~
lawlessone
How did they get permission give the students uncensored access?

~~~
yorwba
The acknowledge a grant by the National Science Foundation of China, so I
assume they convinced someone there that knowing more about the effects of
censorship would be useful for the government as well.

~~~
qinchencq
The researchers made clear that they are "independent of the government." They
also assured participants that "we will erase all survey data if we are faced
with political pressure to share the data with government or school
officials." They used email and WeChat (similar to WhatsApp) messages to
communicate with the students and even hand out free one-year account of Youku
(similar to Youtube) to obscure the study's explicit focus on censorship.

~~~
yorwba
That doesn't mean they didn't get approval to do so. Obscuring the focus on
censorship is just good study design, since they wanted to find out whether
explicitly pointing out that foreign media report differently has an effect.

I'm not sure what their choice of communication method has to do with
anything.

~~~
yorwba
I just spent way too long figuring out the NSFC grant system, but I did
eventually find the grant acknowledged in the paper. [1]

Turns out he got 2.8 million yuan from 2015-01 to 2019-12 for research on
behavioral economics, which I guess is broad enough that he _could_ have done
the research without telling anyone at the NSFC about it. I guess we'll be
able to tell based on whether he gets a new grant approved from 2020 onwards.

[1] can't link, but you can find it with 批准号 71425006 and 批准年度 2014 at
[https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-
li...](https://isisn.nsfc.gov.cn/egrantindex/funcindex/prjsearch-list)

------
Leary
The study in question:

[https://site.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj8706/f/3586-19...](https://site.stanford.edu/sites/g/files/sbiybj8706/f/3586-1984bravenewworld_draft.pdf)

A quote: "An important — although need not be exclusive — reason why students
exhibit low demand for uncensored information and hence are unwillingness to
pay for access is their beliefs that such information is not valuable.
Specifically, a key dimension of such belief is students’ assessment of the
difference in value between foreign and domestic news outlets, and whether the
value-added of foreign outlets justifies the cost to access."

~~~
umadon
I wouldn't pay to look at Western media either.

~~~
widowlark
as if chinese media is better?

~~~
Maken
Russian outlets are the only valid source of information.

------
sagebird
Re: Even when given free tools to access anything they wanted, less than 5% of
the subjects actually accessed uncensored content.

I am not particularly concerned by a low interest in general( if we ignore the
other flaws and accept this study for arguments sake).

In “free” societies not that many people are engaged in politics, activism,
etc. If two percent of a population is paying attention and hollers when
something gross happens, and then 30% of the population joins in, maybe that’s
enough.

------
nootropicat
Looking up what you want in an uncensored but monitored channel is such a
great idea, what could go wrong?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hundred_Flowers_Campaign)

------
X6S1x6Okd1st
How does this compare to students that grew up with an uncensored internet?
I.e. how often do they access materials that the party would censor?

~~~
throwaway_9cc8
Probably extremely frequently since the GFW blocks a huge number of random
things including even GitHub once in a while.

~~~
X6S1x6Okd1st
Clearly the party was censoring GitHub because of a couple particular repos,
it would just muddy the picture if you said that github counts. Not to mention
that most of the people in my family and most of my close friends don't visit
github.

~~~
throwaway_9cc8
Good point - I certainly uses GitHub all the time and I should thank you for
pointing out my bias. Most of the people probably won't care, but then again,
aside from Google, most people here probably won't care about the censored
websites either. It's also worth mentioning that Google's Chinese search is
atrocious although that might have happened after they quit China.

------
bjourne
I wonder how often Western people browse for information that is considered
taboo in their countries. My guess is not very often.

~~~
dsfyu404ed
How taboo?

Basically everyone watches porn which is mildly taboo.

I'm sure there's some people that listen to far right podcasts (which is taboo
local to this crowd) but they won't tell obviously.

~~~
bjourne
How to funnel money to terrorist groups. Or maybe browsing Hamas' official
sites. Would you dare it?

~~~
dsfyu404ed
I know a couple people who are big into geopolitics and they literally read
"terrorist" news sites. They read a fuckton of news in general. I'm sure
they're on lists.

------
gwbas1c
Look at the US, we have uncensored internet and people still believe all kinds
of fake news. Major media outlets have major biases, and people still believe
the biases. (Both US liberal and conservative news has major bias.)

As much as I believe in a free and uncensored internet, access to it isn't a
panacea for fixing problems with a government.

------
hohohmm
There are many ways to criticize the draconian Chinese censorship, but
implying western media as the benefit of uncensored internet and objective and
healthy source of information is just laughable.

Particularly funny is this piece: "Chen and Yang found that students who were
consistently exposed to uncensored foreign media outlets became more informed
of events that are usually unreported in Chinese media, such as President
Donald Trump’s businesses in China and surveillance in Xinjiang."

You might as well say that encouraged exposure to Chinese media outlets help
people become more informed of events that are usually unreported in Western
media...

Next time when you do something like this, use the the abundance of extremely
well-done and educational videos on Youtube that beat the crap out of your
regular western media in both objectivity and healthiness, and might just save
the monetary rewards entirely.

~~~
lawlessone
>use the the abundance of extremely well-done and educational videos on
Youtube that beat the crap out of your regular western media in both
objectivity and healthiness

Any recommendations?

~~~
throwaway_9cc8
EdX and MIT OCW are both based on YouTube - I think they have mirrors or at
least unofficial uploads in China but it would be better to just use YouTube.
Aside from that, there are a vast amount of video lectures uploaded by
university professors that are probably not accessible from mainland China.

I spent the majority of my undergrad YouTube time on MVs, so there's that.

