
Skype banned from China - inovica
http://www.fastcompany.com/1713155/skype-illegal-in-china?partner=homepage_newsletter
======
StavrosK
This is entirely unrelated, but it reminds me of a comment I saw on reddit
that was very telling. Someone was talking about a colleague of his who was
Chinese and had come to the US, and who, over dinner with some other
colleagues, said: "I can't believe how smooth your propaganda is here in the
US. In China it is crude and everyone can see through it, but here you almost
miss it." To which all of the other colleagues replied: "What are you talking
about? We don't have propaganda in the US!"

I wish I could find it, it was very telling of the climate in China (I assume,
I've never been).

~~~
garply
I'm an American expat in China and I've lived here for several years. I
completely agree with the Chinese guy's statement and have thought the same
thing myself many times, though I've never heard anyone else openly express
it.

Living in an extremely alien culture allows you to see things about your own
culture that are hard to notice when you're immersed.

I can be a little more specific about how the propaganda systems work.

The Chinese system:

According to the news, there are more blue skies in Beijing this year than
last year, and more blue skies last year than the year before. The pollution
situation is getting better and better very rapidly. It's definitely false,
but they print it anyway.

Youku and Tudou (Chinese Youtubes) will often have videos of advanced Chinese
missiles or other weaponry as the featured video on the front page.

When the Chinese media runs a story on the US, there is a high probability it
is discussing some negative aspect of the US (high murder rate, copious drug
usage, poor governmental handling of environmental disasters).

And of course you have the censorship end of it: Sina Weibo (Chinese Twitter)
and Kaixin (Chinese Facebook) posts are ajax-filtered for sensitive keywords
and give you a big red warning if you try to say "bad" things. Or sometimes
you'll come back to your computer and some posts you made a couple hours ago
are just deleted. Clearly someone monitoring the networks noticed and removed
your undesirable content.

I think we can agree the system is used a bit like a blunt instrument. But it
works. People, especially the mass population with relatively poor education,
really do believe the stuff. America loves war. China is an extremely peace-
loving country. Americans love guns and drugs. Chinese pollution is
significantly better than a few years ago. Etc.

In the US, on the other hand, "propaganda" is more closely woven into consumer
demand and people's value systems.

If an organization wants to convince you of a message, they don't lie
outright, they omit information that would cause you to believe to the
contrary.

Let's talk about Iran for a bit. In China, there have been a series of
articles about recent terrorist attacks in Iran and evidence that the bombers
were supported by US intelligence agencies. I don't have strong feelings about
how America should treat Iran one way or another, but I find the notion that
we were involved at least plausible. But the headlines in the US papers don't
mention possible American involvement. If it is mentioned in the article
bodies, it's usually as a passing statement which the reader is likely to
casually dismiss ("the Iranian government issued a statement that the US was
involved in the attacks").

So the emphasis is different.

If you looked at the NYT on the first day of the Wikileaks stories, they wove
stories from the cables, and the story they chose to focus on was how Iran was
angering many other nations in the Middle East.

Again, it's a matter of what the media chooses to focus on and what it chooses
to neglect. There were tons of potential stories in those wires - why did they
choose that one as the most important?

And a lot of information in the US media is conveyed on top of a set of
assumptions. When Wikileaks broke, the major news organizations mentioned that
not all of the cables were being revealed, as some of the information might
have posed a threat to national security. Whose national security? The US's.
Why is that necessarily a bad thing? What if the cables had contained
information that posed a threat to Chinese or Russian or Iranian national
security? Would that have been a bad thing too? Or would that, instead, have
been a matter of freedom of speech?

And we can also look at how people in the US choose to consume information
that confirms their existing beliefs. Fox News and the Huffington Post. The
fact that liberal and conservative news exist at all should tell you that the
information inside is politically biased. I think they could fairly be called
conservative and liberal propaganda. In these cases, Americans are not
bludgeoned by unwanted propaganda, they actively seek it out.

In short, in the US, people actively pursue biased information and news
organizations don't blatantly lie, they just emphasize and deemphasize certain
facts in accordance with a value system that the consumer already holds. I
would call that a more subtle propaganda system than what happens in China.

There are, of course, a few similarities between the two systems as well. A
short commercial that says "Support our troops!" may not seem like propaganda
to you until you've seen one where there's a Communist flag waving in the
background.

~~~
mike4u2
Your post is interesting but it misses a key point: Selection bias is
everywhere, but in the US and most other countries you do not get run over by
a truck if you watch Fox News, run your own blog or decide to make fun of
politicians.

~~~
sdkslzdfk
Yes. It's a long, well thought out post that's entirely non-sequitur. The
poster doesn't understand the difference between true propaganda and spin.

The NYTimes has its own opinion, but it is definitely not an instrument of the
US Government.

He also implies that because China has clunky methods which are obvious they
don't have any subtle ones. Having clunky methods doesn't rule out having
subtle ones. I don't speak Chinese, but I find it exceedingly hard to believe
that China doesn't employ both clunky and subtle forms of propaganda.

Having clunky and detectable methods isn't better, either, as you claim, it's
worse, because they're more invasive. That's the whole point. That's why we
don't want censorship, or the great firewall, or our non-violent dissenters
rotting in jail.

Anyway, maybe you live in a relativistic world where everybody's country is
only as good as they're told, but I'm smart enough to discount my own bias,
and I know that the US is a freer place to live than China.

~~~
hackerblues
"I'm smart enough to discount my own bias"

I am genuinely interested, how did you establish that you have the ability to
correctly compensate for your biases?

------
gregcmartin
Most people forget or don't know that Skype was created by the founders of
Kazaa and they are hackers (like us) at heart and they built strong encryption
into it protecting (actually) the privacy of their users' audio conversations.
Skype's encryption has been a heated issue to governments who cannot wiretap
Skype for various reasons law enforcement or otherwise.

[https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Skype_securit...](https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Skype_security)

~~~
est
> Skype's encryption has been a heated issue to governments who cannot wiretap
> Skype for various reasons law enforcement or otherwise.

China has a customize Skype build called TOM-Skype. It has a built-in
"sensitive words" filter and backdoor keylogger.

------
dageshi
The thing to remember with China is that there is a law on the books so that
practically everything is illegal. The law isn't there to tell you what you
can or can't do, it's there so that if you piss off the wrong people they can
come down on you like a ton of bricks "legally".

~~~
yardie
_The law isn't there to tell you what you can or can't do, it's there so that
if you piss off the wrong people they can come down on you like a ton of
bricks "legally"._

Ahh, then it's like the US tax code.

------
awt
I hate making generalizations about huge entities like states, but I can't
resist on this one. I think this kind of thing will ultimately trip China up,
and prevent China from ever gaining a significant technological lead. The more
closed their internet is, the less ideas people will be exposed to, and thus
there will continue to be less innovation.

~~~
alexqgb
Obsessively trying to force toothpaste back into the tube does not telegraph a
general sense of well-being and confidence. China may be a 'superpower'. But a
'superpower' like the US? Or the USSR?

Obviously they've avoided the worst tendencies of the latter, but will they
every master the best aspects of the former?

Alternately, will we continuing relentlessly undermining our own advantages to
the point where China doesn't have to bother taking civil liberty seriously?

~~~
awt
Indeed, the US could kill the goose that lays golden eggs as well.

------
ck2
Ironically almost every external device/accessory for skype is made in China
(and we keep buying them from them, which empowers their government).

------
est
false positive? just used skype few hours ago (in china). Tom-skype actually
does have a VOIP license. The original news was circling in chinese media days
ago but no one really gives a $@/7 coz bans like this occurs every year

~~~
noahr
Skype's been deemed illegal, but that doesn't mean it won't work in China
(like so many other illegal things there). As the story says, no one is sure
how the government will enforce the ban yet. This is likely a stall tactic to
allow state run competitors to play catch up.

~~~
naner
Apparently all they have to do is go after Chinese supernodes.

------
mickdarling
I'm reading <http://craphound.com/ftw/> For The Win By Cory Doctorow right
now. In it some of the main characters try to join a Gold Farmers Union, and
the argument of how they can effectively mobilize is that now anyone in the
world can instantly communicate and organize for workers rights and fair
wages. Before these communication tools only the rich had the ability to
organize countrywide and worldwide, but with access to skype or other VOIP
tools the workers can have the same level of organization.

Maybe Cory Doctorow has a fan in the Chinese Communist party and they decided
to nip that particular problem in the bud.

------
alanh
Update (can’t believe no one else posted this as a comment): Skype denies
this. <http://mashable.com/2010/12/30/china-skype-ban/>

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gorog
Wait, China allowed Skype? Where has their protectionism gone?

