
China Just Blocked Thousands of Websites - wyclif
https://zh.greatfire.org/blog/2014/nov/china-just-blocked-thousands-websites
======
eob
Speaking entirely divorced from my opinion on China politically (as someone
with strong US and TW ties, FWIW), I think the Great Firewall has been a
brilliant economic move in retrospect. While it may have been an accidental
side-effect, blocking so many foreign sites has enabled a flourishing of
domestic internet companies of the likes that nobody but the US has seen
unless I'm mistaken.

And for a "middle class" of blocked sites, while not technically blocked, the
packet delay is so great most people (except a dedicated few) will just shrug
and figure that cross-continent internet connections must be too slow to be
practical. Accessible, but only if you're willing to wait a minute. A
brilliant political play, because it's hard to pin a charge oppression on
anyone, since the information is technically there, but so slow nobody will
access it.

~~~
maged
The side-effect was definitely not accidental. China has blocked the major
company in every internet industry (social networks, search engines, video
streaming, etc.), and as a result domestic products are booming. Now these
domestic products are starting to expand internationally with the revenue they
get from the artificial Chinese market.

Korea did something something similar with its Chaebols' (Hyundai, Samsung, or
other large Korean companies in countless industries) in the 80s. It had
protectionist policies that let the Korean companies charge outrageous prices
domestically, and used that revenue to become very competitive
internationally. And it worked.

~~~
Al-Khwarizmi
Actually, all the major economic powers got there by means of protectionism.
Economic liberalism is nice when you're already at the top.

~~~
tim333
Is that true? I got the impression the US and UK mostly became major economic
powers by being ahead on tech in their day and China mostly by undercutting
everyone on price through low wages and low environmental protection. OK China
is protectionist but iPhones are made there because it costs less, not because
of restrictions on importing phones to China. Dunno if you've got a source?
I'll give you protectionism seems to have worked for S Korea though I'm not
sure I'd call it a major economic power. Also what I'd think of as the most
similar competitor in the area, Taiwan, has a higher gdp/captita without all
the Chaebol protecting stuff.

~~~
latch
The US became an economic power in large part because of slavery [1]. And I
don't mean to say that in a snarky or condescending manner. The US is hardly
the only country to give itself advantages. As you say, China's taking
advantage of the environment. Protectionism is extremely active (subsidies and
import tariffs). Wages are kept low.

Comfort and suffering seem to go hand in hand. Subsidized rice creates a
surplus, which floods the market, which [seemingly paradoxically, but not
really] results in famine in Haiti.

[1] -
[http://www.salon.com/2014/09/07/we_still_lie_about_slavery_h...](http://www.salon.com/2014/09/07/we_still_lie_about_slavery_heres_the_truth_about_how_the_american_economy_and_power_were_built_on_forced_migration_and_torture/)

~~~
tim333
I can believe you on the slavery thing but that's not really protectionism.
Without being moralistic about anything I'm still skeptical that
protectionism, as in restricting imports, works particularly well for a
country as a whole.

~~~
cousin_it
Well, let's do the standard mathematical thing and take the extreme case.
Imagine that some country sucks so much that all its industries are less
efficient than those in other countries. Since capital is free to move between
countries nowadays, Ricardian comparative advantage doesn't apply, and the end
result is that no one ever invests in the country's industries, so it just
stays poor forever. You might try to use government investment to prop up
domestic industries, but the government doesn't have too much money because
the country is poor to begin with.

It seems like protectionism would help in this case, by creating a market that
can only be satisfied by domestic industries. And since there's a spectrum
from this case to more realistic cases, there's also a spectrum of usefulness
for protectionism. Does that make sense?

~~~
dragonwriter
> Since capital is free to move between countries nowadays, Ricardian
> comparative advantage doesn't apply

Ricardian comparative advantage always applies when ignoring transaction
costs; reducing transaction costs for any given set of transactions (e.g., by
eliminating formal restrictions on capital movement) increases (rather than
reduces) the likelihood that Ricardian comparative advantage applies.

(If you want an extreme case in which Ricardian comparative advantage to fails
to apply, you need to assume extreme transaction costs -- one of the canonical
hypothetical examples where this is argued to the case is an interstellar
civilization without FTL travel.)

~~~
cousin_it
I don't see how that's true. Let's run through the standard example from
Wikipedia.

1) England can produce a unit of cloth for 100 units of labor, and a unit of
wine for 120 units of labor. Portugal can produce a unit of cloth for 90 units
of labor, and a unit of wine for 80 units of labor. Portugal has absolute
advantage in both goods, but England has a comparative advantage in cloth. By
the standard Ricardian argument, we get lots of trade and happiness.

2) Now let's change the situation slightly. Replace all occurrences of "units
of labor" with "units of capital", and assume that capital can move freely
between countries. We've lost the key component of comparative advantage, the
idea that producing a good forces you to "forgo" producing some other good.
Everyone just produces everything in Portugal, and England dies. Whoops!

3) Now allow England to set up protectionism, so that all wine consumed in
England must be locally produced. This way it can survive. Not very nicely,
but between (2) and (3) I'd choose (3) every time.

Am I missing something?

~~~
dragonwriter
You are missing that for capital in England to move to Portugal, something has
to move the other way.

If you look at actual neoliberal trade, a lot of production of goods (and even
services, to the extent that they can be provided remotely) moves to the
peripheries, but the core's comparative advantage becomes in _renting out
surplus capital_ (which produces even more surplus capital to rent out). That
is, the developed world in actual neoliberal trade with free capital movement
are the countries that are like _England_ in your example.

~~~
cousin_it
> _You are missing that for capital in England to move to Portugal, something
> has to move the other way._

Why? Because nature abhors a vacuum? :-)

As far as I can tell, production doesn't really move to the poorest countries
like the one in my example. It seems that it moves to countries that have an
absolute (not just comparative) advantage in manufacturing costs.

~~~
dragonwriter
> Why? Because nature abhors a vacuum?

Well, because "England" and "Portugal", on the level that Ricardian
comparative advantage really works, aren't really _countries_ , but sets of
people (and, really, the comparative advantage really exists on the individual
level, its existence between sets of people is simply an aggregate of its
individual existence.)

Absent an external actor using force to compel an involuntary transfer,
productive capital moving from person E to person P requires some item(s) of
value moving to E such that the value to E justifies surrendering the capital.

------
wmeredith
"We have acknowledged all along that our method of unblocking websites using
“collateral freedom” hinges on the gamble that the Chinese authorities will
not block access to global CDNs because they understand the value of China
being integrated with the global internet."

If they "understood the value" of that, these shenanigans wouldn't have been
necessary in the first place.

~~~
13
If you think about it from a purely practical standpoint, it would make sense
for all countries to block the any CDN that isn't on their soil. Local
companies make more money hosting websites, less traffic on the pipes coming
into the country, and better control over what is censored.

~~~
mvc
...and higher prices for consumers in those countries.

~~~
bottled_poe
Sending money overseas only benefits the single buyer in the short term.
Keeping it within the country increases the wealth of that society leading to
better services for all citizens.

~~~
meric
Here's a counter example:

A island nation with highly accessible fisheries populated by 100 people in
the middle of the ocean could spend their labor on building a CDN or fishing.

If they use other's CDNs, the money they sent would be used by foreigners to
buy their fish, which could be produced very cheaply. Building their CDN means
forgoing their fishing opportunity. Building a CDN means they can now sell
their CDN services cheaper than it would have cost them to run a website to
sell their fish, but the benefit is marginal compared to the income they would
have received by focusing their labor in an industry where they have
comparative advantage.

They must choose only one because they have limited labor.

...Land, labor, capital and technology is wealth, and money only represent a
claim on that wealth.

~~~
mp8
I'm not sure if this really addresses your argument, but China certainly
doesn't have a limited labor supply... Quite the opposite

~~~
SixSigma
The comment being replied to specifies that blocking and building would be a
beneficial activity for all countries to participate in.

------
tbenst
I'm currently in China. VPNs are very common and popular here. Many work very
poorly unfortunately (Private Internet Access included). Astrill appears to be
the most popular and best performing. A few high-end hotels that I've stayed
at route all traffic through a VPN to cater to their Western audience.

Many, many people with little technical ability use a VPN, especially in
businesses dealing with the West.

~~~
greyone
There are better VPNs for China: [http://www.greycoder.com/openvpn-
china/](http://www.greycoder.com/openvpn-china/)

------
tiatia
China does a good job in what it intends to do.

Most non-Chinese IP websites are not blocked but traffic gets slowed down by
factor 40. I have an offshore webserver. A ping suggests a 50% packet loss.

Often you can access foreign websites. At least sometimes. Some days even
gmail does work. Everything works sometimes or a little bit and or is
unbelievable slow.

What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be
able to sniff on it. Facebook and Google were most of the time not working,
even with the proxy. Maybe the 50% packet loss makes their websites non
functional.

I just bought Astill VPN and for now I must say they are doing a tremendous
job.

~~~
rahimnathwani
> A ping suggests a 50% packet loss.

This likely caused by the limited peering arrangements of your host. I rent
~10 virtual private servers outside China, and ping times vary between 90ms
('best' provider) to 500ms ('worst' provider). Packet loss varies over time,
but has never been an issue with > half of the providers.

> What I never understood with my self build SSH proxy VPN: China seems to be
> able to sniff on it.

Were you using an HTTP proxy (e.g. forwarding a local port to squid running on
your VPS) or a SOCKS proxy (just using the SSH command to act as a socks
proxy)? If the latter, then your DNS queries would still be resolved locally
(probably by your ISP's DNS server and, even if using an external DNS server,
subject to MITM).

~~~
tiatia
No. I use DNS via my SSH proxy

##Preference Name Status Type Value

network.proxy.socks_remote_dns user set boolean true

~~~
rahimnathwani
Hmm... perhaps malware on the client? I can't imagine your SSH connection is
being MITM'd.

------
lbenes
There are a number of ways to help people in China gain access to the open
Internet. One easy way to help is to setup an obfsproxy bridge to alleviate
the shortage.[1] The quickest and easiest way is to setup your free Amazon EC2
account with the Instructions at the Tor Cloud Project page[2]. It took me
just a couple of minutes to install my free EC2 account. Another option is to
donate money to pay for the bandwidth that Tor relay and exit nodes
require.[3]

NOTE: A bridge is not the same as an exit node. Only exit nodes could possibly
attract attention from authorities. If you are just running a bridge, you are
only helping people circumvent government firewalls to join the Tor network.
The default EC2 Tor Cloud images only run as a bridge.

[1] [http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-
ca...](http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/04/tor-calls-for-
help-as-its-supply-of-bridges-falters/)

[2] [https://cloud.torproject.org/](https://cloud.torproject.org/)

[3] [https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-
donate-...](https://blog.torproject.org/blog/support-tor-network-donate-exit-
node-providers)

------
seanmcdirmid
Inevitable. As people start using other services to get around the wall, those
services will be blocked no matter how popular they are. Given what we've seen
of Xi so far, I guess Chinese internet will probably be mostly cutoff from the
rest of the world by the end of his term.

~~~
LiweiZ
Yes. But I think it could be way sooner than most of Chinese can be aware of.
Consensus among average people in China seems in favor of Xi now. Someone is
just picking up the organization's old-fashion tricks and copying them and
hoping all of them work as expected since those are all that they know. When
the energy begins to loose, everything could turn up-side-down shortly. It has
not started yet. Everybody needs a huge stable market now. Perhaps leader can
get what he wants in the end.

~~~
edwinyzh
Too me it'll be the end of the world...

------
apli
When I was living in Beijing some month ago the bad Internet really upset me.
Almost every international connection was quite slow. A lot of pages took
minutes to load because so many sites use Google hosted fonts, js libraries or
API. These requests took about a minute to timeout and finally the browser
could start to render the page (e.g using a default font). Most vpns are like
described often slow, so also no solution. I then wrote a chrome plugin to
filter all requests to Google hosted libraries and rerouted them to a Chinese
service which mirrors Google hosted libraries. This really improved my surfing
experience.

------
sorpaas
I'm really surprised that so many people are still just talking about it in an
economic prospective. I'm not talking about Human Rights or Freedom because
the government don't event accept them. I just want to surf the Internet.

Currently it works well because we get more and more tools to deal with GFW,
but do you know how frustrating it is in the early days of the Internet in
China that you spent nearly half of your life just to solve "networking
issues"?

Put yourself in others' shoes for a moment please.

------
bnomis
I've often thought one could make an economic argument against filtering. But
for that to work, those in charge need to care about the losses. I think of it
like those Mastercard ads
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GofscoXnpDw)

"Losses due to filtering: X yuan. The illusion of control: Priceless. Some
sites we like, for everything else there's the GFW."

~~~
jackvalentine
You could also make an economic argument _for_ filtering: the infant industry
argument.

Protection from the west by the great firewall has made Chinese services
flourish.

Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been
practically destroyed by foreign competitors.

~~~
ninjin
> Compare this to say, Japan, where the native social network Mixi has been
> practically destroyed by foreign competitors.

Or, maybe it was that Mixi had been lagging behind for ages and deservingly
died off. You might also want to add that Line [1], a domestic company (well,
subsidiary of a South Korean company, but still...), is now pretty much
dominating the market.

[1]:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_(application)](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Line_\(application\))

~~~
precisioncoder
In fact it's so good that it's now making inroads in Europe and North America.
If you play internet games many of the guilds require members to use LINE. I
picked it up to chat with friends in Japan and love it, I'm now trying to get
my friends to switch over.

------
est
tl;dr Greatfire.org hosted content mirrors on edgecastcdn.net , China bans
*.edgecastcdn.net altogether.

~~~
jsmthrowaway
How helpful of them. Maybe they can throw a mirror up on Akamai and CloudFlare
next.

~~~
est
They already did. See their wiki
[https://github.com/greatfire/wiki](https://github.com/greatfire/wiki)

They are hosting mirrors on Akamai, Azure, Cloudfront.

They previously hosted on Amazon S3 and Cloudflare, they were blocked in China
already

~~~
fatman13gg
oh god, Greatfire.org, stop trying to make every cdn service being blocked!

~~~
wmt
China is trying to make every CDN blocked, not Greatfire.org. Stop blaming the
victims.

------
Timucin
China should block itself from the internet instead. I am running several
servers and getting the most useless/annoying bot/malware traffic from China.
Even that I had to block everything that comes from them.

~~~
nomercy400
You mean we should filter our connection based on what IP it is coming from.
Yeah, that's a good idea...

------
spdustin
I legitimately want to know why the "Great Firewall" doesn't block spamming
botnets that post to wp-comment.php hundreds of times per hour.

~~~
junto
I think that the firewall is predominantly one way. Restricting access to
external information rather than prevention of hackers going out.

But, I agree. I'd also like to see them stop. I now use a geo-IP filter and
whitelist the few countries that actually don't appear to spam that much.
Needless to say, China is not on that list.

Out of interest Brazil, Ukraine and Russia are also banned for this reason.
Does anyone else have loads of comment spam originating from Brazil?

------
canadev
I was about to ask, "Anyone know the significance of the part-way filled red-
links?"

Did an inspect element/hover over the links and it shows the percentage that
the site is blocked, which seems to be the same as the proportion of the link
background that is red. Pretty neat use of styling.

------
Kiro
My former room mates were from China and I was really surprised to learn that
they supported the Great Firewall. They didn't seem to have any issues with it
and even thought it was for the greater good.

~~~
wmt
Foreign students from China know they'll have a very good chance at becoming
one the oligarchs ruling the country, and as such likely think any tool as
keeping the people subservient is a good thing.

I find it unlikely that Chinese rulers would want to send abroad anyone but
its loyal opposers of democracy.

~~~
1stop
Are you seriously suggesting that Chinese students are all vetted by the
government to make sure they are Pro-Communist and Anti-Democratic? AND they
are all from the "ruling class".

wow. I don't even...

~~~
tokenadult
Chinese students who study abroad are "oriented" in official programs before
they go abroad. Some may be more influenced by those orientations than others,
but that's a much more comprehensive program in China than anything like that
elsewhere. When I left the United States to study abroad, I had no government-
sponsored program to get me ready for that experience at all.

~~~
raitorm
I have no idea where you got that impression, but based on my personal
experience as an International student from China, most of the Chinese
undergrad students get financial aids from relatives and post-graduate degree
students live on university funding. It is extremely rare to have students who
are "sent" by the Chinese government and few people actually have strong
preference of returning to China after they complete their study over getting
a job abroad.

------
tomelders
I think the easiest way to undermine China right now is to trick them into
further limiting it's own connectivity with the global internet by banking on
their zeal for censorship and their itchy trigger finger.

Not that I'm advocating this as a strategy, it's more of a warning. China has
enemies, and those enemies can do a lot of damage feeding the fire that drives
it's governments oppressive policies. And they can do it practically for free.

------
known
I think websites should be re-developed as torrents

~~~
altcognito
I think Freenet is the closest thing to a distributed, encrypted network like
the one you speak of.

[https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html](https://freenetproject.org/whatis.html)

------
dbz
Does anyone know if Cache Databases are blocked? I made a chrome extension
called WebCache that views the cached version of a webpage which would be
helpful if Google Cache, Wayback Machine, or Coral CDN isn't blocked. Here is
the source: [https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache](https://github.com/Dbz/WebCache)

~~~
stoooooooooop
The first two are definitely blocked (without the Greatfire mirrors). I'm not
sure about Coral CDN.

------
est
Apparently Greatfire.org think this caused "significant economic loss as many
businesses will be impacted".

I think this only cause problems for edgecast customers, and China doesn't
give the slightest fuck.

And for those people who does want to see those "collateral freedom" mirrored
content, they already have their own private circumventing methods.

~~~
tempestn
Edgecast customers include some very popular websites, which are certainly
used by consumers and businesses in China. So it's definitely a problem for
China. Now, whether the Chinese _government_ gives a fuck is indeed another
matter. I'm sure they can browse whatever they want.

~~~
geekingfrog
After living in China for a few years, I understood something: the __only
__thing chinese government cares about is its longevity. The whole system is
designed to keep the party in the control seat. Economic growth was a way, now
that 's is slowing down, the party is finding other ways, but it would be a
mistake to think chinese economy is more important than power for the party.

------
roylez
Personally I have to thank the great firewall for blocking Facebook and
Twitter so that I would not waste my time on these nonsenses. For serious
problems I do not mind find a way to access google, but I would not do it to
try to access Facebook especially when none of my friends are there.

~~~
pherocity_
There are other methods like discipline, that don't obliterate your personal
freedoms.

------
askinakhan
May sound opportunistic but there are some great opportunities here to create
domestic companies that mimic those companies that have been blocked.

------
riverain
Yes, and this article itself has been blocked too.

~~~
voltagex_
Is there any way I can buy a Chinese VPS to see the impacts of the blocks
myself?

~~~
mappu
There's a bunch of providers listed on
[https://www.exoticvps.com/](https://www.exoticvps.com/) .

