
China Blocks WhatsApp, Broadening Online Censorship - sethbannon
https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/09/25/business/china-whatsapp-blocked.html?
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slachance
Most of us (on HN) probably still feel relatively safe in our mostly-
functioning democracies oceans away from the country, but the way that China
casually blocks any service which it's not easily able control or monitor is
fairly terrifying.

China's almost 1.4 billion people now. It's been removing possible channels of
dissent one by one, and even recent history shows that they're not afraid to
treat anyone who steps out of line with extreme prejudice.

The controlling government's been in an advantageous position for some time
now in that living conditions in the country have been improving rapidly for a
lot of the population (i.e. moving from rural poverty to middle-class by world
standards), but you have to wonder what would happen if things tapered off.
Large-scale unrest might be treated with the kind of brutality that the world
hasn't seen in decades, and the country's citizens would have few safe
channels through which to organize.

