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By now, we've had dozens of posts about the Great Firewall, VPNs, internet censorship, and so forth, but they're all from the vantage of the outside trying to look in.  Of course, that gives us a skewed picture of what the situation is really like with regard to the internet inside and outside of the PRC.  This is not a healthy situation, for nearly one fifth of the world's population (17.72%) live inside the borders of China.  To be ignorant of how they are living is dangerous, for we may make erroneous assumptions about what one fifth of humanity is doing and thinking.

Fortunately, at last I have found an American expat who has been living and working in the PRC for more than a decade at a remote location and is well connected with many Chinese colleagues.  He is an active scholar and very well informed about the internet, AI, databases, and so forth, both inside and outside of the PRC.  I should note that he does not live among expats.  In fact, he is the only Westerner where he is located, quite far from major metropolitan areas, so he truly understands what Chinese of all walks of life do on a day-to-day basis.

1. Do you use a VPN?

Absolutely. Everyday. My ability to do research would be severely impacted if I couldn’t access databases outside of China and use Google scholar, for example. I also want to keep up on news and culture from western media such as the NYT, Guardian, Economist, NYRB, and of course easily keep in touch with family and friends.

2. How important are VPNs for Chinese and for expats?

I would say for most expats pretty much indispensable. For Chinese, it really depends on the demographic. I asked numerous people on this one just to get a sense anecdotally — I seriously doubt there are dead-on accurate figures — and the replies in numbers never exceeded 1-2% of the entire population, so perhaps 14-28 million people max.  That’s still a guess, but at least one based on Chinese friends' and colleagues’ day-to-day experiences. Is a VPN important for Chinese? For academics in the hard sciences much more so, for those in social sciences less, and for those in humanities far less. Some elite universities actually give faculty and students access to VPNs within restricted areas, e.g., on campus, in the library, etc., so a recognition of the importance of accessing information and information flow. In this regard, it’s crucial that universities as institutions with their administrations, like the Chinese government and Party, are not understood as simplistic monoliths with singular voices and views, as I typically see in western media. As for demographics, it also depends generationally: older people I would say very, very little. For the youngest segment, guys in their teens and early twenties definitely more, and specifically for online gaming and other youthful distractions. But the vast majority of Chinese have no need and no interest in using a VPN.

3. Does it matter that Google, FaceBook, Twitter/X, Wikipedia, Wiktionary, etc. are not available in China?

Google a little given the impotence of Baidu, but cn.bing.com is an ok-ish alternative to google. The others definitely not. Facebook and Twitter/X are especially irrelevant to most of the Chinese population. There are quasi-equivalents to Wikipedia on Baidu and other platforms that fulfill a similar need (I can’t speak to quality). 

Does it matter…for whom.  There’s a massive knowledge asymmetry (akin to information asymmetry) and definitely not in favor of the US. The vast majority of westerners don’t care about what’s going on in China and know very little about the country, but like the rest of the world China has to deal, de facto, with the US and its military-political and cultural power. Cultural power can be attractive, but it need not necessarily be accessed through FB, YouTube or X.  People here interact with family friends and colleagues via WeChat and Xiaohongshu (not FB [VHM:  it's like Instagram]), they watch Friends on Billibilli and YouTube or TikTok content on Douyin. As for American politics, I live in a very small town and yet I can chat about the American election and politics with a taxi driver. He’ll even know who the US Secretary of State is. I seriously doubt the opposite is true for an equally remote place in the US.   What this means is that in spite of any supposed barriers, Chinese know far, far more about the ‘West’ via the internet and apps, never mind via the hundreds and hundreds of thousands of Chinese students studying in North America, Europe, JP, KR, and AUSNZ posting their daily experiences and thoughts on Chinese social media.  (Remind me again what the total number of US students studying in China was last year???) This is a serious knowledge imbalance that doesn’t bode well for the US and other countries in the longterm. My sense is that Americans have zero clue about the overall situation and very likely don’t care.

4. Can OpenAI/ChatGPT, etc. gain access to things inside the Great Firewall?

I asked ChatGPT4o about that! 

And chatted about transparency…   so a little bit about the proprietary “knowledge curation” by companies like OpenAI versus the peer review process in the academic world. And yes, I understand the peer review process is not totally transparent but academics in general tends to be a much more open playing field than a singular corporation.

In the blog you wrote "If China doesn't want its people to know about the world and doesn't want the world to know about what's going inside the Great Firewall I don't think AI Google or any other outside entity should make costly time-consuming efforts to compensate for the willful obscurantism of the CCP/PRC”.  According to ChatGPT itself, that’s not what’s going on.  It’s not that the Great Firewall/the Chinese government are specifically restricting access to ChatGPT etc., it's governments and companies or “content platforms” worldwide. (The NYT, among a number of other major organizations, is suing ChatGPT for snuffing up its content.) Here’s what ChatGPT4o had to say on the topic — a conversation via a number of screen-grabs gathered as a pdf —  where ChatGPT admits that maybe it’s not in the best interest of everyone to let it “scrape” (nice term) content from all and sundry.  And what to make of the statistic it gives of less than 0.1%…

(click to embiggen)

5. Which LL post were you referring to that seems to have mentioned the article by Henry Heng LUO (The Hong Kong Polytechnic University) that you felt left much to be desired?

This one that mentioned Luo’s article on Medium, with its poor methodology and remarkably weak understanding of differences in how the internet functions among diverse countries, never mind how people actually use the internet through devices and across apps ("So my friends it’s crucial to be mindful of your online expressions. You never know what kind of unexpected stereotypes may emerge when these powerful language models come into play.”  Oi…)

I hope you can bring some attention to the knowledge imbalance aka knowledge asymmetry. This will affect the future far more than the Chinese lack of interest in VPNs or access to western websites.  I just came across this interview on VOA that ends on a rather bleak note from David Moser:

David Moser, an American who has lived and worked in China for more than three decades and is the former academic director of China Educational Tours (CET) in Beijing, said that “I haven’t seen an American student in years.”

…

"Asymmetry is bad for China, but it's much worse for the United States because asymmetry is in one direction, which is towards us,” Moser said. “The Chinese have very good knowledge of the U.S., of its culture, of its government, everything."

We need to know how information exchange actually transpires in China, and what the implications of that modus are for Chinese perceptions of what is happening outside of their country.  It's not a simple matter of an absolute divide between what is inside the Great Firewall and what is outside the Great Firewall.  Although, from the standpoint of the CCP, that would be an ideal situation with regard to knowledge spheres and information flows, it simply is never going to be that way, because China is too inescapably tied into the global politico-economic system, with China leading the way with such grand projects as the Belt and Road Initiative (founded 2013).

There are millions of Chinese living in the United States, some of whom have been living here for a century or more, some more recent immigrants, and hundreds of thousands who come and go as students, workers, tourists, etc.  Needless to say, information seeps into China with all of these individuals who come out, communicate with their families and colleagues inside, and often go back to visit or resettle there.

Selected readings

• "China VPN redux (7/17/24) — with extensive bibliography
• "God use VPN" (12/28/15)

July 31, 2024 @ 2:50 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Censorship, Information technology

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