← Back to context

Comment by OkGoDoIt

6 years ago

So if WeChat is basically the only messaging app allowed in China, and WeChat is not allowed to be used in India, is there any widely available platform that Indian citizens can use to chat with Chinese citizens? Making it impossible or at least very difficult to communicate with people in another country seems like it’s only going to make any divide even worse in the long term. Think of the fallout of Facebook filter bubbles but to an extreme, by making it very difficult to even communicate with someone in a different culture with different viewpoints.

18 comments

OkGoDoIt

Reply
ketzu  6 years ago

> So if WeChat is basically the only messaging app allowed in China

How did you get that impression? There are a ton of chinese messanging apps, e.g., QQ, which is also on the list of banned apps.

  • technobum  6 years ago

    Great job refuting your own point. QQ is owned by the same parent company as WeChat (Tencent). Tencent is also implementing the Chinese Social Credit Score system, and so in my humble opinion, is the tech arm of the chinese government.

    • ketzu  6 years ago

      It really comes down to what "basically the only one" means. But I wouldn't aggree that "google hangouts is basically the only messaging app" would even extend to all the other messaging apps google ever produced. (Please note that this is an example of formulation and what I consider that encompasses, not that hangouts is the only messaging app in any context.)

      But besides that: There exist further chinese messengers and non chinese messengers that are not blocked in china.

      The rest is, in my opinion, irrelevant to the topic of wechat being the only chinese messaging app.

president  6 years ago

Have you ever thought that maybe China shouldn't banned all foreign social media and messaging services in the first place? They literally divided the world by putting up a wall between themselves and the rest of the globe, the Great Firewall. Besides, the divide between China and the rest of the world has already happened on the ideological level.

kortilla  6 years ago

The language barrier already guarantees that. Only 12.6 percent of Indians speak English and only 6.4 percent of Chinese speak English. The overlap is worse with any other common language.