Comment by kccqzy
4 hours ago
Yes China will kill your network connections. And that is proof that Internet cannot route around censorship. Any time Internet routes around censorship China finds a new way to censor it.
Normal people don’t care about “downgrade” or “decrypt” or “intercept” they care about availability.
Have you been to China? It is still super easy to bypass the Great Firewall with VPNs.
Until a time of "civil unrest" occurs, and suddenly your "super easy" VPN becomes entirely blocked at the very same moment you wish you had it the most.
They aren't stupid, they're not going to insta-block everything they can detect, giving away clues to people trying to evade it.
What makes you so sure this is the case?
If there's civil unrest, they can of course essentially turn off the internet, but there's a distinction between "the internet can route around censorship" and "the internet can be blocked in its entirety (or near entirety)"
They certainly pull levers during unrest that they don’t on a day-to-day basis, but China still does not have complete control over the Internet. The Chinese people on the server I frequent talk about this constantly.
They certainly don’t have total freedom, but they’re harder to squash than you think
With pre-approved commercial VPNs yes. Set up your own unapproved VPN whether it’s IPSec or Wireguard or plain old SSH port forwarding, and see how fast it gets killed.
But of course the easiest approved “VPN” is just data roaming.
I used Wireguard to my home residential internet almost exclusively the last time I was in China. 2 weeks, no issues.
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In times of low social unrest theyd rather create a list of dissidents than try to shut them down. Keeps unrest lower and then when they need to spin up the domestic security apparatus they already know who to watch