Posted on 02/11/2017 8:20:37 PM PST by nickcarraway
The Great Firewall just got more impenetrable.
Chinese authorities block access to big-name websites such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and numerous others, and to thwart these restrictions, many residents on the mainland use virtual private networks. Starting this week, that could be a crime. Use of VPNs and special cable connections in China must now be approved by the government, essentially making these services illegal in the country.
China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the new rules on Sunday, as reported by the South China Morning Post. Calling it a "clean-up" of the country's internet connections, the Ministry said the new rules would go live immediately and be in place until March 31st, 2018.
VPNs are already subject to government scrutiny and interference in China. The most recent, large-scale crackdown on VPNs happened in March 2016, during the National People's Congress meeting in Beijing, SCMP says.
As The Washington Post points out, China's new VPN and cable regulations are purposefully vague. It's unclear how the government will implement or enforce these rules, but the language in the announcement suggests Chinese officials are taking aim at companies who provide VPN services to individual citizens, rather than professionals working for multinational corporations in the country.
Last week, in stark contrast to the Ministry's new VPN rules, Chinese leader Xi Jinping defended the tenets of globalization at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
"We must redouble efforts to develop global connectivity to enable all countries to achieve inter-connected growth and share prosperity. ... Pursuing protectionism is like locking oneself in a dark room. While wind and rain may be kept outside, that dark room will also block light and air," he said.
China isn't the only country that censors internet access: Authorities in Egypt, Russia, Cuba, Bahrain, Turkey, Vietnam and other nations also routinely interrupt connections, particularly during times of political strife. In July, the United Nations Human Rights Council condemned the state-sponsored disruption of internet access and upheld online privacy as an essential facet of freedom of expression.
And now?
Hollywood is eager to sell America’s info infrastructure to them.
They’re itching to do it, they just can’t wait.
That wall is just so F’n amazing, will never get to see it though.
From 1989 until about 2010 China was getting freer and becoming a pretty nice place to live. Since about 2010 it has regressed considerably
When Commie China does it, it is good. When America does to defend its security, it is bad.
No, I lived there at the time and even obtained a PhD from a PRC university. Under Jiang Zemin & Zhu Rongji it was getting better. I sat around a table at diner in a public restaurant and listened to people complain about the government and leaders with party members there present.
It was still a fairly oppressive place in some ways but was making progress towards being a free society. All that changed with Hu Jintao, he started walking the reforms back and they are now almost completely gone with the exception of the travel bans that the old communist had. The military controls China now in a cabal with party hardliners. It is really sad. China had the opportunity, was actually on the cusp of transitioning from a totalitarian state to a free country. They missed the opportunity, I don’t know if they’ll ever get it back.
A bit off topic, but nobody seems to discuss how we gave the Internet away only a few short months ago.
It seemed such an outrage then, but only silence now. If we can get it back under the control of the U.S., we should do it while we have a real President.
VPN is how secure communication is set up within government (US) agencies....very disturbing
Yes. Democrats, Republicans, Trump. They all agreed it wasn't worth stopping.
Sounds like a great place to visit and stuff that moves with a rock, if we don’t understand it....
Where we are done, they are no longer a synthetic nation of 1.2 billion Chinese but, a land mass of maybe 400 million actual Chinese, who are mostly just trying make living in a rice paddy farm ( There is nothing going wrong with that)
The rest will revert to their natural indigenous peoples, which number, if they were counted as nations, some 58 distinct ethnicities.
It is 2017 and China seeks to homogenize more than 600 million people into greater China.
How is it these A-holes are better than Blue eyed White Devils? Who....did not conquer the west initially.
No, that Shiite happened under the Brown Eye Battalion of the other Fighting Whitey, Spaniards and their Moorish assistants.
But whatever. When the winds of Santa Ana blew, he lost...bigleee
White-ee’s wascist....Chinese runts...
GFY’s...
<>I had no problems accessing the Internet when I was teaching in Turkey. However, that was 20 years ago. Evidently things have changed.
China is smart. They publicly support Openness but don’t allow it in their country. Leftists can swallow that easily.
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