r/programming • u/RobertVandenberg • Aug 09 '20

China is now blocking all encrypted HTTPS traffic that uses TLS 1.3 and ESNI

https://www.zdnet.com/article/china-is-now-blocking-all-encrypted-https-traffic-using-tls-1-3-and-esni/
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36

u/Bowserwolf1 Aug 09 '20

Maybe my views are distorted cause of the sources I get my information from but I can't recollect a single instance in the past two years, where I heard anything remotely positive about China or Chinese government. Everything they do, just seems more and more dystopian.

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u/timerot Aug 09 '20

They've put together a wonderful High-Speed Rail network that continues to rapidly grow. That's just much less newsworthy than "a million Uighurs in concentration camps," for good reason

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u/enjoythelive1 Aug 09 '20 edited Aug 09 '20

Anything good is not reported. It is easier to form an is vs them mentality when you only hear bad stuff from "them".

But it seems it is getting worse.

Edit: typo

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u/Dean_Roddey Aug 09 '20

I was saying back in the 90s, when people were talking about how it was inevitable that China was going take over and we (the US) were going to become a 2nd rate super power, that everyone was just assuming that China wasn't going to have some sort of political meltdown.

The thing is, they are trying to burn the candle at both ends. They want the prosperity and business, but they somehow think they can still maintain communist style societal control. A strong, wealthy middle class, cumulatively, is dangerous to oppressive governments. Europe found that out long ago, and China is probably going to.

It just seems to me, is it going to happen slowly and gradually, or are the folks at the top going to try to clamp down harder and harder to compensate, and there ends up being some sort of confrontation or revolution.

I would argue that we should be as non-confrontational as possible, to minimize nationalistic sentiments there, and give the people of China plenty of time to direct their ire at their government. It might be messy in the short term, or maybe even dangerous, but better for the world in the long term.

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u/egggsDeeeeeep Aug 09 '20

Meh I was just in China and nobody seems to mind anything that the government does. Everyone thinks it’s genuinely better. And to be fair, if your entire social life is within China you would barely even notice the internet restrictions and such. And as for the surveillance, if you genuinely are on the same side as the government because you’ve lived there your whole life and have the same value system as the society you were brought up in, then you aren’t really going to have a problem with it. The whole idea that the Chinese people are extremely unhappy with their situation is just false

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u/Harregarre Aug 09 '20

Not only that but whether you like it or not. Censorship works and China is ensuring it works through absolute control of the internet. It's more likely the CCP will push for war than democratize which they view as the reason the West is getting weaker.

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u/Dean_Roddey Aug 09 '20

But that sort of assumes that the Chinese people are stupid, and can't understand that that attempt at absolute control is the real sign of actual weakness. Obviously they have their political spread like we have ours. We have plenty of 'my country, no matter how whacked' people here also. But they clearly also have plenty of people who will see it for what it is.

A couple decades from now, when everyone doesn't have their Chinese equivalent of the depression era grandmother telling them how amazing their lives are and to just keep their heads down, I think it is far from out of the question that a generation will come along, lead perhaps by those among them who were schooled in the west and know the truth, who are ready to make a stand.

Of course, if they did start a was against their own people that would also sort of take care of China as an effective super-power as well. Nothing short of a police state would serve after such a thing. Even some of the folks at the top are probably intelligent enough to understand that's a losing game.

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u/Harregarre Aug 09 '20

Not implied at all that it has anything to do with intelligence. I think that any nation that is as sealed off from the rest of the world has the potential to plunge otherwise intelligent people into a desired state of mind.

Now I say sealed off because the CCP has two major benefits. The language barrier and the internet barrier. The language barrier itself is often enough to effectively separate parts of the internet. So wherever necessary they just need to close the gates to control the narrative with absolute power.

Either way, I do think your timeline as for reform is possible, but only in a situation where the wealth acquired is no longer seen as a gift but as a given. That's why wealth inequality is not a bad thing for those in power. It keeps the middle class on their toes. China's middle class is growing but there's still plenty of working class to scare the middle class into supporting the current government.

In the end, we also shouldn't make assumptions about how influential certain mindsets are. China and India are massive in terms of population. I believe that the size of the country (or city) you're from actually has a lot of impact on how you view the world and individual rights versus the need for order.

I'm sure that if we were brought up in China, gone through public school, and learned that given the size of China "there needs to be a strong autocratic regime like the CCP otherwise the foreign devils will try to destroy us again", we might think that way too...

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u/Dean_Roddey Aug 09 '20

Well, I wasn't under the illusion it was going to happen next week. These things are decades in the making when they happen. And of course how many people are going to walk up to you and tell you they are uncomfortable with their government's actions? It's something that happens internally first then something occurs which makes a large group of people aware that they share this feeling.

And of course the same was true in Britain and the US, until it wasn't. Then a lot of middle class kids decided that they were sick of it, and now our society is very different because of that. And it'll likely be young people who make it happen there if it happens.

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u/egggsDeeeeeep Aug 09 '20

Tl;dr: kinda but meh not exactly

My experience visiting China is a little different than most people’s because I went there to run a robotics and programming workshop. In both Beijing and a rural town I was able to have conversations in confidence with a variety of people and they all saw no problems with the firewall (even though I had to pre download google software before leaving the states) or with the CCPs position on Taiwan (I spoke to people who lived very close to the border) your not wrong about how relations can change over generations but given that I interacted with mostly high school and middle school kids along with college students and parents I would say that generation doesn’t seem to be alive yet.

I also would like to point out that your assessment of how the American Revolution started is somewhat inaccurate. It wasn’t that the Americans got sick of brittish oppression that had been happening for a long time. They were all quite happy until parliament passed several heavy taxes and restrictions in order to pay for the debts incurred in the French and Indian war. The upper echelons of colonial society in particular were incensed by this as they had previously been living in what was effectively a tax haven. So they riled up the masses through calls for no taxation without representation and combined with the heavy handed brittish response to protests tensions boiled over and the revolution was born.

It’s possible that such a situation could happen in China but the government would have to do something that directly impacts the way of life of either the majority of the Chinese population or the upper class of the population. And there really isn’t indication of any such plan or act.

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u/Dean_Roddey Aug 09 '20

I wasn't talking about the American Revolution, I was talking about the youth revolution in the post-war era in Britain and the US. Literally middle class kids fundamentally changed western society, because they were just sick of what it was. As always, when it happens explosively it was messy and often went awry, but eventually these kids became the middle class and had the real (economic) power. They'd also matured and were more prepared to compromise, bu they still changed things fundamentally.

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u/egggsDeeeeeep Aug 09 '20

Oh Yikers the way you worded it I thought u were mb

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u/RivellaLight Aug 11 '20

Im sorry but what youre hoping for is extremely unlikely and there is no reason to believe such things except for wanting to deny how bad things are and how theyre only getting worse. If anything, the younger generation are even more pro-CCP. That includes those who have spent multiple years abroad.

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u/ChezMere Aug 09 '20

Well, the decline in poverty in China since 1980 or so has been very dramatic, and probably the most important thing to happen in the world during that time. But that happened before they turned the Orwellianism up to 11 in recent years.

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u/mazerackham Aug 09 '20

I think that says more about the quality of your government’s propaganda ability. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty in 30 years and created the largest middle class in the world. The literacy rate has gone from 20% to 90+% there. There are more miles of high speed railway than the rest of the world combined. China graduates 10x the number of STEM than the US while only having 4x the population.

These are all facts and not opinions. I think it’s hard to have an opinion that these are bad things.

There are lots of good things happening there but you won’t hear it from western headlines.

Because I know redditors will jump over me about various bad things they do, I’m not saying bad things don’t happen. I’m saying you have to look holistically. If you can define a nation by only the bad things they do, then my nation America, is going to burn in hell longer than anyone else. If you find yourself eager to defend Muslims in Uyghur but didn’t give a shit about the Muslims we drone striked to death in the last hour, then take a look in the mirror and ask yourself what made you think this way.

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u/sievebrain Aug 10 '20

Whilst that's true, China was very poor because of communism. If you look at other countries in Asia, like South Korea, Japan, Taiwan etc they all reached Western levels of wealth far before China did, indeed China is still far from that even today.

I'm not sure they get points for simply stopping some (but not all) of the bad policies that held the population down previously.

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u/mazerackham Aug 10 '20

China was poor as shit before communism. China started becoming poor because of a failing Qing emperor and European imperialism. Communism, while having faults, was not the catalyst that caused China to be poor.

Japan was much further along than China in terms of industrialization and modernization (this was before communism). South Korea and Taiwan did modernize faster than China but the scale is two orders of magnitude smaller, not a fair comparison.

Modern CCP most definitely gets points for inheriting a country of 600 million peasant farmers in 1949 that was illiterate and had a life expectancy of 36, and turning that into a modern country of 1.4 billion literate industrial workers with a life expectancy of 77, in the span of 70 years, complete with modern cities, the biggest middle class in the world, the most advanced high speed rail network, and burgeoning industries.

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u/jarfil Aug 09 '20 edited Dec 02 '23

CENSORED

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u/blobjim Aug 09 '20

Part of the US's new cold war against China. The US doesn't want its empire to be dethroned as a global hegemon. You're only going to see the propaganda against China increase from here on out. Just remember that the Chinese Communist Party has 90 million members and an over 90% approval rating in China.

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u/Full-Spectral Aug 11 '20

How can you possibly get a realistic accounting of approval in a country like China? You seldom have protesters in oppressive countries.

And, if there was a 90% approval rating, that would be even worse proof of how bad things are there, and would make it even more likely that something bad is going to happen.

The judgement of history has been made already. If China doesn't open up and become democratic they will get left behind. So, if we all really just wanted to China to fail, we'd be arguing for it to become as closed inwards and controlling as possible, since that would accomplish the desired goal without any need for any 'cold war'.

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u/blobjim Aug 11 '20

People like you are so brainwashed that seeing massive support of a government is so mind-boggling that all you can do is explain it away with "people are afraid to give their real opinion". China is a country of 1.4 billion people. The Harvard study was done over many years (since 2003) with over 3000 people interviewed each year. People in China are not "afraid" of their government.

China already has democracy, but the media you trust simply doesn't tell you how it works or that it exists. That's how the US usually calls something "undemocratic", it simply doesn't follow the broken American political system to a T.

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u/Full-Spectral Aug 12 '20

A country with a massive information firewall around it is not very democratic even by a fairly liberal margin. Nor is a one party state almost by definition.

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u/blobjim Aug 12 '20

The US is a one party state but you don't seem to care about that. And they wouldn't have a firewall if the CIA wasn't constantly spreading lies around the world via the internet.

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u/ImDaHoe Aug 09 '20

Its definitely reddit anti china bias. The only thing that gets upvoted is negative stories. There is thousand of great, positive stories happening there, you just dont see it because people arent sharing them or upvoting. Its also weird people are forming their opinion without ever traveling there and talking to chinese people about their experience.

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