A New Future for Icanhazip

China currently makes some absurdly large percentage of the world's consumer goods, and the discussions about producing them are probably being had over the internet. Cut them off of the internet and we have to rebuild manufacturing capacity everywhere else.

Which might not be a bad thing overall, but it's sure not gonna make any transnational corporation's bottom line happy over the next few quarters, so they'll be waving a lot of money at politicians to make this not happen.

China is an oppressive authoritarian state currently engaged in ethnic cleansing. How is enabling them indefinitely an option?

Because doing so would essentially push China towards a China-only internet, which they're already halfway towards.

The benefits of gobalization and the spread of democracy (or even just alternative governance models) via exposure to other cultures cannot be understated

Not a strong reason. I would be shocked if the average Internet user has heard of any of the top ten most visited websites in China. Their entire infrastructure, from the technological layer to the bureaucratic layer, has ensured that the average Chinese Internet user knows very little about the outside world that hasn’t been pre-vetted or filtered out completely by the GFW.

I liked this hypothesis overall—that exposure to democracy through trade is sufficient to breed democracy in China. It’s a confident and peaceful approach, and I’m glad that we tested it. However, in this case, I believe we’ve disproven the hypothesis; continuing to run the same experiment unmodified and expecting improving results is signing up for disappointment.

Is it really working, though? Has there been a push in China (or other country connected to the global internet) for more democracy?

How is keeping the USA online (which by the way actively destabilizes other countries and seeks out war outside its own soil) any different?

> continuing to run the same experiment unmodified and expecting improving results is signing up for disappointment.

Maybe that's an acceptable price to pay for not being the ones to take the next step toward war. If war is a game in which "the only winning move is not to play", then maybe it's also true that when it comes to doing the peaceful thing, the only winning move is to keep on playing, even if it hurts us.

Im in China and met a Xinhua journalist once. At day she would edit propaganda stories that she knew were complete horseshit, at night her and her colleagues would go to their boss watch netflix together because he had a working VPN.

Even if just one port is left open, people will be curious enough to find it and use it. Chinese people are humans too :D

I disagree: I m not sure what's making you say it's not working but from a Chinese point of view, this was also an experiment, to try and open up a little.

Are you sure you're doing your part of the bilateral exchange? It cant just be China changing, the US must learn too to adapt and accept a larger, more powerful country, with a widely different model.

Living in China, I can tell you the american model is known, and not particularly impressive to them. They care a lot less about freedom of speech, maybe because they never had it, than they care qbout order, unity and crime rate for instance. And what I always hear is that throwing themselves at the communists in revolt to get the same shitty system as the US is not so seductive.

Maybe become a role model and people will beg to ressemble you ? I have a hard time convincing them voting for their government is gonna work better because "if even idiots can vote, look at who they elect" :s

Many British people made similar statements back in the early 1930s.

When do we accept the fact that Xi's ambitions extend far beyond the borders of Mainland China and pose a threat to the very idea of human dignity?

Is it when he invades Taiwan? Floods the Uyghur camps with gas? Bombs Japan? Lands an army at the port of Darwin?

Yeah, just imagine if Chinese internet users were prevented from accessing websites that exposed them to a diversity of opinions

It's totally an option if you're in a country effectively ruled by soulless transnational corporations who rank "making lots of money" several orders of magnitude more important than "any kind of ethical concern".

It's probably totally an option if you want to work for one of those corporations, too.