They want to block Github entirely because Github allows for the free flow of information (politically sensitive information, not just code) and they don't have a way of doing currently without just blocking all of Github... Which would be bad for business, and China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way.
Actually, if you want to send large amounts of text information to users in China right now, Github is probably one of the better ways. Unfortunately probably not for long!
No, I don't think it's about blocking Github. Many of their tech companies are using open source.
For China it's safer to have a Chinese Github ecosystem. Just imagine if Github suddenly decide to block Chinese users like they did for Iranian users.
It's also strategic for their government and some critical private sector to not put their source code on an American platform. So there are enough incentives especially after everything that happened to Huawei.
this is the correct answer. I think this is China's response after seeing Huawei getting blocked from using Google Services.
Github is still owned by an american company and it has shown that it needs to comply with whatever foreign policy that washington enacts. It's reasonable want to have a contingency plan that would allow the Chinese domestic software industry to continue to function when things turn sour between the two powers.
That being said, Github is now owned by Microsoft and Microsoft has a very strong relationship with the Chinese government such that they provided a custom version of Windows 10 for them. https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/21/14998644/microsoft-window... But I see your point.
The USG steamrolls the interests of US companies without a second thought, whenever sanctions are implemented. It doesn't matter how badly Microsoft wants to trade with China, they can't stop sanctions.
I'm pretty sure it's also about being able to ban Github. China banned it once before in 2013 but had to unban it when developers complained that the ban interfered with their work
How long before this strategy backfires? When does the CCP hurt itself because it stifled innovation? When does it have political problems because it suppressed the wrong thing? I can't tell if this style of governing is super robust or a house of cards.
Probably very long. Given the success of the Chinese ecosystem compared to other regions on the globe, including a lot of democratic countries without significant limits on expression, it doesn't seem to be very important.
The first answer is that innovation can be channelled towards military or surveillance technology instead. The government has no problem with research into facial recognition, enterprise software, drones, and whatnot. Under the so called 'military-civil fusion' strategy its if anything encouraged and heavily bolstered.
Another point that has become fairly popular among the more conservative or nationalist Chinese intellectuals is that free expression in the workplace is if anything, harming the US because it's seen as divisive and hindering research. There were a lot of comments with negative overtones when it came to BLM, and stuff like the internal Google Maven protests. For a lot of nationalist Chinese commentators free expression in the West is seen as damaging state capacity and the ability of large firms to work effectively.
Discussions about the first amendment often elide its true purpose, keeping the government honest. One way that a lack of free speech can hurt a country is that smarter individuals are more likely to get arrested due to their greater innate capability to come up with novel-to-them ideas, some of which are "booby trapped" and get their originators arrested. However, the consequences of it being illegal to make practical attempts at changing the government truly come home to roost when officials realize that they can steal. The less ability citizens have to exchange information that threatens the authority of the regime, the less able they are to not be stolen from. The problem with that is, private economic activity needs resources, and officials tend to take all they can get. Again and again, in the history of countries around the world, the activity of many individuals given relatively small domains of authority has lead to the destruction of the nation's industrial capacity. Since it is impossible to question the bribe-taking of the inspector without questioning the legitimacy of the system who installed him, criminals within government quickly discover that they can do anything they want, so long as they keep their superiors happy, which is typically accomplished by making sure they get a cut of the proceeds.
If China's system is really "open source" then this is really dumb. Basically, they give out any innovations they create, while shielding themselves from any external innovation.
I don't see how this could possible benefit them over any measurable amount of time. Sure, they can do private repos for sensitive stuff, but the benefit of an open system like github is not in the closed off stuff... it is in the openness and propensity to inspire collaboration. Without the openness, they will only fall behind from the second they enable their one way information shield.
> If China's system is really "open source" then this is really dumb.
I get the sense from reading this that we're both aware that with China that won't be the case.
> Basically, they give out any innovations they create, while shielding themselves from any external innovation.
In a sense I feel like this relies on an exaggeration of the benefits and requirements of open source that most people in the west would have. Thinking about it right now I can see two questions.
1) Do we really need a free and open (as in free speech) internet to bring many people's code contributions and skills together?
2) Is having a walled off system actually better, on the reasoning that developers in China make the best "chinese software" (meaning software that will do well in or be useful to China)?
I think the answer to the first is that the need for free speech for open source at first seems necessary, and is certainly still helpful, but not ultimately needed for this to work. China can block topics like on any other site and chances are the people that still want to contribute ultimately will, just like people still use Wechat, Baidu, etc. I would think that as it stands you can still have a large group of hard-working contributors without some 'sensitive' topics coming up. I really think that the benefits of the open source model aren't as tied to the principles of western countries as a lot of people would initially assume, myself included.
The second question might be worth looking into some more, in terms of market research and what is successful in China. Plus Chinese developers are probably more used to having to work with the government in regards to censorship and surveillance, which GitHub could shut the doors on pretty fast.
Either way I don't think that having restricted topics is going to cripple the benefits of having a much larger contributor/talent pool and open source code. Not having freedoms isn't as good of course but I don't think open source software depends on them as much as some might say.
They seem to be doing pretty well, economically-speaking.
I suspect, so long as they can continue to provide good lives for their professional class, the country will continue to grow in world influence. The professionals that drive growth and innovation probably desire to live in a less authoritarian society, but life is generally good enough for them to remain complacent, and turn a blind-eye to injustice.
The Chinese people are not less ethical than any others and their government knows that. The way they keep people blind to injustice is to filter all narratives through the systematic surveillance of communications and push for more technology to control people's lives under the guise of convenience or the promotion of "social harmony".
> They seem to be doing pretty well, economically-speaking.
This is all relative. In an absolute sense, China's level of economic development on Bulgaria, Mexico or Kazakstan. They've had a long period of high growth, but that's only because of the abject poverty the Maoists left the country in. Before Deng's reforms, the country was essentially North Korea.
China's prosperity is much more of a "most-improved award" rather than a gold medal. Their current system has certainly proved better than Stalinism, but that's a pretty low bar. There's no reason to believe that Xi Jinping thought can produce an economy that in any way is competitive with liberal capitalist democracy.
Visiting China (Shanghai, Beijing, Nanking, Hangzhou) they all seemed like modern cities. Shops, restaurants, enormous shopping centers, coffeeshops, co-working spaces, theaters, bars, dance clubs, etc... Other than knowing I happened to be in China it certainly appear that in day to day life things are pretty good and the experience of living is similar to living in any modern western city.
Beijing[1], as China's richest city and capitol, has a GDP per capita is $38,000. That's comparable to the GDP per capita found in other middle income capitals, like Istanbul[2] ($45k) or Mexico City[3] ($43k)[3] or Bangkok[4] ($36k).
Certainly substantially behind the level of development found in the capitols of highly developed nations, like Washington DC[5] ($85k), London ($74k), or Tokyo[6] ($69k).
What is the GDP PPP of Beijing vs New York, San Franciso, or Chicago? GDP Nominal is not a good indicator here in a country which seems to be devaluing it's currency willingly or unwillingly.
The Chinese numbers are from 2019. The American numbers are from 2015. If anything the comparison strongly disadvantages the US, since there was robust growth in the latter half of the decade.
Can you use a single source that contains the numbers for both China and the US, please? For such data points that have a lot of very different possible methodologies it's quite important to use the same source or ensure that the methodology is exactly the same.
I think that is an unreasonable request for rigor for a casual internet forum comment. That amount of rigor you have to pay for, and at this point I think it's reasonable for you to do your own research and present such normalized numbers.
It really isn't much to ask for. If you're making arguments based on really really shaky data you should not be making them at all. Comparing OECD regions to Chinese administrative metro areas is really quite absurd. The variance in Montréal for example depending on what you call a city can be almost 2x.
For example, if you take the Tokyo Metro Area, you find a GDP per capita of 48k, with a PPP ratio of 0.98 we get 48k USD PPP.
Comparing it to the Beijing Metro Area you have a 39k USD PPP.
This took around 4 minutes to do for the two cities, so I really don't think it's a quantity of rigor you should pay for, nor an unreasonable amount of scrutiny for an internet comment at all. I was just trying to get the commenter to realize the issue with using two completely different data series in a comparison.
You can also compare for example Jiangsu and South Kanto to find similar numbers.
> It really isn't much to ask for. If you're making arguments based on really really shaky data you should not be making them at all.
Can you demonstrate your principles with your other comment [0], by using “a single source that contains the numbers” of many of the countries and claims you mentioned in that comment?
Funny how you asked others to “use a single source that contains the numbers”, and yet you make arguments without providing any sources, as you did in your other comment I linked above.
How do we know your arguments aren’t “based on really really shaky data”?
No one provided sources here. A partial source was provided by the other commenter. But if you ask, the source for inflation control is OECD inflation data, the source for Tokyo GTA GDP per capita is Wikipedia/SCMP, and the source for Beijing administrative region GDP is official national numbers.
China's newfound prosperity is HEAVILY concentrated in ~100 huge cities. Smaller cities are poorer but livable like eastern europe. The countryside is basically a third world country.
Traveling through US or Europe you won't find people living in cinderblock shacks with a dirt floor and no plumbing. In China it's still the norm outside of cities.
There's not anybody starving to death, but I wouldn't consider China a wealthy country, not even close. There's very wealthy areas but a large fraction of the population still survives on a few thousand dollars a year.
Nobody in the US is starving. It's just not possible. The government will give you $200 a month for food and there's free meals for the poor in every major city.
I've never met a homeless person that was starving and many of them turn down free food because they don't need it.
As far as outsourcing, look what China is doing in Africa. Plenty of outsourcing in appalling conditions
1st tier China cities only host 5% of China's population.
What outside people don't see, and especially ones who thump their chests thinking they've seen all of China by being to some small town is that china has probably thousand times more of such small towns, and villages than 1m+ cities. And these are where most of Chinese live.
There are still many places in China with such level of destitution where even moving to a township centre from a village is an achievement of a lifetime to an average person.
Looking only at the cities, and especially tier one/tier two cities, is not a great way to get a picture of the real-world living conditions of the average person in China.
While it is true that hundreds of millions of Chinese live moderately prosperous lives, and enjoy many of the same luxuries that people in developed countries do, there are also hundreds of millions of Chinese who are still living in relative poverty (both relative to people in developed countries, and relative to the country's own urban, educated class).
In November last year the government declared that they had met their target to lift all of China out of extreme poverty by 2020, but that just means that nobody lives on a dollar a day any more. There are still a lot of subsistence farmers in rural areas, and there is still a large underclass that powers the urban economy by working for very low wages in factories, on delivery routes and so on.
China has come a long way in a relatively short period of time, and that's worth applauding, but it still faces some big challenges in raising the quality of life for all its citizens. I'm not an economist, but I expect that there will be a point where the growth can't continue because there won't be enough of an underclass to provide all the services that the current "middle" class takes for granted. I think the government is hoping that by that point either automation or outsourcing will be able to fill the gap.
> economy that in any way is competitive with liberal capitalist democracy.
Fixation on only economy and relative development indexes distract from the measure that matter: comprehensive national power or other similar composite measures. Apart from 1st rate turbojets engines and semiconductors, China has indigenous capability for nearly every sector. Compared to US, no other country is remotely competitive in a comprehensive sense. Relative measures only disguises how far China has come in terms of national capabilities, very few countries have: indigenous nuke, space, military, light/heavy industries, tech, media etc. When US policy makers reference peer competition, it's not referring to other OECD countries, it's referring to China because no one else has similar levels of comprehensive hard/soft power to remotely matter.
"Most improved" hides the fact that China holds the silver medal after brief development period, or that the gap between gold and silver are closer than gap between bronze and no-name junior varsity bench player. In that sense, the Chinese system (tuned to specific Chinese conditions) has already out competed nearly everyone else when considering aggregate factors to general power which enables prosperity. The question is whether Xi thought can make China competitive enough with US to create multipolar world. Seeing as to how everyone is hedging against Sino/US coldwar, right now it's seems to be between strong maybe and probably. Ultimately, Chinese scales means never reaching per capita parity can still outcompete in general. Doing so as middle income country with massive income disparity and relative easier gains only works in Xi's favour.
> There's no reason to believe that Xi Jinping thought can produce an economy that in any way is competitive with liberal capitalist democracy.
Isn't it already? Speaking broadly of economic trends for the past 30 years, China has dominated manufacturing, at levels of increasing sophistication. To the extent it's running into issues, it's been a victim of its own success: laborers in China are increasingly too expensive for China to be a cost effective exporter at the low end. And in exchange it's developed Shenzhen, which has pretty much no competition in its niche. And as far as tech goes, on the whole China is still behind the USA, but at the same time solidly ahead of every other country. The entirety of the EU area doesn't have a Baidu or Bytedance, let alone a Tencent or Alibaba.
You're confusing having a very large population at middle income for being a developed country. China is four times larger than the largest developed nation. Even at Bulgaria-level income development, that guarantees that they'll "dominate" most aggregate measurements. Doesn't really say anything about the success of their economy.
Even within their area of strength, manufacturing, China severely lags the liberal democracies. On a per capita basis, its manufacturing output is more than three times lower than Japan, Germany, Switzerland, Korea, Sweden or the Netherlands. It even produces less than half per capita as the US or UK, who don't even specialize in manufacturing. China is barely above Brazil or Turkey on a per capita metric.
And outside manufacturing, China's level of development is abysmal. It produces virtually nothing competitive in the service sector. China exports essentially zero financial services, media, software, professional services, or travel services. China has internally developed barely any internationally successful pharmaceuticals, Internet properties, film or television franchises, marketable brand names, banking franchises, auto models, jet aircraft, or microprocessors.
The success of China's tech companies is almost certainly because the Chinese government doesn't allow much stronger American competitors to enter the market. The reason Europe doesn't have a Baidu is because Google was allowed to compete in Europe. The entire Chinese tech industry's sole global success has been TikTok. The inability to compete on the global market proves that the Chinese tech industry does not measure up to their American counterparts. This is corroborated by the fact that not a single major software project has ever come out of China.
Yes, China punches under its weight in software, and yes, China's services are not particularly visible in the US, but I assure you they're already making a huge impact, particularly in the developing world, and that impact is only going to growing in the next 5-10 years.
Alibaba/Aliexpress are massive for consumer online shopping, particularly in Russia & Eastern Europe. Alipay payments are increasingly accepted across SE Asia. JD.com (which nobody ever hears about, but is considerably larger than Ali) operates directly and indirectly in many SE Asian countries.
Tencent Games owns and operates a huge slew of globally popular games, including Fortnite, League of Legends, the Supercell suite (Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans etc). Yes, most of these games are still produced primarily in the West, but for long?
Trip.com has been run out of China since 2017 since it was acquired by Ctrip. Meituan/Dianping dominate food delivery in China and are started to branch out to other markets like Australia and Singapore.
DJI I think is another good example of chinese tech exports. Phone & TV manufacturers also do a lot of exporting, huawei makes some of the best cell phone cameras out there and if we don't count that then we can't count samsung's TV & handset tech exporting too, which is responsible for a good chunk of south korea's exports in general.
> Speaking broadly of economic trends for the past 30 years, China has dominated manufacturing, at levels of increasing sophistication. To the extent it's running into issues, it's been a victim of its own success: laborers in China are increasingly too expensive for China to be a cost effective exporter at the low end.
That’s just it. It’s grown because it had massive amounts of cheap labour but now it doesn’t. Can they transition into a competitive economy up the food chain?
It's not just most-improved, it's actually the best economic system in large countries (thus more easily corrupt) that were not benefactors of classical imperialism if all you care about is development. This is simply an incontrovertible fact - India, Nigeria, Congo, etc... were in similar initial conditions and fared much worse economically.
Far from being worse than liberal capitalist economies - which are the majority of the world - it's 73 in GDP PPP per capita out of 193 - solidly above average.
It's also not had a period of high growth, it is still having a period of high growth, with 2.4% growth in 2020 which is by far the highest out of all major economies, and a predicted 7.3% next year. This is better than a lot of low income countries, coming from a medium-high income country.
It's also set on escaping the middle income trap in 2-5 years as GDP per capita goes above 12500$, which is something that most liberal capitalist economies cannot achieve.
So no, it's really not just in relative sense. In performance with its current position, it really is doing better than alternate models of liberal capitalism, and by quite a margin.
I don't support the political reality that makes it work at all, but it is clear that liberal capitalism is not the undisputed king anymore.
>It's not just most-improved, it's actually the best economic system in large countries (thus more easily corrupt) that were not benefactors of classical imperialism if all you care about is development. This is simply an incontrovertible fact - India, Nigeria, Congo, etc... were in similar initial conditions and fared much worse economically.
Compared to countries with a similar culture/demographics: Hong Kong, Korea, Singaporem Japan and Taiwan, mainland China's growth has been way slower.
>It's also set on escaping the middle income trap in 2-5 years as GDP per capita goes above 12500$, which is something that most liberal capitalist economies cannot achieve.
This is still only around a fourth of the GDP per capita in the other East Asian countries.
Mainland China's growth has been much slower because the madness of Mao's misrule set the country back by several decades. If you compare the country's growth since Deng Xiaoping took over and started reforming in the early 1980s, it compares much more favorably.
Japan was a benefactor of Imperialism - its like comparing Algeria and France. Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are city states and completely incomparable, and South Korea also heavily used state capitalism and incredibly non-liberal policies until it got richer than where China is at right now. It's also a much smaller country.
As for the rest, you're completely missing the point. Liberal capitalism's single greatest issue for the developing world is the middle income trap.
Credit is due for taking advantage of the west's naivete and greed.
Most-favored-nation (MFN) trade status renewal came with conditions. Few if any were met by CCP China and yet American administrations continually renewed MFN for CCP China. Ultimately President Bush (#43) made it permanent.
They opened the door that enabled CCP China to drink the West's milkshake.
This does not bear out in the data - of 60+% employment in the public sector as well as higher performance than (much more) liberal capitalist countries.
I'm sure it's hurting CCP right now. Being closed off from the rest of the world does have its consequences.
It probably just doesn't hurt CCP enough to matter in the short term. It'll probably take closer to half a century before we can truly understand if the cumulative effects of the pain will amount to anything significant.
Silicon Valley is infamous at this point for running loss leaders to lock people into their ecosystem with the expectation of being able to milk people dry later. The fact that the services are "worth the money" doesn't mean it's economically in China's interests to allow for easy access to them.
Well yes but China has its own replacements that are worth even more to the purchasers because they are highly localized, to a degree that a multi-language global product would never be able to accomplish.
Given that China already has its own equivalent of Facebook and Google, possibly backed by the government. Penetrating that market may prove to be a significant challenge.
That's the parent comment's point: closing the doors led to them being able to build and establish that in-house stuff instead of sending money to other countries...
Possibly never. The reason China's isolationist policies work is their massive population is big enough to form a mini world without a ton of knowledge gaps.
The US and maybe western Europe could be in a similar position, if they wanted to.
IMO the reason you don't want to be isolationist(as a big country) is more about political clout than tech. China has no "soft power" because their firewall works both ways.
The US and western Europe have military prescence and political allies worldwide because the free flow of information and technology fosters all sorts of political, corporate, and cultural mixing.
What influence China has on its neighbors (and worldwide to an extent) is maintained through pressure and threats, because frankly, their ultra nationalist policies just don't make many friends. I personally don't think this is sustainable long term but it is yet to be seen. Instead of allies wanting you to succeed, other nations are encouraged to obstruct as much as possible to weaken you and your unwelcome influence. You can see this unfolding in the last few years with increasing tariff and trade restrictions on China. And I don't see it letting up until Xi is out
>Love how you robbed the Intercom content and css 1:1 and still being upvoted. Well, all the best with sales.
>Thank you for your reply. Intercom is way more advanced. About clone, All big companies take design and ideas from each other, without any issues. So am not new to game.
t "Picasso had a saying -- 'good artists copy; great artists steal' -- and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." Steve Jobs
China is through the period of easy gains in their economic expansion from the days of early developing nation status. The next 10-20 years will answer your question (including, critically, what Xi does from here forward and what comes after Xi). If their model stifles - and or to the extent that it does - it'll become apparent as economic gains get increasingly difficult going forward and the segments they begin to compete in are much more challenging (the US in software, Germany in high-value manufacturing, going after semiconductors, aerospace, building quality automobiles, et al.). There have been potent signs all across their economy for numerous years now that growth has become far harder and more expensive to acquire, how innovation maps to that context will be interesting to watch.
Their style of governing is very clearly not super robust. If it were they wouldn't need to so extremely tightly control their people in every possible manner. They regularly reveal how fragile the system is in their behavior, including how very easily their party ego is injured (which partially reveals how fragile they view their own position, that they're so obsessed with maintaining the facade of omnipotence; they fear any cracks). That also doesn't mean it's a house of cards, the CCP has proven they have staying power, even if it's expensive ground to hold.
If the US hadn't retreated from diplomacy in favor of acting more like a mob boss, China would have been hurt far more. Most countries are looking to move away from Australia, but the absence of a countervailing power is what's stopping them.
Alternatively, the CCP got more aggressive with their suppressive tactics because of the US's diplomatic retreat, but I dont think this is the case. I think the CCP's behavior is a natural consequence of Xi Jinping basically giving himself a life term. With no opportunity to ever lead the party through a peaceful transfer of power, all the leadership hopefuls will probably be looking for alternative solutions. And even if they aren't, Xi is almost certainly gonna be paranoid that they are, and that would mean increasingly severe crackdowns on the people of the country.
They do not need their own innovation, that would require pesky freedoms, they can just steal it from freer societies. China has been been very good at keeping their cake and eating it for 30 years.
Flip the perception: In China, US govt doesn't have MS levels of access to info, potentially including protected user data & non-public hosting /admin data.
Even if that's not the case, being in China avoids (most?) NSA choke points.
Thanks for the clarification, that makes more sense.
Personally, I would think microsoft would be easier to "motivate" to share given they probably have more investments in china which could be used as leverage.
I thought the opposite, they are afraid github will block some Chinese software because of political reasons, the same way happened now with Trump supporting companies. I can understand the reasoning and I think more and more people will try to find alternatives to big tech, especially if their politics is not aligned with SV taste du jour.
flamebait, that is a great word mashup that conveys a lot. Clickbait for starting a comment flamewar, never saw that one before. Gonna keep an eye out for these things with this lens.
yeah agreed, i don't think they are connecting the dots. they are missing large sections of knowledge that would protect them and the lives of those around them. but for some odd reason they have mental blocks when trying to help them out flawed framework
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
That applies 10x when said accounts are breaking the rules, as you've unfortunately been doing. If you want to pick one account and want to commit to following the rules, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and let us know which username you want to use.
The idea of China wanting an open source platform like GitHub is akin to Adolf Hitler starting The Nazi Center for Jewish Appreciation & Cultural Enrichment.
No, Charlie. For the hundredth time, Jewish people were not sent to vocational training camps for violent extremism during WWII. Uyghur are also not being killed. Nice "backbone" tho.
> China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way.
All of our jobs and companies are at risk. China has far more software engineers than we do, all willing to work 996. They'll steal our tech and our data until they're ahead, then shut us off.
We already lost our manufacturing industry. Our tech, entertainment, knowledge, and capital are next. China has bought our biggest gaming and media companies.
We need to shut the CCP off. Yesterday.
Biden needs to create easy immigration programs for Hong Kong and mainland residents.
The recent Capitol shit show needs to be quickly dealt with and we need to take back our leadership role. Our image matters.
Hollywood needs to step in line and stop kowtowing. Where's the
"Chernobyl" series equivalent for Tiananmen? The Tibetans and Uyghurs?
This is the most important issue of our time.
I know the Chinese loyalists and many Europeans that hate the US are going to downvote me, but this should be the priority of all democracies. If the CCP reaches the top, it imperils democracy.
They are hardly willing to work 996. Extreme opposition is mounting, and a lot - maybe most - of the younger generation of programmers soft-strike by not doing anything work related at all after 4-5pm. Because of relatively generous firing protection and a lack of programmers they generally get away with it too.
This is actually a big reason why most Chinese people didn't care about the CCP going after Jack Ma, 996 is extremely unpopular.
That said, given the shortage of programmers, being willing to work unreasonable and frankly unproductive hours is not a sufficient deterrent to competitiveness.
America is manufacturing more than it ever has. It’s producing more cars, trucks, airplanes, semiconductors, software, and military weapons than ever. It’s at historical highs. Oh and, it’s also highly mechanized and done by machines now.
When did America lose entertainment to China? Back in the 90s and 00s, western people thought that China was going to steal all of Hollywood’s movies. But what happened instead? It turns out Hollywood movies are shit. The same boring stories, played by the same white actors. In a multicultural world, all the Hollywood actors are white. Why? Someone here is clueless, and it’s not the Chinese.
It turns out, that the Chinese don’t care to watch western movies. Star Wars was a flop. All the major Hollywood blockbusters flopped in China. What happened instead? The Chinese people wanted to watch movies filled with people that looked like themselves. Movies that actually had multicultural people. Movies that had Chinese people in it. And it turns out, their movies are getting pretty good. You, as a westerner might not like their movies, but your opinion doesn’t matter here, since you’re not the target market for this money.
And ironically, for a guy that professes the virtues of democracy, you’re talking about suppressing the Trump supporters, all 75 million of them that voted for him.
Did it occur to you that the Chinese don’t care about your democracy? You can vote for whoever you want. You can have all the gay rights you want. You can have all the abortion or pro-life you want. You can protest your leaders, or mock them all you want. All irrelevant to the Chinese and to the CCP.
What does the Chinese want? They just want to trade with you. And they’re willing to send their children to your schools and universities to learn English and your culture. At least before Trump threw this all away, and poisoned the well.
Did it occur to you, that the Russians are playing you instead? They’re sitting back and laughing now from the comedy of the past 4 years.
Thing is that in the big picture, it's not just that China is building a replacement for GitHub. China is building a replacement for everything that matters and accelerates their transition to be the Super Power. And they have been doing so for last 30 years, just that now it's hitting a critical mass and world is waking up to it.
And I think, we, The West, have been getting it wrong. We are looking at China like a jealous neighbor, pushing back politically, through regulations and sanctions. Unfortunately that can only go so far. Thing is China is obsessed (and determined) about progressing and West is obsessed about protecting what it already has.
America needs to be obsessed about creating and innovating. Hard creation and innovation on a scale never seen before - like 1000x the man-on-the-moon scale.
the last time the west only managed to "win" the moon race because it was competing against financially poor and poorly managed soviet state(all key brains behind soviet space program were released from gulag just to work on it and knew that if they will not please their masters they will go back to gulag and die. the greatest motivation of all time)
china now is a lot more sane people that don't mess with politics/publicity enjoy comparable levels of freedoms to the west(In a lot of cases more economic freedom but in all cases no political freedoms) which makes them much more likely to succeed competing against corrupt west as it is now
Incorrect, and that’s a common misconception. There are countries with way cheaper labor. China now has the manufacturing knowhow and eco system no other countries can compete. That’s it’s power
I can't help but wonder if such an attempt would even work.
Unless I am misunderstanding the culture that makes an open source ecosystem work, a free and open exchange of information and ideas is one of those fundamental things. When a thing is broken, sometimes you have to tell an authority the horribly embarrassing fact that the thing is broken. With the CCP controlling all information flows and what is or is not fact, then ISTM that pointing out that The Peoples' Authentication Protocol is fundamentally flawed and insecure could get one disappeared just as likely as it would get the protocol fixed.
There are a lot of people in China, and most don't speak good English. Free exchange is thus already limited before we even get into censorship. The large number of people in China means they have the potential to create a new ecosystem. They just need to get a few of their own people to start it, and then let things grow. I don't know if they can pull it off, but they have enough people to at least make a good try at it.
I fear it can work. I think despite our distaste for some of the censorship that will occur when it comes to social control and etc, ultimately the meat of github and open source would be entirely functional within a CCP run context.
Bug reports about a particular project? Provide a particular leader isn't embarrassed I don't expect anyone to care. I suspect they'd let the engineers fight it out and only care about the output.
If anything social media faces bigger censorship concerns in China... but social media does just fine...
I think you're right. There's been this long held belief that you can't create the level of prosperity seen in the U.S. and Europe without having a free(ish) and open society. China is showing everyone that there's another way to do it. I don't know why people keep underestimating China and the CCP.
It’s worth pointing out that almost everything China has accomplished during this period of growth has been about aggressively adopting practices and technologies that were developed in Europe and the US.
What happens now that they have succeeded at this, remains to be seen.
I think this is just following the chain of what's just been happening in China with software.
Americas/Europe has Google? We'll make our own that the CCP can control
Americas/Europe has Uber? We'll make our own that the CCP can control.
Americas/Europe has GitHub? ...You see where this is going.
Those are all US companies. What does Europe have to do with them?
And like it's been noted many times before here, had Europe banned US companies like China had, maybe they would have a stronger software development culture, and they could control their own data instead of handing over everything to the US.
I'm pretty sure there's gonna be a fork of all major projects on GitHub on that site, so that developers inside the wall can use the site exclusively. Chances are the forks are going to be updated with actual code from GitHub from time to time.
If you go back to the rhetoric of the Clinton-era the belief was that the Internet and Capitalism would "free" China from authoritarian rule. Instead, the authoritarians managed to co-opt both and gain further leverage abroad. They can't do everything, but don't bet against the Chinese accomplishing a lot of what the West thinks is based on "free and open exchange" via responsive authoritarianism.
After Iran and many non Iranian businesses which have been cut off from GitHub because of an Iranian holiday or single employee I’m not surprised. In fact, any business critical service, such as GitHub and cloud hosting providers should have national or at least continental providers. Nobody would complain if China was to develop its own national electric grid or telecommunications infrastructure, because it seems obvious that these services shouldn’t be at the whim of a foreign nation. Guess what, cloud infrastructure powering million dollar businesses fall in the same category. The US has lost all trust to us, not just to Eastern nations but also in Europe we don’t want to expose ourselves unnecessarily anymore.
It’s interesting how people focusing on Github representing the spirit of free information and an open internet, while the very same Github blocking Iran developers’ work, breaking every good ‘virtue’ it calls itself stands for, not even mention it’s just another American company, bounded by American laws, which means your data is forever at stake, if yourself, your country, being targeted by the USA, or the company it self. No one can stand that right? In fact, no one should put his data solely on a hosted platform out of his control, worrying one day even not being able to access it just because he’s not one of them who controls. You can social interact, share, collaborate on such platform like GitHub, but I think it’s completely logical and understandable trying to protect your data by building your own platform or storage no? Or should Github, or the US dominate all code hosting?
Sometimes, people write as if the authorities in China really believe they can e.g. cease to teach people how to read and write, and speak a common tongue.
I know nobody here is quite that stupid, (although it bears mentioning the more theocratically regressive nation states we have around the world do actually do this, to women) -So this is at some level only a rhetorical complaint.
People need to understand that the Federated Chinese provinces and national government and the party are in a complex web of relationships, and power struggles have been a constant since before 1949.
Git, and use of open-source models and methods is not deeply alien to the Chinese political system, any more than Samizdat was unique to Russia. Many of the things done during the cultural revolution depended on people passing information, sharing ideas. The chinese fear of information and passing information has a domestic, as well as an international quality is what I am trying to say here.
So, there will be oppositional views on the use of Git inside China, and there will be attempts to regulate behaviour in ways which are a poor fit for what Git expects? Sure!
I don't beleive this is like digital communications as a weapon of soft power, something which was actively promoted by the US department of state, and explains some of their abiding interest in Internet governance, worldwide. I think this is something the Chinese face, and brought into their own situation completely unaided.
Lest we forget, Git was invented by Linus Torvalds, a citizen of an economiy in the non-aligned states.
There's a growing trend of people who would are otherwise vocal supporters of open-source suddenly being suspicious when a government they don't like uses open-source technology for their own gain, without asking Westerners for permission first. That's kind of the point?
A lot of people act like Chinese people don't understand concepts like accountability, transparency or open dialogue and therefore any open-source tool will be doomed to fail if it isn't controlled by wiser Western interests.
Open-source either is an universal concept or it isn't. Yes, the Chinese government will probably want some degree of control over their platform and will suppress free speech that threatens them, and yes, that's bad. But that doesn't mean open-source stops being a desirable thing as soon as the Chinese are doing it.
I think that until China views the West as safe, it will continue to do these things. Chinese tend to view Westerners (Anglo/American in particular) as dodgy, yet charismatic, which is the reason for these trust issues.
Rooting this attitude is an observance of the events of the last fifty years. In others’ minds, Japan was competing pretty fairly, and beating the U.S. until the Paris accords. Russia was freed from communism, only to enter a 2nd-world decline in which it was mocked in major papers like the New York Times. The Iraq occupation, and the Arab Spring reinforced the distrust that the American goal of spreading its style of governance was more about itself than the rest of the world. It made for a good story, but it did not follow through. There is, above all, the inability of the third world to modernize under the American-supported capitalist framework.
The attitude given in the article is problematic because it doesn’t quite capture how Chinese engineers feel about this dynamic. It feels more like the narrative that Western Americans want to hear. I’ve gotten the impression that many feel that their government is overbearing. But I don’t get the sense that they trust what America says more. That’s a real legitimacy and credibility issue, and as we should know, politics is rooted in legitimacy. More one-sided criticism of China’s strategy is not going to help America’s case. It feels dodgy, too good to be true.
it would be interesting to see how the phrase “the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak” looks when cycled through multiple translations and then back again into english.
Honestly, I do wonder if there is an alternative community out there. I know nothing about the Chinese Internet. One of my friends had 20k followers on his Twitter-equivalent and he seemed like an unassuming fellow. That's a large number.
It probably is going to be very slow, all in Chinese, welcome code written in Chinese characters and commented in Chinese (English is not my native language yet I believe code should always be written and commented in English).
Useful cultural accompaniment reading; Bunnie on gongkai, the culture of idea sharing that is prevalent in Shenzhen manufacturing. It's not open source but it's similar.
I'm sure they've always wanted this - but recent events likely made it a glaring necessity in their eyes. When Apple and Google app stores removed Parler it was a big deal, a bigger deal was AWS deplatforming them - a logical step further would be removing the hosted source code. I'm in no way commenting on whether it would be right or wrong, but its not hard to imagine a scenario where company morals begin to come into play here.
I don't think the CCP cares about an obscure American social network. They know they have a dependency on American software & software distribution mechanisms, & have known far longer than Parler has been around.
The obscure American social network is not the interesting bit of information. It's that the infrastructure and delivery corporations decided overnight not to support a customer for not aligning with their values.
This is why China used the GFW to grow Alibaba Cloud, Tencent, WeChat and more that provide more than sufficient infrastructure and delivery, from servers to payment processors, and currently has almost-good-enough alternatives for the silicon down to the foundry level.
That's a good point. They probably want their own Github as much to control it but also so they won't suffer consequences from embargos like when Iran was blocked just recently
> “Gitee’s future depends on attracting quality open source projects onto its platform, from both in and outside of China, which in turn attracts developers from both China and elsewhere to collaborate and contribute,” Kevin Xu.
Many people (and I think including Xu) are not super optimistic about this.
What is stifling the Chinese software microcosmos from springing up great open-source projects like linux, reactjs, keras, ror, etc, is the 996 culture[1], bad wages, and backward management that are encouraged and enforced in (most) Chinese software companies. (Perchance a feature and not a bug under the current settings of the country's econcomical and political system?)
It'll be interesting to see many years down the road how much initutives like this will help to introduce a gradual paradim shift in the Chinese tech scene into a more liberaltarian one.
The 996 culture might stop people working on opensource in their spare time... But it won't stop companies releasing opensource projects.
So far there isn't much opensource written in China. I suspect because by keeping everything "closed source but easily stolen", it advantages innovation within China but prevents US companies using the same tech.
> So far there isn't much opensource written in China
There are lots of opensource written in China.
I think you have mistaken my stance on this. The Chinese open-source microcosmos are pretty cool. It's just that I have yet seen anything reactjs-great[1], let alone linux-great.
[1]: For example, vuejs (https://github.com/vuejs/vue) is closed to being reactjs-great. It is by Evan You who is now New Jersey-based (though looks like he's quite involved in the Chinese tech scene which is pretty intriguing)
Remember that Chinese companies and peoples also contributed heavily to "Western" Open Source, from Linux kernel to Apache Spark. It should be a borderless world in Open Source ecosystem.
This is weird, considering Mongo changed their licensing because of Chinese cloud providers if I remember correctly. I don't know if people will merely blindly trust a GitHub rival ran by a foreign government as opposed to an organic startup, the only upside is for people in countries that are not allowed on GitHub.
And then you have to question why a foreign country would allow the new solution and not GitHub... it seems like it might be used by people used to a certain set of restrictions on them online, while others used to more liberal information flows would not.
> The problem is that this organic startup is now a enterprise behemoth that can be trusted as much as CCP: Microsoft.
Remind me again when MS killed millions of people and committed genocide? I mean, Windows is horrible, but this is a bit much.
I apologize for the snark (I really don't think it's a good way to communicate) but this is a shockingly bad opinion. Comparing a bad company to a totalitarian regime that routinely abuses human rights cheapens real suffering and numbs people to real tragedy.
Both of them can't be trusted the same way, at least if you are not American. If you are american ok, you have a government similar to CCP to defend you. Me? my government "willingly" shutdown open source projects to use Microsoft services. CCP never did something similar, so yeah, Microsoft can be worse than CCP in many ways.
Git and other resources are subject to US sanctions just like anyone else. They are the logical next step since the started making a fuss over mobile phone makers, networks providers, chip makers etc.
IANAL, but my understanding is that this is not true. Free software is not sanctioned. Commercial contracts that revolve around it are however. For example I think Huawei can still use AOSP, but cannot licence play services because they require a commercial agreement.
I think Trump just proved that America can do whatever the f*ck it wants, and the rest of the world must comply, or risk facing sanctions or gunboats.
They can even force GNU open source to declare that this code is open source, except for non-democratic countries, such as China.
You, as an American citizen, are still under the legal jurisdiction of the long arm of federal laws.
They can probably even declare that all programs written in C or C++, are in effect, under American jurisdiction. Or even code that is encoded into x86 assembly, will be under American jurisdiction. And we know that all code written in China, uses the C programming language, as they have never developed their own technology stack.
In order to avoid this fate, then China must rip out everything from their country that has American technology, and develop their own technology stack, down to the ISA (Instruction Set Architecture). They cannot even use ARM or RISC-V, they must develop their own ISA, and call it CNA-1.
Then, they would have to develop their own programming language on top of this. Then their own operating system, and application software, to replace all American technology.
GitHub tied to their Social Credit System would be a scary thing. I actually wish I was joking, but given the other things it takes as inputs, this would be obvious.
If they're going to do that, couldn't they at least improve upon GitHub in some meaningful way (perhaps tailored towards their culture)? Looking at its repos, it's a literal GitHub clone.... totally shameless copy.
wow. they even copied the contribution map. Is it also cloning github repos and hosting on gitee? Why does US gov put up with this crazy wholesale censorship and copying?
Code on github is open source, so copying is supposed to and expected to occur. The copyrights of the various projects on github are held by their respective authors, not by the US government. These authors have chosen to permit and encourage copying of their code.
Many of these authors are not even American citizens or residents.
Not all of it. A lot of code is uploaded without specifying a license, in which case the only granted rights are those required by the github terms of service. I don't remember the details, but think the ToS mainly allowed downloads and forking on github.
I only know from friends living there, take anything I say as speculations, but what I gather is that they see open source as a technical advantage over starting from scratch, it's not a spontaneous movement.
it makes sense from the point of view of a country that has gained a leading position worldwide from accurately reproducing something that already existed.
judging from the number of Linux distro they are releasing I think they are pretty serious about it.
Exactly. Reimplementing GitHub is not building a rival to GitHub. Like Wikipedia the value isn’t in the platform but the content hosted by the platform. Until there is a critical mass of open source software hosted Chinese GitHub provides very little value.
In the west we had a critical mass of open source software and then built GitHub. This is putting the cart before the horse.
The simple reason - you don't trust the host to keep your content up if it infringe's on anything deem it to infringe upon. 100% would never host anything up there.
Do you trust AWS? Azure? If you fear the state, the risk is the same. You can for example mirror your gitlab repository there. I think you are being to radical.
Well hosting a mirror from my open source project don't make me endorse any regime. I host my code in github and gitlab not because I endorse their countries. Your code being hosted there supports the local people there, developers that, like you and me, just want to survive and ship code.
lol look at the dubious site name : "Restofworld" sorry China, its the Rest of the world that doesn't live under your oppression. It's so funny how they try so hard to just deny and reverse claims.
Actually, if you want to send large amounts of text information to users in China right now, Github is probably one of the better ways. Unfortunately probably not for long!