this post was submitted on 20 Jul 2025
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Buddy, I lived there for years. My sources are the hundreds of Chinese people I spoke to in their native tongue for years. Not the propaganda from my country. True, SOME Chinese people have VPNs. Most do not.
And I think the more poignant question is this. Why do they need a VPN to access the wider internet in the first place?
Stop with the pedantic BS. MOST do not use VPNs to get around censorship because MOST do not have a VPN. So again, why do the Chinese need a VPN to access the wider internet?
And there's more to the internet to social media.
Not all internet outside of China is Western. I'll give you an example. My wife was a cross cultural communications teacher in China. She had her students pick countries outside of Asia to do a cultural report on. One student picked Poland for whatever reason. The Chinese internet, other than here is Poland on a map, it has this many people, and it's capital is Warsaw, had no other information, Literally nothing else.
So when you ask why they would need access it's because they deserve to be informed about the world around them. There is waayyyyyyy more to the internet than "fascist propaganda".
They also can't access the absolutely braindead remarks you're saying right now. Isn't that a travesty?
And you searched this inside China did you? What are you not getting? Even Chinese search engines inside China show different information then Chinese search engines outside china. It's a walled garden. You are out of your depth here. Go to bed.
Were you an English teacher?
Dude. They literally started the first comment with "I lived in China for 4 years". When you start trying to "um actually" people with years of first-hand experience, it might be time to reflect on your own biases
That doesn't mean that person is an expert on China just because they lived there. They could very well be wrong, and in fact they are. You don't have to take my word for it, the Brazilian YouTuber Felipe Durante has lived in China for years, and continues to do so, and he goes in the complete opposite direction than the person saying "I lived there and censorship no one knows anything" in this thread.
Why should I take this random person word instead of the one I can literally see is in China?
What hypocrisy?
What makes that hypocrisy, and how is that manifested in the comments you replied to?
"instead" is incorrect. They both do both, albeit to differing degrees.
Also you're quoting yourself, not caboose. How long have you lived in China? They lived in China and spoke to Chinese people in Chinese about their personal experiences with the Chinese information landscape. Where were they hypocritical?
And yeah, lots of Chinese people do [X], if [X] is a thing people do. There's like 2 billion of them. Even the most supportive source you could find said 75% don't use VPNs. Listen to the person with personal experience.
Nothing you said have anything to do with hypocrisy. You still haven't quoted them.
I didn't accept the accuracy of that figure, I just noted it as an upper bound. Absolute values aren't particularly useful in this kind of discussion. Any weird and obscure niche interest has millions of fans. What's relevant are proportions. I think numbers are probably much closer to 1:10. In a big country that's a lot of people, but it isn't anywhere near typical. Even 1:4 isn't typical, and that's an unexamined generous figure.
Do they have more personal experience with the US than you do? I only listen to them enough to figure out how they got where they are and how to prevent others from going there, but I've lived in the US for decades so I have my own expertise. How long have you personally lived in China?
Living in China doesn't make you an expert.
Tons of people who hate China live in China as "English teachers" because it's "easy" and stay within their own "expat" bubble.