NaibofTabr

AI is a surveillance technology.

VPNs as a technology might not be illegal but circumventing the firewall certainly is.

Unless you are very vocal and high profile person no one will black bag you in a country of billion people, lol.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding about how things work in an authoritarian system. Sure, you might fly under the radar for awhile, but if you call attention to yourself (say, by getting caught trying to bypass the government firewall) and you are not high-profile, then it is very low-effort to make you disappear. Few will notice, and those that do will stay silent out of fear.

If you are more high-profile you still get black-bagged, you just get released after, with your behavior suitably modified.

Naomi Wu no longer uploads to YouTube.

Depends - how many family members do you have that the PRC might use against you? or who would miss you if the PRC black bagged you?

And there are hundreds if not thousands of them, plus a lot of automated tooling.

futuristic technology

In which case anyone who wants to can read the message traffic and make changes to it before passing it on to the receiver.

No, you can't conduct business this way.

No one can bank online without reliable encryption. No one can transact business online without reliable encryption.

throwing a wrench into the US industry right now is a pretty good deal.

This is the part I don't really get - they've spent decades working to control these resources, and I can't really see what benefit they get from this that offsets that time and effort.

Manipulating the flow and the prices makes sense. Cutting it off entirely just to participate in a dick-measuring contest with the US really doesn't make any sense. Nations are already looking at moving their supply chains especially for electronics after all the COVID disruptions. Encouraging those nations to go looking elsewhere for the entire supply chain just loses you business and influence, no matter how much short-term cost you inflict.

This is kind of interesting... China has been working on monopolizing sources of raw materials for awhile now, and putting them on the market cheap so that they become the de facto supplier, making it difficult or impossible for any other sources to be developed.

But... there are other sources of things like lithium and cobalt, it's just been cheaper to buy it from China so everyone does.

Cutting off the supply will cause some slow-downs and a bit of chaos in the short term but what will happen is local sources will suddenly become worth developing. What this does is effectively burn a big piece of China's economic power... I wonder what they're getting out of it right now? The impact won't last very long.

It is now...

Isn't there a beach over there with a mountain of used tires?

History never repeats, but it often rhymes.