China Practically Unreachable By Western SMS?

Ainsy writes "A friend of mine recently began a placement as an English pronunciation teacher in China. She has picked up a pay-as-you go sim for use over there, only to discover that China seems to have been almost completely overlooked by international communications agreements, specifically from the UK. A bit of snooping tells me that Vodafone is the only network from which it is possible to send SMS to a Chinese registered mobile phone. SMS in China is upscaling massively, and is incredibly cheap currently — even 'premium' SMS info services cost 1 Yuan (that's just £0.081 GBP). I'm curious why such a large section of the world market is cut off from the west's wireless communication networks especially with the recent Olympics putting the spotlight on the nation in general. China mobile is the world's largest carrier ranked by subscriber base (415 million) and isn't even the only carrier to operate in China). There are a few websites around from which SMS can be sent to China for a fee but this is of only limited use when on the move. Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Comments

Is this for real?

[shidarin'ou]

Can anyone tell me why this situation has come about and when we can expect this sort of service to be enabled?"

Here's an answer to your second question: NEVER

Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

Perhaps a more pragmatic answer would be that China will allow text messages to enter into the country when it's able to monitor and censor every text message, and connect a sender to a recipient with their name and current location (to allow for quick and easy arrests), and know who to detain when they enter the country.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

This is exactly what I thought. Blaming "the rest of the world" is idiotic. Sending SMSes to China requires a cross-connect agreement, which means both sides have to agree to connect. Why does the author think it's nothing to do with the Chinese themselves?

Re:Is this for real?

[Threni]

> Here's an answer to your first question: Why the hell would the people's republic of china suddenly want to let unfiltered, uncensored text
> messages into the country while it keeps an iron fist on what their citizens see and hear even over the internet?

There can't be an easier to control method of communication than SMS. You need a carrier in your country which delivers the messages to phones, which will be forced to allow monitoring; the messages are 160 characters each and text-only; the phone they're being sent to can be trivially geographically located etc. If you're going to keep a close eye on your subjects, you're going to watch to encourage SMS over any other system.

It's exactly like in the UK/US, where all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio) are controlled completely by their governments - there's no way of sending information without the authorities knowing who sent it to who. Encryption is something of a false hope, given that countries will either prohibit it or, slightly more sensibly, pass laws empowering courts to punish subjects for not revealing their passwords and/or decrypt the messages on demand.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is 8p (~15 cents) incredibly cheap?

Re:Is this for real?

[CountBrass]

"There can't be an easier to control method of communication than SMS." of course there is, don't allow it at all.

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because we know that SMS messages are way more valuable than a phone call or email.

Assuming you saying that with sarcasm... *Uncensored* SMS messages are inherently more valuable than a *censored* phone call or email...

Re:Is this for real?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps a more pragmatic answer would be that China will allow text messages to enter into the country when it's able to monitor and censor every text message....

No. A more pragmatic answer would be that SMS does not and probably will never support Chinese characters, or logograms of any kind. It probably doesn't even support languages written in Greek or Cyrillic characters. SMS can created by latin script societies, and like ASCII before it, probably makes the most possible use out of the fairly small latin character set.

Don't underestimate the impact of this problem. Recently, the German government embark on a multi billion euro effort to rewrite decades of government and other offical documents so as to remove the now "archaic" Eszett character and replace it with double "s"es ("ss"). When I studied German, only ten years ago, this character was still on the course. It was actually quite a useful little glyph, given the occurrence of double "s"es in the language.

But it's gone now. The reason is painfully evident. There is no Eszett character on the Qwerty keyboard or in the ASCII character set. The emergence of unicode was not enough to save it. It probably won't be the last casualty.

Things like accents, graves and umlauts will probably suffer the same fate. I remember meeting a young Sweedish office worker about problems with database inputs. Basically, customer names(the customers were also Sweedish) would often be missing umlauts on their "o"'s and the like. It emerged that the office worker inputting the names had no idea how to make an unlauted "o". The guy was a trained typist, from Sweeden, and he didn't know how to type letters of his own language using a Qwerty keyboard on an ASCII based PC. He wasn't alone.

These problems have emerged because computers were developed and are still being developed by english speakers and writers, for english speakers and writers. The computer industry was and is still centered in and on America, and other nations and speakers usually have to work around this. Rampant incompatibilities, lack of hardware support and a lack of resources and interest in the problem have lead to people, and governments, taking the easier option and just modifying their written languages to fit QWERTY and ASCII.

The Irish government in fact already did this for the Irish language as far back as 1948, in a sweeping spelling reform which moved the entire language from Gaelic script to the Latin alphabet. The move was so total that most Irish people (who admittedly don't speak irish very much anyway) do not even know that irish was ever written in anything other than latin script. This is probably a portent for the eventual fate of every other european written language, particularly smaller ones. They will change to fit ASCII/QWERTY, not the other way around.

So in short, no, SMS is not going to change. It's not going to support other characters and languages. Ever. And telephone companies are simply going to expect others to adapt their own written word to existing systems instead. The trouble is, while this may work for european languages, it is NOT going to work for Chinese and related languages. There are literally thousands of Chinese characters, and without them, speakers from different parts of the country will not be able to communicate at all as their spoken languages are in fact mutually unintelligible.

While anglophones are quick to suggest "Just Learn American!", that probably isn't going to work out so smoothly. If the western computer and telecommunications industry expects China to fit into the english/ASCII/QWERTY mould, they are probably going to be disappointed. The reality is that sooner or later, western tech is going to have to fit into the China mould. Otherwise, the Chinese will fill that mold themselves.

The quoted material is just blatantly incorrect and ignorant and based on misunderstanding of the reasons for spelling changes in various languages. It is really easy to enter esset and accented characters from a keyboard. The Swedish typist in question was incompetent. Sweden, Germany etc do not use qwerty keyboards. These locales have their own keyboard layouts.

Conspiracy

[maxume]

I do believe it is a conspiracy by telecom companies not to spend money on something that they don't anticipate making a profit from.

anonymous mail is possible

[davidwr]

It's exactly like in the UK/US, where all companies involved in communication (phone, parcels/mail, tv, radio)

In the US it is legal to send mail up to 13 ounces without a return address. It is legal to send mail over 13 ounces without a return address but you have to hand-deliver it to a post office box and your face will typically be caught on camera. That's to prevent bombs and the like, not contraband information.

In the USA, it's also legal to use a pay phone or a prepaid phone call without revealing your identity. You will reveal your location, so make sure you call from a relatively populated place that is devoid of cameras.

For some, anonymity is a valuable commodity: Some people are willing to pay $10-$20 for a single phone conversation in exchange for anonymity - that's the approximate cost of a cheap prepaid cell phone with 10-20 minutes of talk time.

Re:Shenanigans!

[Anonymous Coward]

Can western devices send SMS in a Chinese Characters set ? or must the Chinese recipient know Pin- Yin etc., How do Chinese to Chinese send SMS text?. What Character set is used?

So even if my USA device can do SMS , mine can only input ASCII English characters on my device, So how do I communicate with you
?

What's more surprising?

[exp(pi*sqrt(163))]

That one person who has trouble sending SMS to China thinks that their story is newsworthy, or that the /. editors accepted it?

Re:Shenanigans!

[francium de neobie]

If you go to Finland are you forced to send messages only in Finnish? No?

If you go to Poland are you forced to send messages only in Polish? No?

Same for China.

OMFG c3nz0rZ!

[6Yankee]

Exactly. I have two friends in the US. One, I can send SMS to her but she can't send back. The other, we can send SMS both ways but MMS only works from her to me - on my old phone with a different network, MMS also worked both ways. Now, is it the UK or the US that has this repressive Great Firewall? I forget. I'm quite sure that this has more to do with differing roaming agreements between operators than with some sinister tinfoil-hat plot to crush teh t3xtz0rz. Some people on here really need to grow up. The OP would do better to ask their mobile operator than Slashdot.