China Lifts Bans On Social Media, Foreign ISPs In Free Trade Zone

hackingbear writes "Beijing has made the landmark decision to lift a ban on internet access within the Shanghai Free-trade Zone to foreign websites considered politically sensitive by the Chinese government, including Facebook, Twitter and newspaper website The New York Times. The new free trade zone would also welcome bids from foreign telecommunications companies for licenses to provide internet services within the new special economic zone to compete with the state-owned China Mobile, China Telecom and China Unicom; the big three telcos didn't raise complaints as they knew it was a decision endorsed by top Chinese leaders including Premier Li Keqiang, who is keen to make the free-trade zone a key proving ground for significant financial and economic reforms, the sources added. The decision to lift the bans, for now, only applies to the Zone and not elsewhere in China. 'In order to welcome foreign companies to invest and to let foreigners live and work happily in the free-trade zone, we must think about how we can make them feel like at home. If they can't get onto Facebook or read The New York Times, they may naturally wonder how special the free-trade zone is compared with the rest of China,' said one of the government sources who declined to be named due to the highly sensitive nature of the matter."

Comments

Are they taking notes?

[wbr1]

Good ol' US of A has "Free Speech Zones" for certain things.

Umm, landmark?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Haven't 'free trade zones' always been about the relaxation of certain local restrictions in the interest of attracting commercial activity? And isn't turning a blind eye to the activity of economically useful foreigners (so long as they aren't too tacky about it, and don't start mouthing off about local politics) a downright venerable tradition?

If anything, this looks like another aspect of China's gradual evolution toward a 'repress smarter, not harder' theory of censorship, where they've gradually relaxed assorted easy-but-grating blanket bans as their technology and techniques have allowed them to get the results they want without as many (upsetting for the user) overt and visible exercises of state power. The most effective controls are the ones you never even notice.

Re:Umm, landmark?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

From the perspective of the convenience of foreign workers(who don't just VPN back to home office anyway) certainly. From the perspective of the state of the Chinese citizen on the internet, nuance might actually be worse:

Consider the analogy of price discrimination:

If you have to set a single price for a good that you are selling, you will be forced to lose customers on the low end(because they can't afford it), lose money on the high end(because they'd pay ten times as much; but don't have to) or suffer some other sub-optimal tradeoff between these two. If you have a price discrimination mechanism, and can charge different customers different amounts, this problem is reduced (poorer customers can be charged less, down to whatever the minimum profitable price is, wealthier ones can be charged more, until even they say the hell with it). In a hypothetical system of perfect price discrimination, everyone gets exactly the price they are willing to put up with, and your only challenge is discerning that price correctly in order to capture all the gains from trade.

Repression is in certain ways similar: because online repression involves breaking things, it's a nuisance whenever you run into it, so the ideal system of repression (analogous to the ideal system of price discrimination) applies only as much as is needed, where it is needed, to the people who need it, while leaving everyone else free to tweet and look at cat videos and things. Not censoring a free trade zone (where outside ideas are inevitably easy to come by, a substantial percentage of the population are foreigners there on business, and employed by businesses who value continued good relations with your customs and other officials..., or comparatively well off locals involved in business there) is a partial price discrimination strategy. Not perfect; but closer than a blanket level of repression. Why block social networks to people who are going to chat, not in Mandarin, to their friends and family who don't live in China? That just annoys them and doesn't improve your control at all. Why filter the internet access, like some penny-ante dictatorship, of people who can VPN back to HQ anyway? It just makes you look repressive without stopping them. Why lean on people who are just here to make money, and won't develop any stupid ideas about local politics, no matter who runs the show, so long as they are allowed to keep doing that?

Re:Competition

[interval1066]

I'll stain my knickers when the Gov. mows down citizens and students for not being "Politcally correct."

Re:Such a landmark decision

[jeffmflanagan]

If you actually cared, you wouldn't post as an AC, which makes you invisible to anyone hiding zero-rated comments (probably most people) unless mods find and up-rate you.

Re:Such a landmark decision

[jbolden]

Life expectancy doubled 1949-1985
Food poverty fell from 270m in 1948 to 100m in 1985 to almost 0 today
Rural real standard of living per capita has been rising 6.7% per annum. In urban areas 5.5%
Clothing styles have changed as now everyone has adequate clothing for a generation and fashion drives consumer choice
Square feet of living area per person is up about 50% and the quality of housing is much higher
Education in the urban areas is readily available and in rural areas is now often readily available. As contrasted with a few generations ago where education was hard to get.

Why shouldn't the Chinese people think their government has their best interest at heart? They are seeing everyday evidence of their government working to make their lives better. As contrasted with the US where the government has pursued a stagnant wage policy for over a generation.

China already allows some of this

[Balthisar]

A lot of big, western companies — like mine — already provide our own internet infrastructure and have access to the internet at large. All of our employees are free to read the New York Times, American version of Google, or have FaceBook accounts. And if we don't mind going through the company servers for stuff at home, the company VPN works everywhere in China.

The point of this move in the FA, though, is that China will license private ISP's to provide this service to anyone or company in the free trade zones. *This* would be of great convenience, and I wish I were in this zone. I use China Telecom now and have 50 Mbs fiber service. It's fast as hell and dirt cheap (by American standards), but my connection slows to a crawl as soon as I start routing all of my traffic through a single, private VPN pipe to Germany or California or Sweden.