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China The Internet

The Chinese Internet Is Shrinking (nytimes.com) 88

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese people know their country's internet is different. There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter. They use euphemisms online to communicate the things they are not supposed to mention. When their posts and accounts are censored, they accept it with resignation. They live in a parallel online universe. They know it and even joke about it. Now they are discovering that, beneath a facade bustling with short videos, livestreaming and e-commerce, their internet -- and collective online memory -- is disappearing in chunks.

A post on WeChat on May 22 that was widely shared reported that nearly all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available. "The Chinese internet is collapsing at an accelerating pace," the headline said. Predictably, the post itself was soon censored. It's impossible to determine exactly how much and what content has disappeared. [...] In addition to disappearing content, there's a broader problem: China's internet is shrinking. There were 3.9 million websites in China in 2023, down more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017, according to the country's internet regulator.

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The Chinese Internet Is Shrinking

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  • by penguinoid ( 724646 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @12:27PM (#64522557) Homepage Journal

    I remember that story, don't worry, soon your history will be back on the internet. It might not be the same history, but are you going to dare point it out?

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Honestly this is what is really frightening about the digital era. We are already seeing this with books and film, 'edits' to reflect the sensibilities of the week, and the copyright owners all but kicking in your door and demanding your hand over your VHS/DVD/Paper copy. If its in your streaming account, on your kindle etc, good luck getting the original if they decide you can't have it anymore.

      There is a whole slew of words and ideas you are not allowed to express anymore that literally won popular votes

      • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @01:06PM (#64522673) Homepage Journal

        "but they take their queues and strategy for the Marxist and Maoists"

        Look bro, they are taking their CUES and strategy from fascists, not commies. China is far from Communist. They are very, very capitalist and very, very far right, and they have a strong man leader to rally behind - that is textbook fascism.

        • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

          by zlives ( 2009072 )

          so in essence what you are suggesting is that CCP is in fact FAP (fascist authoritarian Party)
          i for odd reasons, welcome that change

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by guruevi ( 827432 )

          There is not much different between fascism and what you would consider pure communism. By your definition pure communism (Marxism) doesn't exist because it requires fascism (a strong leader) to establish. Your definition is wrong though, fascism is socialism with a strong racial purism aspect.

          Although China is somewhat fascist when it comes to the Han Chinese, I'm not sure it amounts to racial purism (the other types of Chinese are tolerated unless it comes to religion).

          • Your definition is wrong though, fascism is socialism

            Then why did socialists and communists hate each other so much?

            • by guruevi ( 827432 )

              Why did Menscheviks and Bolscheviks hate each other despite working together? Pol Pot killed all his frenemies too after he got to power. Because the promise of communism/socialism requires a dictator and the eradication of people that do not agree (even Nietzsche pointed that out before communism was established anywhere), there is no room in a dictatorship for 2 ideas.

        • by caseih ( 160668 )

          There are two dimensions (at least, probably more) to it all. Communism and Fascism are not polar opposites. It was very educational to first be exposed to a web site called Political Compass where they analyze politics on a two-dimensional scale. We have an economic scale, where we have libertarians on one end and socialism on the other end. Then we have a political scale where anarchism is on one end and authoritarianism on the other end. Fascism as we saw it during WWII consists of authoritarianism c

        • Ah yes, the monsters canâ(TM)t possibly be extremists on my side of the political spectrum, can they?

          Bro, all extremists are bad.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          It doesn't help to throw terms like communist and fascist around when the subject is neither of those things.

          China is neither communist nor purely capitalist in an economic sense. It is more like Europe, with capitalism that is well regulated and where the government is directly involved in much of it.

          As for fascism, they aren't that either. Fascism is a form of populism, but the CCP doesn't need it because it has widespread support due to having greatly improved the lives of most Chinese people. I think th

          • by N1AK ( 864906 )
            I agree with most of this, however it is worth noting that why the CCP has widespread support is much more complex than simply because they have "done a good job". If it was that simply they would allow other parties to run in elections, aggressively censor news etc. Claiming the population are supportive of censorship is questionable because we have no way to know given that it is dangerous to be critical of the government, and even if you are the censorship means it won't be widely seen. I hear more about
      • Honestly this is what is really frightening about the digital era. We are already seeing this with books and film, 'edits' to reflect the sensibilities of the week, and the copyright owners all but kicking in your door and demanding your hand over your VHS/DVD/Paper copy. If its in your streaming account, on your kindle etc, good luck getting the original if they decide you can't have it anymore.

        There is a whole slew of words and ideas you are not allowed to express anymore that literally won popular votes just a 10-12 years ago; but you have certain parties demanding that things from that time be scrubbed and sanitized because they want to paint the illusion "nobody ever spoke like that" and "it was never a popular position" in your lifetime anyway; because they want to make it seem unthinkable it could be different or we could reverse, its the very gaslighting progressives and other hard left authoritarians are always wingeing about!

        but they take their queues and strategy for the Marxist and Maoists so it unsurprising to see China doing this, just know Nina Jankowicz will be advocating for dear old Uncle Sam to take over doing it here, as soon she thinks she can get away with it again; until then it will be employee the puppet media cartel!

        You write as if there was a past where books and movies weren't reedited, AFAIK books and movies has always been reedited (and that goes for the other arts as well, painting and sculpture comes to mind)?

        • by sjames ( 1099 )

          The difference is that before, they could edit all they want but the copy sitting on my shelf didn't change. But now it's all going digital, so that book on your Kindle or that movie on Netflix can change from day to day.

    • by stooo ( 2202012 )

      As long as Pr0n is there, who cares :)

    • Is this like when embarass changed to embarrass? Or was it always spelled embarrass? Or do I have a memory of a teacher telling the class that remembering the number of letters is easy because , em bare ass. But no, it has always been embarrass, even though it doesn't follow the spelling rules that we were taught as children.

  • on how to reduce the crap infecting the internet in the rest of the world?

  • by Comboman ( 895500 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @12:35PM (#64522587)

    >> all information posted on Chinese news portals, blogs, forums, social media sites between 1995 and 2005 was no longer available.

    It's a good thing that can't happen here. My Geocities site is safe.

    • by cruff ( 171569 )
      Exactly. :-) Why do people think web sites will be perpetually available?
      • Why do people think web sites will be perpetually available?

        You're right, they won't be...but there's a nuanced difference between "it wasn't viable for Yahoo to keep it running" and "President Obama mandated the deletion of Geocities" (it was shuttered in 2009). Moreover, The Internet Archive still exists, and has snapshots of many Geocities sites. To my knowledge, nobody has attempted to have TIA purge its archives of those pages.

        The West lacks many 'old internet' pages from pre-2005, but it's primarily due to apathy. The East lacks many 'old internet' pages from

    • by JBMcB ( 73720 )

      My Geocities site is safe.

      And it is!

      https://web.archive.org/web/19... [archive.org]

    • by Samare ( 2779329 )

      Just noticed that easter egg: https://www.google.com/search?... [google.com]

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Chinese intranet today...

  • by timeOday ( 582209 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @01:16PM (#64522711)
    I'm not sure if the number of domains in operation has decreased, but as a share of traffic, independent websites are almost a thing of the past.

    We bemoaned the consolidation of retail under Walmart. The same thing happened on the web, as a few websites get most of the page views. That's why Facebook's market cap is $1.2T.

  • by VertosCay ( 7266594 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @01:16PM (#64522713)
    “Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.” George Orwell, 1984
    • to be clear about 1984, it was already the path we were set on IN 1984, as anyone who remembers 1984 should be able to attest to.
      • by jonadab ( 583620 )
        In this context, 1984 is a book title. It was written in the forties, IIRC.
        • yes, in the context of my message the first mention of 1984 is a reference to the book, the second reference was to the year, as was the third reference. To be honest George Orwell was probably seeing evidence of the activities he bemoaned in the book, as he was writing it, hence his writing the book. It was intended for the society of the time as a warning about the path we were on. By the year 1984 I believe it was clear that it was still happening and accelerating. I read the book the first time in the e
          • by guruevi ( 827432 )

            Yes, the 60s-80s were particularly bad when it came to the rise of communism in the US, but that died down in the 90s and 2000s with the advent of the Internet. The debate was once again ignited when early 2010s (and a little before that) the government started abusing anti-terrorist laws from the early 2000s to prosecute political speech that didn't align with that of the government, especially in the terms of social media to the point that now the FBI regularly marks people as domestic terrorists for just

  • by drnb ( 2434720 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @01:42PM (#64522793)
    Digital info is fragile. Old servers eventually get taken down, the new ones don't have the software to read the old data format. Even supported software available on new servers may only go so far back with respect to reading old formats. Similar story with desktop applications, ex MS Word, Excel.

    Data archaeology is a thing.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    Then there is the problem of not losing the old files to begin with. Maybe my former employer had a crappy provider but half of my requests for files from offline archival resulted in "files unrecoverable". I had much better luck going to the former project leader of a project from 10 years ago and asking if they had personally backed up everything to CD/DVD.
  • ... "that time 35 years ago this week when I paid my respects to Chairman Mao" (map [app.goo.gl]).

  • DNS Blocking (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Brooks138 ( 22908 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @02:43PM (#64522979) Homepage
    We just got a message yesterday from China Telecom that unless we can state a business case for port 53 DNS will be blocked for our locations in China. Basically, are you using DNS? What?
  • by pz ( 113803 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @03:54PM (#64523143) Journal

    "We have always been at war with Eastasia." -- George Orwell, 1984

  • "There is no Google, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter." They say that like that's a bad thing.
    • Yeah, and those companies decided to not serve China, not the other way around.
      Although, Facebook were supporting terrorism, so they were shut down.

      • Last time I checked, Alphabet did not block China, China is the one that blocked Alphabet services. Care to show any sources where Alphabet actively blocked China mainland users from accessing YouTube or Gmail for instance?

  • >"Chinese people know their country's internet is different"

    That's because it isn't the internet, it is an intranet. Or perhaps "Chinanet".

    • I don't think you understand what "Internet" means. It isn't short for "international - net", it's literally interconnected networks.
      The Chinese exercise sovereignty over their network, and that is right and proper. All those services mentioned could provide services to China if they wanted (except Facebook, maybe) but they decide not to. It's their decision.

      Other countries don't physically enforce sovereignty, and rely on the courts instead. I think we can agree that relying on a western biased legal syste

  • they accept it with resignation. Lucky for us only Chinese corporations do that.
  • by dwater ( 72834 ) on Tuesday June 04, 2024 @07:05PM (#64523543)

    It's just the Web that is shrinking. They simply don't use it (much). It's all native apps and wechat/miniapps. There are no PWAs or any other regular web apps to speak of. If you want to buy anything, you often need a company's native app.

    The Web and Web technologies have never really caught on in China, since they were largely junk back when flash was all over them. I mean, it is way better than then, but developers just concentrated on native apps and wechat miniprograms.

  • If you've tried to use western Web sites from China, you'll likely have hit the problem where western sites actually block access from China.
    Also, using services that don't serve China at all, like Google or Cloudflare, means you'll keep hitting the "confirm your human" challenges....over and over and over. This is particularly true when accessing via VPN.
    I don't think there's such a problem when using roaming cell data, which isn't subject to the GFW at all in China, unless using a VPN, of course.

    So, it se

    • by vbdasc ( 146051 )

      If you've tried to use western Web sites from China, you'll likely have hit the problem where western sites actually block access from China.
      Also, using services that don't serve China at all, like Google or Cloudflare, means you'll keep hitting the "confirm your human" challenges....over and over and over. This is particularly true when accessing via VPN.

      Thankfully, websites served by Cloudflare are almost always worthless. Same for G**gle.

  • Western corporations respond to, and even anticipate, the desires of the CCP regime in censoring Western content. They emulate the Chinese internet's control. Apple telling Jon Stewart not to talk about China is just the tip of the iceberg.
  • The thing is, the Western internet is also disappearing in chunks [slashdot.org]. See the discussion there about why.

  • There were 3.9 million websites in China in 2023, down more than a third from 5.3 million in 2017

    While ccp.gov.cn exists, I'm not worried.

  • They'll soon be snail-mailing CDs containing the software for their New And Improved service, Asia On-Line. AOL for short.

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