They want to block Github entirely because Github allows for the free flow of information (politically sensitive information, not just code) and they don't have a way of doing currently without just blocking all of Github... Which would be bad for business, and China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way.
Actually, if you want to send large amounts of text information to users in China right now, Github is probably one of the better ways. Unfortunately probably not for long!
No, I don't think it's about blocking Github. Many of their tech companies are using open source.
For China it's safer to have a Chinese Github ecosystem. Just imagine if Github suddenly decide to block Chinese users like they did for Iranian users.
It's also strategic for their government and some critical private sector to not put their source code on an American platform. So there are enough incentives especially after everything that happened to Huawei.
this is the correct answer. I think this is China's response after seeing Huawei getting blocked from using Google Services.
Github is still owned by an american company and it has shown that it needs to comply with whatever foreign policy that washington enacts. It's reasonable want to have a contingency plan that would allow the Chinese domestic software industry to continue to function when things turn sour between the two powers.
How long before this strategy backfires? When does the CCP hurt itself because it stifled innovation? When does it have political problems because it suppressed the wrong thing? I can't tell if this style of governing is super robust or a house of cards.
Probably very long. Given the success of the Chinese ecosystem compared to other regions on the globe, including a lot of democratic countries without significant limits on expression, it doesn't seem to be very important.
The first answer is that innovation can be channelled towards military or surveillance technology instead. The government has no problem with research into facial recognition, enterprise software, drones, and whatnot. Under the so called 'military-civil fusion' strategy its if anything encouraged and heavily bolstered.
Another point that has become fairly popular among the more conservative or nationalist Chinese intellectuals is that free expression in the workplace is if anything, harming the US because it's seen as divisive and hindering research. There were a lot of comments with negative overtones when it came to BLM, and stuff like the internal Google Maven protests. For a lot of nationalist Chinese commentators free expression in the West is seen as damaging state capacity and the ability of large firms to work effectively.
They seem to be doing pretty well, economically-speaking.
I suspect, so long as they can continue to provide good lives for their professional class, the country will continue to grow in world influence. The professionals that drive growth and innovation probably desire to live in a less authoritarian society, but life is generally good enough for them to remain complacent, and turn a blind-eye to injustice.
I'm sure it's hurting CCP right now. Being closed off from the rest of the world does have its consequences.
It probably just doesn't hurt CCP enough to matter in the short term. It'll probably take closer to half a century before we can truly understand if the cumulative effects of the pain will amount to anything significant.
Possibly never. The reason China's isolationist policies work is their massive population is big enough to form a mini world without a ton of knowledge gaps.
The US and maybe western Europe could be in a similar position, if they wanted to.
IMO the reason you don't want to be isolationist(as a big country) is more about political clout than tech. China has no "soft power" because their firewall works both ways.
The US and western Europe have military prescence and political allies worldwide because the free flow of information and technology fosters all sorts of political, corporate, and cultural mixing.
What influence China has on its neighbors (and worldwide to an extent) is maintained through pressure and threats, because frankly, their ultra nationalist policies just don't make many friends. I personally don't think this is sustainable long term but it is yet to be seen. Instead of allies wanting you to succeed, other nations are encouraged to obstruct as much as possible to weaken you and your unwelcome influence. You can see this unfolding in the last few years with increasing tariff and trade restrictions on China. And I don't see it letting up until Xi is out
China is through the period of easy gains in their economic expansion from the days of early developing nation status. The next 10-20 years will answer your question (including, critically, what Xi does from here forward and what comes after Xi). If their model stifles - and or to the extent that it does - it'll become apparent as economic gains get increasingly difficult going forward and the segments they begin to compete in are much more challenging (the US in software, Germany in high-value manufacturing, going after semiconductors, aerospace, building quality automobiles, et al.). There have been potent signs all across their economy for numerous years now that growth has become far harder and more expensive to acquire, how innovation maps to that context will be interesting to watch.
Their style of governing is very clearly not super robust. If it were they wouldn't need to so extremely tightly control their people in every possible manner. They regularly reveal how fragile the system is in their behavior, including how very easily their party ego is injured (which partially reveals how fragile they view their own position, that they're so obsessed with maintaining the facade of omnipotence; they fear any cracks). That also doesn't mean it's a house of cards, the CCP has proven they have staying power, even if it's expensive ground to hold.
If the US hadn't retreated from diplomacy in favor of acting more like a mob boss, China would have been hurt far more. Most countries are looking to move away from Australia, but the absence of a countervailing power is what's stopping them.
Alternatively, the CCP got more aggressive with their suppressive tactics because of the US's diplomatic retreat, but I dont think this is the case. I think the CCP's behavior is a natural consequence of Xi Jinping basically giving himself a life term. With no opportunity to ever lead the party through a peaceful transfer of power, all the leadership hopefuls will probably be looking for alternative solutions. And even if they aren't, Xi is almost certainly gonna be paranoid that they are, and that would mean increasingly severe crackdowns on the people of the country.
They do not need their own innovation, that would require pesky freedoms, they can just steal it from freer societies. China has been been very good at keeping their cake and eating it for 30 years.
I thought the opposite, they are afraid github will block some Chinese software because of political reasons, the same way happened now with Trump supporting companies. I can understand the reasoning and I think more and more people will try to find alternatives to big tech, especially if their politics is not aligned with SV taste du jour.
The idea of China wanting an open source platform like GitHub is akin to Adolf Hitler starting The Nazi Center for Jewish Appreciation & Cultural Enrichment.
> China also seems to be entering the software business in a bigger way.
All of our jobs and companies are at risk. China has far more software engineers than we do, all willing to work 996. They'll steal our tech and our data until they're ahead, then shut us off.
We already lost our manufacturing industry. Our tech, entertainment, knowledge, and capital are next. China has bought our biggest gaming and media companies.
We need to shut the CCP off. Yesterday.
Biden needs to create easy immigration programs for Hong Kong and mainland residents.
The recent Capitol shit show needs to be quickly dealt with and we need to take back our leadership role. Our image matters.
Hollywood needs to step in line and stop kowtowing. Where's the
"Chernobyl" series equivalent for Tiananmen? The Tibetans and Uyghurs?
This is the most important issue of our time.
I know the Chinese loyalists and many Europeans that hate the US are going to downvote me, but this should be the priority of all democracies. If the CCP reaches the top, it imperils democracy.
They are hardly willing to work 996. Extreme opposition is mounting, and a lot - maybe most - of the younger generation of programmers soft-strike by not doing anything work related at all after 4-5pm. Because of relatively generous firing protection and a lack of programmers they generally get away with it too.
This is actually a big reason why most Chinese people didn't care about the CCP going after Jack Ma, 996 is extremely unpopular.
That said, given the shortage of programmers, being willing to work unreasonable and frankly unproductive hours is not a sufficient deterrent to competitiveness.
America is manufacturing more than it ever has. It’s producing more cars, trucks, airplanes, semiconductors, software, and military weapons than ever. It’s at historical highs. Oh and, it’s also highly mechanized and done by machines now.
When did America lose entertainment to China? Back in the 90s and 00s, western people thought that China was going to steal all of Hollywood’s movies. But what happened instead? It turns out Hollywood movies are shit. The same boring stories, played by the same white actors. In a multicultural world, all the Hollywood actors are white. Why? Someone here is clueless, and it’s not the Chinese.
It turns out, that the Chinese don’t care to watch western movies. Star Wars was a flop. All the major Hollywood blockbusters flopped in China. What happened instead? The Chinese people wanted to watch movies filled with people that looked like themselves. Movies that actually had multicultural people. Movies that had Chinese people in it. And it turns out, their movies are getting pretty good. You, as a westerner might not like their movies, but your opinion doesn’t matter here, since you’re not the target market for this money.
And ironically, for a guy that professes the virtues of democracy, you’re talking about suppressing the Trump supporters, all 75 million of them that voted for him.
Did it occur to you that the Chinese don’t care about your democracy? You can vote for whoever you want. You can have all the gay rights you want. You can have all the abortion or pro-life you want. You can protest your leaders, or mock them all you want. All irrelevant to the Chinese and to the CCP.
What does the Chinese want? They just want to trade with you. And they’re willing to send their children to your schools and universities to learn English and your culture. At least before Trump threw this all away, and poisoned the well.
Did it occur to you, that the Russians are playing you instead? They’re sitting back and laughing now from the comedy of the past 4 years.
Thing is that in the big picture, it's not just that China is building a replacement for GitHub. China is building a replacement for everything that matters and accelerates their transition to be the Super Power. And they have been doing so for last 30 years, just that now it's hitting a critical mass and world is waking up to it.
And I think, we, The West, have been getting it wrong. We are looking at China like a jealous neighbor, pushing back politically, through regulations and sanctions. Unfortunately that can only go so far. Thing is China is obsessed (and determined) about progressing and West is obsessed about protecting what it already has.
America needs to be obsessed about creating and innovating. Hard creation and innovation on a scale never seen before - like 1000x the man-on-the-moon scale.
the last time the west only managed to "win" the moon race because it was competing against financially poor and poorly managed soviet state(all key brains behind soviet space program were released from gulag just to work on it and knew that if they will not please their masters they will go back to gulag and die. the greatest motivation of all time)
china now is a lot more sane people that don't mess with politics/publicity enjoy comparable levels of freedoms to the west(In a lot of cases more economic freedom but in all cases no political freedoms) which makes them much more likely to succeed competing against corrupt west as it is now
Incorrect, and that’s a common misconception. There are countries with way cheaper labor. China now has the manufacturing knowhow and eco system no other countries can compete. That’s it’s power
I can't help but wonder if such an attempt would even work.
Unless I am misunderstanding the culture that makes an open source ecosystem work, a free and open exchange of information and ideas is one of those fundamental things. When a thing is broken, sometimes you have to tell an authority the horribly embarrassing fact that the thing is broken. With the CCP controlling all information flows and what is or is not fact, then ISTM that pointing out that The Peoples' Authentication Protocol is fundamentally flawed and insecure could get one disappeared just as likely as it would get the protocol fixed.
There are a lot of people in China, and most don't speak good English. Free exchange is thus already limited before we even get into censorship. The large number of people in China means they have the potential to create a new ecosystem. They just need to get a few of their own people to start it, and then let things grow. I don't know if they can pull it off, but they have enough people to at least make a good try at it.
I fear it can work. I think despite our distaste for some of the censorship that will occur when it comes to social control and etc, ultimately the meat of github and open source would be entirely functional within a CCP run context.
Bug reports about a particular project? Provide a particular leader isn't embarrassed I don't expect anyone to care. I suspect they'd let the engineers fight it out and only care about the output.
If anything social media faces bigger censorship concerns in China... but social media does just fine...
I think you're right. There's been this long held belief that you can't create the level of prosperity seen in the U.S. and Europe without having a free(ish) and open society. China is showing everyone that there's another way to do it. I don't know why people keep underestimating China and the CCP.
I think this is just following the chain of what's just been happening in China with software.
Americas/Europe has Google? We'll make our own that the CCP can control
Americas/Europe has Uber? We'll make our own that the CCP can control.
Americas/Europe has GitHub? ...You see where this is going.
Those are all US companies. What does Europe have to do with them?
And like it's been noted many times before here, had Europe banned US companies like China had, maybe they would have a stronger software development culture, and they could control their own data instead of handing over everything to the US.
I'm pretty sure there's gonna be a fork of all major projects on GitHub on that site, so that developers inside the wall can use the site exclusively. Chances are the forks are going to be updated with actual code from GitHub from time to time.
If you go back to the rhetoric of the Clinton-era the belief was that the Internet and Capitalism would "free" China from authoritarian rule. Instead, the authoritarians managed to co-opt both and gain further leverage abroad. They can't do everything, but don't bet against the Chinese accomplishing a lot of what the West thinks is based on "free and open exchange" via responsive authoritarianism.
After Iran and many non Iranian businesses which have been cut off from GitHub because of an Iranian holiday or single employee I’m not surprised. In fact, any business critical service, such as GitHub and cloud hosting providers should have national or at least continental providers. Nobody would complain if China was to develop its own national electric grid or telecommunications infrastructure, because it seems obvious that these services shouldn’t be at the whim of a foreign nation. Guess what, cloud infrastructure powering million dollar businesses fall in the same category. The US has lost all trust to us, not just to Eastern nations but also in Europe we don’t want to expose ourselves unnecessarily anymore.
It’s interesting how people focusing on Github representing the spirit of free information and an open internet, while the very same Github blocking Iran developers’ work, breaking every good ‘virtue’ it calls itself stands for, not even mention it’s just another American company, bounded by American laws, which means your data is forever at stake, if yourself, your country, being targeted by the USA, or the company it self. No one can stand that right? In fact, no one should put his data solely on a hosted platform out of his control, worrying one day even not being able to access it just because he’s not one of them who controls. You can social interact, share, collaborate on such platform like GitHub, but I think it’s completely logical and understandable trying to protect your data by building your own platform or storage no? Or should Github, or the US dominate all code hosting?
Sometimes, people write as if the authorities in China really believe they can e.g. cease to teach people how to read and write, and speak a common tongue.
I know nobody here is quite that stupid, (although it bears mentioning the more theocratically regressive nation states we have around the world do actually do this, to women) -So this is at some level only a rhetorical complaint.
People need to understand that the Federated Chinese provinces and national government and the party are in a complex web of relationships, and power struggles have been a constant since before 1949.
Git, and use of open-source models and methods is not deeply alien to the Chinese political system, any more than Samizdat was unique to Russia. Many of the things done during the cultural revolution depended on people passing information, sharing ideas. The chinese fear of information and passing information has a domestic, as well as an international quality is what I am trying to say here.
So, there will be oppositional views on the use of Git inside China, and there will be attempts to regulate behaviour in ways which are a poor fit for what Git expects? Sure!
I don't beleive this is like digital communications as a weapon of soft power, something which was actively promoted by the US department of state, and explains some of their abiding interest in Internet governance, worldwide. I think this is something the Chinese face, and brought into their own situation completely unaided.
Lest we forget, Git was invented by Linus Torvalds, a citizen of an economiy in the non-aligned states.
There's a growing trend of people who would are otherwise vocal supporters of open-source suddenly being suspicious when a government they don't like uses open-source technology for their own gain, without asking Westerners for permission first. That's kind of the point?
A lot of people act like Chinese people don't understand concepts like accountability, transparency or open dialogue and therefore any open-source tool will be doomed to fail if it isn't controlled by wiser Western interests.
Open-source either is an universal concept or it isn't. Yes, the Chinese government will probably want some degree of control over their platform and will suppress free speech that threatens them, and yes, that's bad. But that doesn't mean open-source stops being a desirable thing as soon as the Chinese are doing it.
Readit News
Actually, if you want to send large amounts of text information to users in China right now, Github is probably one of the better ways. Unfortunately probably not for long!
For China it's safer to have a Chinese Github ecosystem. Just imagine if Github suddenly decide to block Chinese users like they did for Iranian users.
It's also strategic for their government and some critical private sector to not put their source code on an American platform. So there are enough incentives especially after everything that happened to Huawei.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/04/ddos-...
Github is still owned by an american company and it has shown that it needs to comply with whatever foreign policy that washington enacts. It's reasonable want to have a contingency plan that would allow the Chinese domestic software industry to continue to function when things turn sour between the two powers.
Wait I thought India blocked github, not that github blocked India. Or has there been a whole thing I've missed?
The first answer is that innovation can be channelled towards military or surveillance technology instead. The government has no problem with research into facial recognition, enterprise software, drones, and whatnot. Under the so called 'military-civil fusion' strategy its if anything encouraged and heavily bolstered.
Another point that has become fairly popular among the more conservative or nationalist Chinese intellectuals is that free expression in the workplace is if anything, harming the US because it's seen as divisive and hindering research. There were a lot of comments with negative overtones when it came to BLM, and stuff like the internal Google Maven protests. For a lot of nationalist Chinese commentators free expression in the West is seen as damaging state capacity and the ability of large firms to work effectively.
I suspect, so long as they can continue to provide good lives for their professional class, the country will continue to grow in world influence. The professionals that drive growth and innovation probably desire to live in a less authoritarian society, but life is generally good enough for them to remain complacent, and turn a blind-eye to injustice.
It probably just doesn't hurt CCP enough to matter in the short term. It'll probably take closer to half a century before we can truly understand if the cumulative effects of the pain will amount to anything significant.
The US and maybe western Europe could be in a similar position, if they wanted to.
IMO the reason you don't want to be isolationist(as a big country) is more about political clout than tech. China has no "soft power" because their firewall works both ways.
The US and western Europe have military prescence and political allies worldwide because the free flow of information and technology fosters all sorts of political, corporate, and cultural mixing.
What influence China has on its neighbors (and worldwide to an extent) is maintained through pressure and threats, because frankly, their ultra nationalist policies just don't make many friends. I personally don't think this is sustainable long term but it is yet to be seen. Instead of allies wanting you to succeed, other nations are encouraged to obstruct as much as possible to weaken you and your unwelcome influence. You can see this unfolding in the last few years with increasing tariff and trade restrictions on China. And I don't see it letting up until Xi is out
Their style of governing is very clearly not super robust. If it were they wouldn't need to so extremely tightly control their people in every possible manner. They regularly reveal how fragile the system is in their behavior, including how very easily their party ego is injured (which partially reveals how fragile they view their own position, that they're so obsessed with maintaining the facade of omnipotence; they fear any cracks). That also doesn't mean it's a house of cards, the CCP has proven they have staying power, even if it's expensive ground to hold.
If the US hadn't retreated from diplomacy in favor of acting more like a mob boss, China would have been hurt far more. Most countries are looking to move away from Australia, but the absence of a countervailing power is what's stopping them.
Alternatively, the CCP got more aggressive with their suppressive tactics because of the US's diplomatic retreat, but I dont think this is the case. I think the CCP's behavior is a natural consequence of Xi Jinping basically giving himself a life term. With no opportunity to ever lead the party through a peaceful transfer of power, all the leadership hopefuls will probably be looking for alternative solutions. And even if they aren't, Xi is almost certainly gonna be paranoid that they are, and that would mean increasingly severe crackdowns on the people of the country.
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
See also: skype.
Not just because they don't want Chinese code stored on foreign servers, but because they want it on servers they have easy access to.
Even if this is far-fetched, it's not about what we think, but the risk China perceives.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25842028
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472212
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21472433
I have seen considerable chinese github projects. xmake is one of them i use
China has a capability to block arbitrary GitHub urls ... I don’t think this is that.
https://cnpmjs.org/
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
All of our jobs and companies are at risk. China has far more software engineers than we do, all willing to work 996. They'll steal our tech and our data until they're ahead, then shut us off.
We already lost our manufacturing industry. Our tech, entertainment, knowledge, and capital are next. China has bought our biggest gaming and media companies.
We need to shut the CCP off. Yesterday.
Biden needs to create easy immigration programs for Hong Kong and mainland residents.
The recent Capitol shit show needs to be quickly dealt with and we need to take back our leadership role. Our image matters.
Hollywood needs to step in line and stop kowtowing. Where's the "Chernobyl" series equivalent for Tiananmen? The Tibetans and Uyghurs?
This is the most important issue of our time.
I know the Chinese loyalists and many Europeans that hate the US are going to downvote me, but this should be the priority of all democracies. If the CCP reaches the top, it imperils democracy.
This is actually a big reason why most Chinese people didn't care about the CCP going after Jack Ma, 996 is extremely unpopular.
That said, given the shortage of programmers, being willing to work unreasonable and frankly unproductive hours is not a sufficient deterrent to competitiveness.
America is manufacturing more than it ever has. It’s producing more cars, trucks, airplanes, semiconductors, software, and military weapons than ever. It’s at historical highs. Oh and, it’s also highly mechanized and done by machines now.
When did America lose entertainment to China? Back in the 90s and 00s, western people thought that China was going to steal all of Hollywood’s movies. But what happened instead? It turns out Hollywood movies are shit. The same boring stories, played by the same white actors. In a multicultural world, all the Hollywood actors are white. Why? Someone here is clueless, and it’s not the Chinese.
It turns out, that the Chinese don’t care to watch western movies. Star Wars was a flop. All the major Hollywood blockbusters flopped in China. What happened instead? The Chinese people wanted to watch movies filled with people that looked like themselves. Movies that actually had multicultural people. Movies that had Chinese people in it. And it turns out, their movies are getting pretty good. You, as a westerner might not like their movies, but your opinion doesn’t matter here, since you’re not the target market for this money.
And ironically, for a guy that professes the virtues of democracy, you’re talking about suppressing the Trump supporters, all 75 million of them that voted for him.
Did it occur to you that the Chinese don’t care about your democracy? You can vote for whoever you want. You can have all the gay rights you want. You can have all the abortion or pro-life you want. You can protest your leaders, or mock them all you want. All irrelevant to the Chinese and to the CCP.
What does the Chinese want? They just want to trade with you. And they’re willing to send their children to your schools and universities to learn English and your culture. At least before Trump threw this all away, and poisoned the well.
Did it occur to you, that the Russians are playing you instead? They’re sitting back and laughing now from the comedy of the past 4 years.
And I think, we, The West, have been getting it wrong. We are looking at China like a jealous neighbor, pushing back politically, through regulations and sanctions. Unfortunately that can only go so far. Thing is China is obsessed (and determined) about progressing and West is obsessed about protecting what it already has.
America needs to be obsessed about creating and innovating. Hard creation and innovation on a scale never seen before - like 1000x the man-on-the-moon scale.
china now is a lot more sane people that don't mess with politics/publicity enjoy comparable levels of freedoms to the west(In a lot of cases more economic freedom but in all cases no political freedoms) which makes them much more likely to succeed competing against corrupt west as it is now
Dead Comment
Unless I am misunderstanding the culture that makes an open source ecosystem work, a free and open exchange of information and ideas is one of those fundamental things. When a thing is broken, sometimes you have to tell an authority the horribly embarrassing fact that the thing is broken. With the CCP controlling all information flows and what is or is not fact, then ISTM that pointing out that The Peoples' Authentication Protocol is fundamentally flawed and insecure could get one disappeared just as likely as it would get the protocol fixed.
Of course they can then censor it as desired.
Bug reports about a particular project? Provide a particular leader isn't embarrassed I don't expect anyone to care. I suspect they'd let the engineers fight it out and only care about the output.
If anything social media faces bigger censorship concerns in China... but social media does just fine...
Americas/Europe has Google? We'll make our own that the CCP can control Americas/Europe has Uber? We'll make our own that the CCP can control. Americas/Europe has GitHub? ...You see where this is going.
And like it's been noted many times before here, had Europe banned US companies like China had, maybe they would have a stronger software development culture, and they could control their own data instead of handing over everything to the US.
That was just a cover to enable outsourcing american jobs to a country without a level playing field.
Corporations and government sold out the US. The only guy to stand up to that just got run out of office and deplatformed.
The dems had Tulsi, but shes getting dissed by her own party already.
I know nobody here is quite that stupid, (although it bears mentioning the more theocratically regressive nation states we have around the world do actually do this, to women) -So this is at some level only a rhetorical complaint.
People need to understand that the Federated Chinese provinces and national government and the party are in a complex web of relationships, and power struggles have been a constant since before 1949.
Git, and use of open-source models and methods is not deeply alien to the Chinese political system, any more than Samizdat was unique to Russia. Many of the things done during the cultural revolution depended on people passing information, sharing ideas. The chinese fear of information and passing information has a domestic, as well as an international quality is what I am trying to say here.
So, there will be oppositional views on the use of Git inside China, and there will be attempts to regulate behaviour in ways which are a poor fit for what Git expects? Sure!
I don't beleive this is like digital communications as a weapon of soft power, something which was actively promoted by the US department of state, and explains some of their abiding interest in Internet governance, worldwide. I think this is something the Chinese face, and brought into their own situation completely unaided.
Lest we forget, Git was invented by Linus Torvalds, a citizen of an economiy in the non-aligned states.
There's a growing trend of people who would are otherwise vocal supporters of open-source suddenly being suspicious when a government they don't like uses open-source technology for their own gain, without asking Westerners for permission first. That's kind of the point?
A lot of people act like Chinese people don't understand concepts like accountability, transparency or open dialogue and therefore any open-source tool will be doomed to fail if it isn't controlled by wiser Western interests.
Open-source either is an universal concept or it isn't. Yes, the Chinese government will probably want some degree of control over their platform and will suppress free speech that threatens them, and yes, that's bad. But that doesn't mean open-source stops being a desirable thing as soon as the Chinese are doing it.
Chinese does not fear information, it only fears "unauthorized" information flow.
gitlab has been open-source for a while.
The U.S. could force MS to suddenly ban all China IP addresses. This would hamper software development for a month or so there.