Steam has been banned in China

https://www.thegamer.com/steam-banned-china-christmas-day/

by meibo • 5 years ago

380 400 5 years ago

meibo• 5 years ago

Note: this refers to the global Steam service/community - Valve still offers Steam China with a very limited/censored selection of mostly-Valve games, adhering to local child protection laws.

Most Chinese Steam users have historically been using the global service instead, as this Chinese version of Steam has only been available since February 2021.

foverzar6• 5 years ago

I really love how we all have an impression of China as a country without access to global internet, but then there are things like "Most Chinese Steam users have historically been using the global service instead".

Really makes you want to visit and see how this actually works for yourself. The more I read about China, the more unbelievably contradictive it gets.

blahgeek2• 5 years ago

It’s not true that chinese don’t has “access to global internet”. Many sites are blocked (including most top sites), but still it’s a blacklist instead of a whitelist

flohofwoe4• 5 years ago

IME the Great Firewall doesn't outright block global traffic apart from some selected services, but makes them so unreliable and slow that it's almost impossible to directly connect and use services from the other side (think 'analog modem speed'), companies (maybe just IT companies, not sure) can get an exemption (they need to connect to github after all), but even then it's not very reliable.

If Steam had a working 'global service' then it almost certainly used local datacenters as proxy. But AFAIK PC gaming is pretty much seen as a niche for computer nerds though (apart from E-Sports), gaming mostly happens on mobile phones.

qybaz3• 5 years ago

You should be sceptical of all the news about China that come from the West.

manuelabeledo4• 5 years ago

It is indeed a country full of contradictions.

I was there in 2016, and besides the usual, like Google, Netflix, Facebook or Twitter, most western sites seemed to work, just very, very slow for some reason.

Also, some high end hotels did provide unfettered access to the Internet for some reason, so I guess anyone could go there and browse Facebook for the price of an expensive coffee.

idxoutofbounds2• 5 years ago

There's a small minority of college educated youth that speak english and are able to use VPNs to bypass GFW.

alisonatwork6• 5 years ago

I don't know who "we all" is who has the impression that China doesn't have access to the global internet. There must be thousands of people on this website alone who have either lived in China in the past or still do now who regularly comment and show that not to be the case. There are plenty of articles in the mainstream western media that discuss exactly how censorship and surveillance works in the country.

Steam is one of the few popular international services that escaped getting blocked by the Great Firewall, despite hosting content that the Chinese government ostensibly considers illegal or inappropriate. There have been a lot of articles about how Chinese indie game developers were using Steam as a loophole to sell their games without getting the official government approval to sell games inside China. It's never been clear why Steam was an exception to the blocks, but that's par for the course. The government never explains to the people why something gets blocked, sites just suddenly stop working from one day to the next and the people are expected to accept it and move on.

The internet blocks are set up by the internet providers in the country, so somebody must know what's going on, but - like many things that happen in China - the people just need to guess the reasoning by reading between the lines of impenetrable Party literature or relying on supposedly independent editorials in the tabloid newspapers.

So nobody knows for sure, but people have deduced that there are several reasons that the government blocks websites. One is as a "punishment" for a foreign company, because that company published content that insulted or offended some officials in the government. Another is if the foreign company is specifically and deliberately producing content aimed at Chinese-speakers that discusses topics the Chinese government does not want Chinese people to discuss freely (June 4/Tiananmen massacre, Hong Kong autonomy, alternative governing models that do not include the the Party at the core etc). Another one might be if the foreign company refuses to allow the Chinese government to install their surveillance hooks. But I think perhaps more relevant to the case of Steam is economic protectionism - the Chinese government tends to block foreign services that could compete with Chinese companies, so that Chinese companies can become dominant in the space.

The thing with Steam is that there wasn't really a local alternative with a wide enough catalog of games that it would please the middle class/educated/moneyed gamer in the country, so that's probably why Steam was quietly allowed to continue for so long. A few years ago Valve announced a partnership with Perfect World (local media company) to produce a Chinese version of Steam, but for whatever reason it took ages to come out. Now that it is out, and presumably up and running (I don't know since I don't live in China any more), the government has no incentive to allow people to buy from the international version, so that is probably why it now got blocked.

As usual, Chinese government only block in one direction - every day, every month, every year there are more and more things blocked. Eventually even though technically people in China are still able to visit most of the internet outside of China, the sites that are the most popular in China will all be owned by Chinese companies (or partnerships) and exist completely inside the monitoring and self-censorship bubble of the Chinese cultural sphere. So it's not like people in China don't have the opportunity to see other content, it's just that those other sources are very far outside the mainstream and not frequently accessed by the average person. If it did become popular, that's when the government would make a move.

legofr4• 5 years ago

I'm personally opposed to the idea of visiting certain countries, such as China and North Korea, to 'see for yourself', especially when you don't know the language, when you're not willing to risk your life to understand and uncover the parts the government doesn't want you to see, like VICE did in Xinjiang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7AYyUqrMuQ

That being said, if you go then please try to walk into a random hotel/apartment you see on the street to try to book a room.. then you'll discover that 9/10 hotels/apartments won't allow foreigners to live there. I lived in China for more than a year before I realized this was the case, and I have on multiple occasions even been kicked out of friends/partners apartment because someone told the landlord there was a foreigner in the building (or maybe they saw through the surveillance camera).

trasz2• 5 years ago

There’s no contradiction if you understand that all those bans are on companies, not users. People just use VPN, like they did anyway, but for companies it means they have to comply with Chinese law to make money there.

NamTaf2• 5 years ago

As other posts have said, the GFW isn’t just a whole heap of blocked IPs. There’s some of that (Google, FB, etc.), but a lot more of it is DPI and other inspection techniques that also have the effect of slowing overseas data to a crawl. In that sense it is quite sophisticated.

I remember getting 300KB/sec at the best of times to overseas sites. VPNs didn’t really make a difference for speed (I believe I had poor routing on top of that), but I could use WG and SS to maintain access to blocked content for weeks on end.

The end result is that internet users are corralled into domestic services where the CCP can flex its power. If anything overseas continues to be too anti-government then it cops a more concrete block.

As also mentioned, the educated class might get VPN access but Joe Bloggs on the street won’t know how to. Also, it’s hard to get a VPN from within China, but once set up with one you can relatively easily keep using it.

bnralt• 5 years ago

I think visiting and seeing the country for yourself is a good idea. I have a lot of experience with the country (lived there, keep in contact with many friends from there, consume a lot of TV and podcasts from there), and the picture of it usually painted by Hacker News comments is completely different from what I've experienced. I usually avoid the topic here, though, because heterodox opinions often are met with hostility or accusations of being propaganda.

In general, when it comes to other countries, I think visiting them when possible and talking with the people there when you can is often eye-opening and can reveal personal biases you didn't realize you had. To give another example, speaking with people from the former Soviet Union and Eastern Bloc made me realize that many of the assumptions I had (adopted from the traditional "common sense" American narrative) were overly simplistic or just plain wrong.

myrandomcomment• 5 years ago

I have been there more then once. Most of the web outside of China is blocked. The government actively blocks VPNs and any long lived connections (more then a few minutes) that cannot be identified is dropped. Not sure why that is so hard to understand.

mcculley2• 5 years ago

I have been studying Mandarin and reading about China for years. I suspect that China is so big and diverse that the average Chinese person cannot speak generally about China. I wouldn’t expect someone who has only lived in Alabama to be able to describe America generally. Yet we fall into that trap often with other cultures.

codeddesign• 5 years ago

Who would think that China doesn’t have internet?? They aren’t North Korea. Even Cuba where it’s literally banned has internet.

seanmcdirmid6• 5 years ago

Really makes you want to visit and see how this actually works for yourself. The more I read about China, the more unbelievably contradictive it gets.

It’s not really weird: most Chinese prefer the best choices possible, and if it isn’t blocked (and often even it is) they will use the service if t has more than a watered down local version. The government blocks internet global services via the great firewall because otherwise they would get used in China (and also makes jumping the wall annoying because otherwise more people would jump it).

xedrac• 5 years ago

I was in China for about a month, up until a couple weeks before the covid outbreak started. The internet was so locked down I could hardly do anything. Thankfully I had set up my laptop and home server with Wireguard, so I was able to route everything through my home server back in the US. Interestingly, the factory I was in had a room with a "special" connection to the internet, which apparently wasn't nearly as locked down (but probably monitored heavily). This was so they could do things like video calls with businesses outside the country. I don't know if this is representative of China in general, but it was certainly oppressive.

sebow• 5 years ago

Ok, this makes much more sense than the click-baity title, i already knew that to a degree.They'll probably never ban steam because it doesn't make sense, even if you are "PRC"

chunghuaming5• 5 years ago

As an average Chinese citizen right now:

- You cannot travel abroad (no passport issued for average citizens, except for those that study/work abroad)

- You cannot go beyond China's intranet legally (VPN is technically illegal in China). VPN services keep getting slowed/banned.

- You cannot transfer much money out of country legally (50k limit a year, but you end up going to bank 10+ times just to be able to transfer 10k)

- You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally

- You have very little rights as LGBT

- You have to work 9-9-6. Which is why many citizens are lying flat (not working/pursuing marriage)

- You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list

- You should not get rich (1/3 of billionaires have died or disappeared). The state discourages showing off wealth

- You have little recourse as a woman who is abused by men in power

- You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold

- Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship

终究怀揣的不安，是愈来愈近的丧钟声

Aperocky2• 5 years ago

You have to work 9-9-6. Which is why many citizens are lying flat (not working/pursuing marriage)

None of the government/public workers are working that schedule. Or someone who finds a job in the private companies who aren't insane.

You are constantly subjugated to random mass covid testing, standing hours outside in the cold.

Speaking from anecdotal experience, my parent has been subjugated to none in 2021 because they were not living in an affected location. Mass covid testing are only carried out where there are outbreaks.

You are constantly watched, monitored, "invited" to police station for tea, banned for posts that contain any words that are on the growing banned list

Might apply to your personal case? I don't know even one person who are constantly invited to police station for tea, despite having hundreds of friends in China.

You cannot watch Spiderman, BTS, squid game, porn and many many more things legally

Except that everyone does, and I'm not aware of any prosecutions. Also, Spiderman, BTS, squid game does not even touch laws, they just haven't been screened in cinemas, you can still get them from different sources (which often means piracy in China).

Oh and there's the yearly flood + shoddy buildings + crashing economy + crashing real estate + aging workforce + factory jobs leaving + dictatorship

We'll see then. The rhetoric have been around for decades.

Some of what you said is true to a degree, but you are painting it in a very biased fashion. China has a lot of flaws, but what you said certainly does not apply to an 'average' Chinese citizen. In fact, all of these combined are almost impossible to happen to a single Chinese citizen, average or not.

Aunche• 5 years ago

This is the second time I've seen you try to piggyback off of a top HN comment without saying anything relevant to it.

whoevercares3• 5 years ago

Why you are posting the exact comment repeatedly? I saw this twice the past week in China related posts

teeray• 5 years ago

This also does not refer to the gaseous form of water, which was my first impression reading the headline

ganzuul12• 5 years ago

In my eyes, the attack on 'effeminate men' is the nail in the coffin for the government of China. They are as dead to me and my actions will reflect it. Down with Emperor Pooh!

IsThisYou• 5 years ago

Also maybe the genocide in Xinjiang.

The constant attacks against India.

Daily sending war planes into Taiwan's air defense zone.

Using armed fishing vessels to militarily attack the Philippines.

Raiding the fishing grounds of poor countries by turning off transponders and sending hundreds of fishing vessels into their national waters at night.

Destroying world heritage nature reserves to steal fish.

And don't get me started about the crimes the Chinese Communists are doing to the Chinese people...

LudwigNagasena• 5 years ago

It’s weird that westerners care so much about such issues compared to, you know, erosion of human rights, genocide, totalitarianism.

topspin4• 5 years ago

It is amusing. They could have gone on filling the oceans with plastic and using banned CFCs and gamifying life on Earth through Social Credit all while enjoying near total deference from the prevailing virtuegeist of the West. But instead they chose to mess with LGBTQ and all of the sudden they're evil incarnate.

ganzuul12• 5 years ago

It's not about an amount of caring like liters of water. Even then the things you mention are effects and not causes.

saba2008• 5 years ago

It's less than 'final nail', but rather sign that government has no better topics, than crude mix of chauvinism an and emotional manipulation. Cf. Russian progression from 'ignore politics, look at economic growth' -> 'ignore politics for economical stability sake' -> 'ignore politics or homos will diddle your kids'

jkhdigital• 5 years ago

You know the end is near when ideas of proper morality flow from a government to its citizens, rather than the reverse.

dang• 5 years ago

Please do not take HN threads into flamewar like this. We ban accounts that do that, for what should be obvious reasons if you review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

You can make your substantive points thoughtfully, so please do that instead.

Abroszka3• 5 years ago

Recently I have been getting a lot more annoyed about China. Sure they can ban things, it's their right. But I just don't understand why we are not doing the same.

izacus3• 5 years ago

You don't understand why your own nation isn't following the tantrums of a totalitarian regime? That would make your own nation into China, why the heck would you want that?!

Abroszka3• 5 years ago

Because it's an unfair competition.

legofr4• 5 years ago

We wouldn't be turning into China if we only banned Chinese companies, if we only blacklisted/punished western companies that spread CCP propaganda (nine-dash line, calling Taiwan a province of China, etc).

To quote HN user stale2002: Tit for tat reciprocity is the basis of most modern trade relations.

jollybean2• 5 years ago

Because trade only really works if there's balance and bilateral rules.

Opening your nation to trade, while the other does not, and does things like subsidize their companies to put yours out of business, is not good.

The US should probably play tit-for-tat and ban an arbitrary Chinese company for every US company banned by China.

That way, China understands at least the repressions.

Of course, that policy might not work, as it would just spiral up into a big 'ban fest', but you get the idea.

Banning games is a funny thing, people like games. People are going to be upset.

When people are playing games, they are not agitating.

When people are bored, they think about things like politics.

forgotmyoldname• 5 years ago

If other countries start banning everything, isn’t that just as bad as what China is doing here?

siva72• 5 years ago

Because we are not them? There must be a fine distinction which results in freedom of speech

darthrupert2• 5 years ago

To put it bluntly: Because we're better than them.

OtomotO4• 5 years ago

Not by a large margin, but yes, yes you are, to some extent still.

I just wished you and Europe where as good as your PR, I really and genuinely do

Abroszka3• 5 years ago

Yet we are allowing human right abuses? I think we only care about money, that's why we allow this to happen.

Just look at Intel right now, apologizing for not using slave labour...

lnxg33k12• 5 years ago

Does it make it better to make our workers compete with people without rights, healthcare, holidays, sustainable pay? I don't have any problem with China they can ban what they want, I would just desire that this open borders crap would require import only from countries where workers have a compatible standard of living of importing countries

jollybean2• 5 years ago

No, that's not it at all.

Trade is a serious issue, it has consequences.

If China banned most US companies, the US would have to ban most Chinese companies.

speedgoose• 5 years ago

Cough Huawei Cough.

_tik_4• 5 years ago

US already banned and blacklisted numbers of chinese companies

stjohnswarts6• 5 years ago

I mean you should take yourself and your valuable talents to China and live your best life under the CCP paradise.

brian-armstrong• 5 years ago

Boilers on notice!

32ninin3• 5 years ago

European and American economies will be destroyed by China soon. But their stockholm syndrome prevents them from doing anything against it.

OtomotO4• 5 years ago

Imperiums fall, such is the effect of time.

And in time others rise, sometimes in the same region.

China will fall too, at some point.

Memento mori, amor fati!

fosk• 5 years ago

Sic transit gloria mundi.

enkid2• 5 years ago

Ooookkkkk. That's not even China's goal. China need the US and Europe to have strong economies to sell stuff to for the foreseeable future. China doesn't have a strong consumer sector, outside real estate, which is not a good driver for growth in the long term, and the demographics of China mean it's not likely to develop a strong consumer class before the work force ages out.

medstrom3• 5 years ago

But why do you need to sell stuff to anyone, once everyone else has shit economy? You can lie back and relax at that point, you're still top of the heap.

eunos• 5 years ago

Eh these days biggest trade partner for China is ASEAN, it will be much bigger of course if other Asia included. Especially when RCEP become effective.

sgjohnson4• 5 years ago

What is China going to do? Tell their corporations to take on trillions upon trillions of foreign currency denominated debt, become unable to repay it, default on it all and go bankrupt?

Because that seems like the current MO.

siva72• 5 years ago

What is going on here with the comment section? Seems like it's flooded with pro ccp activists

rosndo4• 5 years ago

Standard practice anywhere you have Chinese people, most are perfectly reasonable but many are deeply indoctrinated nationalists.

Unfortunately the rest aren’t willing or able to do anything about the genocide cheerleader squad.

simonh2• 5 years ago

The communist party party has successfully managed to associate love of China with loyalty to the party and government, and criticism of the party with being “anti-Chinese”. So being pro-democracy in Hong Kong is being anti-China, and opposing the ethnic and cultural suppression in Xinjiang is China hating.

My wife is Chinese and we have a Chinese friend here in the UK we have to be careful what we say to. She gets upset if anything critical of the Chinese government comes up, because she “loves China”. We love China too, just not the communist party.

Ostrogodsky5• 5 years ago

Standard practice anywhere you have... people, most are perfectly reasonable but many are deeply indoctrinated nationalists.

Just a cursory reading of the comments in any topic about China will show you that their western counterparts are alive and kicking here

dkjaudyeqooe2• 5 years ago

You'll find the same with any article critical of China.

The party is paying people (quite well) to defend China online. It's another kind of misinformation campaign.

miohtama• 5 years ago

You can also check the comment history of these people to see if they are outright government trolls or brainwashed university students. Sometimes it is pretty clear.

pell• 5 years ago

Always interesting to see what kind of mindblowing absurdities they come up with to defend the horrendous acts against the Uighur people. I also see it in German comment sections at this point.

nowherebeen3• 5 years ago

There are definitely signs of them here. I have another thread that had someone trying to steer my comment into a East vs West argument just for mentioning China. It seems like they are trying to pick fights out of nowhere as if they are getting paid. And if you notice, they come at certain hours like there is suddenly a wave of them all at once.

okasaki2• 5 years ago

Can you point me where to sign up to get paid to defend China online?

tombh14• 5 years ago

I must offer another data point. I'm British, and often find myself in these threads criticising criticism of China. Not because I'm being paid by the CCP, but because I believe that mainstream anti-Chinese sentiment tells us more about the West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.

kmlx2• 5 years ago

West's psychological struggles to come to terms with its own historically unprecedented imperial past, than it does about China itself.

oh come on. we criticise China because it’s whole political system, that was set up very recently btw, fights against basic rights we take for granted in the West. not because of what the romans or european empires did hundreds of years ago, but because of what China is doing right now.

honkdaddy2• 5 years ago

That's very interesting. So you think generally the news of vast human rights abuse we see coming out of China are due to the West's psychological struggles (?), and not due to actual suffering caused by the Chinese government?

Do you have any Chinese heritage in your family? This reminds me of the perspective most of my half-Chinese friends had from back in college. They always felt as if it was their duty to defend China from the biased Western media, despite all the real world evidence painting a very clear and unbiased picture.

rosndo4• 5 years ago

Have you ever spent time in China? If you had, I suspect you wouldn’t be writing this comment.

mgsk• 5 years ago

Not because I'm being paid by the CCP

But you _are_ being paid by the CCP?

andrepd2• 5 years ago

What does criticism of authoritarian censorship today have to do with imperialism? Sounds just like an attempt to muddy the waters tbh

rndgermandude2• 5 years ago

Not being OK with the myriad of human rights abuses the Chinese government commits - sometimes "silently" and sometimes very opening and outright proudly - is just because I struggle with my own regions history? What the actual fuck... I have to call your "theory" what it is: stupid and dangerous - and whataboutism on top.

robbedpeter2• 5 years ago

Neville Chamberlain had similar thoughts about Germany.

Perhaps when dictators start doing things like rounding up undesirables into camps and pushing ideological uniformity at the point of a gun the reasonable response is to condemn the behavior? It doesn't matter who's wearing the jackboots, it's despicable to appease, condone, or enable the ones stepping on the throats of human beings.

LAC-Tech• 5 years ago

unprecedented? The PRC is still pursuing Imperial Qing claims to this day.

xinniethepooh4• 5 years ago

It's curious that you say 'historically unprecedented imperial past' - imperialism typically has to do with having a ruler, and exerting diplomatic or military force to influence other nations.

Why do you say this is historically unprecedented? China has been imperialist since its beginning, and continues its imperialism with Hong Kong, South china sea, Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Myanmar ...

What 'historically unprecedented imperial past' are you referring to that isn't preceded by China's?

mrjin3• 5 years ago

How do you tell that?

yodsanklai• 5 years ago

I didn't read the comments but 1. it could be flooded with pro cpp activists, it's a known fact that China pays people to influence forums 2. It may be difficult to understand for Americans, but (I think) some people here are "pro-china" as they see China as an alternative to US imperialism, or at least something that can be less harmful.

Personally, my wife is Taiwanese so I'm extremely concerned about China in a very concrete way. I'm not sure the people who advertise themselves as "pro-China" really have a sense of what's going on.

the_af• 5 years ago

Can you provide some examples of this alleged "flood of pro CCP activists" in this comments section?

I'm reading some minor disagreements. Is this activism in your worldview?

_-david-_3• 5 years ago

Anytime someone says the CCP there is a post saying the west does the same thing. It is tiring since we aren't talking about the west.

stared• 5 years ago

I am European and not affiliated in any way with China. And don't want to whitewash them.

Still, there is a double standard regarding China vs the Western World. While China gets (IMHO deserved) criticism for their territorial claims and human right abuse, the Iraq War (over 400k deaths) was "business as usual".

The same goes with anti-pandemic restrictions - when it happens in China, it's an authoritarian rule. When in the West - it's social responsibility. When China started vaccinating children, I saw an article with "child soldiers" and a photo of a crying kid. The same action in the West had a picture of a smiling kid, and a more welcoming title.

Or even when it comes to pollution and worker's rights, the West is hypocritical. Blames China, while happily outsources most heavy industry there, due to lower costs. (When was the last time you bought some electronics and there were not "Manufactured in PRL"?)

emptysongglass5• 5 years ago

We're not discussing the US, we're discussing the latest abuse of power by the CCP. That's where the link goes. Would you like to next make a false equivalence of US prison labor to slave labor in China? Because that's where this goes, every thread.

Submit a link of the US' latest atrocity to HN. A world of tolerance allows and accepts the stories of violence perpetrated by all actors. The reason you are seeing so many related to China is we have some new flagrant human rights abuse happening from the CCP every week, sometimes multiple times a week, that's why you see so many of these stories percolate to the top. Just two days ago, the CCP tore down the statue commemorating the Tiananmen Square massacre in Hong Kong. [1]

This is the screaming of the machine doing its work of control, every day of every week. The memories of them will be inhaled whole and exhaled as dust, a phantom of a thing that never truly existed.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-59764029

sgjohnson4• 5 years ago

Not really. The Iraq war was horrible and unnecessary and I doubt you’ll find too many people here who’ll say otherwise.

But it was the past and it’s settled. China is happening now.

alkonaut• 5 years ago

That’s whataboutism. Most liberal democracies didn’t invade anyone recently and have free press and a history of little recent human rights abuse.

It’s possible to criticize China on its own merits without somehow excusing anyone else.

I’d happily pay more for goods from manufacturers saying they avoid China. Hopefully this will be easier and cheaper in coming years.

charcircuit• 5 years ago

Not everyone who disagrees with you is an activist. It's possible for people to have different information than you or have different values than you.

pessimizer2• 5 years ago

Really? As somebody constantly accused of being a Chinese bot for not agreeing that the Chinese government is a manifestation of absolute evil that the world needs to destroy in order to save, these threads all seem to be filled with anti-Chinese hypernationalists.

gentleman11• 5 years ago

On hn, we should try to engage with peoples ideas, and be careful about attributing motives and dismissing people.

That said, I’ve seen a lot of pro ccp posts in the last few months. If we hypothetically say there are state manipulators on hn becoming active, what is the most mature way to respond to the situation?

KwisatzHaderack• 5 years ago

The most mature way would be to debate their claims with logic, data, sources, etc.

yibg• 5 years ago

People have different opinions and are free to voice them. I’m not pro ccp (but here I feel the need to clarify up front), but it’s not hard to understand that some people view china more favorably than most in the US. At the very least it shouldn’t be hard to understand why some people would reject the more extreme anti china stance.

edit: long way of me saying, I don’t think anyone that defends china should automatically be labeled ccp propaganda.

OtomotO4• 5 years ago

"we've always been at war with eastasia"

The major problem I see, is that every major power uses propaganda to their benefit, yet even highly intelligent people often don't see the propaganda of their native (or chosen) home.

I see the propaganda of China, Russia as well as the one of the US and Europe.

There are no white, selfless knights around. There never were.

Does that mean that nothing matters, that (subjective) morale suddenly is meaningless?

Of course it doesn't!

But it puts "them vs us" into perspective.

Humans are humans and act like humans all around the world.

cosmodisk• 5 years ago

Well it's the first page from 'Politics for Dummies': find an enemy and blame it for everything. If there's no enemy,create one or even imagine one.

tristor• 5 years ago

And if you already have an enemy and they’re doing horrible things, don’t look the gift horse in the mouth, tell people about it.

Comparing China’s bad behavior to the bad behavior of the West is a false equivalence on every aspect. It is clear that the West also has (or had) bad behavior, but bringing it up is a form of whataboutism to distract from the much worse behavior happening right now in China.

axiosgunnar2• 5 years ago

Of course I see Western propaganda, but at least Western propaganda pretends to benefit me.

So I would rather pretend to believe in Western progaganda than Chinese propaganda.

„Humans are humans“ is dangerously naive in a world full of thug nations.

medstrom3• 5 years ago

Pretends to benefit you? Example, please?

nsv• 5 years ago

Propaganda does not benifit you. It benifits the state. To think that the state's goals are your own is a symptom of being poisoned by propaganda.

enaaem• 5 years ago

There is no such thing as unbiased news. But here in the west I can (legally) read Chinese state news and get the other side of the story. The other way around is not possible.

polotics• 5 years ago

That is one big false équivalence. The mistreatment of minorities by the CCP is not the same thing as the mistreatment of minorities by the USA. Or did I miss the news about the black lives matter forced sterilisations?

lmz2• 5 years ago

You missed the part where the USA killed off most of the native population of its western side and drove them off their lands, yes. Different times, but maybe that's just the thing to do to get to superpower status and China's just catching up.

cscurmudgeon3• 5 years ago

I see the propaganda of China, Russia as well as the one of the US and Europe.

This is a huge false equivalence.

You won't see Chinese citizens publicly in favor of US/Europe but you will damn well see it the other way around.

E.g., some of my coworkers genuinely think it is ok for China to ban Western companies in the name of harmony but the US introducing the slightest of regulations is seen as fascism.

A discussion like this can't happen inside China on a popular platform.

_tik_4• 5 years ago

I though US maintains list of black listed companies

axiosgunnar2• 5 years ago

The move comes as a surprise

How dense and gullible do you have to be?

Do people keep forgetting they’re dealing with an authoritarian dictatorship?

ANYTHING is on the table, nothing should come as a surprise.

Divest from China and diversify manufacturing sources, otherwise we will wake up one day imprisoned, and „the move will come as a surprise“

ketzu• 5 years ago

Do people keep forgetting they’re dealing with an authoritarian dictatorship?
ANYTHING is on the table, nothing should come as a surprise.

That does not follow from the first part. People and politics can, at large, still be predictable independent of the political organization.

pksebben• 5 years ago

I would argue that any single individual is perfectly capable of being unpredictable, so any form of authoritarianism would derive that unpredictability.

This is, fwig, the instability that a republic is meant to fix.

nullifidian• 5 years ago

It's not a surprise because the localized version of steam done in cooperation with Perfect world, a Chinese publisher, was in development specifically for this purpose, I believe, i.e. the inevitable/planned replacement of foreign with local and fully controlled. Otherwise there wouldn't be a need to do it for Valve.

Not surprising really considering how hard it is to publish a game in China to begin with -- you basically have to have a local company representing you, and they usually take 80-90% of your profits, that's on top of the the 30% share that stores take, and go through an extensive bureaucratic process, with various forms of censorship of course, and even then there is no guarantee that you will be allowed to publish.

China tries and succeeds at playing the globalization game in a way that everyone else ends up dependent on them, but not the other way around. And the global corporations are stampeding over each others heads to betray all the principles there still are in the west for that sweet sweet access to the giant Chinese market, for the time being they are still allowed to that is.

netcan• 5 years ago

> Divest from China and diversify manufacturing sources

Who is this aimed at?

Major brands (apple, tesla, disney, etc.) are not going to divest from China. China is a big part of their future market, they hope. They're going to invest wherever their market is. Obviously they know that this comes with strings and risks attached. They will get sideswiped with rules, punitive or otherwise.

Authoritarian government action is just a risk, like any other risk. Apple might also lose their popularity. Disney might get There could be an economic downturn. These are all risks, and companies take risks. The reward is worth the risk, evidently.

On the manufacturing side... there probably aren't as many surprises in the cards. Whatever qualms are to be had were had decades ago.

On a side note, China is proof that 99% of chamber of commerce-ish "warnings" are nonsense. Investment goes wherever the market is, whatever the rules. The ccp could decree that all iphones must be red and starred as of next week. Apple would make red starred iphones, and Cook would make a public statement praising the wisdom of this regulation.

chunghuaming5• 5 years ago

Major brands (apple, tesla, disney, etc.) are not going to divest from China

Diversification is already happening - 20,000 foreign companies have left China in the last 4 years. Samsung, LG, GoPro, etc.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk6lkW4A7Ec

China is a big part of their future market

The Unemployed and semi-unemployed might reach 300M+ people in China. Chinese consumer market is slowing down big time - Lost decades just like Japan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lk6lkW4A7Ec

threatofrain• 5 years ago

This is also not a surprise because tech journalists as early as February already anticipated that Valve working on a Chinese version of Steam implied a later ban for the "international" version.

stjohnswarts6• 5 years ago

Waiting until they declare VPNs as a crime punishable by 5-10 years in prison when you're caught using one.

amzin• 5 years ago

Sent the link to my son who is an avid gamer.

Got an one-word response:

"Winnienet".

Could not phrase it better.

armendhammer• 5 years ago

Banning google, banning, crypto, banning Steam, so much for progress.

stjohnswarts6• 5 years ago

eh, crypto might have been the right choice tho

jokoon• 5 years ago

I just asked my 23 years old sister if she knew what Steam was, she said no.

I would guess that China doesn't have any big enough economic advantage of allowing steam, so maybe steam is not that really big that people think.

Not to mention Valve takes a large cut of game sales so China has pretty good reasons to block it.

Aren't PC game sales a big stagnant? And on all those sales, Steam seems to be interesting for indie and niches games, not for big AAA games, since those AAA games often have their own online platform.

I looked some numbers some time ago, and to me it seems that the PC game market is not really profitable anymore.

And honestly, China might also increase its game profits by banning steam. When you can legally push a product out to make more money, you do it. China doesn't care about liberal economics.

300bps2• 5 years ago

China seems more anti-game than it seems pro-profit in this case.

Otherwise why limit children to 3 hours per week of gaming? Why ban images of “effeminate men”?

To me, China seems to be preparing.

xvector• 5 years ago

To me, China seems to be preparing.

This is a really interesting perspective. If China is trying to masculinize its teenage male population, we could see it engage in conflict as soon as these teenagers grow into adults at their physical prime, 6-8 years from now.

I think it's entirely likely that China will attempt to annex Taiwan within the next 10 years.

I think we will also see China be one of the first countries to engage in large-scale cyberwarfare alongside any physical conflict, e.g. DOS'ing civilian communications.

dragonelite3• 5 years ago

Wouldn't be surprised if tencent and others are going to launch their own app store. Tencent already partially did with the epic game store. Pull some string in China to block steams global edition to even out the fight for epic game store. Tencent owns like 40~48% of epic.

jfoster2• 5 years ago

I didn't know until now that Tencent owned such a large stake in Epic. Makes me wonder a little about the disputes with Google & Apple.

Whilst Epic seems to be fighting the good fight, I've thought it was very odd that they were putting so much on the line in their Google & Apple battles. Now I have to wonder if Tencent endorsed those legal battles with some more ambitious goal in mind.

dragonelite3• 5 years ago

Behind every big battle or war there is always a motivation to gain market access. This was true for ww1 and ww2 and I wouldn't be surprised it is true in these legal battles.

Wouldnt be surprised that tencent actually was the key player that pushed epic to open source their unreal engine so that the US can't block the unreal engine code base from being exported to China.

chunghuaming5• 5 years ago

Doubtful, Xi Jing Ping is hellbent on destroying the Chinese tech industry right now

dragonelite3• 5 years ago

In what way has the Chinese government destroyed Chinese tech. The big tech companies are still there just more regulated. They are also still innovating.

The Chinese government does actually know the difference between real productive forces and the stock market. It would be really weird for a socialist government to not know the theoretic works of Marx, lenin and stalin.

beebmam• 5 years ago

What will happen to Chinese games on Steam? I will be profoundly sad if they disappear. For example: Dyson Sphere Program is one of my favorite games of all time. If that's gone, I'm going to have a hard time not making the CCP my mortal enemy

hwers• 5 years ago

(Wow thanks for that gem, looks amazing I just bought it in case it goes away.)

ErikVandeWater2• 5 years ago

If that's gone, I'm going to have a hard time not making the CCP my mortal enemy

Wouldn't be a bad choice, regardless of what happens with Steam.

7sidedmarble• 5 years ago

> If that's gone, I'm going to have a hard time not making the CCP my mortal enemy
Wouldn't be a bad choice, regardless of what happens with Steam.

I can't tell if this is an ideological thing or not. There's a lot of states out there to vehemently dislike. But it's always this creepy strain of cold war torch-bearing that is so many people's pet cause. For the record, I think almost all states are on the exact same level of hateable, as a concept.

sovietmudkipz3• 5 years ago

The Chinese government != the Chinese people. Whenever geopolitics separates artists from their audiences, it’s just sad. It’s in a similar vein of when total war is waged; the governments talk a big game but it’s the common, every day people who suffer.

If you have an axe to grind be advised to make sure it’s targeted at the right people.

jtms• 5 years ago

Dyson Sphere Program is in my library backlog… I guess I need to bump it up to the top position!

sovietmudkipz3• 5 years ago

I appreciate that like something created by a group of people. It’s a great relationship between creators and audiences. That’s awesome and I hope you aren’t cut off from this group for arbitrary reasons like geopolitics.

viktorcode2• 5 years ago

Chinese games are free to be published outside of China. It is about the control of what's available inside the country.

vfulco2• 5 years ago

Decentralized web advancements will continue to punch holes.

tjpnz2• 5 years ago

You don't need web3 to punch holes in The Great Firewall of China. I've got a tech illiterate acquaintance living there right now and they regularly finds ways around it.

unityByFreedom2• 5 years ago

That explains why China decided to propagandize the whole internet.

ngcc_hk• 5 years ago

The real q should be what is not banned …

lenkite• 5 years ago

Thankfully, Taiwanese game franchises like "Sword & Fairy" are still available. It's deeply irritating that Emperor Xi is now butting his interfering nose into gaming entertainment.

yawaworht1978• 5 years ago

Maybe they don't want a dull population sitting many hours playing games and eat junk food.

Or they want the population to use some domestic platform, I am not sure, but even the Google ban has some legitimacy perhaps, when considering the amount of misleading news articles.

China does propaganda, the US outlets lie selectively according to their bias.

And such things can and will lead to having Trump elected with his maga disciples.

I think both are equally bad, just different.

scotty79• 5 years ago

Or maybe they don't want kids learning to communicate and cooperate randomly with each other through online games.

stjohnswarts6• 5 years ago

Or maybe they prefer that only video games that espouse loyalty to the party and communist values become the only possible types of games played, so they whittle away right along the road to achieving that goal

NelsonMinar• 5 years ago

It might not actually be banned; there are reports on Twitter and Reddit saying it's just a DNS cache poisoning attack similar to one a few years ago. No one's posting good verifiable info though so I don't really know. Steam definitely seems to be inaccessible in China right now, but why and whether it's intentional is not yet clear.

viktorcode2• 5 years ago

But a ban can be expected, as Chinese government enforces a system that allows only pre-approved games to be available to the country citizens. Chinese gaming companies too had been hit with bans.

octagons• 5 years ago

This correlates with some of the other reports I’ve read and I appreciate your skepticism. A “ban” is certainly not outside the realm of possibilities in China, especially given some of the new social policies, but we cannot afford to react like this whenever the word “China” makes its way into a headline if we want to draw attention to the real “bad” things.

LeanderK• 5 years ago

anti-Chinese, including the presence of "effeminate men"

How can effeminate men be anti-chinese?

stjohnswarts6• 5 years ago

Because it is preventing Chinese citizens from exercising their human rights to choose the way they want to live their lives rather than some made up masculine "uberm-man" of the CCP.

iszomer• 5 years ago

"Steam has been banned in China" reads differently than the article's original title: "Steam Has Reportedly Been Banned In China".

FFS, get it right the first time. Initial impressions went from:

* "Oh really? Not likely but okay..", clicks thread

* Fast-reads comments top to bottom "fuck, what is this.."

* Reads actual article, "God damnit."

Leary• 5 years ago

https://twitter.com/Stutsies/status/1474748979326111751?s=20

Looks like it's a DNS attack, not a ban.

lionkor• 5 years ago

Almost 6.5 billion people in the world excluding china, and I don't think a single one should care.

imapeopleperson• 5 years ago

China does this, then gets their panties in a bunch when the US bans goods made with slave labor.

livinglist• 5 years ago

As a Chinese who moved to U.S. couple years ago... I will never move back to China if there's no sign of democratization.

silexia• 5 years ago

Xi Jinping has turned China into a nightmare dictatorship. Ethically, why do any companies want to do business there?

Every business that goes into China gets it's IP stolen, it's new business entities stolen, etc. Why would anyone want to do business there period?

I do no business with anyone or any company in China with my company.

dragonwriter2• 5 years ago

Xi Jinping has turned China into a nightmare dictatorship.

That...seems to be giving him too much credit. Not saying that China under Xi isn't a nightmare dictatorship, just that if it is, he either didn't make it that way or didn't have far to go to get there.

Every business that goes into China gets it's IP stolen, it's new business entities stolen, etc.

That description has been being made of China longer than Xi has been in power, probably from a few days after the initial euphoria of Communist China opening up to Western business wore off.

seanmcdirmid6• 5 years ago

China liberalized a bit under Hu, with the pullbacks liberties only beginning after the 2008 olympics. Xi…as a child of the cultural revolution who seems to have nostalgic feelings for it for some reason, was a huge step back. He is also china’s first leader who is monolingual and skipped most of his college education (having a degree handed to him after the cultural revolution ended). It’s weird.

People forget china’s rollercoaster with liberalization in recent history, with China opening up dramatically in the late 80s before a huge pullback due to Tiananmen Square, there was also a movement in the late 70s that gained a lot of traction before being quashed. The pullback after the 2008 olympics has just lasted longer than the previous ones.

throwaway_me• 5 years ago

I honestly (no flamewar intended) wonder if the people of China (the majority of its regular citizens) suddenly decided that they're actually not happy with where the country is going, could they successfully make a change in government? Or is the power grip (+ available technology) of the powers that be (Xi and co) already too strong as to make that impossible, i.e. beyond the point of no return?

I am asking because, putting China aside, other countries seem to be headed in a similar direction if are not outright copying what China's been doing during the last years.

Steam has been banned in China

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