What would a world run by China be like?
We may think that our current western democracies are not favoring Main St, whereas they are totally favoring Wall St. And we may think our capitalist system has been hijacked by elites or insider traders and that it should be overhauled or re-invented. But have you considered the alternative, especially when it looks like that alternative is about to become China?
Those of us who were around in 1989 may remember the horrific government massacre of hundreds of unarmed innocent civilians by the Chinese military in one of their biggest public protests ever. Otherwise we can all go look it up on Wikipedia – all of us except anyone in China where it actually occurred. The Tiananmen Square Protests took place over a period of seven weeks in the Square itself situated in Beijing but also in 400 other Chinese cities. The cause was said to initially be the death of a leading activist Hu Yaobang, along with concerns over political corruption, nepotism and economic inequality in a new and more open market of the Communist state.
source
These are identical problems to ours in capitalist democracies globally, but at least we can take to the streets to voice our concern without being mowed down by tanks and soldiers as occurred in China – for now.
On seeing the student-driven uprising, the Chinese single party government simply declared martial law and sent the military to occupy the Square. The death toll from tanks and gunfire is, of course, uncertain as foreign journalists were thrown out of the country but estimates range from a few hundred to thousands, including innocent bystanders on the fateful event of 3-4 June. So it’s no surprise that the Chinese Communist party who perpetrated the crimes against their citizens are banning Wikipedia to prevent information of the event reaching their population.
Commit massive crimes against humanity and then just hide the historic data so that no one ever knows your real nature and you’re able to maintain your dictatorship a little longer.
It’s ironic that the protests which were also about freedom of speech and freedom of information have led to the very opposite. The Chinese translation of Wikipedia has been banned since 2015 in China already but since last month all of it is beyond the purview of the Chinese, according to the Open Observatory of Network Interference, a global observation network for detecting surveillance, censorship and traffic manipulation on the internet.
When Wikipedia moved to HTTPS it became more difficult for the government to see exactly which web pages people were accessing, but by using DNS injection and SNI filtering, they have blocked any access altogether.
Twitter is also technically banned in China, as is Google, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, Pintrest and thousands of other domain names, though some users can still gain access via VPN. Nevertheless the government maintains a harsh response to anyone who uses any social media platform to voice their protests against the totalitarian regime. This could be your reality too in years to come as China takes over the world, first economically, then politically and finally militarily. By the looks of it, it’s just a matter of time.
Their “social credit score” is currently forcing self-censorship on the citizenry, lest they lose any more freedoms for looking at the wrong websites or speaking out in any way at all. Anyone stepping outside the line gets their privileges removed, blocking access to jobs, public transport, property purchases, decent schools and more.
The banning of Wikipedia also blocks the Chinese citizens from access to all the other valuable information on the community-edited website, effectively dumbing down the population still further. In the past Turkey has done the same thing during times of unrest in 2017 and Venezuela is currently also intermittently blocking its citizens from access as an attempted coup takes place there, sponsored by the USA.
So which is the lesser of the two evils as our global imperialist master, you might wonder.
At least we still have some degree of free speech in the current status quo.
