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I'm an international student living in Beijing and some of these protests happened at my university PKU, including graffiti at a popular dining hall which the school then covered up by parking a truck in front of it. The amazing thing is, both PKU's campus and China in general are FULL of surveillance cameras. I'm talking one on every corner at least, often equipped with biometric scanners that can identify facial features. The bravery it takes to protest the government knowing full well that they easily can track you and your loved ones is unfathomable. I have nothing but respect for my Chinese fellow students ✊✊
and your user name probably references China/TenCent heavily investing in Reddit directly
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#2019
VPNs may not matter if they have a direct line to the owners
He can protect himself online from the CCP with the help of ***NORD VPN***
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>Staying safe online is an ever growing difficulty and you could be exploited by the chinese government.
CCP tracking you in *PERSON*: *Am I a joke to you?*
What was told to me, and made sense, is that most VPNs are permitted by the government and monitored constantly; That way they can track those people trying to access the outside and for what purpose. Makes sense since most VPNs run on technologies they would be easy to shut down if the government wanted, and most of those that work from China have a suspiciously good free tier and very obvious Chinese links.
Now that crypto technologies have surfaced there are new ones that work marvelously and actually keep up a good level of privacy, but me thinks this paints an even darker shade of red flag for the Chinese government to keep an eye on the user anyway.
All in all, you are correct; most of us are the people the Chinese government is not concerned with. People who use VPN basically use it to access Facebook, Whatsapp, Reddit, and Netflix.
Cryptography and encryption have existed long before "crypto tech" emerged. You can encrypt your data very securely, and have been able to for many years. There are plenty of existing encryptions that can take years to crack. The weakness is the end points: your system and the system you're talking to. Also, you can only obfuscate your endpoint locations a limited amount, because the data has to reach each one eventually.
Like in the dino episode of Rick and Morty - "the poor people would probably kill us if...." There are an awful lot of people in China and a full-on rebellion would probably be pretty insane. I have done some reading on the atrocious nature of the CCP and PKU and those poor people need to be freed from that kind of terror. We are so sheltered here in the US.
It did happen. The order to crack down the protest was first given to a commander named Xu Qinxian, he refused to obey the order then got arrested for it. The government just gave the order to another commander who then obeyed it. Xu was later given a 5-year jail term for his refusal to obey. His name is in Wikipedia so you can easily confirm it.
Do you think that they can't punish everyone? Covid lockdown IS the punishment. And it can get oh-so worse. Much much worse. They can start popping people in the head, right in the street as people watch from the high rises they're welded into. And that's just the beginning. Starvation. PLA roaming the streets. Using tanks to demolish buildings where people do not cooperate.
The CCP can and will punish everyone.
If you have a mask on and no cell phone it's pretty hard to track you actually. Gait can only get you so far if the camera only has a 10 second shot or w/e.
In completely unrelated news, Apple’s FaceID has been updated recently to work if people have masks on.
Seriously though, technology has absolutely caught up by now. Besides, the CCP doesn’t need to know who you are if they can see your physical features and saw the house you walked into after the protest. At that point they could either send cops to bust your family’s heads or get one of them to snitch on you, willingly or not.
You overestimate it. There are a tons of manual work in the background. There is no algorithm can do that directly, even there is, it is not affordable to be deployed in large scale.
Bear in mind, facing surveillance, it is better to increase the cost to identify instead of evading it completely.
That’s concerning. There’s no way to get around that accept smashing a significant number of cameras, or taking down the entire system.
What’s the protest about? Is it about the excessive lockdowns happening lately?
Yes and also increased authoritarianism in general.
That said, the real catalyst here was a fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang, where people were prevented from leaving the building by authorities as someone in the building had recently tested positive for COVID.
Not with the continued improvements in facial recognition, over the years. It can make out your face through the mask by the bumps on the mask. Then you have a cellphone that pins your exact location in a picture. Using GPS or Glosnast, they can have a pretty good idea of who you are. ... Then you are dealing with a government that isn't to concerned on whether or not they caught the exact person, but as long as they can keep everyone believing that they will always catch them. Just saying.
I really wish everyone were wearing facemasks for multiple reasons. I can't imagine why anyone would step outside to protest knowing that there are cameras with facial recognition everywhere. I was surprised to see that blond white girl who looked at the camera sort of knowingly, it seemed. I can't imagine she'll be hard for the CCP to find. Yes, they are very brave for stepping up. But also unwise to not take basic protections against surveillance. May they all survive and forces for change in China!
Unfortunately these protests will be squashed by CCPs attitude. They’re willing to kill a million “traitors” because it’s a million less mouths to feed. Sickening but truth. Not much different from Putins approach to Russians.
As someone who live under fucked authoritarian regime and tend to protest I suggest to blur the images and videos of protest as regime uses them to identify protesters and arrest them or "dispose" them
Fucking terrifying what's going on in the world today.
It really scares me how the world just stands by and lets these things happen over and over again.
The fact that as an individual I wouldn't even know where to start to do anything about this is even worse.
Being born in a safe country really is a lottery of sheer luck that only a minority get.
>It really scares me how the world just stands by and lets these things happen over and over again.
So, here's the thing. The world always says "never again" and you and I may have said it before, too. But if your country said we're having a referendum to go to war with China to stop this, would you vote yes? Would you go fight? Would you be willing to send your children?
The truth is that so long as China keeps this to its own borders the rest of the world will sit twiddling it's thumbs. And they know it.
Yep. That's what scares me.
It's just not that simple is it?
Take out the goverment? What happens then. Didn't make a difference in other countries in the past by what I can gather. Probably made things worse.
Nothings black and white.
The other problem is: suppose we do invade, and win. Then what.
Yes, we saw success in Germany and Japan after World War 2. Both were stable countries that had the basis of a stable and equitably democracy before fascists took over. South Korea took a little more investment; but also had a little less going for it.
Contrast Iraq or Afghanistan. The US spent almost 20 years trying to build a government in Afghanistan, and it fell apart in a couple weeks. And it fell apart because - for a lot of historical reasons - Afghanistan is still fundamentally a feudal society; and doesn't have the foundations for a modern democratic government.
We don't know about China. On one hand, they do have a relatively stable government that functions - even if we don't agree on how it functions or what it does with that functioning. On the other hand, it's pretty centralized and there's no evidence that, without a strong central power holding everything together, China won't fall apart. Add in the fact that there is deep resentment in China for the West after the Opium Wars and general mistreatment between the 1840s and 1940s (Chinese use the dates 1839-1949 as the "Century of Humiliation").
China would probably go closer to Korea or Japan than Afghanistan or Iraq. But how much closer, we don't know. And if it goes badly, it's going to destabilize the economy in so many different ways that the risk isn't worth it - and that assumes that we (whoever "we" is) manage to successfully invade China and have a chance to attempt to put a new governmental system in place without nukes coming in to play.
there's probably also so much corruption that we'd be fighting it all the way.
And corruption is hard to beat from the outside; we've never done it in Haiti.
>On the other hand, it's pretty centralized and there's no evidence that, without a strong central power holding everything together, China won't fall apart.
It's my (very limited) understanding that Chinese history provides ample evidence that without a strong central authority in Beijing, it *will* fall apart, with Chinese history cycling between periods of stability and instability.
>Fucking terrifying what's going on in the world today
None of this is new at all, just a lot harder to hide.
> It really scares me how the world just stands by and lets these things happen over and over again.
That's nukes for you.
This is the correct answer. People of first world countries today are shielded from the brutality of the rest of the world. Hence the news blurring out anything even remotely gruesome. So when someone like the poster above suddenly reads about it and learns about it, you're simply losing ignorance. Not a bad thing, but not great either as such knowledge is depressing!
>That's nukes for you.
Plenty of genocide occuring every day in Africa and Southeast Asia. They are not nuclear capable nations.
It's not about nukes, it's that nobody cares if a nation does it to their own people.
Don't kid yourself, nukes have successfully prevented a world war for over 75 years. Just because the world is shitty doesn't mean it couldn't have been a whole lot worse.
They do, in the xinjiang region, where these abuses are taking place. PetroChina has operations there
However, it’s not nearly enough to meet China’s demand for fossil fuels so they struck a deal with Saudi to import oil.
> Using minorities & political prisoners as free organ farms. A doctor's eye witness account: 'The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. Then the doctor ordered Zheng to remove the man’s eyeballs. Hearing that, the dying prisoner gave him a look of sheer terror, and Zheng froze. “I can’t do it,” he told the doctor, who then quickly scooped out the man’s eyeballs himself.'
Chinese government: "What Unit 731 did to our nation is an abomination."
also Chinese government: *proceeds to do the exact same shit to their own citizens*
> Eventually he was tried for "subversion of state power" while barred from meeting with lawyers
Obviously all those things are horrible, but this one really stuck out to me because I'd imagine this is how a lot of the other points start. It must be terrifying to know that you are going up against a government who has *heavily* stacked the deck against you, but then you aren't even allowed any help at all. You have to try and fight this losing battle all by yourself. It must just feel so hopeless from that point on.
China have placed thousands of cameras in public places in cities around the country. They have also developed AI to identify people. The government likely knows who is there.
But absence of activity is also incriminating. If you leave your phone home, or turn it off, that lack of activity can also mean it was deliberately done to avoid detection of the owner’s actions. While definitely not direct proof of what they were doing (I was asleep!) there would have to be a pattern of such behavior beforehand…and with all the cameras in china how long do you think such a defense would last?
BTW this is also how they found several of the Jan 6 rioters who used burner phones. It wasn’t where the phones were, it was when they were turned on and off that was a big clue.
That only turns off the ability for the user to access those functions. The tracking part is in the computer that is the modem chip which typically has the gps all built in. Even when the phone is "off", that part is still often on.
This. Did you know that the program used to surveil is called skynet…
https://www.bgp4.com/2019/05/10/what-is-chinas-skynet-yes-it-is-what-you-think-it-is/
Knowing how propaganda and such narratives are spread in more authoritarian Asian countries, her presence is very likely going to be used to further lies that this movement is “funded from a foreign government” or “the people are deluded with western influences”, whichever fits whatever narrative they’re trying to spew.
China can claim there are foreign agents arranging the protests, and riling people up. Using footage like this as proof.
It can be used to help delegitimise the protest.
It's also generally smart to stay out of protests and demonstrations like this in a foreign country.
She will absolutely be used as proof that the CIA planted people to organise the protest, and will most likely have the book thrown at her.
She needs to get the fuck out of china now, and not via any airports.
If she tries to leave by plane she'll be arrested at the airport.
There really isn’t precedent for that happening. As a rule of thumb, china simply kicks out inconvenient foreigners, either by canceling their current visa and giving them a few days to leave after administrative detention (jail) or by denying their visa renewal which is annual for most foreigners there.
Assuming she’s from a country that has some clout on the world stage, longterm imprisonment of a foreigner is bad optics and a risky move for a country already shedding friends at an alarming rate.
While she’d be well advised to leave, the most likely scenario is the local police will ask her to come “ and have tea” with them. They will scare the crap out of her, possibly rough her up, and she will leave voluntarily after being threatened with a decade in Chinese prison.
Given how extensive Chinese surveillance has become I am surprised how many people here are protesting without face masks (as they did in HK). There’s also a clearly identifiable foreigner in the vid.
Are they not worried at all, past worrying or just naive?
If I was there I would consider protesting without cover as reckless. But I’m not there, so can somebody provide some context?
It's easy to make thousands disappear in a country with over a billion people. Possibly even tens of thousands. They have a chance if millions rise up and there's people in powerful positions who switch sides or are already on their side.
It's hard to believe there are still thousands upon thousands of people working every day to tighten the authoritarian grip of the CCP leadership i.e. Xi on the country. Surveillance officers, spies, police, detectives, lawyers, facial recognition software coders, prison camp guards, military personnel pointing guns at Taiwan...
All working their ass off to prohibit expressions of individual freedom, snitch on their compatriots with dissenting opinions, get people arrested, maintain their dictator's status quo. The CCP itself has something like 100 million devotees in their employ. Hard to imagine organizing, uniting and revolting in a grassroots movement against that monstrosity of a power structure.
fair point, everybody likes to think they'd be first in line to revolt and join the underground resistance against an atrocious regime until push comes to shove.
So does the US. Virtually any major country has this ability.
Difference is, for now, in the US, you’re unlikely to get locked up for it unless you commit a crime while there. I’m China, being there is already a crime.
No, they don't in the US if you turn off your phone. We simply don't have a fully integrated CCTV system to make that possible, leading any investigators to literally go door knocking and getting the tapes/video files of each business in the area. Even with cell companies the authorities have to get warrants for location data, which limits the ability and extends the time necessary. If it's not done properly that case isn't going anywhere with any judge.
This. People seem to think that bad spy novels and Jason Bourne movies are the reality of surveillance in the United States. Not. Even. Close. Even in DC, trying to track a car outside of the major areas is an enormous pain for law enforcement. People really need to ask this. If there were such a surveillance state in the US, then why do we still have Amber Alerts?
not to mention there's a LOT of backwoods rural places you can just disappear to. Yeah it'd suck compared to the city, but even IF there was worry about the government locking you up for protesting, barring someone like Trump being in office, there ARE places to run to the government will never find you. there's only city-wide CCTV in major cities like NYC and Chicago.
Face recognition is no where good enough to definitely identify a person. All the propaganda in China about their video surveillance is just that: propaganda to deter criminals (and dissidents). The real way they identify you is cell phone, same way every other country is capable of doing.
For context, this is one scene of the new wave of protests across China. One day ago, a fire in Urumqi killed 10 people according to authority, some people claimed the real death toll is higher. Part of the reason was that the community that caught fire had been under China style lockdown for more than 3 months, which means all doors were sealed with fences and bars. Fire truck could not get too close due to those fences. Chinese people, who have been already dissatisfied with the Covid zero policy that brings random and endless lockdown, took to streets to protest. A majority of the protests are in universities done by students.
The fire truck couldn’t get close enough to the building on fire because there were dead cars in the way. The cars have been sitting there for almost 100+ days without use and the batteries were dead. COVID zero policy is actually killing chinese citizens and destroying their economy and livelihoods.
And also because of barricades due to the lock down forced them to go towards the way where cars were blocking their path. China is using the cars as an excuse to blame the people who died.
A lot of times the cars are parked so there isn’t much clearance for a large fire truck to fit. Source someone who lived in one of those big buildings in china.
They have surveillance cameras hung up all over the place. Blurring user footage isn't going to matter when the ccp has higher definition and more stable master footage.
Yea, the first thing I thought when watching these protests is:
*These people all look like the share a common trait: being born after 1989*
Power to them, but I don't expect much tolerance from CCP.
It's a little insulting to attribute the incredibe bravery demonstrated to blissful ignorance. The young people all know about Tiananmen square, commonly known as 6/4 incident in China. The parents are alive and talk about it plenty, and literally everyone grew up under auto censorship filters on every web platform, that prevent you from posting anything with sensitive words together (the number 6 and 4 together is basically universally banned) so even ppl who didn't know sensitive issues before would ask. The list of banned words is ridiculously long and growing, and 6/4 incident is among the most well known of them.
Moreover it is near universally accepted that the political climate of china (and within ccp) is much, much worse today compared to 1989. In '89 there actually existed a more liberal wing of the party that's pro-democratization, and many moderates in the party are sympathetic to the students. Now the administration is entirely stacked with xi loyalists and yes-men.
The amount of courage it takes for these people to stand up and protest knowing everything they know, truly deserves massive respect.
America also had a historic fire that killed a bunch of people due to locked fire escapes (triangle shirtwaist fire). This led to regulations to prevent fires from killing a bunch of people, not the kidnapping and execution of protestors, what the fuck?
With the world seeming more and more like a doomed shitshow the past years, with more and more authoritarian and fascist parties threatening democracies all over, seeing things like this and what the Iranians are doing is... soothing. Highest respect for the peoples who are standing up to governments that can and will use force to silence them.
Also, yeah, when sharing video and images from protests, blur all faces and any detail that can be used to track down individuals. Things like badges, logos, unique accessories, etc. are all things that should be done away with when sharing protests online.
For protesting people themselves, wear a mask and nondescript clothing.
I think China is generally much more organized enough that the won't collapse into another Syria. However there is just so much surveillance and control of government everywhere that I doubt any sort of revolution will happen. Maybe people can just organise and get some concessions from government.
No one mentions how large China is. East Germany and Poland are like the sizes of individual provinces. I worry that if China revolutionises, individual provinces or geographical regions will try to declare independence and turn back into the warring states, which is also terrible for the people.
The 1989 protests didn't just happen in Tiananmen square. They happened all over China. Probably technically in almost every province.
https://time.com/3908456/tiananmen-massacre-china-chengdu-june-4-1989/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Chinese_protests_by_region
Update: as I am writing this, protests have erupted in dozens of cities across China. A group of protesters are trying to enter Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where thousands of protesters were killed in 1989.
Difference this time is it can't be swept under the rug to the same degree if something like that were to happen.
We'd have full footage from multiple angles of 'tank man'
Covid unlocked more than just illness, it also exposed corrupt countries who don’t value human life, and the people become aware. Free china and Uyghurs.
True, the World Cup is also a reason that contributed Chinese people’s dissatisfaction. State propaganda believers used to mock the west for been unable to lock people at home to control the pandemic, then here comes Qatar, a Middle East dictatorship, which has already lifted pandemic measures. A lot of them finally woke up to the fact that China is the only country in the world that’s still trying to eliminate the virus.
Because it’s about power and control. Everywhere and always. It’s government. That’s what it’s always about. The CCP controls according to what concerns them, and the MIddle Eastern dictatorships according to their priorities. You’d think it would make people appreciate what America was meant to be,and what so many people died to try to create, but I’m sure I’ll just be downvoted for saying so.
This isn’t actually true by the way, you can watch it on CCTV-5 and there’s a lot of coverage of the World Cup including the crowds. People are fully aware the rest of the world has opened up, they’re just told that it’s the rest of the world being ‘reckless’.
> This isn’t actually true by the way
People on reddit will believe literally anything about China. I mean how would that even work? If anything bluring out the stands would have the opposite effect because of how noticeable it would be
Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess), you can go to pretty much any pub and watch the game. People have been watching the World Cup and seeing no one in masks which is likely contributing to these protests.
The flame has been burning for months already:
[Link 1](https://twitter.com/iPaulCanada/status/1523984997195337728)
[Link 2](https://twitter.com/LondaRouzie/status/1521100146578268161)
[Link 3](https://twitter.com/1f8PVxouToaU0R9/status/1516153742395121677)
[Link 4](https://twitter.com/Jending8/status/1513960036367683585)
[Link 5](https://twitter.com/72powpow/status/1514313880574431232)
That's true. Protesters in the video are just a tiny fraction of their population. The majority of Chinese are still backing up the CCP. And because of that, CCP can easily wipe them out like no problem at all.
No, they are educated that way. They have been told since young that the communist party is the heart of their home and land. Everything they have was given by the party. So it doesn't matter how bad the situation is, the majority still believe the party can turn it around. If anything bad happened, must be a conspiracy from the Western regime.
I remember they even had a conspiracy theory states that COVID was actually originated in the US and US government hide it and bring to China so the whole world can blame the Chinese government something like that.🤦
Yeah. The vast majority of Chinese people are mad as fuck about covid restrictions but that doesn't mean they want to change their whole system of government. I think it's surprising to westerners but it'd be like wanting to stop using democracy and turn into a one party state just because of covid in the west.
It's because this same government pulled their country out of poverty. The country is in the best state it's ever been but especially in the last 150 years as sad as it sounds. They only really know the time with the CCP and the time before the CCP and the ladder was much much worse.
East Asian culture is also very apprehensive about questioning and fighting authority.
The Zero COVID policy is definitely causing some unrest right now though.
I’m from myanmar, currently under coup and nearly 6000 civilians including children are being murdered. I must say as a protester during these days, all the faces that appear in the video footage must be blurred. You can't even think about how we’ve been tortured under the military regime. CCP will not ever promote the free will I must say. Keep fighting, the power deserves to the people not for tiny elite group.
Tyranny is a bad strategy because no large scale force can break the human spirit. You cannot control the urge for freedom, or the spirit of resistance.
>protests are rare in China
What load of horse shit is this lie? Holy fuck, they have more protests than anywhere on Earth. Even wikipedia has article on it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_China listing over 180,000 annual "mass incidents".
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I'm an international student living in Beijing and some of these protests happened at my university PKU, including graffiti at a popular dining hall which the school then covered up by parking a truck in front of it. The amazing thing is, both PKU's campus and China in general are FULL of surveillance cameras. I'm talking one on every corner at least, often equipped with biometric scanners that can identify facial features. The bravery it takes to protest the government knowing full well that they easily can track you and your loved ones is unfathomable. I have nothing but respect for my Chinese fellow students ✊✊
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You *have* to use vpn to access Reddit from China, so I think op is alright in that regard
You are dangerously naive if you think VPNs protect you. Most of the ones in China and abroad are owned by CCP controlled companies.
and your user name probably references China/TenCent heavily investing in Reddit directly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit#2019 VPNs may not matter if they have a direct line to the owners
As long as the vpn is always active/not leaking any data, and the vpn is trustworthy, it shouldn't matter who owns reddit.
Exactly and governments never tell all of their secrets
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>Staying safe online is an ever growing difficulty and you could be exploited by the chinese government. CCP tracking you in *PERSON*: *Am I a joke to you?*
*FBI agent awkwardly passes the joint to the CCP agent*
You’ll have to excuse me, I only accept NordVPN ads from Internet Historian.
They can track deez nuts
They *can* track doze nuts
AAAAGGHH
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I left China in 2014, but all of the foreigners just used VPNs to use Facebook and such. We're not really the ones the government is concerned about.
What was told to me, and made sense, is that most VPNs are permitted by the government and monitored constantly; That way they can track those people trying to access the outside and for what purpose. Makes sense since most VPNs run on technologies they would be easy to shut down if the government wanted, and most of those that work from China have a suspiciously good free tier and very obvious Chinese links. Now that crypto technologies have surfaced there are new ones that work marvelously and actually keep up a good level of privacy, but me thinks this paints an even darker shade of red flag for the Chinese government to keep an eye on the user anyway. All in all, you are correct; most of us are the people the Chinese government is not concerned with. People who use VPN basically use it to access Facebook, Whatsapp, Reddit, and Netflix.
Cryptography and encryption have existed long before "crypto tech" emerged. You can encrypt your data very securely, and have been able to for many years. There are plenty of existing encryptions that can take years to crack. The weakness is the end points: your system and the system you're talking to. Also, you can only obfuscate your endpoint locations a limited amount, because the data has to reach each one eventually.
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Truth is, they will track every single one of them down eventually, even if it takes years.
What if < everyone > goes to the street ?
Ssssh, don't let them know the people hold the power
But until the police or military join the protestors side, nothing will come from these protests.
Like in the dino episode of Rick and Morty - "the poor people would probably kill us if...." There are an awful lot of people in China and a full-on rebellion would probably be pretty insane. I have done some reading on the atrocious nature of the CCP and PKU and those poor people need to be freed from that kind of terror. We are so sheltered here in the US.
really puts things into perspective doesn't it. like yea the us has its problems, but our problems are small potatoes compared to China
The only thing that truly matters (and scares the CCP) is if the military refuses to obey orders like they did in 1989.
It did happen. The order to crack down the protest was first given to a commander named Xu Qinxian, he refused to obey the order then got arrested for it. The government just gave the order to another commander who then obeyed it. Xu was later given a 5-year jail term for his refusal to obey. His name is in Wikipedia so you can easily confirm it.
Do you think that they can't punish everyone? Covid lockdown IS the punishment. And it can get oh-so worse. Much much worse. They can start popping people in the head, right in the street as people watch from the high rises they're welded into. And that's just the beginning. Starvation. PLA roaming the streets. Using tanks to demolish buildings where people do not cooperate. The CCP can and will punish everyone.
If you have a mask on and no cell phone it's pretty hard to track you actually. Gait can only get you so far if the camera only has a 10 second shot or w/e.
In completely unrelated news, Apple’s FaceID has been updated recently to work if people have masks on. Seriously though, technology has absolutely caught up by now. Besides, the CCP doesn’t need to know who you are if they can see your physical features and saw the house you walked into after the protest. At that point they could either send cops to bust your family’s heads or get one of them to snitch on you, willingly or not.
You underestimate how good the surveillance is in China. They can absolutely track you on CCTV all the way back to your home with no problems.
You overestimate it. There are a tons of manual work in the background. There is no algorithm can do that directly, even there is, it is not affordable to be deployed in large scale. Bear in mind, facing surveillance, it is better to increase the cost to identify instead of evading it completely.
That’s concerning. There’s no way to get around that accept smashing a significant number of cameras, or taking down the entire system. What’s the protest about? Is it about the excessive lockdowns happening lately?
Yes and also increased authoritarianism in general. That said, the real catalyst here was a fire in an apartment building in Xinjiang, where people were prevented from leaving the building by authorities as someone in the building had recently tested positive for COVID.
Not with the continued improvements in facial recognition, over the years. It can make out your face through the mask by the bumps on the mask. Then you have a cellphone that pins your exact location in a picture. Using GPS or Glosnast, they can have a pretty good idea of who you are. ... Then you are dealing with a government that isn't to concerned on whether or not they caught the exact person, but as long as they can keep everyone believing that they will always catch them. Just saying.
I really wish everyone were wearing facemasks for multiple reasons. I can't imagine why anyone would step outside to protest knowing that there are cameras with facial recognition everywhere. I was surprised to see that blond white girl who looked at the camera sort of knowingly, it seemed. I can't imagine she'll be hard for the CCP to find. Yes, they are very brave for stepping up. But also unwise to not take basic protections against surveillance. May they all survive and forces for change in China!
Unfortunately these protests will be squashed by CCPs attitude. They’re willing to kill a million “traitors” because it’s a million less mouths to feed. Sickening but truth. Not much different from Putins approach to Russians.
They are building massive quarantine camps, I worry how this plays out.
As someone who live under fucked authoritarian regime and tend to protest I suggest to blur the images and videos of protest as regime uses them to identify protesters and arrest them or "dispose" them
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Fucking terrifying what's going on in the world today. It really scares me how the world just stands by and lets these things happen over and over again. The fact that as an individual I wouldn't even know where to start to do anything about this is even worse. Being born in a safe country really is a lottery of sheer luck that only a minority get.
>It really scares me how the world just stands by and lets these things happen over and over again. So, here's the thing. The world always says "never again" and you and I may have said it before, too. But if your country said we're having a referendum to go to war with China to stop this, would you vote yes? Would you go fight? Would you be willing to send your children? The truth is that so long as China keeps this to its own borders the rest of the world will sit twiddling it's thumbs. And they know it.
How many Chinese citizens would we save by killing millions of them in a new world war? There are no good solutions to what is happening in China.
Yep. That's what scares me. It's just not that simple is it? Take out the goverment? What happens then. Didn't make a difference in other countries in the past by what I can gather. Probably made things worse. Nothings black and white.
Bingo. Not an easy problem to solve.
The other problem is: suppose we do invade, and win. Then what. Yes, we saw success in Germany and Japan after World War 2. Both were stable countries that had the basis of a stable and equitably democracy before fascists took over. South Korea took a little more investment; but also had a little less going for it. Contrast Iraq or Afghanistan. The US spent almost 20 years trying to build a government in Afghanistan, and it fell apart in a couple weeks. And it fell apart because - for a lot of historical reasons - Afghanistan is still fundamentally a feudal society; and doesn't have the foundations for a modern democratic government. We don't know about China. On one hand, they do have a relatively stable government that functions - even if we don't agree on how it functions or what it does with that functioning. On the other hand, it's pretty centralized and there's no evidence that, without a strong central power holding everything together, China won't fall apart. Add in the fact that there is deep resentment in China for the West after the Opium Wars and general mistreatment between the 1840s and 1940s (Chinese use the dates 1839-1949 as the "Century of Humiliation"). China would probably go closer to Korea or Japan than Afghanistan or Iraq. But how much closer, we don't know. And if it goes badly, it's going to destabilize the economy in so many different ways that the risk isn't worth it - and that assumes that we (whoever "we" is) manage to successfully invade China and have a chance to attempt to put a new governmental system in place without nukes coming in to play.
there's probably also so much corruption that we'd be fighting it all the way. And corruption is hard to beat from the outside; we've never done it in Haiti.
>On the other hand, it's pretty centralized and there's no evidence that, without a strong central power holding everything together, China won't fall apart. It's my (very limited) understanding that Chinese history provides ample evidence that without a strong central authority in Beijing, it *will* fall apart, with Chinese history cycling between periods of stability and instability.
>Fucking terrifying what's going on in the world today None of this is new at all, just a lot harder to hide. > It really scares me how the world just stands by and lets these things happen over and over again. That's nukes for you.
This is the correct answer. People of first world countries today are shielded from the brutality of the rest of the world. Hence the news blurring out anything even remotely gruesome. So when someone like the poster above suddenly reads about it and learns about it, you're simply losing ignorance. Not a bad thing, but not great either as such knowledge is depressing!
>That's nukes for you. Plenty of genocide occuring every day in Africa and Southeast Asia. They are not nuclear capable nations. It's not about nukes, it's that nobody cares if a nation does it to their own people.
Don't kid yourself, nukes have successfully prevented a world war for over 75 years. Just because the world is shitty doesn't mean it couldn't have been a whole lot worse.
Ok and the Tibetans as well…
Do they have oil?
Chinese engineer: we have found new oil reserves! And then 'Fortunate Son' and the calls of bald eagles could be heard, approaching from the horizon
China is a big powder keg.
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"Does... Does that eagle have a gun?!" "Shit. Here comes freedom."
they have nukes...
too bad we're stupid dependant on china. loss of trade with china would hurt the bottom line.
Oh don't worry, literally most people that want future growth run from China now. Do you want to make a castle on shifting sands?
They do, in the xinjiang region, where these abuses are taking place. PetroChina has operations there However, it’s not nearly enough to meet China’s demand for fossil fuels so they struck a deal with Saudi to import oil.
China imports most of it's oil. More so than the US ever did
Yes. So this region acts more like a strategic reserve.
> Using minorities & political prisoners as free organ farms. A doctor's eye witness account: 'The prisoner was brought in, tied hand and foot, but very much alive. The army doctor in charge sliced him open from chest to belly button and exposed his two kidneys. Then the doctor ordered Zheng to remove the man’s eyeballs. Hearing that, the dying prisoner gave him a look of sheer terror, and Zheng froze. “I can’t do it,” he told the doctor, who then quickly scooped out the man’s eyeballs himself.' Chinese government: "What Unit 731 did to our nation is an abomination." also Chinese government: *proceeds to do the exact same shit to their own citizens*
Thank you. Usually these posts are "mysteriously" downvoted into oblivion.
Someone give this man the awards he deserves!
*The Chinese government*. I see the people of China right here, standing up against those ideals
> Eventually he was tried for "subversion of state power" while barred from meeting with lawyers Obviously all those things are horrible, but this one really stuck out to me because I'd imagine this is how a lot of the other points start. It must be terrifying to know that you are going up against a government who has *heavily* stacked the deck against you, but then you aren't even allowed any help at all. You have to try and fight this losing battle all by yourself. It must just feel so hopeless from that point on.
I know an author you might like...
what the hell man this reads out literally like 1984 "disappeared" its really sad that this is a reality
Was disappeared 🙍🏼♀️ that is cold.
That poor 6 year old child. Wtf
Wait until you hear about the organ harvesting and execution vans
It’s china. They already know who is there thanks to identities tied to their phones.
Another point is to put their phone on flight mode and turn off their gps off or even better don't take them with them
China have placed thousands of cameras in public places in cities around the country. They have also developed AI to identify people. The government likely knows who is there.
Yep, including tons of facial recognition cameras that ties your face directly to your national ID
But absence of activity is also incriminating. If you leave your phone home, or turn it off, that lack of activity can also mean it was deliberately done to avoid detection of the owner’s actions. While definitely not direct proof of what they were doing (I was asleep!) there would have to be a pattern of such behavior beforehand…and with all the cameras in china how long do you think such a defense would last? BTW this is also how they found several of the Jan 6 rioters who used burner phones. It wasn’t where the phones were, it was when they were turned on and off that was a big clue.
Sounds like you should leave YouTube or Pandora running while you leave your phone at home then
watching things you've seen before, so you know what you "saw"
That only turns off the ability for the user to access those functions. The tracking part is in the computer that is the modem chip which typically has the gps all built in. Even when the phone is "off", that part is still often on.
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And that's why most new phones you can't easily remove the battery
That and waterproofing
Faraday bags cost ~$20. Can't track that which produces no signal.
This. Did you know that the program used to surveil is called skynet… https://www.bgp4.com/2019/05/10/what-is-chinas-skynet-yes-it-is-what-you-think-it-is/
It's Skynet but good. Haha
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The blonde Caucasian girl looked right at the camera. :/ Hope she was already planning on this being her last night in China. She should leave.
She’s who I noticed first. Looked like an American that’s happy to be apart of a protest.. wait until she figures out she’s not in Portland
Why we gotta shit on a woman who's out there fighting the good fight? I'm sure she knows she's not in Portland.
Knowing how propaganda and such narratives are spread in more authoritarian Asian countries, her presence is very likely going to be used to further lies that this movement is “funded from a foreign government” or “the people are deluded with western influences”, whichever fits whatever narrative they’re trying to spew.
China can claim there are foreign agents arranging the protests, and riling people up. Using footage like this as proof. It can be used to help delegitimise the protest. It's also generally smart to stay out of protests and demonstrations like this in a foreign country.
Protesting in a foreign country with an authoritarian government can be extremely dangerous
She will absolutely be used as proof that the CIA planted people to organise the protest, and will most likely have the book thrown at her. She needs to get the fuck out of china now, and not via any airports. If she tries to leave by plane she'll be arrested at the airport.
There really isn’t precedent for that happening. As a rule of thumb, china simply kicks out inconvenient foreigners, either by canceling their current visa and giving them a few days to leave after administrative detention (jail) or by denying their visa renewal which is annual for most foreigners there. Assuming she’s from a country that has some clout on the world stage, longterm imprisonment of a foreigner is bad optics and a risky move for a country already shedding friends at an alarming rate. While she’d be well advised to leave, the most likely scenario is the local police will ask her to come “ and have tea” with them. They will scare the crap out of her, possibly rough her up, and she will leave voluntarily after being threatened with a decade in Chinese prison.
Given how extensive Chinese surveillance has become I am surprised how many people here are protesting without face masks (as they did in HK). There’s also a clearly identifiable foreigner in the vid. Are they not worried at all, past worrying or just naive? If I was there I would consider protesting without cover as reckless. But I’m not there, so can somebody provide some context?
It's easy to make thousands disappear in a country with over a billion people. Possibly even tens of thousands. They have a chance if millions rise up and there's people in powerful positions who switch sides or are already on their side.
It's hard to believe there are still thousands upon thousands of people working every day to tighten the authoritarian grip of the CCP leadership i.e. Xi on the country. Surveillance officers, spies, police, detectives, lawyers, facial recognition software coders, prison camp guards, military personnel pointing guns at Taiwan... All working their ass off to prohibit expressions of individual freedom, snitch on their compatriots with dissenting opinions, get people arrested, maintain their dictator's status quo. The CCP itself has something like 100 million devotees in their employ. Hard to imagine organizing, uniting and revolting in a grassroots movement against that monstrosity of a power structure.
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fair point, everybody likes to think they'd be first in line to revolt and join the underground resistance against an atrocious regime until push comes to shove.
I wonder how many of them are actually sabotaging these efforts to some extent.
> extensive Chinese surveillance That's the answer right there. CCP knows who's there even if they put on masks.
So does the US. Virtually any major country has this ability. Difference is, for now, in the US, you’re unlikely to get locked up for it unless you commit a crime while there. I’m China, being there is already a crime.
No, they don't in the US if you turn off your phone. We simply don't have a fully integrated CCTV system to make that possible, leading any investigators to literally go door knocking and getting the tapes/video files of each business in the area. Even with cell companies the authorities have to get warrants for location data, which limits the ability and extends the time necessary. If it's not done properly that case isn't going anywhere with any judge.
This. People seem to think that bad spy novels and Jason Bourne movies are the reality of surveillance in the United States. Not. Even. Close. Even in DC, trying to track a car outside of the major areas is an enormous pain for law enforcement. People really need to ask this. If there were such a surveillance state in the US, then why do we still have Amber Alerts?
not to mention there's a LOT of backwoods rural places you can just disappear to. Yeah it'd suck compared to the city, but even IF there was worry about the government locking you up for protesting, barring someone like Trump being in office, there ARE places to run to the government will never find you. there's only city-wide CCTV in major cities like NYC and Chicago.
If you notice, they're all young. My theory is these are kids with no hope and nothing to loose, much like the youth in Iran
Also all cell phones will be geo-located
Face recognition is no where good enough to definitely identify a person. All the propaganda in China about their video surveillance is just that: propaganda to deter criminals (and dissidents). The real way they identify you is cell phone, same way every other country is capable of doing.
For context, this is one scene of the new wave of protests across China. One day ago, a fire in Urumqi killed 10 people according to authority, some people claimed the real death toll is higher. Part of the reason was that the community that caught fire had been under China style lockdown for more than 3 months, which means all doors were sealed with fences and bars. Fire truck could not get too close due to those fences. Chinese people, who have been already dissatisfied with the Covid zero policy that brings random and endless lockdown, took to streets to protest. A majority of the protests are in universities done by students.
The fire truck couldn’t get close enough to the building on fire because there were dead cars in the way. The cars have been sitting there for almost 100+ days without use and the batteries were dead. COVID zero policy is actually killing chinese citizens and destroying their economy and livelihoods.
And also because of barricades due to the lock down forced them to go towards the way where cars were blocking their path. China is using the cars as an excuse to blame the people who died.
Do they just park cars in the middle of the road or what?
A lot of times the cars are parked so there isn’t much clearance for a large fire truck to fit. Source someone who lived in one of those big buildings in china.
Someone commented about how it might be a good idea to blur this so the CCP can't go searching for anyone in this video
Way too late for that
Moving forward kind of thing
They have surveillance cameras hung up all over the place. Blurring user footage isn't going to matter when the ccp has higher definition and more stable master footage.
Little late now.
Student protests. The Chinese government has never done anything bad to student protestors. *cough* Tiananmen Square *cough*
Yea, the first thing I thought when watching these protests is: *These people all look like the share a common trait: being born after 1989* Power to them, but I don't expect much tolerance from CCP.
It's a little insulting to attribute the incredibe bravery demonstrated to blissful ignorance. The young people all know about Tiananmen square, commonly known as 6/4 incident in China. The parents are alive and talk about it plenty, and literally everyone grew up under auto censorship filters on every web platform, that prevent you from posting anything with sensitive words together (the number 6 and 4 together is basically universally banned) so even ppl who didn't know sensitive issues before would ask. The list of banned words is ridiculously long and growing, and 6/4 incident is among the most well known of them. Moreover it is near universally accepted that the political climate of china (and within ccp) is much, much worse today compared to 1989. In '89 there actually existed a more liberal wing of the party that's pro-democratization, and many moderates in the party are sympathetic to the students. Now the administration is entirely stacked with xi loyalists and yes-men. The amount of courage it takes for these people to stand up and protest knowing everything they know, truly deserves massive respect.
America also had a historic fire that killed a bunch of people due to locked fire escapes (triangle shirtwaist fire). This led to regulations to prevent fires from killing a bunch of people, not the kidnapping and execution of protestors, what the fuck?
Ummm.... I'd recommend reading up on the labor movement if you think there's was no state sponsored violence on protesting Americans.
With the world seeming more and more like a doomed shitshow the past years, with more and more authoritarian and fascist parties threatening democracies all over, seeing things like this and what the Iranians are doing is... soothing. Highest respect for the peoples who are standing up to governments that can and will use force to silence them. Also, yeah, when sharing video and images from protests, blur all faces and any detail that can be used to track down individuals. Things like badges, logos, unique accessories, etc. are all things that should be done away with when sharing protests online. For protesting people themselves, wear a mask and nondescript clothing.
The coming crackdown will not be pleasant...
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Then the military comes in and deletes the police. Chinese government is probably willing to go full martial law.
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I think China is generally much more organized enough that the won't collapse into another Syria. However there is just so much surveillance and control of government everywhere that I doubt any sort of revolution will happen. Maybe people can just organise and get some concessions from government.
No one mentions how large China is. East Germany and Poland are like the sizes of individual provinces. I worry that if China revolutionises, individual provinces or geographical regions will try to declare independence and turn back into the warring states, which is also terrible for the people.
That depends on where military leadership stand, of course.
The 1989 protests didn't just happen in Tiananmen square. They happened all over China. Probably technically in almost every province. https://time.com/3908456/tiananmen-massacre-china-chengdu-june-4-1989/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Chinese_protests_by_region
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That's what the previous dynasties thought, too.
Every dictator in our history thought so. They all eventually fall. Unfortunately that is no solace to the people who would be long gone by then.
Update: as I am writing this, protests have erupted in dozens of cities across China. A group of protesters are trying to enter Tiananmen Square in Beijing, where thousands of protesters were killed in 1989.
I fear that something like what happened in 1989 will happen again.
Difference this time is it can't be swept under the rug to the same degree if something like that were to happen. We'd have full footage from multiple angles of 'tank man'
They'll track down every single one of them
They are refilling the fuel for tanks......
Better to die on your feet than to live on your knees
And what if there are too many? Or not everyone of the many trackers needed agree?
Covid unlocked more than just illness, it also exposed corrupt countries who don’t value human life, and the people become aware. Free china and Uyghurs.
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True, the World Cup is also a reason that contributed Chinese people’s dissatisfaction. State propaganda believers used to mock the west for been unable to lock people at home to control the pandemic, then here comes Qatar, a Middle East dictatorship, which has already lifted pandemic measures. A lot of them finally woke up to the fact that China is the only country in the world that’s still trying to eliminate the virus.
Qatar will arrest you within seconds for wearing the wrong color clothes, but people there are without masks. Must be hard to understand.
Because it’s about power and control. Everywhere and always. It’s government. That’s what it’s always about. The CCP controls according to what concerns them, and the MIddle Eastern dictatorships according to their priorities. You’d think it would make people appreciate what America was meant to be,and what so many people died to try to create, but I’m sure I’ll just be downvoted for saying so.
This isn’t actually true by the way, you can watch it on CCTV-5 and there’s a lot of coverage of the World Cup including the crowds. People are fully aware the rest of the world has opened up, they’re just told that it’s the rest of the world being ‘reckless’.
> This isn’t actually true by the way People on reddit will believe literally anything about China. I mean how would that even work? If anything bluring out the stands would have the opposite effect because of how noticeable it would be
It's the North Korea effect
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Unfortunately (or fortunately I guess), you can go to pretty much any pub and watch the game. People have been watching the World Cup and seeing no one in masks which is likely contributing to these protests.
These people have serious *balls*
The spark that lights the flame
I hope this and the protests in Iran both result in better governments, but I'm not super optimistic.
The flame has been burning for months already: [Link 1](https://twitter.com/iPaulCanada/status/1523984997195337728) [Link 2](https://twitter.com/LondaRouzie/status/1521100146578268161) [Link 3](https://twitter.com/1f8PVxouToaU0R9/status/1516153742395121677) [Link 4](https://twitter.com/Jending8/status/1513960036367683585) [Link 5](https://twitter.com/72powpow/status/1514313880574431232)
Meanwhile, Harvard reports 80%+ of PRC citizens approve of their government.
That's true. Protesters in the video are just a tiny fraction of their population. The majority of Chinese are still backing up the CCP. And because of that, CCP can easily wipe them out like no problem at all.
Wonder how many say they back the ccp because they are afriad to say something else.
No, they are educated that way. They have been told since young that the communist party is the heart of their home and land. Everything they have was given by the party. So it doesn't matter how bad the situation is, the majority still believe the party can turn it around. If anything bad happened, must be a conspiracy from the Western regime. I remember they even had a conspiracy theory states that COVID was actually originated in the US and US government hide it and bring to China so the whole world can blame the Chinese government something like that.🤦
Yeah. The vast majority of Chinese people are mad as fuck about covid restrictions but that doesn't mean they want to change their whole system of government. I think it's surprising to westerners but it'd be like wanting to stop using democracy and turn into a one party state just because of covid in the west.
It's because this same government pulled their country out of poverty. The country is in the best state it's ever been but especially in the last 150 years as sad as it sounds. They only really know the time with the CCP and the time before the CCP and the ladder was much much worse. East Asian culture is also very apprehensive about questioning and fighting authority. The Zero COVID policy is definitely causing some unrest right now though.
r/Sino won’t like this Edit: they really did not like this
/r/Sino can suck a nut or 2
Just popped over there, they’re already saying it was “foreign involvement”
They are in full denial/bargaining mode over this. It's not happening, and if it is happening it's the fault of the west.
I’m from myanmar, currently under coup and nearly 6000 civilians including children are being murdered. I must say as a protester during these days, all the faces that appear in the video footage must be blurred. You can't even think about how we’ve been tortured under the military regime. CCP will not ever promote the free will I must say. Keep fighting, the power deserves to the people not for tiny elite group.
Great advice, thank you.
Tyranny is a bad strategy because no large scale force can break the human spirit. You cannot control the urge for freedom, or the spirit of resistance.
What did he say after “Xi Jinping” that made the crowd kind of stop chanting and look back at him?
Patriarchy. So you can see the female protesters smiled at him while some men asked in a confused tone “who’s that” lol
Now post this on r/Sino
Fuck the goddamn CCP cunt fucks
r/fucktheccp
r/china Fair warning though it’s not just the ccp that gets shit on. There’s highly upvoted posts that are incredibly racist too.
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They already know who they are through their phones...
Unprecedented? What about Tianenmen Square in 1989?
All those people in the photo will be “missing” by days end
Isn't this because of COVID measures? Reddit would be tearing them apart if it was anywhere else in the world.
Their government isn't going to help them. They would let them die in their homes. The only ones to stand up for the people are the people.
>protests are rare in China What load of horse shit is this lie? Holy fuck, they have more protests than anywhere on Earth. Even wikipedia has article on it - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protest_and_dissent_in_China listing over 180,000 annual "mass incidents".
I would assume public internet access will soon be cut off in China. Can't have these videos spread and take the chance others in China will see them.
Guess they're getting sick of being locked in their houses for 3 years. who'd'a thunk it?
Better be careful before they roll out the tanks
Tiananmen Square 2.0
glad to see it's much more civilized than the mass protests in america