Chinese internet censorship and the big picture

A friend of mine was complaining about Dropbox being blocked in China and drop.io being bought up and deactivated by Facebook, leaving him no available large-file storage sites that he could use in China and America. After thinking for a minute, I sent him the following. Please note that when I say "China" it is a metonym for the Chinese government and Chinese business leaders, not the Chinese people, Chinese culture or Chinese tea, all of which are wonderful for many reasons.
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I just figured it out. I think that the government started blocking foreign sites like Facebook and Twitter with the stated intention of halting civil unrest, which most people here were able to swallow pretty easily. Those brown people are twittering scooters to blow up and facebooking mass stabbings with AIDS-infected needles. And Youtube hates China with their pro-Dalai Llama promoted content. What they're actually doing is creating a Chinese intranet where Chinese people only use Chinese products. Baidu will forever be ahead of Google here because that's where you can get free movies and mp3s if you want them. No need to block them, really. But who needs Youtube? Tudou has more locally-targeted content and everything has subtitles. Renren basically negates the usefulness of actual Facebook as everyone here has it. You can get news in English from the Global Times. Blogspot? Pfffft put that shit on a BBS. QQ will probably eventually displace MSN and Skype once it figures its stuff out.



Point being, there's probably a dozen Chinese drop.ios that may scan files for illegal content but work just as fine and are in Chinese. Once a viable copy of a foreign product is up, running and known the government will just block the website (whether or not they have spent millions or billions investing in putting their business in China). They get all the benefits of well-developed software with a fraction of the overhead costs to develop it, and then when it's popular they just block the competition. It's infuriating for any foreigners wanting something that's useful in both China and their home countries, but China isn't really interested in foreigners' rights, now are they?

It's the Chinese way of doing business, and no one can do a damn thing about it with the economic power they hold right now. Russia moved tons of fighter planes here for years until the whole thing was reverse-engineered and China just started making them for themselves. They bought that aging Russian aircraft carrier from the Ukraine not for naval power but so they could start building their own aircraft carriers. Restaurants. Cars (especially the shameless crap they pull at the Shanghai auto show every year). Clothes. Steak. You name the product, there is a Chinese copy of it, and if it's not a copy is a downscale version that no one can compete with for the price.

China has no interest in really opening up to the west. They want to pick and choose from the technological developments they missed while they spent two hundred years getting metaphorically and literally fucked by the west, the Japanese and Grandpa Mao, and copy their way to being the world's lone superpower. It's an incredible strategy and their timing couldn't be better, with the rest of the world at its economic knees. But the brass at the top should make sure they don't fuck up this whole housing bubble, because an economic collapse would lead to massive social unrest and government collapse at the worst (for them) and severe economic restrictions from the west (at the best).

And at some point China's going to have to learn how to innovate and develop new technologies for themselves. China's green initiatives are among the world's best, as is the high speed rail system. Part of the problem, in my opinion, is the lack of focus in China's education system for innovation and critical thinking, where cheating is tolerated at every level. That's a post for another day, though.