[marco_salvatori]

The police state that is China doesnt care about summit attendees, it cares about social harmony. Summit attendees should have a passport and a visa if needed. Otherwise they should act in a harmonius manner. If they can do that, then they will be disappointed to find out that the officials simply dont care about them. No one is going to ask friendly, personal questions in customs; no one is going to ask for an inventory of what is being carried in; no one is going to ask how much money you have with you; no one is interested in seeing and opening your electonics; no one is going to pay the least attention to your baggage. Relax, have a good time, and prep a vpn if you are set on working. Then, on the way back, contrast the experience to the police state that you are from.

[qubex]

As somebody who lived for three and a half years in mainland China (2003-2006) and regularly crossed the border, I can confirm that this was my experience too. I was never tampered with, interrogated, or made the object of any undue attention; my equipment was of the utmost disinterest to authorities and I even crossed the border with copies of Nineteen-Eighty-Four and Capitalist Realism once, to the local authorities' utter disinterest.

I still visit semi-regularly (once a year, approximately) and my observations remain valid now as then (for me at least).

Same goes for my experiences going into and coming out of Russia, for that matter.

[dis-sys]

China International Book Trading Cooperation (CIBTC) offers the original version of Capitalist Realism online to Chinese readers for 141RMB delivered. CIBTC is a company started/owned/managed by the Communist Party of China.

https://detail.tmall.com/item.htm?spm=a230r.1.14.1.WxB4yL&id...

Nineteen Eighty-Four is more interesting, apparently, there are hundreds of vendors selling it on taobao.com, including the Xinhua which was started/owned/managed by the Communist Party of China.

https://list.tmall.com/search_product.htm?q=Nineteen+Eighty-...

[qubex]

That's very interesting research I never thought to conduct, thank you.

(In all due deference, Capitalist Realism is a very anti-capitalist argument, so...)

[LorenPechtel]

Seconded. I've carried a laptop to China upwards of 20 times by now. The bag has been opened exactly once--by airport security as I was leaving, they wanted to run my assorted electronics through separately.

Only once has customs had the slightest look at our bags and that was when the airline left them behind and we had to pick them up later. I was wheeling out a cart with 4 checked bags, no carryons and that drew the interest of the customs guy. The entry stamp two days earlier also drew his interest. He started running the bags through his x-ray, at that point my wife caught up and explained what had happened (she's a native speaker, I figured it was easier to leave any discussion to her) and that was the end of it. Nothing was ever opened.

Even the day my wife set off a nuke alarm at customs produced no response. (She had set off a previous alarm also, which was resolved with a short discussion. They never checked what the actual radiation source was and the card from the lab that explained why she was hot was sitting at home in the pocket of the jacket she didn't wear.)

Now, if my employer was some big company I would be concerned with espionage but that's all. Since my employer doesn't do anything remotely of interest to the Chinese I don't worry about it. Besides, we stay with relatives, my laptop has never seen a Chinese hotel room.

[zcbenz]

Books get much less censorship in China, compared to its Internet. Like, there are new books about culture revolution every year.

However if you brought any book that attacks current government, for example books about the 64 event, you would be in very big trouble.

[chmars]

64 event = https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of...

[dis-sys]

That is not true. The most famous student leader who testified in front of the US congress 8 times was allowed to go back in China. In fact, she (Chai Lin) even started her business in China.

You seriously believe that she is less influential than a few books? If Chai Lin is allowed to enter and stay in China, what is the point stopping a few books?

[justicezyx]

They are allowed because they fully abandoned their belief... Oh, humans...

[rdslw]

Correcting Russia case.

Its an only state where during my travels on the way out of the country (Russia here) in addition to usual security scan and passport control you have an additional booth maned with rusia official/military personel only judging if they can let you out. Again: this was in addition to passport control due to destination etc.

Source: me at s petersburg airport 2016.

P.s. Overall Russia experience was very good and eyes opening (comparing to what you get from media)

[jackyinger]

I was able to get away with carrying a knife through the Shanghai metro, and onto the maglev to the airport. At entries to both, they x-rayed my bag and were not enthused by the knife's presence (one guard made vigorous stabbing gestures to communicate his concern). But it did not take much to assure them it was a souvenir not to be used as a weapon.

My point is perhaps you were profiled to your benefit as well.

Edit: I'm from the US.

[baby]

I lived in both China and the US and the experience at the border are very different.

I wouldn't say the experience of getting into China is the best, because you still need a Visa to study/work there. But I'd say that it might have been the easiest Visa to get.

On the other hand I've never been through so much aggressiveness and difficulty with the American border. It probably is the worst border in the world (or at least that I've been through).

[sjwright]

The US border might be the worst if you have any reason to attract interest, but as a boring tourist with an Australian passport, I've found the US border staff to be perfectly nice, like most other countries I've visited. Slow, boring and drab, but with a smile.

(In my travels to various unremarkable destinations, there's one country that stands out as having far and away the grumpiest, officious, unpleasant and sour people in immigration: the UK.)

[Veratyr]

To contrast, I'm also an Australian passport holder (though I'm on a working visa) and the US is so far my absolute least favourite country to enter or travel to (out of Australia, Malaysia, Turkey, Germany, The Netherlands, France, Switzerland, Mexico and Russia).

Some of my experiences:

- ~2013 on an Australia -> US (1 month) -> Mexico (1 month) -> Australia via US stopover (~8h) trip, I was detained by customs at the stopover for ~3h and had all my luggage opened and unpacked in front of me for no reason that I can tell other than that I was coming from Mexico and looked tired. About 2h of the 3h were spent waiting in line and nobody told me why I was in line or what to expect.

- Mid 2014 on an Australia -> Malaysia (6h) -> Turkey (2w) -> US (2w) -> Australia trip, I was detained on the way into the US for ~2h by immigration and was asked the question "did you ever step foot in Syria" about 10 times (I wish that was an exaggeration). Again, nobody was friendly, nobody told me what was happening and I spent most of the time waiting and wondering whether I was about to be denied entry for some reason.

- Late 2015 on a US -> France (3d) -> US trip, I was pulled aside prior to boarding the plane because I had an SSSS mark on my boarding pass, which meant I was one of the 10% "randomly" selected for extra screening.

- Early 2016 on a US -> Switzerland (8d) -> US trip, I was pulled aside in Switzerland because once again I had an SSSS mark on my boarding pass. This was the second time in a row.

- Late 2016 on a US -> Germany (3d) -> US trip, I was again had an SSSS mark, for the 3rd time in a row.

Aside from my travel history which I don't think is particularly out of the ordinary, I don't believe there's anything else particularly interesting about me. I'm a young white male with a bachelor's degree, my father works for the Australian government, my mother is a nurse and I've never been a member of any major religious or human rights organization.

[nasalgoat]

I'm the definition of boring, being a white male Canadian, and I get no end of hassles at the US border.

YMMV.

[LorenPechtel]

Of the ones you've been through.

I've been in most of the Iron Curtain countries--most of which searched us in far more detail than anything I've gotten from the US.

And I've been subject to some fairly through searches in Africa looking for anything that carried those forbidden words "Product of South Africa". Never mind all the stuff written in Afrikaans with the forbidden words blacked out.

[org3432]

This was my experience as well, my USA cell phone wasn't even blocked from accessing websites that were normally blocked in China, they make an exception. There could be some cases where you could run into issues, but the paranoia is greatly exaggerated, and being a "socially responsible" techie is not acting like a conspiracy theorist wing nut.

[dis-sys]

vpn that can unblock all those web site can be purchased for $15/year.

ironically, you don't get comparable Internet speed or cost (my 200mbps Internet costs me $180/year, or I can upgrade it to 500mbps for $400/year) in most "free" countries. I'd be protesting really hard if I have to pay some unfair cost, say $50/month or more, to suffer from the so called uncensored broadband running at tortoise speed such as 50mbps or less.

[thyrix]

Nearly all vpn that you can get now by searching will be blocked when they are becoming popular quickly. But if you have your own server(or a vps) and setup a vpn or shadowsocks server, there will never be such problem. It's because China block website via blacklist, so only some well-known ip will be blocked. Many friends of mine is using shadowsocks to unblock now(I'm a Chinese :).

[dis-sys]

That is not true. It is a well know fact that the Great Fire wall does deep packet inspection since early 2000s, e.g. when google was still available in China, your connection got stopped for a few minutes every time when you search for some undesirable keywords.

[nie]

I'm afraid your follow-up is even more inaccurate.

We developed shadowsocks for the exact purpose of battling machine learned DPI head on.

The real challenge is the (poor) quality of the networks and the topology of censorship body all around China. The Blackbox nature of such state system made each improvement feel like experiment at best, simulated annealing at worst.

[dis-sys]

The claims I was referring to are highly inaccurate:

1. shadowsocks is a good example that certain vpn/proxy can survive after becoming popular. 2. GFW blocks sites/pages/connections based on content, it has been doing this for more than a decade. whether shadowsocks can fool GFW or not doesn't change the nature of GFW.

[b6]

> vpn that can unblock all those web site can be purchased for $15/year

Have you lived in China? If so, please tell me what VPN service you're talking about. If not, I think you might not be aware how sophisticated and annoying the GFW is.

[dis-sys]

search for "god use vpn". not trolling, that is the actual name of the service I am using. they charge for 100 RMB per year, that is $15/year, you get access to ~20-30 of their geographically distributed servers and all of them can help you to bypass vpn.

[userbinator]

The name is also a rather clever pun on an existing item of Chinese food, likely chosen precisely to avoid censorship: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=22954

[boomboomsubban]

There's nothing sophisticated about China's attack strategy on VPN's, make them illegal and block their IP. Sites like greatfire.org maintain lists of working ones, or running one on a vps would be pretty easy.

[kaybe]

Check out the CCC talks for details on what the sibling comments talk about if you want. It's actually very interesting.

[chatmasta]

This is just false. China has a massive censorship operation, of which their wry advanced anti firewall technology is a critical piece.

Start here: http://blog.zorinaq.com/my-experience-with-the-great-firewal...

[iliketosleep]

Maybe 15 years ago, but today it's very sophisticated, incorporating deep packet inspection and machine learning. Under normal circumstances, they allow some VPN traffic. But they ramp up the firewall during big political events, at which times it's almost impossible to gain proper connectivity.

[e12e]

But there's no "deep packet" inspection of encrypted vpn or an ssh tunnel? Sure, you can guess that the connection is encrypted, and block it on general principle - but there's no way (that I know of) you could selectively block ssh based on the content/traffic pattern (you might let through low-throughput ssh only, ie: only allow use that "looks like" shell use, but a) you could run w3m on the other end of that tunnel, and b) it sounds unlikely - as that would also kill many other uses like file transfer for backup etc).

I'm curious if ssh access to eg: digital ocean is allowed?

If so, you can simply use ssh as a socks5 proxy:

  ssh -D 8080 [e-mail]
  # Set your browser to use 127.0.0.1:8080
  # as a socks5 proxy for dns lookup and
  # traffic, via eg foxyproxy for firefox

I'm not saying GFW won't block this, but I'm doubtful it'll allow plain ssh, and block this use case?

[dis-sys]

you must be kidding. the great firewall of China is arguably one of the most sophisticated systems ever deployed on the Internet.

try IPSec or PPTP based vpn, they turn your encrypted communication into plain text. then think about the scale - they do this on almost 1 billion users.

[org3432]

on a desktop we'd just setup an ssh tunnel to an ec2 instance and use SwitchyOmega in Chrome.

[srett]

How did that work out performance wise? I was on an adsl connection in Beijing. Inside the country it was really great, could max out the 100mbit. Foreign websites were a pain. I found that ingress traffic constantly had a packet loss of 30%, which made TCP really unhappy, including ssh tunnels. Ended up writing my own tunnel software that was tuned to cope with the network situation.

[auganov]

I found the most success with https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks/tree/master . It was a while back though.

With ssh, restarting the connection would help for whatever reason. So I had a little script rotating a set of connection behind haproxy.

EDIT: oh and Hong Kong. HK VPSes seemed to work the best.

[e12e]

Does anyone know the story behind:

https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks

"Removed according to regulations." vs:

https://github.com/shadowsocks/shadowsocks/tree/master

Is it the shadowsocks project dancing around github censorship, or github allowing ss to dance around chinese censorship?

[chmars]

What's about connections outside the browser (and SSH)?

BTW, I have noticed a trend to block port 22 in international hotels. It's annoying!

[devdoomari]

> it cares about social harmony

um... so what's social harmony? The exact same words are used by chinese gov. when trying to be 'vague' about their censoring activities...

[averagewall]

I live here and it doesn't seem vague at all. It seems to basically mean no riots, large protests, or attempts to overthrow or weaken the government. We don't have a democracy so there's a risk that if large enough groups of people get too worked up, they might create a massive problem like a revolution or something. Nobody would benefit from that - see the mess it made in Syria, Egypt, Lybia, and Tunisia. In a democracy, there's no such risk because of the safety valve of angry mobs being able to vote their opponent out of power. But in a one-party system, it's necessary to limit the spread of dissenting ideas.

So as long as you're not doing political activism, it's fine. I know people who've had private messages apparently censored when they contained anti-government ideas. They don't get arrested. It's not something to fear. The tech companies just monitor and delete politically risky content. If you are a real dissident, then you know you're breaking the law, however vaguely it's worded, and you know you're in danger.

[a_bonobo]

Nobody benefits from a revolution? Tell that to the French and the Germans!

[dis-sys]

seriously? German? you mean the 1918/19 revolution that eventually helped to cause WWII? surely Hitler benefited a lot from the German Revolution of 1918/19!

You tell me how Nazi could possibly raise to the very top without the help of that very beneficial revolution? maybe time to read more history books and come back with better trolling skills?

[fh973]

He was probably referring to the 1848 revolution.

[dis-sys]

two German revolutions, one probably okay/good, while the other one was a total disaster for the entire humanity. with this in mind, I'd probably argue that revolution is bad in general.

I do agree that it is always good for some political speculators.

[kaybe]

You'll have to disregard the wars inbetween the revolution and the profiting though.

[panic]

We don't have a democracy so there's a risk that if large enough groups of people get too worked up, they might create a massive problem like a revolution or something. Nobody would benefit from that - see the mess it made in Syria, Egypt, Lybia, and Tunisia.

What about the Cultural Revolution which put the ruling party itself in power? It's a bit hypocritical for the government to categorically condemn revolution when they wouldn't even exist without it.

[jpatokal]

No, see, the revolution created the one true revolutionary state that's a perfect expression of the People's Will(tm), so any attempt to have another revolution is clearly counterrevolutionary sabotage by lackey capitalist running dogs.

And yeah, while the French Revolution was probably a good thing in the long run, it was pretty terrible in the short run: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror

[baby]

The french Revolution was also kind of a mess, they shortly after elected Napoleon as the emperor, then they became a monarchy again, then an emperor came again? I don't know it's confusing.

[imron]

> What about the Cultural Revolution which put the ruling party itself in power?

First of all, the Cultural Revolution didn't put the ruling party in power, and second of all the CCP (and China) of today is very different from the CCP (and China) at the time of the Cultural Revolution.

[TomMarius]

Yeah, it is. That's the reality.

[baby]

peace is obtained through war. There are no exception.

[devdoomari]

well tell that to North Koreans escaping through China. Technically, they are 'dissidents' in the eyes of Chinese gov. so --- it's ok for Chinese gov. to torture them & deport them back to N.K. to be tortured.

[hdra]

Anything that "rocks the boat", or try to "change the status quo", so to speak.

[tytso]

There are multiple dimensions of threat. The first is from the police state angle. This is the one where the US Customs officials are demanding social media passwords from people with dark skin coming from certain countries, and is targeted at what ever the law enforcement or "homeland security" personnel are most worked up about. If you don't fall into the targeted categories, you will likely not notice it at all. I'm privileged in the US that I never get that treatment because I don't fall into that bucket. Similarly, if you don't fit whatever risk profile that say, the Chinese MSS are most concerned about, you won't see any issues either. As another example, if you are coming from a country that gives $8 billion dollars a year to Israel, your treatment will be very different than if you are of Palestinian descent. So a statement that a country has a really pleasant border crossing experience compared to "the police state that you are from" may be an egregious example of sampling error.

Another dimension of threat is the targeted threat model. Examples of this include the French Secret Service leaving audio recording devices in the first class seats, so they could distribute economic espionage to French state-owned companies. Or of some country (NSA, MSS, BND) trying to get a toehold into some company's internal systems as preparation either for cyber defense, cyber attack, defending their country against the pernicious dissident movement, etc. There have been stories about laptops left in Chinese hotel rooms getting outfitted with keyboard bugs or other free hardware "upgrades". It's not clear how true those stories are, but again, since they are targeted attacks, just because you've never seen it happen doesn't mean much.

Perhaps simply you never noticed the free hardware upgrade. Or the country has laws that prohibit using intelligence agencies from giving an advantage to that country's companies; or you are a citizen of that country and that automatically gives you significant protections over anyone else, for which anything is fair game because that country doesn't recognize privacy as a fundamental human right or views non-citizens located outside of the country as not having any constitutionally guaranteed rights.

Or perhaps you simply don't work for a US defense contractor, or a large social media or search company, and so you were deemed too unimportant to bug. (Don't take it personally.)

So the question of deciding what is the right level of paranoia is a tricky one, and I wouldn't be too quick to judge. Is wearing a seat belt in a car being too paranoid? After all, the vast majority of the time you don't need it. Does that mean you are a crackpot for insisting that you and your passengers wear a seat belt?

Finally, note that the person who wrote the article is responsible for providing IT for kernel.org, Linus Torvalds and Greg K-H, and other kernel developers who have their git trees on the kernel.org system. How much security protections do you think we should be providing to make sure no one is trying to introduce a backdoor into the Linux kernel?

[baby]

> the French Secret Service leaving audio recording devices in the first class seats

somehow, a plane is so noisy that I cannot imagine this working :D

[e12e]

It's easy enough to test, record some video with your cellphone during a flight, see how much voice you can pick up after some simple filtering. Now imagine what an intelligence service could do if they had access to test runs on actual planes, could engineer their own microphones, and could tune filters to the engine noise.

You might as well say that it's unlikely that tapping 60s era cars on the highway will work. I'm fairly certain it did.

[mirimir]

> The police state that is China doesnt care about summit attendees, it cares about social harmony.

Well, the Cultural Revolution was a crazy time.

[JumpCrisscross]

Is there a relationship between democracy and the rudeness of border control officers?

[throwawaymanbot]

Yea... this aint the DHS at the USA entry points...