[jinzo]

This is offtopic (as it has nothing to do with the linked blogpost) but it's even worse. At the tail end of 2019 I went to China for a few weeks, I created a WeChat account at home without any problems. As soon as I stepped into China it got locked and I needed someone with a WeChat account to verify me. They can only verify (I think?) 3 new accounts per year, and 6 accounts that got locked out for whatever reason. This is (from my perspective) even worse than requiring ID for SIM etc. It links people together and I'm sure it brings some repercussions to the people that verified you if you make trouble down the line.

It was very fascinating to see, a near total domination of WeChat everywhere and relatively very hard onboarding for new accounts. Contrary to the west where most of services seek to streamline onboarding as much as possible - I guess that becomes an anti feature when you have total monopoly and _everyone_ has a WeChat account. I think it's a very effective (and very dystopian) form of control. P.S: Signal worked without any problems for me, even on a Chinese SIM (one "trick" to go around most of the GFW was buying a HK SIM in HK. Works across china and has a lot less blocks, but for various reasons I got a China SIM too).