[insane_dreamer]

> Why is half this thread pretending that the Great Firewall is effective?

It's extremely effective. Just because a very small fraction of the population 1) know how to use a VPN, 2) are willing to pay for it, and 3) bother to use it, doesn't mean the GFW is ineffective. The CCP doesn't need 99.99% efficiency rate, 95% is plenty to control their population.

Source: myself, many years living in China.

[jMyles]

I've never lived in China.

But you're saying that 95% of people refrain from reading resources that are not served by The Great Firewall?

That seems like a huge, huge stretch.

I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.

[insane_dreamer]

My 95% was an educated guess, it could well be 90%. But I would be shocked if it were any lower than that.

> I've never met a Chinese person whom, when the topic came up, hadn't read about, for example, tiananmen square, in a method contrary to the wishes of the CCP.

I know many as well, but there's major selection bias at work here, in that if you 1) met them abroad, 2) spoke to them in English about 3) a highly sensitive subject, they are highly likely to be one of the 5%.

[TeaBrain]

I would not be surprised if the use of VPNs in China is not as prevalent as is often assumed. I knew a Chinese guy in his thirties who came to the US for a graduate program and he was excited to tell me of the websites he now had access to that he wasn't able to access on the Chinese web.

[insane_dreamer]

What people don't understand is that it's hard to discover VPNs in the first place. They're not going to be in the Chinese iOS app store (which is separate from the rest of the world), or local Android app stores (Google Play isn't even there). Websites advertising VPN services are likely to be inaccessible (though not all are). I used a VPN for years in China, as did some Chinese I knew, but even among highly educated and well-off Chinese in a 1st tier city it was less prevalent than you would think, not to mention your average Chinese person living in a 2nd tier or smaller city (the vast majority of the pop).

[dgfitz]

Have you met more than 5% of the residents of China? If not your point is moot. I’m guessing not.

[insane_dreamer]

Yeah, I did!

Joking aside, that's not how statistics work. But I am reasonably confident that a random sampling of 1000 Chinese people drawn proportionally from where they live (meaning mostly in smaller cities, not Beijing, Shanghai, do not speak English, are not well off or highly educated, etc.), that only 50 of them would be using a VPN regularly. But I could be off by a factor of 2 or 3 and the point about control of the population still stands.