REPOST: I thought it may be interesting for some of you that have not lived in a censored country or had your freedom of speech removed, to see how this works in practice with regards to simple things - like watching the news. I am a European living in Mainland China, next to HK. Almost all foreign social media / media is blocked, which leaves us with just a few channels on TV showing international news broadcasts. The feed is delayed a few seconds (as you can see by the mismatch between audio and image); as soon as the TV channel shows something which is contrary to the government policy (i.e. Hong Kong protests, the Dalai Lama, reporting pieces on the wealth of the CCP party leaders) then the feed gets cut, the TV goes black - and bizarrely - we get to watch a loop feed of parries and flowers, with a subtitle that says the 'signal has technical problems'…. The first time this happened to me in a hotel I thought i had inadvertently broken the TV. Now after a few years of no NYT, WSJ, Bloomberg, Reuters, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Google, Gmail (list goes on and on) a dark reality sets in. We can still access some content (like LL) with costly VPNs which slow down our browsing rate, but that is not the issue. The collective society's minds are kept isolated, controlled and confirmative… and that is the gravest problem. When the currently leadership is dead and gone - who knows what their youth of tomorrow - never having been offered the possibility of free thought, will do. This is my first post so take it easy ;) will try to bring you more extreme and crazy clips from China as we go on.
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