Let me tell how how much people actually follow laws in China.

I was born while the One Child Policy was in effect. My mother already gave birth to my older brother. Basically, my existence is illegal.

As you can see, clearly I’m not dead. They didn’t manage to kill me, just demanded my parents paid a massive fine and denied legal papers until they did so.

Honestly if you just browse and don’t post anything too serious, are they really gonna go after everyone who use a VPN. I mean, say even if just 1% uses a VPN. That’s 1,400,000 people. Are they gonna lock up a million people? Really? Surely they have bigger fishes to catch. (Edit: 1% of 1.4 billion is actually 14 million, good luck locking that many people lolz)

As for control of information, internarional phone calls aren’t blocked, you can send letters. My mom regularly call my aunts (aka: her sisters) in China. I heard the Covid QR codes being mentioned, afaik, the didn’t lose their teaching jobs nor ever got arrested.

The overwhelming majority wouldn‘t even know how.

It’s like adblocking. Do you know anyone irl that use adblockers? Seriously, I don’t know anyone that does except like maybe 1 perdon.

But here we are, on a platform where practically everyone uses adblockers.

Or in another analogy. Mainstream social media is like inside the GFW and Lemmy is like using VPN to bypass it.

TLDR: Okay sorry if my point isn’t concise, I guess my point is: NPCs will just follow the wind, those who have the will to dig deeper will probably be able to bypass the censorship (provided that it’s not completely cut off from the outside internet)

Sometimes, you find things so niche, you can’t find a torrent for it even after looking through torrent aggregators.

China isn’t a “Actually Existing Socialist” country to be clear. I’ve lived there, nothing socialist. Parents were stuggling so much just working all day. My maternal grandmother had to take care of me and my older brother.

I don’t think the “socialist” thing really can appear out of nowhere. Japan had just destroyed China, I think it’s really unrealistic to leap from a war-torn country into a Socialist paradise, just not realistic. Not in this timeline, neither in the “KMT Wins Civil War” timeline.

In the other timeline, it’s either with the KMT as the sole party, or with a multiparty democracy, I think it’s just gonna be capitalism for most of the 20th century. Then as the country gets richer, there would eventually be calls for more socialist/social democratic policies. If it’s a democracy, KMT would eventually lose power (like are struggling with losing power in RoC controlled Taiwan right now) and hypothetically a Social Democratic or Socialist party would get into power democratically. I don’t think Socialism would’ve been acheived by 2025, but I think there would’ve more social policies helping the poor.

I think the best way to acheive Socialism is to democratically capture an existing prospering “capitalist democracy” and turn it into socialism from the inside. I mean violent revolution has been tried and they have failed. The current China doesn’t really have much social programs helping poor people. It’s state capitalism. My family was one of those poor families, I remember parents just be away from home all the time, its the reason why I fight with my older brother a lot.

Norway, although not entirely “socialist”, has more success with socialist policies because it was slowly reformed, it was done bottom-up. I mean you can’t really just force “democracy” or “socialism” to the people, it has to be grassroot. I don’t think “Vanguard Parties” work, they get eventually get corrupted by small amount of bad actors seeking power, and it ends up becoming a tragedy, the opposite of what egalitarianism is supposed to be.

Soon: Police sirens have been detected, video recording terminated.

police begin shooting protesters

How do you even “rip” media from streaming services? Like how to bypass the drm thing and convert the data to a file?

Canary Islands?

More like asking the internet because this feels like it’s inappropriate to ask to my mother.

It’s the Euro-wan aka: 欧湾

Mainland Europe has always claimed it as the inseperable（不可分割）part of the European Union, meanwhile, the ruling government of Euro-wan, the Union of Europe, insists its a separate independent country. Some residents of Euro-wan are trying to rename the country into Republic of Euro-wan

If you ask me, is it a country?

Sorry I don’t want to hurt the feelings of the 400 Million+ Mainland Europeans. No comment.

Probably.

It’s hard to say, I don’t have a time machine, and there’s a lot of butterfly effect stuff.

But I’d imagine the KMT and CCP would be still be on speaking terms, maybe.

I mean, I see these timelines: (Keep in mind, I’m not an expert in history)

1. If Japan never invaded, and Sun Yat-sen died at the same time as current timline, KMT would’ve won the civil war. They wouldn’t be in the aftermath of suffering from the massive losses fighing the japanese imperialists.

2. If Japan invades, but Sun Yat-sen was magically kep alive this entire time, I guess there might’ve been more cooperation during the resistance against japanese invasion. As for after the war, it’s possible that:
   a. the KMT beomes majority ruling party, and CCP is a major opposition party, and maybe there would be elections… Or maybe the democratization doesn’t happen until like a decade, or 2 decades, or maybe much more later. I imagine there is a timeline where perhaps in the alternate 2025, CCP is one of the political parties in a sort of Taiwan-like multiparty democracy. Perhaps it could splinter into multiple groups, Democratic Socialists, and hardcore “Communists”. I’d imagine there’s also be some people who are more militant and probably launch random attacks sort of like the US’s political violence. Perhaps like the IRA.
   b. Perhaps a hot civil-war goes off, KMT probably has an advantage because of Sun Yat-sen as the unifying figure. So if KMT wins, its probably just Taiwan timeline, but perhaps the democratization could take a bit longer than Taiwan timeline since the land is bigger, and also the CCP probably goes full “IRA Mode” and start doing attacks, so KMT might’ve used that as an excuse to implement martial law… so we might not see a a real democracy until like 2000s, there’a gonna need to be a lot of under western pressure to do this.

Just my theories, a historian probably think a lot differently.

TLDR: I don’t think the internet censorship would be as harsh, or perhaps the censorship wouldn’t exist at all. No great leap forward, likely no One Child Policy. More time spend on actually fixing the country. Possibly multiparty democracy.

My mom says: 錢唔係萬能，但冇錢就萬萬不能

Money can’t solve every problem, but lack-of-money will make you unable to solve any problem.

Then she threatens to leave me zero inheritance and already transfered some stuff to my older brother’s name…

😕

Those inheritance dispute lawsuits are gonna be fun to watch

I mean, I get it.

I used to hate Mandarin a lot because of my government, kinda hated Cantonese too because of my parents and their conservative culture

But I realized they don’t own the language, fuck governments, language is a weapon, and I can wield it to advance my goals.

Make anti-government content using the very language they use as an official language, wield the language as a sword. Use it to attack the corrupt governments.

Learning Mandarin is very useful to say:

Guāngfú Xiānggâng, Shídaì Gémìng (Free Hongkong, Revolution of our times!)

xD

Related:

I remember having a fight with my older brother and I kinda ran away from home, pretty sure this was after the Hong Kong trip, this memory was more vivid and… I was about 5-7 I’m pretty sure I returned home later that night, possibly explains why I get weirdly emotionally attached to parents, older brother = danger, parents = the next safest thing that I know, the outside world has just been so cruel to me, I sort of overlooked my parents emotionally abusive behaviors… there’s nothing I could do.

Like a bird who’s wings are damaged, never allowed time to heal before getting injured again, can’t fly anywhere, forever trapped.

Lol I sound sus as hell

Lmfao, this is me choosing which psychaitrist to see.

I’d say you just make an amalgamate of them, then see which idea you actually enjoying working on the most.

I tried writing a story and kinda just got stuck and never made it past a rough outline of the plot. (barely even an outline, like just he beginning, and ending, and I had an idea of the middle in mind, but didn’t even write it down before I got bored)

good luck, its gonna hurt you brain a lot just thinking xD

All/Top-Day, I don’t read everything, kinda just skim through

Then I just like check comms I really had in mind that day, usually asklemmy an nostupidquestions and technology and casual questions and sometimes Android… etc…

I check [email protected] at least like twice a day to see if its still alive.

Even if I sort by subscribed, there’s often like 5 tech articles I have no interest in, and then 5 random gaming stuff I have no interest in, then 5 random c/television stuff, 5 random android stuff, before you know it, subscribed/new is filled with 20 uninteresting stuff, but like I don’t wanna unsubscribe to technology or android, know what I’m saying?

So like, I really have to be in the mood for that specific comm to click on it. Then its just sort by new and check the last 24 hours.

I wanna go to Canada, haven’t even been on a plane or crossed a border since I was like 8, so I really wanna just travel internationally a bit.

But politics is kinda unstable at the moment for me to do that as a US citizen. Reentry would be terrifying.

My mom do bussiness and manage financial assets on a smartphone…

Phone literally old, laggy, half-dying, charging port is filled with dust… and also no backups…

lmfao

Of course, actual word documents and stuff and printing were done by me or my older brother

You kinda shift the entire pitch of your voice so that the words are still, relative to each other, have the tones and it’s distinguishable to a native speaker intuitively.

Its easier in Cantonese, 6 tones, you can play around with words to make the tones go high or low, the tones don’t change much from what I’ve noticed in Cantonese songs, yo es sounds almost the same as spoken. In Mandarin, 4 tones, and the tones are much lower and deeper in the sounds, you just have to change the tones a lot to make it higher pitched, you rarely pronunce the tones as-is. Still understandable.