Well, this is interesting. Eileen Gu, the American-born and raised freestyle skier competing for her mother’s home country (China) in the Olympics is using a VPN to post on Instagram from Chinese soil.
Uh-oh. Using a VPN in China is illegal. Instagram is blocked in China. Double-whammy. Gu’s reply to someone calling her ability to post on Instagram into question only made it worse. “anyone can download a vpn its [sic] literally free on the App store”. It isn’t. VPNs aren’t even available on whatever App store they use in China. Nor is Instagram.
So…
Well, I can do the math here. If Gu is in fact a Chinese citizen on Chinese soil, she’s engaging in illegal activity (and if she’s not a Chinese citizen, I would expect the medal count to change). Now, the solution should be simple — fine her like you would any other Chinese citizen and make sure she doesn’t do it again. But, of course, it’s not that simple. Treating her as a Chinese citizen — something they’re more than happy to do when she’s standing on the podium collecting a gold medal — just won’t work for the nation that wants to show the world that their way of doing things is better than everyone else’s. Because now they’re putting the part about them censoring free speech and access to information in the spotlight. And that will probably dredge up their draconian COVID lockdown and tracking policies. Which will probably dredge up their social scoring system. And of course this all brings to mind the fact that they’ve rounded up well over a million religious minorities for “re-education” in remote camps.
I think we can all admit, a perfect system of governance does not exist in a world populated by far-from-perfect humans. The question then is, how would you rather live? In a land where you’re relatively safe, as long as you toe a very specific line and don’t disagree with how the government runs your lives; or in a land where you run the risk of being exposed to unpopular opinions, disagreements, and even misinformation in exchange for the freedom to educate yourself and choose how you want to live and what you want to believe?
I’m sure it will come out that Eileen Gu is in fact a dual-citizen, and as such enjoys certain freedoms. But Gu is extremely high-profile in China right now, and they can’t get around it. I’m not sure they want to (or even can) disappear her for a while like they do to their other citizens who step out of line. But it’s still a bad look for the Chinese government. It tells the Chinese people the benefits of not being altogether Chinese and hints that maybe their system isn’t all that great.
Then again, if you can mow down thousands of your own citizens right there in the heart of the capital city and not be held accountable for your actions, I would think you’re home free with something as easy as this.
Wow.. just wow. How could she make that mistake? I would think she would have been warned and coached on that.
By the way, I thought it was just a kind of ‘rumor’ that China has a social scoring system. That’s just insane. How does that even work exactly?
The social credit scoring system gives you points based on your various behaviors. Of course, since everything is online and electronic (I believe most Chinese citizens have to use a kind of online payment system to buy anything), it’s easier to track you and control your habits, even if only indirectly. If you know something will count against you if you buy it (like a third or fourth video game), you will be less inclined to buy it. If the car registered to you gets tabbed for speeding or running a light, you won’t speed or run a light (good things).It really comes down though to just who gets to say what counts…and of course in China, that’s only the government. And if your score gets too low, who gets to levy punishment? Of course…the government. Put this all together with a growing AI surveillance state where facial recognition and government cell phone tracking — completely legal, and as a matter of fact, necessary to the Chinese system — can pretty much nail down your location just about any time they want. So yeah…it’s actually worse than it sounds. We just don’t realize it yet.
As for Gu’s Instagram, I’m thinking it’s a mixture of naivete, ignorance, and privilege. She grew up in a country of freedom and is not yet at an age where real oppression by the government computes. Probably well-versed in the shortcomings of the US. That’s one of the things about growing up in a free country — the warts are there without too much work to find them. But she probably heard very little about the drawbacks of her mother’s home country, and even less about things like the Tiananmen massacre.