A Lot Of People In Mainland China Are Perfectly Capable Of Getting Around The So Called 'Great Firewall

A lot of people in mainland China are perfectly capable of getting around the so called 'Great Firewall of China' and interacting with the internet beyond it but the thing is a lot of them just flat out don't want to or don't really care all that much. Yeah sure the internet is heavily censored, but outside of that non-English spaces have gotten smaller and smaller while English takes over as the lingua franca of the internet, and they may or may not be able to read and understand English very well.

Also a lot of people on the internet beyond the 'firewall' are very hostile to them, they get treated like naive idiots or brainwashed infiltrators for the ccp. I remember a few years back when a lot of Chinese fanfic writers started uploading their stories on ao3 en masse because there had been a big uptick in websites that host fanfiction getting taken down and some people were so utterly vile about it, making jokes about how they could get the fics taken down by mentioning the Tiananmen Square massacre in the comments and things like that.

All because they were apparently offended by their favorite tags having more non-English works that can very easily filter out so they don't have to look at them at all. Because God forbid a fanfiction website that already greatly skews towards English fics have more works in other languages, right? That's like the only thing I miss about fanfiction.net, it had way more non-English fics, well that and more stories for certain fandoms than ao3 does.

And it's not like a lot of tech companies and other governments don't censor the internet to some extent or another, China isn't unique in that regard, it's just particularly infamous for being so heavy-handed and easy to use as a red herring.

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is chinese language fics on ao3 controversial? 😰 I was thinking about translating some of my own works but now I'm worried 1. somehow people can't understand that chinese people isn't the same as ccp. nobody I know likes the ccp. but it's just that way 2. using tiananmen square jokes as threats is the most appalling thing I've ever seen?? it's like...making fun of the people who jumped out of windows to escape the fire during 9/11 truly shows an utter disregard for human life. (but we are not human to you westerners are we?)