Many Chinese users found out that “一键三连” is being banned on social media. So, all of sudden, this phrase became popular on Twitter. Especially, many twitter users don’t even know what that means.
Some thinks it refers to the following buttons for the people’s congress to vote:
The green button means “Agree”.
The red button means “Support”.
The yellow button means “Approve”.
I searched on google, and found Baidu Baike (Chinese Wikipedia) explaination:
Pressing the approval button for a long time so that you can do “like”, “award” and “save” of a product on the Bilibili website.
Okay, but why it is a problem all of sudden? On Wechat, people’s account were taken off for good because they were posting this:
I just saw that the “One key three uses” from Bilibili is going to be banned starting 12th. We have used this for years and never thought about this usage. I have to say, the people in charge of censorship is the most anti(-CCP) people.
Do you understand why 一键三连 is banned?
It is because of the “third term” that our supreme leader will get in a week.
Many people who believed the conspiracy that there would be a coup still believe it. They say that the people who have toppled him are just humouring him, while in reality he has no more power.
Elon Musk is wrong on a lot of things. Ukraine, Taiwan. But the most embarrassing place he got it wrong is Wechat. He kept saying that he wants to turn Twitter into the X everything app, inspired by Weixin/Wechat.
But Wechat got to where it is, not because it is very good, but because Tencent got monopoly status with the blessing from Chinese supreme court in 2010. Facebook tried very hard to get into China, but it could not. Do you know why? Because Wechat is Chinese Facebook.
In 2010, Chinese supreme court denied that Tencent had market monopoly because: “The relevant geographic market was worldwide. This meant that companies like Facebook and Twitter, which are banned in China, were considered to be competitors of Tencent.”
Hahaha, so funny.
And don’t let me start about Wechat ‘freedom of speech’: Musk loves freedom so much that he views Wechat as his ideal social media.
Hahaha, so funny.
Around October 1st, many overseas Chinese Wechat users found out that, when they interacted with their contacts inside China on Weixin, the chat content was blocked by Tencent. They did not know it was blocked and were wondering why their friends/relatives inside China stopped reacting to their chats. This lasted for a few days, until the chat function was restored. Everyone guess is that it was a technical glitch when Weixin/Wechat upgraded its monitoring system.
Now, let me explain the difference between Weixin and Wechat.
The app in China was always Weixin.
The name Wechat was created in 2012 when Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, and Portuguese languages were added to its user interface, and Wechat tried to conquer the world of chat. TechInAsia has an article on the early years of Weixin/Wechat.
Remember the Messi ad?.
It’s not clear when users registered outside of China (on Wechat) and users registered in China (on Weixin) were given different treatment and put on separate networks. And as it showed last week, can be ‘separated’ if needed.
Overall, Wechat users have more freedom and less censorship than Weixin users inside China. While a Weixin user will be banned for saying the wrong words, a Wechat user will not be banned, instead what they say in group chat will just become invisible to Weixin users.
The ‘funny’ thing is, just like what happened in private chat around October 1st, this “invisibility” is invisible to the Wechat user, unless he/she gets suspicious and check it out (usuall one-on-one chat still works!).
Trying to have an interesting conversation and share information on Wechat/Weixin is a very tiring experience.
Unless you are Elon Musk.
On October 7th, the USA passed laws to restrict the technology transfer to the chip industry in China. According to Financial Times (non-paywalled version),
Chinese chip companies are even more concerned about Washington’s attempts to bar US citizens from supporting them.
“That is a bigger bombshell than stopping us from buying equipment,” said a human resources executive at a state-backed semiconductor plant.
“We do have [US passport holders] in our company, in some of the most important positions,” the executive said, calling them a “core weapon” for developing technology. “We need to find a way for these people to continue working for our company. This is very difficult. Most people are not willing to give up their US passports.”
Most US citizens in the Chinese chip sector are Chinese and Taiwanese returnees from the US. There are no statistics on the size of this group. But a Taiwanese intelligence official estimated that as many as 200 US passport holders worked in Chinese semiconductor companies.
The deadline to leave is today, October 12th 2022. No one outside of these companies knew about the sanctions (thanks for tightly controlled media in China) … until people started leaving. Now social media in China is full of lists of Americans who were working on key positions in various chip companies. It seems entire research groups are gone.
We discussed the vital strategic importance of the chip industry to our dear supreme leader in our newsletter 88. This blow is the Biden administration’s gift to him for his third term.
Many places are under lockdown now. Many videos of brutality are uploaded on Twitter.
I lost interest in writing about each case.
Everyone asks: when will it end? The question perhaps they should ask is: What will force the government back down?
The answer is: nothing.
In our newsletter 57, we told a story of man whose cat is “Anthony” on Twitter. The man’s name is Lu Yuyu, he used to run a citizen news website (“Not The News”) in China with his ex-girlfriend Li Tingyu. In 2016, they were arrested. Lu was sentenced to prison for 4 years. Li was let go after ten months in jail and an admission to guilt.
Wall Street Journal just reported that: “A Dissident Escapes Xi Jinping’s China and a Life ‘Made Up of Lies’ “ non-paywalled version- she was able to leave China sponsored by Reporters Without Borders (RSF). She now lives in Berlin and plans to stay out of China.