Categories:
Liberty
Technology
The Economist has an article that discusses the proposed US shutdown of WeChat. This caught my eye:
Foreigners in China have long relied on virtual private networks (vpns) to jump the great firewall. Now, Oscar Li, a postgraduate in Colorado, plans to do the reverse. After his mother in China heard the news about a possible WeChat ban, she called him, frantic with worry. He reassured her that he would download a vpn to circumvent the new great firewall of America.
A sign of the times.
Readers interested in China should also checkout a longer article in the same issue of The Economist, which provides an excellent discussion of recent changes in Chinese economic policy.
PS. Here’s a bit more from that famous Robert Frost poem:
Before I built a wall I’d ask to knowWhat I was walling in or walling out,And to whom I was like to give offense.Something there is that doesn’t love a wall
READER COMMENTS
robc
Sep 4 2020 at 1:18pm
There is only one line in the poem repeated twice.
Philo
Sep 4 2020 at 2:25pm
Well, repeated once.
robc
Sep 4 2020 at 3:19pm
Technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
Thomas Sewell
Sep 4 2020 at 7:42pm
Which, because no one is proposing setting up an actual great firewall of America, will do absolutely nothing for him with regards to WeChat.
The WeChat order isn’t a good thing, but it’s about removing the application from app stores and cutting financial ties, not any kind of network-level blocking. If someone has a non-Apple phone, they can just keep using it (Apple’s “walled-garden” may lead them to force people to remove it, or at least will prevent them from getting updates for it).
Scott Sumner
Sep 5 2020 at 2:14am
Thanks for that info.
Philo
Sep 5 2020 at 11:31am
If you could associate each of your blog posts with so appropriate a poem, you would be the greatest blogger ever by a huge margin!
robc
Sep 8 2020 at 9:12am
The Gods of the Copybook Headings would probably work for 90% of the posts on econlib.
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