I'm talking to my very neoliberal friend and I'm basically praising China and saying I'd want to move there and she's all "But they censor all the internet!" and I'm honestly at a loss because I don't know enough about their internet situation to have any strong arguments. Is the internet heavily censored in China? Is using VPN not allowed? What's up with their whole internet vibe?
This is my go-to response. The firewall only incidentally causes censorship (which is easily bypassed via VPN, and Chinese netizens are well aware of all the things mayos claim are hidden from them), the actual purpose of the firewall is digital protectionism to allow Chinese tech to develop independent of American tech. It's basically like if all the internet regulations the EU passed were executed by instead having a parallel version of the internet that wasn't owned by American techbros.