Prison walls are typically built to keep people in. Similarly the Great Fire Wall of China is intended to keep Chinese inside the moderated Chinese “internet”.
But, with the threat of a TikTok shutdown in the United States, hundreds of thousands of users of that service have opted to move to “Red Book“, an alternative Chinese Social Media app similar to Instagram. The result is a place on the internet where Chinese and Americans can meet. So what is the impact of mixing the “horrors” of western thinking, attitudes and ideas into the languid and highly managed Chinese Stew pot? Aside from the obvious (Chinese censors are overloaded), the wall has been breached, but not in the way strategists had prepared for. There is no mass exodus of people escaping the protected zone of suppression, rather there is an influx. The virus of freedom of thought and expression has entered, “infecting” the staid and orderly inner sanctum. No one needs to go outside. Oh oh.
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