China: A Largely Unfocused Ramble

Here I am, looking bored.


The location would be a really surreal "theme park" (I hesitate to call it that, but...) in mainland China, circa 1999. The idea was, they had weird replicas of all the main tourist attractions throughout the globe, all stuffed into one glorious cavalcade of amazingness.

Unfortunately, it was crap.

Crap, and hideously expensive. So much so, that we couldn't afford to get inside and take a look around. As we'd spent the best part of a day to get there (riding on the back of passing motorbikes whose drivers wore yellow construction worker hats for crash helmets), we thought we should make the most of it so we took a lot of pictures outside, acting like we'd been in.

What does this have to do with anything? Nothing really, except to serve as a nicely random introduction to a ramble about China. See, I couldn't help but notice this post over at the Sunbelt blog (regarding Bruce Schneier and his opinions on Chinese hackers) and felt like I should weigh in, because I like to ramble about China every now and then.

For the most part, I agree with this guy. Nobody really knows what's happening in China, and even an outsider with experience in the mainland itself probably doesn't see the bigger picture. Hell, I hooked up with a lot of hacker-type people while I was there and though I didn't understand a lot of what they were doing at the time, it was clear there were - how can I put this? - multiple versions of the same reality being presented to every onlooker and even every participant. The secrecy that emanated from each individual - presumably for fear of prosecution, or moles, or who-knows-what was so overwhelming that it seemed to get in the way of what they were trying to show you.

Of course, I was the only English speaker and didn't speak a word of Chinese so that probably didn't help, either.

I kept in touch with a few of them after I left, and indeed used to hang out with a bunch on an IRC channel called "Toshogu" - so called because the main guy had a huge obsession for all things Japanese. I haven't seen any of them online for years, they all basically fell off the face of the Earth and that was the end of that. They probably just got bored with their computers or whatever, but who knows?

Even so, they had some decent connections and I still keep in touch with some of those guys - but even then, it's all a bit twitchy and erratic. The last time I conversed with one of them, he reiterated something that I've said quite a few times - we tend to focus on the great "unknown menace" of all those evil waves of Chinese hackers, but we completely fail to mention the steadily growing Adware industry out there.

I talked about this briefly at one of the ASC Conferences, but in my opinion the "legit" Adware industry over there is going to balloon out and hit us in the face. They've watched how the Western guys did it, and they're going to ape their antics with the added problem of being almost impossible to track down. The "legit" Adware guys likely won't have the hackers problem of the Government breathing down their necks, either - why would they? It's legal and legit, leave us alone! - so they'll be free to do what they do, relatively left alone and out in the open. Indeed, I could see a situation where lots of ex-hackers go down the Adware route as their safest option for dropping crap on PCs and not getting smacked around the head for it.

Aside from that whole "Bruce on China" thing, one of the things that tends to disappoint me is when I see articles about the Chinese using encrypted methods of communication, and proxies, and all the rest of it. Not because I hate proxies or anything - but because the articles only ever mention technological methods of "secret" communication related to computers, like that's all the Chinese have ever known. Like we flew in on magical clouds, bopped them over the heads with TOR and made it all better or something.

Truth is, the Chinese population have done pretty well with secret methods of communication for years. Their history is rich and filled with subtle, hidden meanings and political subversion. Hell, you can trace a line from some of the older martial arts philosophies, right through to Peking Opera and into Chinese cinema for that. Especially throughout the 90s when the threat of the Hong Kong handover to China was imminent - Once Upon a Time in China Part 2, Fist of Legend.....even something as apparently brainless as The Herioc Trio is stuffed full of metaphor and allegory that the clowns in Government would have missed completely.

I would love....love....to see more posts about the many and varied methods used in China throughout the years to get around censorship that rely more on wordplay and less on tech-play. A lot of those more interesting forms of censorship avoidance in China have been handed down from these various non-tech realms and ended up worming their way into the everyday tech-world anyway (like all those people talking about river crabs on forums, for example).

I don't have a nifty closer for this post, so here's a picture of me and some guy with a gigantic melon head lurking in an alley.

Alleyway surprise, originally uploaded by Paperghost.