Chinese version of italki Users in China are forced to change into special Chinese version of italki even if they refuse to "upgrade". And there are no discussion section，language partners and essays.

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Abbie Zheng

Chinese version of italki

Users in China are forced to change into special Chinese version of italki even if they refuse to "upgrade". And there are no discussion section，language partners and essays. The only thing you can do is to look for a online teacher. I have to use VPN first to use the normal version and start the discussion. If that's what they (website or government) really want to do, I had nothing to say.

Thankfully VPN can be used now. I don't know whether it would be blocked in the future. Maybe most Chinese users will disappear from this website at that time. Hope we could find a way to solve this.

2017年8月22日 11:34

评论 · 20

Sudeep:
The point is that the Chinese government wants to control what information Chinese people have access to. They want to control how Chinese people think. It’s impossible for the Chinese government to keep an eye on all content on Youtube. It’s better for them to just block access to Youtube. The Chinese search engines are censored. Google doesn’t censor your search results. In China, using Chinese search engines, if you search on particular words you will get no or severely filtered results.

2017年8月22日

Sudeep, Google and Youtube both collect user data. They have so much information about all of us: who you talk to and what you talk to them about, what you search, listen to and read, and where you go. We can only use our imagination to predict all the ways in which all this enormous amount of information about enormous number of people might be used. I think it is fully understandable if a country doesn't want a foreign company to have all this information about its citizens.

2017年8月22日

As one of the more active teachers in the community area of this website, I'm happy that I have so many students from China whom I love working with, so I definitely pray this possible issue doesn’t turn out to be serious. In fact, since I’ve gotten into learning Chinese myself, I’ve realized that the opportunity for us 外国人 to learn more about Chinese language and culture is actually a major benefit of using this website. Hopefully, everything will work out.

2017年8月23日

Is this part of the anticipated 'crackdown' by the Chinese government on open access to the www ?

Who has created the special Chinese version ; is it produced by Italki to satisfy government restrictions ?

We hear that in future it will be difficult for Chinese internet users to obtain VPNs ; in that case many, maybe most, of the Chinese users of this site will effectively be excluded.

2017年8月22日