Death by a thousand cuts: software development behind China’s Great Firewall

Photo credit: Unsplash.

If you’ve ever been to mainland China, chances are you’re familiar with the Great Firewall, the country’s all-encompassing internet censorship apparatus. You know the despair of not being able to open Facebook, the pain of going mute on Twitter. But with a good VPN, you can magic many of these inconveniences away – at least temporarily.

For software developers based in China, however, it’s not that simple. You’re not just censored from certain websites. Basic building blocks that you use for product development are suddenly beyond your reach. With software services and libraries spread across the globe, China’s internet sovereignty can be a real pain in the ass.

“There’s a whole parallel universe over here,” DC Collier, founder of Shanghai-based chatbot startup Rikai Labs, told me back in June. “I think Chinese developers are doing development work with one hand tied behind their back.”

DC has been a software developer for 20 years, building everything from CD-ROM games to Facebook apps and now, chatbots. When I ask how he deals with the Great Firewall, he says he travels overseas when he has a couple weeks of “serious coding work” ahead of him.

“Otherwise, just bang my head against the wall,” he tells Tech in Asia in an email.

To outsiders who have never developed software in China, it might sound like he’s joking. But he’s not.

Blocked – or slow as hell

Photo credit: Bradley Dilger.

The scope of the Great Firewall has grown along with the internet. Sadly, it’s a highly adaptable and robust system. In terms of software development, it means that a growing number of services are permanently or sporadically blocked.

One of those is NPM or Node Package Manager, an important tool for Node.js. To access NPM in mainland China, you’ll have to find workarounds like using a Chinese mirror. Another is Github, a popular version control and source code management tool that is occasionally blocked or at least throttled to be excruciatingly slow.

Things get worse when you try using anything related to Google: Google Analytics, Google Fonts, Google Maps. All blocked. Even open source tools from Google are inaccessible without VPN or some kind of detour, such as Tensorflow.

“We had to rewrite so much of our stack,” says DC. “In the US, you rely on so many external libraries but then every time you do a deploy here, it takes like 30 minutes because it’s pulling down libraries from someone else’s service. You have to set up all kinds of infrastructure to get around all of that stuff.”

“If you’re using third party APIs, like Facebook’s natural language processing APIs, you have to set up proxies to bounce that stuff around,” he adds. “It’s really painful.”

Hosting dilemmas

No hope?