25th March 2025 > > China.

tl;dr

China, and the now irrefutable case for cryptos.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

Nothing much to report on – this is starting to feel like a lengthy consolidation phase may be upon us.

Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – China

If you ever consider going to China for any reason whatsoever, I have one piece of firm advice for you.

Don’t.

…

I should start by saying that I visited just one city, Chengdu, and I cut my time short for reasons that will become clear. This is a commentary on my personal stay, and it may not reflect what others experience either in Chengdu, or elsewhere in the country. But I suspect it might.

On arriving at my hotel, I did what everyone immediately does these days. I hooked up to the hotel’s WiFi.

Er no, I couldn’t.

After some stilted conversation with the front desk staff (my grasp of Chinese is unsurprisingly precisely zero), I figured out that my access to the WiFi was blocked because of the VPN on my phone, my iPad, and my PC. Simply turning the VPN off did not resolve the situation – I had to physically remove it from all my devices. This was a troubling start.

With a confirmed WiFi connection, it soon became apparent that I couldn’t connect to any of the usual, mostly crypto-related, websites that I am fond of using. Sensing my frustration, the girl at the desk summoned the hotel manager whose command of English was more than adequate. He informed me that Western websites are banned in China. To be fair, over the course of a few days, I did find two that worked – airchina.com and booking.com. And that is it, as far as I know.

Frank (the manager’s anglicised name) advised me that instead of using Google (no chance) I could download the Baidu app, which acts as a search engine. A brief use of Baidu taught me that though you could search in English, all the results presented as tiles on the screen were links to websites written in Chinese, and mostly revolved around the marketing of high heels. I didn’t press that latter point with Frank.

I could not access WattsApp, Facebook, X, Spotify, MixCloud, nor Dropbox. The Ledger app, and my banking apps just would not load. Email? Ha, no way that is happening.

My phone was also out of action.

Many years ago, I was hit with an unexpected and ferociously high mobile phone bill. Since that most unpleasant experience, I have always kept my additional monthly cost limit set to zero. To be able to use my phone in China, which is not a free roaming destination for me, I would have to log onto my phone provider’s website and change the limit from zero to some positive number. But the website is banned.

I was offered the opportunity to buy a local Sim that would allow the utterly useless functionality (for me) of making local, not international, calls with some data thrown in. Frank thought that it might be possible to use a VPN with that data (though I had significant doubts about that). However, you can see the gag coming a mile off. Having removed the AVG VPN from all my devices, I would have to download it again from avg.com which of course is a banned website in China, maybe potentially available if using a VPN. Needing a VPN to download a VPN was never going to be the answer to my troubles.

Remarkably, the Daily Telegraph’s app did have some functionality. The Times too, though this required constant logging back in with about a 50% hit rate. The puzzles section of The Times was inaccessible, probably because solving them requires some independent thought, and that is not welcome in China. The Financial Times’ app failed to work at all, but given that its editorial policy is lacking a degree of rigour or two in its critique of authoritarian regimes, senior management at the FT are probably relaxed about this restriction on its distribution.

There was the option of watching news in English in my hotel room as broadcast by the state-controlled media. With mouth agog, I watched a 30-minute piece describing the moral leadership being shown to the world by Iran, aka the world’s greatest sponsor of terrorism. Somehow that fact got glossed over, hidden amongst the gushing enthusiasm shown for all things Iranian by the programme’s makers. According to this news item, the Western world is full of admiration for the way that Iran takes control of the world’s problems (in conjunction with China of course) and solves them in an equitable manner for all parties, showing no fear or favour based on race, religion, or any other attribute. Those of us in the West apparently recognise our innate inability to be so fair and even-handed, and so we acquiesce by delegating responsibility for the world’s problems to the Iranian mullahs to compensate for our moral deficiencies. The murderous regime occasioned by the dictators of Iran is apparently not so.

I mean, you what?

It was becoming increasingly clear to me that the prospect of writing and sending an informed and accurate CCC from China was looking ever more unlikely, raising my stress levels.

…

On the morning of day two, I was giving some serious thought to leaving China as soon as possible. Researching my options, I found the two travel websites mentioned above do work, to my surprise and delight giving me a potential exit route. To celebrate, and to mull over whether it was the right decision or not, I treated myself to a curry and a couple of beers.

During that lunch, a toothache that had started on Day 2 of the Mongol 100 (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/27th-february-2025-interregnum-1) got significantly worse. After finding a dentist that afternoon, an inspection, an X-ray, and a CT scan came back with a diagnosis of needing root-canal treatment. I was told this via a translation app on a nurse’s phone, an app that would not translate in the other direction, restricting my ability to meaningfully converse about the dental work. Offered the option of 3 days of treatment over a week for a total of less than £40 or high-tailing it back to my dentist in London to incur a near £800 bill, I took what I thought to be the sensible decision to splash the cash, partly because emotionally I was looking for a way out.

There is a certain type of person living in say, Holborn and St. Pancras constituency, or Islington, who would immediately decry my lack of desire to have major dental work in China rather than the UK, probably reaching for their personal knee jerk reaction of shouting racist whenever they possibly can at anyone who is white (look in the mirror I say). These people also remain perpetually annoyed that a zero-Covid strategy is not yet official government policy, and so must be ignored at all times on all subjects.

Back at the ranch, I asked the desk staff if they could call Air China for me and bring my flights forward. After an hour or two, with seemingly the same conversation over and over again, and the same exchange of information with a variety of different people at Air China, I was told that I would find out in the morning if the change to my flight had been accepted. The next morning and the next afternoon saw a repetition of this dance, with the ever-present promise that I would find out later on.

With seats selling fast according to the Air China website, and convinced that I had to get out, I decided to book an extra flight. Starting with Revolut as my payment option, the Air China website told me the payment had to be approved in the Revolut app, which is not available for use in China. The same with my Coutts credit card. Flummoxed by this technological barrier, I approached Zoe (her anglicised name) at the front desk who helpfully informed me I could use the hotel’s phone to call my bank’s helpline to try to get the payment approved. After several failed attempts it became impossible for my bank to approve the payment as Air China (or perhaps the Chinese banking system itself) had blocked my card on suspicion of fraud.

My exit route was looking ever more unlikely. My payment options for hotel bills, food, and taxis were diminishing with every failed online transaction. My toothache was worsening. The bar had run out of beer.

Hotel manager Frank rode to my rescue, paying for my flight home himself (at £800 a not insignificant sum of money for someone living and working in a country whose average wage is much lower than ours), with a discussion about repayment to be had later on. What a man, I am eternally grateful for his help.

After more shenanigans involving bank calls, and risking more cards being blocked, Frank got his money back. Just then, Air China called the hotel to inform me that the change in my flight had been confirmed after the very first phone call, more than a day earlier, details of which had been sent to my email which you already know cannot be accessed in China. Quite why no-one at Air China answering the subsequent phone calls knew about this will forever remain a mystery.

A frustrating state of affairs to say the least, but with two seats booked and paid for on the same flight nearly a week earlier than initially planned, I was going home, and that was the most important thing to me.

…

When I asked Frank and his staff for their honest opinions and feelings about these draconian, and frankly disgusting (though I didn’t say that) restrictions on Chinese citizen’s online lives, the question was met with a shrug of the shoulders and a resigned look that said to me, that is just the way it is, and there is nothing that can be done.

...

Almost without exception, the people I encountered were rude and unfriendly, and I don’t mean the visiting Westerners. Just walking down the street, I was met with harsh stares. I tried the usual method of smiling back, and just once, just the one time, one girl responded in kind. All the others looked back at me with shock and incomprehension. Oh, and walking to get somewhere is fraught with difficulty. Your destination may theoretically only be a mile or two away, but many roads are blocked with severe looking and heavily armed guards, who completely fail to convey the impression they are there to help you in any way. And by this stage of my trip, I had had more than enough of walking already.

The exceptions to the rude people are some of those who are employed in the service industries. As discussed above, the hotel staff could not have been more friendly, helpful, and accommodating. My first taxi driver from the airport into town was much the same, though I suspect his objective was to persuade me to visit a (probably illegal) strip joint, convinced as he was by the Chinese news services that make us all out to be moral degenerates. The staff in the Indian restaurant were very nice, the staff in restaurants serving local cuisine less so much of the time.

…

Having got all that off my chest, I am now going to qualify my opening advice about any consideration you may have of visiting China.

Definitely don’t.

…

Some of you might be wondering what all this has to do with cryptos. If so, may I gently suggest you have not been paying enough attention to the CCC over the past few years.

In the West, we are undoubtedly a little complacent about the freedoms and liberties we take for granted, and the various forms of democracy that we enjoy, however flawed they might be. We do not fight hard enough against the siren voices that demand ever greater restrictions and more regulation on our personal lives, and on the commercial world. We are not scared enough by the trespasses on free speech, justified by claims of inclusiveness, though those trespasses work to foster division, and create distrust. Legally enforced protection against offence, religious or secular, is one of many pathways that lead to the type of authoritarianism on display in China.

The technology backing cryptos is a bulwark against such a diminishing of our liberty and our freedom. It is a tool we have to help us in our fight to keep our lives better than those lived in places such as China, Russia, Iran, et al. China is the prime example of the need for the world to accept and support decentralised options to mitigate against the restrictions that can be placed upon us all by malicious actors operating with untrammelled and unaccountable power in the centralised world.