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You're vastly overstating how strong the great firewall is and how hard it's policed. I spent a decent amount of time in China and plenty of upper-middle class Chinese have Instagram accounts and the like. They just tend to prefer their domestic equivalents since it interfaces better with their technology and how they see the world. If Chinese English literacy were higher you'd likely see more crossover, but the Firewall is less of a singular cause of divided internet than the language gap and China's internet having evolved into its own different shape during the period when the Firewall was more rigorously enforced.
Hell, there's jokes amongst a lot of Chinese netizens that Twitter is a porn app since that's 98% of what they use it for
I have never been there but I always got the impression that the Chinese government doesn't really care that much what the relatively affluent and educated can access think or do, but cares greatly that it can control algorithmic feeds of the "masses". Is this accurate? It honestly sounds like a better and more acceptable solution to me as European/Anglo governments come nearer every day to the total VPN ban and ID verification model of the internet.
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