The Great Firewall of China

[lpetrich]

 Great Wall of China

The Great Wall of China (traditional Chinese: 萬里長城; simplified Chinese: 万里长城; pinyin: Wànlǐ Chángchéng) is a series of fortifications that were built across the historical northern borders of ancient Chinese states and Imperial China as protection against various nomadic groups from the Eurasian Steppe. Several walls were built from as early as the 7th century BC,[3] with selective stretches later joined together by Qin Shi Huang (220–206 BC), the first emperor of China. Little of the Qin wall remains.[4] Later on, many successive dynasties built and maintained multiple stretches of border walls. The best-known sections of the wall were built by the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

Over the last few decades, the Chinese government has been building the "Great Firewall of China". What's a  Firewall ? The original sense is a fireproof wall to keep fires from spreading.  Firewall (computing) - "In computing, a firewall is a network security system that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predetermined security rules.[1] A firewall typically establishes a barrier between a trusted network and an untrusted network, such as the Internet.[2]"

 Great Firewall

The Great Firewall (GFW; simplified Chinese: 防火长城; traditional Chinese: 防火長城; pinyin: Fánghuǒ Chángchéng) is the combination of legislative actions and technologies enforced by the People's Republic of China to regulate the Internet domestically. Its role in internet censorship in China is to block access to selected foreign websites and to slow down cross-border internet traffic.[1] The effect includes: limiting access to foreign information sources, blocking foreign internet tools (e.g. Google Search,[2] Facebook,[3] Twitter,[4] Wikipedia,[5][6] and others) and mobile apps, and requiring foreign companies to adapt to domestic regulations.[7][8]

Besides censorship, the GFW has also influenced the development of China's internal internet economy by nurturing domestic companies[9] and reducing the effectiveness of products from foreign internet companies.[10] The techniques deployed by the Chinese government to maintain control of the Great Firewall can include modifying search results for terms, such as they did following Ai Weiwei’s arrest, and petitioning global conglomerates to remove content, as happened when they petitioned Apple to remove the Quartz business news publication’s app from its Chinese App Store after reporting on the 2019–2020 Hong Kong protests.[11][12]

The Great Firewall was formerly operated by the SIIO, as part of the Golden Shield Project. Since 2013, the firewall is technically operated by the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), which is the entity in charge of translating the Chinese Communist Party's doctrine and policy into technical specifications.[13]

 

[lpetrich]

The Chinese authorities have used the Great Firewall of China to create an information bubble around their nation.

In China, the ‘Great Firewall’ Is Changing a Generation - POLITICO - "Once it seemed inevitable that the internet would create a more open society. Now it’s fostering young nationalists." - 2020 Sep

In May, Wuhan Diary, the Chinese writer Fang Fang’s account of the early days of the coronavirus outbreak, was released in English by HarperCollins.

Fang is no radical. She’s the former chairwoman of the Hubei Provincial Writers Association, a government-linked group. She did criticize the initial coverup of the virus by local officials in Wuhan, but didn’t raise any questions about the response of the central government in Beijing, or about the authoritarian political system that encouraged the cover-up. Fang also generously praised low-level Communist Party cadres, front-line health workers and volunteers.

The book, adapted from a series of posts on Chinese social media, was published at a time when many across China were enraged by the death of Li Wenliang, a young Wuhan doctor who was punished for circulating an early report of the virus and then died of Covid-19. So one would think that Fang’s book would have been welcome—a very moderate assessment of the crisis, at a moment when many in China were already reflecting on the political system’s strengths and weaknesses in handling the virus.

That’s not what happened. Instead, Fang’s decision to have her diary published internationally unleashed a backlash in China—and not from the Communist Party, but from Chinese citizens online. The critics, mostly young people, accused Fang of failing to highlight the Chinese government’s success in containing the outbreak, and of being a tool for “anti-China forces.”

On the popular Chinese microblog Weibo, a user commented, “the West smears us and wants to get together to demand sky-high compensation. Fang Fang passes the sword hilt to them to attack the nation.” Another user blamed Fang for racist attacks on ethnic Chinese in Canada. Some exposed Fang’s personal information, including her home address, and alleged that she lived a luxurious lifestyle at the expense of taxpayers, which Fang refuted.

What happened to the Internet in China?

For many years, the internet in China was seen as a channel for new thinking, or at least greater openness; Chinese citizens could go online to expose government corruption and criticize leaders. Online discussions were relatively free and open, and users, especially younger ones, had an eager appetite for learning and debating big ideas about political systems and how China should be governed.

That has changed sharply in recent years as a crackdown on the internet and civil society has become more thorough and sophisticated—and the government’s messaging has grown more nationalistic.

 

[lpetrich]

In February 2011, an online appeal calling for people in China to emulate the Arab Spring uprisings resulted in small gatherings of curious onlookers in Beijing and several other cities. The authorities took it as a threat, and reacted by rounding up over 100 of the country’s most outspoken critics and forcibly “disappearing” many of them for months, without any legal procedure, subjecting them to forced sleep deprivation, abusive interrogations and threats.

A disproportionate response. China's leaders want to stay in control no matter what, and even oligarchs are not exempt.

In November 2013, the Communist Party issued Document No.9, an internal communique warning its members against “seven perils” that could undermine its rule, including “universal values,” civil society and a free press.

Gradually, the experience of being online in China changed. The list of banned words and images grew. Articles and posts that managed to be published got removed quickly. The government got savvier, and more aggressive, about using its own technology: AI-powered censors could scan images to determine whether they contained certain sensitive words or phrases. An increasing number of foreign websites were blocked by the Great Firewall.
[/quote]
Twitter, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal have long been inaccessible.

One can use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to get through the firewall, but Chinese authorities are cracking down on that tactic also.

Then describing Chinese persecutions like having students inform on their professors' ideological deviations.

At the same time, against the backdrop of China’s economic rise and growing influence around the world, the Communist Party has been ramping up its nationalistic propaganda, promoting the idea that a diminishing West, especially the United States, is determined to thwart China’s rise. The Chinese government still invokes the idea that China suffered “a century of humiliation” in the hands of these “imperialist powers.”

When so few have alternative sources of information, government propaganda becomes more believable: The coronavirus was brought to China by the U.S. Army; protesters in Hong Kong are “violent and extreme” and instigated by U.S. intelligence; the election of pro-independence candidate Tsai Ing-wen to Taiwan’s presidency was a result of American manipulation. Inside China, people are living in an information bubble that the government is getting better at controlling.

In some cases, this is almost leading to a generational split. In my cohort—those who experienced a relatively free internet as young people—many strongly resent the Great Firewall. Among people who started college after Xi took power, however, there is a strong impulse to defend it.

Having grown up never hearing of or using international platforms such as Twitter and Google, they believe the Firewall has protected them from false information and the country from social instability. They also think it has created the necessary conditions for the rise of China’s own tech giants, of which they are understandably proud.

I look at this and I think of right wingers. It's the same sort of thing: belligerent nationalism and a belief in their victimhood and in national victimhood.

 

[lpetrich]

The great firewall of China: Xi Jinping’s internet shutdown | China | The Guardian - 2018 Jun 29 - "Before Xi Jinping, the internet was becoming a more vibrant political space for Chinese citizens. But today the country has the largest and most sophisticated online censorship operation in the world"

At home, Xi paints the west’s version of the internet, which prioritises freedom of information flow, as anathema to the values of the Chinese government. Abroad, he asserts China’s sovereign right to determine what constitutes harmful content. Rather than acknowledging that efforts to control the internet are a source of embarrassment – a sign of potential authoritarian fragility – Xi is trying to turn his vision of a “Chinanet” (to use blogger Michael Anti’s phrase) into a model for other countries.

The challenge for China’s leadership is to maintain what it perceives as the benefits of the internet – advancing commerce and innovation – without letting technology accelerate political change. To maintain his “Chinanet”, Xi seems willing to accept the costs in terms of economic development, creative expression, government credibility, and the development of civil society. But the internet continues to serve as a powerful tool for citizens seeking to advance social change and human rights. The game of cat-and-mouse continues, and there are many more mice than cats.

The Great Firewall can make it difficult to do scientific and technological research, since it is necessary to keep up with what people elsewhere in the world are doing.

Scientific innovation, particularly prized by the Chinese leadership, may also be at risk. After the VPN crackdown, a Chinese biologist published an essay that became popular on social media, entitled Why Do Scientists Need Google? He wrote: “If a country wants to make this many scientists take out time from the short duration of their professional lives to research technology for climbing over the Great Firewall and to install and to continually upgrade every kind of software for routers, computers, tablets and mobile devices, no matter that this behaviour wastes a great amount of time; it is all completely ridiculous.”

 

[lpetrich]

China Takes Aim at Western Ideas - The New York Times - 2013 Aug 20
China’s pathetic crackdown on civil society - The Washington Post - 2015 Apr 22

Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere (Document No. 9) « China Copyright and Media

Here are those seven perils:

1. Propagating Western constitutionalist democracy. Attempting to deny the present leadership and to deny the political system of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.
2. Propagating “universal values”, attempting to shake the ideological and theoretical basis for Party rule.
3. Propagating civil society, attempting to deconstruct the social basis for Party rule.
4. Propagating neoliberalism, attempting to change our country’s basic economic system.
5. Propagating Western news views, challenging our country’s principle that the Party manages the media and its press and publications management system.
6. Propagating historical nihilism, attempting to deny the history of the Chinese Communist Party and the history of the New China.
7. Challenging reform and opening up, challenging the Socialist nature of Socialism with Chinese characteristics.

In effect, the Chinese Communist Party must continue to be dominant over all of China's society.

 

[barbos]

How does that wall look in practice in China?
I realize that google,facebook, twitter,etc is blocked. But what about random foreign apolitical sites? free openly advertized VPN is apparently also blocked. But non free VPN is not easy to block.

 

[lpetrich]

China's Great Firewall -- from a series on "Free speech vs Maintaining Social Cohesion: A Closer Look at Different Policies"

The Great Firewall of China | WIRED

At ISPs, Internet cafés, even state censorship committees, we meet the wired of China - and discover that the technology China needs to build the most powerful country on Earth in the 21st Century threatens to undermine the institutions that rule the nation. And Beijing's control freaks are worried.

"Information industries of China unite!"

How China Spreads Propaganda About Uyghurs in Xinjiang - The New York Times

Recently, the owner of a small store in western China came across some remarks by Mike Pompeo, the former U.S. secretary of state. What he heard made him angry.
A worker in a textile company had the same reaction.
So did a retiree in her 80s. And a taxi driver.

All alike. Very suspicious.

Mr. Pompeo had routinely accused China of committing human rights abuses in the Xinjiang region, and these four people made videos to express their outrage. They did so in oddly similar ways.

“Pompeo said that we Uyghurs are locked up and have no freedom,” the store owner said.
“There’s nothing like that at all in our Xinjiang,” said the taxi driver.
“We are very free,” the retiree said.
“We are very free now,” the store owner said.
“We are very, very free here,” the taxi driver said.
“Our lives are very happy and very free now,” the textile company worker said.

There are lots of other videos like that, often with remarkably similar phrasing.

"born and raised" appeared in at least 200 of the 2,000 videos addressing Mike Pompeo.
"on the internet" or something similar in at least 1,000 of them.
"You’re speaking total nonsense and close variations in at least 600 of them.

From the NYT: "Establishing that government officials had a hand in making these testimonials is sometimes just a matter of asking."

"In another sign of government coordination, the language in the videos echoes written denunciations of Mr. Pompeo that Chinese state agencies issued during the same time."

 

[lpetrich]

On Twitter, The Times and ProPublica found, the clips were shared by more than 300 accounts whose posts strongly suggested they were no ordinary users.

The accounts often posted messages that were identical but for a random string of characters at the end with no obvious meaning, either four Roman letters, five Chinese characters or three symbols such as percentage signs or parentheses.

These extra characters were varied to evade spam filters.

All of the accounts had been registered only in recent months. Many of them followed zero other users. Nearly all had fewer than five followers. The bulk of their tweeting took place between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m. Beijing time.

The text of several of the accounts’ tweets contained traces of computer code, indicating that they had been posted, sloppily, by software.

Twitter's management banned these accounts as platform manipulators last year.

The accounts did not upload Xinjiang clips directly to Twitter. Rather, they tweeted links to videos on YouTube or retweeted videos that had been originally posted by other Twitter accounts.

Those YouTube and Twitter accounts often posted copies of the same Xinjiang videos at roughly the same time, according to the Times and ProPublica analysis. Nearly three-quarters of the copied clips were posted by different accounts within 30 minutes of one another. This suggests the posts were coordinated, even though the accounts had no obvious connection.

YouTube's management banned several of these accounts after learning about them.

One has to ask how these accounts work. Is there someone in a propaganda office who runs auto-post software?

 

[lpetrich]

Chinese Police Hunt Overseas Critics With Advanced Tech - The New York Times - "Authorities in China have turned to sophisticated investigative software to track and silence obscure critics on overseas social media. Their targets include college students and non-Chinese nationals."

To hunt people, security forces use advanced investigation software, public records and databases to find all their personal information and international social media presence. The operations sometimes target those living beyond China’s borders. Police officers are pursuing dissidents and minor critics like Ms. Chen, as well as Chinese people living overseas and even citizens of other nations.

The digital manhunt represents the punitive side of the government’s vast campaign to counter negative portrayals of China. In recent years, the Communist Party has raised bot armies, deployed diplomats and marshaled influencers to push its narratives and drown out criticism. The police have taken it a step further, hounding and silencing those who dare to talk back.

With growing frequency, the authorities are harassing critics both inside and outside China, as well as threatening relatives, in an effort to get them to delete content deemed criminal. One video recording, provided by a Chinese student living in Australia, showed how the police in her hometown had summoned her father, called her with his phone and pushed her to remove her Twitter account.

...
Chinese security authorities are bringing new technical expertise and funding to the process, according to publicly available procurement documents, police manuals and the government contractor, who is working on overseas internet investigations.

...
A Chinese police manual and examination for online security professionals detailed and ranked the types of speech crimes that investigators seek out, labeling them with a one, two or three depending on the severity of the violation. One denotes criticism of top leadership or plans to politically organize or protest; two includes the promotion of liberal ideology and attacks on the government; and three, the least urgent, refers to content ranging from libel to pornography. The manual specifically called for monitoring activity on foreign websites.

 

[lpetrich]

China’s troll king: how a tabloid editor became the voice of Chinese nationalism | China | The Guardian - "Hu Xijin is China’s most famous propagandist. At the Global Times, he helped establish a chest-thumping new tone for China on the world stage – but can he keep up with the forces he has unleashed?"

... From the late 1970s onwards, as China was opening up but had yet to assume a major role in international affairs, it struggled to handle criticism from abroad. The official response was usually some form of wounded denial, or a stilted demand that other countries stay out of its business.

...
“My English is almost all self-taught,” Hu once said in a video on Weibo, “and in English, I’m most skilful at picking a fight.” He has hyped up the prospects of military confrontation between the US and China over Taiwan. He has warned that if Britain infringes Chinese sovereignty in the South China Sea then it will be treated like “a bitch” who is “asking for a beating”. He has compared India to a “bandit” that has “barbarically robbed” Chinese companies. He has referred to Australia as nothing more than “gum stuck to the bottom of China’s shoe”. He recently concluded an article with the question: “In the face of such an irrational Australia, shouldn’t China be prepared with an iron fist and to punch it hard when needed, teaching it a thorough lesson?”

...
Hu’s endless stream of quotable insults and invective stands out amid a sea of bland official statements, calls to “occupy new platforms for party discourse”, and so on. Once you know his name, you see him quoted everywhere – the BBC, NPR, the Financial Times, the Washington Post, the Times, Reuters. In the past two years, the New York Times has mentioned him 46 times. “He’s willing to be quoted in the Xi Jinping era, when huge numbers of others – especially liberal commentators – have grown too nervous to go on-the-record with foreign journalists,” says Evan Osnos, who has written about China for the New Yorker since 2008. Hu has even become the subject of headlines in his own right. “Editor of Chinese state newspaper which routinely mocks Australia enjoyed LUNCH at our embassy”, reported Daily Mail Australia last year.

One reason for Hu’s ubiquity is that he has unparalleled licence to speak bluntly about politics.

Because he faithfully follows the party line. It also helps that he is very entertaining.

Where Hu once spoke for a hardline fringe of the Communist party, his newspaper’s aggressive China-first ideology is now ascendant. As one American author who stopped writing for the Global Times in 2011 put it: “With all those Wolf Warrior diplomats, it’s like the government has been Global Times-ified.”

...
In 2013, at the same time the party was tightening its grip on public discourse, Xi called a conference with propaganda officials from across the country, urging them to “tell the China story well”. That meant covering China in a way that was positive, engaging and harnessed new digital platforms. It meant proudly celebrating China’s achievements, rather than focusing on its imperfections.

The right-wing conception of "patriotism".

 

[lpetrich]

Mr. Hu started off in 1993, as China was opening up.

On 3 January 1993, 20,000 copies of the first issue, which included a story on Diana, Princess of Wales’s split from Prince Charles, appeared on newsstands. The front page featured a grandiose message from the editors, which proclaimed that after 500 years of falling behind the west, and 14 years of economic reform, China was “saying goodbye to poverty and backwardness, like a giant dragon about to take off, standing tall in the east of the world, its head held high”. Despite this lofty rhetoric, Hu claims there wasn’t a clear vision at first. “We published whatever ordinary people liked to read,” he told me.

The publication was filled with exotic stories about spies, royal romances, historical assassinations and children raised alongside wild animals. Most mainstream publications were so propaganda-heavy, so filled with party lingo and news of top leaders’ endless meetings, that the arrival of the plain-talking, eye-catching Global Times must have felt like an episode of Sex and the City beamed into the middle of a long sermon. Articles from the 90s included The Dark World of the Russian Mafia, From Female Slave to Fashion Model, and The Unexpected Madness of Monks: Korean Buddhists’ Rivalry Doused Monastery with Blood.

Very different from what Party officials liked to say.

As the Global Times grew, China’s most powerful politicians watched with admiration. In 2004, when the paper published a column that criticised Chinese journalists for unthinkingly accepting American media narratives about the “war on terror”, the foreign minister, Li Zhaoxing, said that he’d long been waiting to read such an article. “Journalism might be without borders, but journalists do have motherlands,” wrote Li – in the Global Times – shortly after.

Later that year, the president of the People’s Daily publishing group, Wang Chen, spoke at a seminar to discuss the “Global Times phenomenon”. Wang said that the minister of foreign affairs and the head of the overseas propaganda office had repeatedly told him how much they loved the paper, and that the Global Times exemplified how to make propaganda readable.

However,

That doesn’t mean that party-approved figures such as Hu are beyond criticism in mainland China. Hu’s critics include former contributors to the Global Times, who feel that since 2010, he has grown into an increasingly absurd, even dangerous, caricature of himself. “You might have noticed that I rarely write for them any more,” Shen Dingli, a professor of international relations at Fudan University, who is on the Global Times’s go-to list of experts, told me in an email. “The reason is their inclination towards extreme nationalism.” Xiang Lanxin, who is based outside China, told me something similar, having been put off by Hu’s increasingly crude politics. He used to be a frequent contributor to the Global Times, but he stopped in the early 2010s when he sensed that Hu was “no longer interested in meaningful debates”.

Hu’s critics are particularly alarmed by enthusiasm for military solutions to problems. After a recent border scuffle in the Himalayas with India, Hu argued that the Chinese army should “ready themselves to launch into battle at any moment”. In another column, Hu suggested that China should build up an arsenal of 1,000 nuclear warheads. In September, the Global Times published an op-ed headlined “People’s Liberation Army jets will eventually patrol over Taiwan”. When I asked Hu about critics who accuse him of warmongering, he became agitated and denied suggesting that China should start a war. “What I said is that if Taiwan started to assault us, then we must fight back with overwhelming force,” he told me. (One wonders what kind of action would constitute an “assault” in his view.)

Yet another similarity of him and US right-wingers.

He's now 61 and there are lot of rumors that he might retire, but he continues.

Hu likes to call himself a shubianzhe, an antiquated term for a guard stationed on the nation’s frontiers, keeping it safe. In just the past week, fulfilling this duty has involved insulting Taiwanese President Tsai Ing-wen, comparing Hong Kong activist Nathan Law to a 6 January Capitol rioter, taunting the Australian prime minister, bickering with a Florida senator and posting numerous cartoons highlighting American hypocrisy. It is a ceaseless task. For now, Hu fights on.

 

[RVonse]

I vacationed in China with my wife about 5 years ago and even at that time had to use a VPN in order to post on facebook and do searches on google. And the VPN which was recommended worked extremely well with no problems. I did not want to do anything that would cause trouble with their government. Yet I took the risk anyway because it was the only convenient way to keep in internet contact with family at home. I remember being a little disappointed their government being so paranoid to even require the use a VPN in the first place. That being said we both really enjoyed China and were very impressed with the people that live there.

Fast forward to present day and I can actually see some valid reasons why the CCP censored those companies that I did not even consider back then. As bad as the CCP is(was), I'm not so sure google and facebook are any better. Both companies are monopolies of public censorship and a clear threat and danger to our western democracy today. Yes they are only companies and not the govenrment but the end effect is exactly the same. IMHO, those monopolies are either platforms or they are political propoganda outlets. And if they are the former and not the later than they should not ever be in the business of censoring anyone. Certainly not the POTUS!....even if he does make bad comments. Otherwise, those monopolies perform nothing different than the CCP and serve as propoganda arms of a particular political party..

 

[ZiprHead]

Otherwise, those monopolies perform nothing different than the CCP and serve as propoganda arms of a particular political party..

Whaich party would that be?

 

[RVonse]

Otherwise, those monopolies perform nothing different than the CCP and serve as propoganda arms of a particular political party..

Whaich party would that be?

In the case of censoring Trump, I'm going to go with liberal democrats. Although maybe someone will site some kind of example they somehow help the republicans. But in either case, the platform should be required to be a platform with no political agenda..

 

[ZiprHead]

Otherwise, those monopolies perform nothing different than the CCP and serve as propoganda arms of a particular political party..

Whaich party would that be?

In the case of censoring Trump, I'm going to go with liberal democrats. Although maybe someone will site some kind of example they somehow help the republicans. But in either case, the platform should be required to be a platform with no political agenda..

Two new studies show, again, that Facebook doesn’t censor conservatives

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Mike Lee says fact-checking is a form of censorship, and Wikipedia explains how it plans to fight Election Day misinformation.

www.niemanlab.org

 

[RVonse]

Otherwise, those monopolies perform nothing different than the CCP and serve as propoganda arms of a particular political party..

Whaich party would that be?

In the case of censoring Trump, I'm going to go with liberal democrats. Although maybe someone will site some kind of example they somehow help the republicans. But in either case, the platform should be required to be a platform with no political agenda..

Two new studies show, again, that Facebook doesn’t censor conservatives

Meanwhile, Republican Sen. Mike Lee says fact-checking is a form of censorship, and Wikipedia explains how it plans to fight Election Day misinformation.

www.niemanlab.org

We might spend a lot debating whether they are indeed censoring conservatives or not. But we should all be able to agree on one thing... that google and facebook are monopolies. The correct and best response is to simply trust bust these into smaller firms. If not for political reasons than to preserve competitive free market capitalism.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

How does that wall look in practice in China?
I realize that google,facebook, twitter,etc is blocked. But what about random foreign apolitical sites? free openly advertized VPN is apparently also blocked. But non free VPN is not easy to block.

Observation:

File storage (Dropbox and the like): always blocked.

Google: always blocked. Note that this takes out everything Google-related, such as the Play store, ReCaptcha, android handwriting recognition and the like.

Social media: Places like this are ok, all the big things are blocked.

News: Local newspapers might work, all major news is blocked.

Search engines: Last time Bing worked, nothing else did. Baidu of course works, but it's Chinese-oriented and the results are pretty bad--generally most of the results will be in Chinese despite using English search terms.

Beyond this occasional things won't work.

Most VPNs are blocked, there are some that play cat & mouse with the blocks and generally work. My understanding is that Shadowsocks is reliable but more expensive. (It's basically your own VPN run on a shared box you rent somewhere.)

Note that if you're in one of the major cities in a sufficiently high end hotel you might have uncensored internet. The censorship is aimed at locals, not at tourists.

Note that all internet cafes require ID on every visit even when you already have an account with them. (Hey, you have my photo on your screen and the card for the account. Why do you need to scan my passport also? I'd prefer not to carry it around and there have been times none of the workers knew how to do it. I haven't needed to use a cafe for some years now but in the years where I was doing so the restrictions only got more and more, never easing.)