[Venue-selection] Beijing / Shenzhen

[Vittorio Bertola <[e-mail]>]

Hello,

I understand that no final conclusion has been made, but I would like to provide some thoughts on why judging the two Chinese cities unsuitable would be in my opinion a mistake.

First of all, if the IETF decided that China were not suitable as a country for meeting, it would be an outlier in the industry. For example, the IEEE is holding several conferences in China this year, and the GSM Association has a MWC Shanghai event. There is nothing bad in making opposite evaluations, but the IETF should make sure to have firm ground for them.

Interestingly, the reasons against accepting the two cities do not seem to be related to the availability of unfiltered Internet access, which apparently the local organizers have guaranteed, or to visa hardships. On this latter point, the 80% criterion seems skewed in favour of having meetings in countries where most of the participants come from; indeed, getting a U.S. visa for Chinese and Indian citizens can be as hard as getting a Chinese visa for European and North American citizens, but since we have fewer participants from Asia than from the Western countries, only the latter situation fails the test. In practice, the assessment of this test relates to how much the IETF wants to broaden the geographical diversity of its participation.

Anyway, the only two criteria that are not met are the one on the U.S. government assessment of travel safety, and the one on religious freedom.

The first criterion was already problematic in times of covid; I remember several participants from Europe challenging the meaningfulness of assessing the safety of travel only from an American point of view. I also remember that the secretariat pointed out that such test is mandated by our insurance agreements, yet, in the end, asking the U.S. government alone whether we should or should not go to a country makes for a strong geopolitical statement.

Moreover, the assessment that Beijing or Shenzhen are less safe than Philadelphia or San Francisco, to mention places where we just went or will go soon, is impossible to justify on any factual ground. The violent death rate in the two American cities is 20.0 and 6.4 per 100'000, compared with 0.5 in China. Similar comparisons can be made for more or less any type of crime. Declaring China so dangerous that nobody should ever go there sounds like a form of prejudice.

As for religious freedom, it is honestly hard to understand how Malaysia (still, one of my favourite Asian countries) can be assessed as "green" and China can be assessed as "red" at the same time. Specialized organizations (see e.g. https://www.opendoors.org/en-US/persecution/countries/ ) put the two countries more or less at the same level of religious persecution. Also, as a non-religious person, I am sincerely disturbed by religious considerations informing any choice at the IETF; religion is an optional private practice and should never influence the public sphere. I am even more disturbed as I discover that failing the LGBT+ tolerance test is not a problem (see Kuala Lumpur's assessment) but failing the religious tolerance test is.

In the end, I have been several times to China (lastly in January 2020) and I would enjoy going there again, but I would also enjoy Kuala Lumpur and even Istanbul. I do not have a strong opinion, but I am worried that the IETF is creating itself problems with its own hands, both internally and externally.

Internally, China is by far the second country in terms of origin of our participants and community, and having at least one meeting in China every now and then would just be normal. Not doing so would feel like a statement of second class citizenship in this organization.

Externally, in times of extreme sensitivity, showing hostility towards China - no matter how and why - will be perceived as a choice of geopolitical camp, with the IETF conceiving itself not as the SDO of the global Internet, but as the SDO of the Western Internet only. While Internet fragmentation is here to stay, there is no need to add more of it on our own - in fact, we need to build bridges, not burn them.

A more sensible course of action, in my view, would be to accept the two Chinese cities as suitable and then evaluate them in comparison with other Asian cities whenever a meeting in Asia is expected to happen. This would perhaps lead to the same result of not meeting in China, but with a general sense of better fairness and respect for the Chinese Internet and IETF community.

Kind regards,

-- vb.