Steam: Not Freedom, Just a Chinese Self-Comfort

Steam can still be used normally in China, and many people explain this as the CCP having concerns: fearing that players might use it to access the outside world, fearing they might incidentally bypass the firewall, fearing the cultural firewall might be breached. This explanation sounds powerful, but is essentially a form of self-comfort.

The real reason is simple: Steam's agent in China is Perfect World. It has money and connections, and can navigate through the power machine. Steam's existence has never been the ruler's tolerance of freedom, but rather a byproduct of commercial interests.

Chinese people are accustomed to interpreting such loopholes as "the rulers fear us." This is a psychological compensation after being colonized. What is clearly a colony divided by others is understood as rights they have won themselves. Steam becomes the stage for this illusion. The virtual freedom brought by games, discounts, and cross-border social interactions is enough to create a delusion: as if the system has some concerns about them.

But the fact is, in 2025, the number of Chinese people who can bypass the firewall is far greater than ten years ago, yet this has not brought any institutional shock. Bypassing the firewall is just a way to obtain entertainment, learning, and consumption, hardly transforming into organized power. Steam is the same; its existence has not shaken any power foundation.

A typical case is the game "Red Poison" launched by Taiwanese independent developers. In the game, the virus has the face of a bootleg Winnie the Pooh, and the villains players must fight are Chinese Foreign Ministry spokespersons and Tedros. Patriotic players discovered this and collectively reported it, demanding Steam remove it, but were instead directly "sent back to the Chinese region" by Steam. These people originally secretly bought games at low prices in the Russian region, yet while shouting patriotism, they wanted to act as law enforcers. In the end, they were slapped in the face by reality.

This story shows that Chinese Steam players are not unstable factors at all; their anger and campaigns are precisely extensions of the system. They are not trying to tear down the wall, but to help the system reinforce it. Given the premise of receiving a salary, they are willing to be dogs at any time.

If the colonized population in China one day truly stands up in the future, the reason will not be that they can bypass the firewall, nor that they have contacted the outside world on Steam. That kind of turning point will only appear when external blood supply is cut off. When the United States or other countries stop providing funds and markets, and the CCP cannot continue to maintain the social system, the colonized people cannot survive, and only then will they point their spears at the Communist Party.

Self-comfort is stubborn because it conforms to survival logic. The colonized lose freedom while convincing themselves this is temporary, that "we actually have power." Steam is just the latest carrier, continuing this tradition of self-anesthesia.