"Don't confuse tourism with immigration"
Though if you go as an American, you will be in a nicely padded expat bubble and the life can be quite comfortable. Just like in any other country.
Though if you go as an American, you will be in a nicely padded expat bubble and the life can be quite comfortable. Just like in any other country.
The realization that should come later is that because people in the West have basic human rights, life is messy as its harder to control a population that's guaranteed rights. But in autocratic/dictatorial states many people are beaten, jailed, or simply killed with impunity or have a mock trial for formalities. Tourists will never see any of this and their Western passport means they'll never be shaken down or beaten or harassed by the authorities. They'll get preferential treatment because its within everyone's economic and political interests to do so. They mistakenly think this is how the locals are treated as well.
Sadly, many Westerners get the 'big city' autocratic treatment and bemoan the messy chaos of their own cities, without realizing that chaos is a feature, not a bug, especially if you want your 'features' to be the rule of law, personal freedom, property rights, an independent judiciary, and human rights.
until my significant other got shaken down by the police there three times in the last three times we were there. so now i realized my first experience was skewed because I'm not the demographic that is the target of all that.
now i know better: your isolated anecdotal experience should never be the only argument for a political discussion.
From a tourist's perspective NYC, Chicago, LA are a madhouse of crime, graffiti, etc while Pyongyang is a wonderful, clean, and relatively quiet capital. You'd think the latter would be utopia, but of course, its far from it. My point is that a tourist's experience actually has the opposite incentives as a citizen's experience. An oppressed and submissive populace is nice for tourists but not nice for locals. A boisterous, empowered, and loud populace is nice for locals but not nice for tourists.
For example, I imagine the Paris and Athens metro systems go on strike a lot more than the Moscow and Pyongyang metro systems do.
In China, I'm scared of the police too but I know that I'll get preferential treatment because I'm a foreigner so excesses are less likely.
That said, I agree with your points, especially with China becoming more and more autocratic since 2013...
So, yes I'm much more afraid of the police in the US, they are demonstrably more violent. That doesn't mean that China and Russia are not dictatures, they are. It also doesn't mean that the police in those countries are not scary. They are scary and they are corrupted and will shake down locals (but rarely foreigners because it's too risky for them).