As for the shitty foreign policy - if I had to buy only stuff produced in "ethical" countries, I'd be living naked and eating only dried fish.
No, but as a citizen of a third country, you worry about countries with a history of messing with third countries (especially yours), not about countries that mess with their own citizenry.
Someone in Chile for example, would probably worry more about their data falling in the hands of Google, than about falling in the hands of China (since the latter never was in bed with Pinochet, even if it censors the internet from its own citizens).
There's a thing called "chilling effects". People stop talking about "risky" subjects because they know they can get prosecuted arbitrarily for it.
The gameplan is simple:
* Someone says something the government doesn't like.
* A plan is devised to get this person in jail and/or to discredit them and/or to ruin their careers.
* In the case of jail, evidence for a crime is collected (from SIGINT) extralegally, and is used to innocuously find, or let someone else find, admissible evidence for the crime. This is called parallel construction and it is very real.
* Maybe they're only sued with the purpose of discrediting them via the press, while making them unable to keep their jobs. Maybe they're actually put in a cage.
It's not out in the open, but it has similar effects to totalitarianism, especially on the part of the population that is more observant and able to affect policy change.
It's not the same, but lets not pretend the US is a lighting beacon of freedom and democracy. Maybe compared to China, but definitely not when compared to e.g. the Netherlands. (I'm biased though.)
It's a very different thing, simply because it cannot be deployed on a large scale. It's equivalent to old-school spycraft of honey-trapping and blackmailing. You can apply this process to a few individuals, but not to everyone without massive effort - the framing and follow-up takes too much manpower - and without risking reputation damage from repeated abuses.
On the other hand, detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law, triggering police intervention and letting the system work as it should, is trivial in the extreme.
Sorry, I'm not a fan of the US system but China is still a step below IMHO.
Yes, but on the other hand, speaking of "detecting you really broke an openly-accepted law", China has 1/2 or 1/3 the prison population per citizens that the US has (which is the world leader in this regard, with 25% of the worlds prison population for just 4-5% of its general population).