1 in 5 humans live under this dictatorship
There's a fairly decent chance all of our grandchildren will live under a Chinese dictatorship.
> surveys suggest Mr. Xi has an approval rating of more than 80 percent
If _all_ your media (including news, private messages, encyclopedias, history) hide this fact from you, how can one possibly tell - or understand what it means?
Of course, it's very difficult to protest and make a change even after you get to view everything past the Great Firewall of China, but there must be a growing amount of Chinese people that know of the propaganda and the lies.
(I literally personally know not one but TWO guys who tried to intervene in an obvious battering but were then set upon by BOTH members of the couple... Black eye for one and a broken tooth for the other)
Chinese everyday life is as free or unfree as it is here. It's funny how average Joe is so proud of living in a free country when all his life he is working his ass off to pay the bills never going anywhere, never being the heroic activist changing anything.
That handful of people who are like that definitely are better off here than in China, but the general public in China is just as happy with life as long as they get their steady income, a shiny iPhone and whatever the Chinese clone of Netflix is. And They certainly don't care that WhatsApp or some other app/website with zero market penetration in China is blocked over there.
Are you sure that's the case? It certainly seems like they to it to keep control over the relationship.
Still even if, its not like people in China feel threatened or even abused. Like I said, everyday life is almost completely unaffected. The occasional political rant on social media gets deleted sure, which people are annoyed by, but there are no consequences to that unless you really push for it, which brings us back to activism.
Anyone who has read any history would know that is most certainly not a good thing. Perhaps China will censor all of human history next, so that those pesky young university students quoting George Washington's farewell address don't get any "revolutionary" ideas.
To maintain a dictatorship you have to terrify the people from time to time. Every dictator - that we have a recorded history of behavior for - of the last century has frequently used fear to maintain their power. Read the history of dictators as diverse as Hussein, Hitler, Stalin, Mugabe, Pinochet, Franco, Ceaușescu, etc. They all used the seeming random application of terror/fear upon the population and their competitors to retain control.
Xi has been using frequent applications of fear the last five years. That's how he acquired the power he now has. He implemented a "corruption" purge, targeting powerful opponents seemingly at random. They never know who is next. The same thing has been going on in the economic sphere, as they arrest people for "economic crimes" - nobody in the business sphere knows who will be disappeared or charged next. This behavior will get a lot worse now that Xi has formally consolidated power.
nowhere nearly as "free" there as it is here. I can blame all the presidents I want for my misfortune, and don't have to go to jail.
Sure, technically not as free as most places on this planet, I don't even question that: just go read my initial post again. The point is that it doesnt matter to 99.999% of people. It simply never interferes with everyday life. And I must say, during my time there I rarely felt unfree or oppressed by government. Obviously I needed VPN as a foreigner to access everyday stuff, but everything else was mostly minor annoyances, normal differences in culture or law.
I find it odd you mention security cameras. I consider that primarily a privacy issue, but apart from that it's a bit ironic to bring this up post-snowden. The government tracking my online movement worries me much more than cameras in public. And how everyone uploads all their photos and life to big cloud providers that don't give access to their users' data to the NSA ever /s. China definitely does all this too, but in comparison the cameras are really just the icing on the cake. The US is careful to spy on their people unnoticed. China doesn't give a fuck.
so you remember registering your new apartment with the police every time you moved.
you said "security cameras", not me.
I said FACE SCANNING... which is explicitly for tracking your movement in meat-space, they already track your movement in fake-space.
to your point about cloud providers, yes... an existential threat to privacy.
> The US is careful to spy on their people unnoticed. China doesn't give a fuck.
disgusting in both cases
Edit to add: there are a lot of things about China that I really enjoyed. and in some ways, more real freedom... in the absence of enforcement. I went with broken ideals, and I'm sure I left with broken ideals... but they were at least better informed, if still broken, ideals. and the food was better than anything I have had before or since.