For now at least, China's citizens are embracing social-credit systems

That’s not to say I agree with, or want to normalize, the Chinese government’s actions, though.

Obviously in a tribal village in the past you know who lived in the hut next door and it was like a big family who trusted each other (food was shared, mothers would take care of each others' kids). Maybe it's related to the Dunbar number?

Privacy is just one pillar of freedom, albeit a load-bearing one. Freedom will crumble if we strike down this pillar and as a society - or even as Western hemisphere - we have to evaluate if safety from (state-defined) crime ends up being worth near-zero privacy.

If I were to judge by some interviews I recently saw on "extra3", a comedic German television format [1], I increasingly fear that democracy, freedom and liberalism are doomed. Context: People at a meat convention (yes...) were asked about their opinions on climate change and animal farming.

Boomer-aged visitors and young visitors alike not only showed complete lack of understanding of ANY issue associated with large-scale animal husbandry. But they turned questions on their head and answered in a sort of stupid and ignorant way I could have never imagined in my wildest dreams. One example: "What do you think about animal suffering in mass animal husbandry?"

Answer, paraphrased, completely serious in tone: "Nothing, the humans here at this convention are also visiting in masses and obviously nobody suffers. They are all enjoying themselves, look around."

A question about CO2-impact of animal farming brought another response forward, that had me baffled: "There is no problem here, we have been eating meat for thousands of years and now suddenly it's supposed to be wrong. The climate didn't change over the millennia either!"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extra_3

That is a question most don't ask. They assume the laws they have and the way they go about such laws are what fits every culture -- and every people at every circumstances.

And they don't just believe that those laws would be good for those people: they also believe that they can readily and without problems adopt them too, as if it's just a matter of will.

Truth is, those laws are not some universal constants, but a result of both inheriting the Greco-Roman culture and Roman legal conceptions, and 2 millennia of iterating on them (and of course Europe itself was divided into islands of elites and peasant chaos up to the times of Hugo and Dickens, and the US of course had the "wild west" frontiers where the rule of law wasn't exactly what is today).

Why though ?

Apart from looking similar they are quite different culturally from mainland China. A lot of which stems from the fact that they were former British colonies and have always taken inspiration from the West.

Because cheating is a cultural rather than ethnical thing.

There are ethnical Chinese people in those regions you listed, but sure mainland China sailed a totally different cultural course over the last 70 years.

In mainland china, cheating mostly happen because of over competition. If you don't cheat, others will and will crush you in business or academic competition. Cheaters go home for chicken dinner while non-cheaters goes to jail.

Now, Taiwan and Hongkong are China. But China that continued on more traditional values. The communist regime has worked hard to change the fabric of society (like it did in e.g. Russia) and that has had negative consequences on culture and manners, and brought distrust in most institutions.

It is also down to the legal and regulatory environment. Just look for stories from Europe and the Us in the 19th century and you'll find many, many stories like you could hear from China today. And those stories from China today are what happens in many countries around the world outside of the Western 'bubble'.

You use to hear it all the time about people in Taiwan and Hong Kong, and Singapore too. Back in the day (for Singapore that's as close as the 70s), they were seedy ports, with anything goes rules, prostitution, gambling, counterfeiting, drugs, and so on. Look for old books on those places.

Those things gradually changed as those 3 places became richer and more important for trade (and Taiwan was an early "China", getting outsourced industrial production from the West).

Note that all three places are much smaller than China, don't have 600+ strong rural population still struggling to get by/to middle class by any means, and some of them had a "Delaware/Switzerland" role in the region, with multiple interests vested in that working well (which is how the law sausage gets made to benefit corporations, the rule of law is held, and the countries get "high marks" for "economic freedom": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_economic_... ).

Taiwan was "civilized" by 50 years of Japanese occupation that wasn't brutal or repressive as Korea. Though I think Taiwan was more of a backwater island nation when the Japanese came. Likewise for Hong Kong with Britain. Taiwan and Hong Kong sort of organically grew into and internalized the modern legal and business structures laid down by the occupiers. China is having to do what Lee Kuan Yew did, which was transform an unruly, anarchic, but otherwise sophisticated culture into one that obeys and values modern legal, rules-based norms.

Maybe the question should be, why do you hear a lot more about it. Because China is 100 times the population of those other places? And, well, there seems a trend at least on HN lately, in stories from US papers/journals, and in the US media generally I assume (don't know, I'm not there) to favour 'China bad' stories, over 'China good' or '(Other country) bad'. It's pretty tedious, and seems to have started not long ago. It has that nauseating feeling of that regular US media obsession on the next country they'll invade/bomb. Demonization, subhumanization, whatever you want to call it.