As things were you “only” had to watch out for people who would rat you out to Securitate or to Stasi (in East Germany), not an ideal situation but manageable from a certain point on, one could live a decent life from a “freedom” point of view, to say so, you could say political jokes or complain about the regime to the right people, i.e. not the regime’s informers, or you could directly “steal” from the State things you believe should have belonged to you, like the peasants from my grandma’s village were doing when they were taking stuff at night from the State farms that had been built on lands nationalized by the State from the same farmers immediately after the Communists came to power. All these things were highly illegal, I mean the regime trash-talking, the taking of stuff from State farms, the only thing protecting us was that the regime couldn’t follow us all in order to catch us. With today’s tools that would not have been a problem, you can see that in today’s China where every form of political jokes (even in private online conversations) is prohibited and actively acted against.
"Heaven is high and the emperor is far away."
I read The Aquariums Of Pyongyang [1] for a take on life and imprisonment in North Korea. Recommended read.
What is your take on Huawei giving 3G/4G technology to North Korea by proxy? Is North Korea technologically advanced enough to abuse technology to suppress its citizens?
Also, to get an idea of the amount of data collected nowadays [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Aquariums_of_Pyongyang
[2] https://opendatacity.github.io/stasi-vs-nsa/frame_en.html
I wonder how you managed to “see” that, since it’s not true at all. If you know Chinese you’ll be able to find political jokes pretty much everywhere on Chinese language websites, especially forums. Some words may be banned by forum software but people just use homophones. Also not surprisingly, no one actually gives a shit about political jokes in private conversations, unless you’re a foreign journalist or known troublemaker or something, I guess (source: done that multiple times within Chinese borders).