I think that Snowden showed us that this is not actually true. Things like National Security letters and the PATRIOT act make the US to me, as a European, seem very hypocritical right now.
The patriot act was passed after 9/11 where the people were hurt and scared. There is backlast against the Patriot act too. Besides PRISM was a highly classified program because the people wouldn't be okay with that type of surveillance here in the U.S where the expectation of privacy isn't even a thing in China.
They are two totally different worlds.
You can't deny the hypocrisy here. While our citizens might support him they don't to the extent that they can pressure governments enough to allow him to return home.
Search "false equivalence". Use Baidu. Or Yandex.
First, they've had neighbor surveilling (snitching on) neighbor to control the people since Mao: it's part of the culture and fully accepted because they can't envision another way. They have a saying [ref needed] "Such a people deserve such a government." Now of course the whole tech stack supports it. We're just getting used to ubiquitous domestic surveillance in the West.
Second, because they've further along, they've used their control of information to abuse their power. Tibet, Tiananmen, organ harvesting, and more lately the Uighur atrocities against people of dissent or race. The West is not there but you can see we're blasting down that road now.
These are not even remotely comparable. China is an outright police state. Not saying the United States doesn't have a lot of work to do with regards to personal liberty, but the Government here has nothing close to the iron grip control that the CCP has; they may want it, and what Government doesn't, but they don't have it and a ton of our internal legal mechanisms are designed specifically to prevent it.
We should be able to discuss America's governance failures and problem areas without conflating them with horribly regressive models of governance.