I don't understand what this has to do with China. Can't they both be bad? How does the NSA spying on people make China doing it any better? If I've got five eyes spying on me I'm still not keen to add a sixth.
The key bias here is normalisation of deviance, both on an individual and regime level.
This is one of the rare cases when China has been brought up in the opposite direction.
We’re constantly told China is a threat, and that’s probably a reasonable bit of advice.
We’re not constantly told our own governments are a threat, and that forms the basis of propaganda and misinformation.
> We’re not constantly told our own governments are ...
When I read these statements, I can't help to substitute these nouns with "a used car salesperson".
Of course a used car salesperson will talk up the cars on their lot and won't go out of their way to point out the defects or bad value. That's exactly why we should look for sources other than the salesperson and their allies. Look for data supplied by neutral third parties who have a slight adversarial stance. Also look for data from strong adversaries and evaluate the likelihood of truth versus pure propaganda.
The experience in the 21st century has thankfully been a little bit milder but (1) we're only 20 years in and (2) if you are going to be persecuted it is still far more likely to be by a local government than a foreign government.
On the contrary I'd say a very notable feature the US culture is the adversarial view people have of the government. It's practically part of every major party's platform.
That has not been my experience living in America. Not even remotely.