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Comment by itsagavin | Hacker News Reader

The reality is every step you took was observed and I would assume even where you slept both video and audio were recorded.

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You can assume anything. Doesn't mean it's true. The reality is that your perception of China is highly fantasized and part of a crafted narrative. It's dangerous if you continue to contribute to this propaganda without care as to whether you've verified anything you've heard yourself. Maybe it's true, maybe not, but I doubt you'd know. I mean, it's certainly possible our rooms were bugged, but to what end? To fulfill the dreams of conspiracy theorists? I guess it's equally likely the US embedded a CIA agent in our group as well so maybe bugging us would be justified.

Your naivete is unsurprising; it was one of the traits you were selected for in trip planning.

Countries spy on foreign visitors. Friendship trips are carefully planned to show none of the underside of a society. China is one of the most oppressive regimes out there - see the detention of Jack Ma, who was five years ago one of their most celebrated businessmen.

Well, must be Obama’s conspiracy because the US side selected the participants. You speak as if you have indisputable proof of some conspiracy.

The naïveté is not understanding that China’s problems is not so much they are evil masterminds rather than just incompetent bureaucrats. The takeaway from the trip is that 90% of what they expose to the outside world is a facade to save face for their own politicians, not that they are competent super spies.

They may have spied on us, but we’d have not much value being spied upon. If spying is somehow the benchmark of authoritarian regimes then the US and Israel probably lead the pack of these types of regimes.

Secondly, just because you disagree with government policies doesn’t make it some evil regime. You cited Jack Ma but he is still out and about.

Business people go missing, women who speak our are silenced, climate change is of no concern, concentration camps are real.

We’ve seen enough already.

The fact that there's an actual genocide taking place in the country is all we need to know - all the other so-called "assumptions" pale in comparison to that reality

I backpacked through China and stayed in youth hostels. Highly doubt they were bugged. They didn’t even have heating (we used electric blankets)

I think part of that is that a lot of infrastructure is missing, but also culturally less wasteful than American lifestyles. For example I stayed in my Japanese friend's house in Tokyo and he doesn't heat the entire place even though it's a pretty small apartment. My room just had a heated blanket as well.

But I agree, for any random foreigner the government is not competent enough to surveil him/her and much less motivated to do so. The fact is any given foreigner is not actually that important...

The problem is that China doesn’t allow for central heating south of the Yangtze. So my coldest winter ever was spent in a small town in south Hunan, where it was above freezing but the lack of indoor heating really beats you down, kotatsus not withstanding. A friend of mine has parents who migrate to “northern” China in the winter so they don’t freeze to death.

Japan had a similar problem being previously not very rich (they invented kotatsu for that reason).

Let me add some nuances to this claim.

Even if “every step is observed” is exaggerated, the surveillance system in China is pretty extensive: it can target journalists and international students among other “suspicious people”, and can compile individual files on such persons using 3,000 facial recognition cameras (in a single province) that connect to various national and regional databases. [1]

And this surveillance system is part of the bigger tracking program, which the Chinese authority has used to harass and intimidate journalists [2] (see this comment for more [3]).

And according to the memoir “A Promised Land”, even Obama and his staff were worried about Chinese surveillance during their stay at the Beijing hotel (see this review [4] or this summary [5]):

    “To make calls involving national security matters from the hotel, I had to go to a suite down the hall fitted with a sensitive compartmented information facility (SCIF) — a big blue tent plopped down in the middle of the room that hummed with an eerie, psychedelic buzz designed to block any nearby listening devices. Some members of our team dressed and even showered in the dark to avoid the hidden cameras we could assume had been strategically placed in every room. (Marvin, on the other hand, said he made a point of walking around his room naked and with the lights on — whether out of pride or in protest wasn’t entirely clear.)” [4]

And I agree with other commenters [6] that the situation worsened significantly after 2018 as Xi was consolidating power, so experiences before 2016 or so may not be representative of the current trend (when Xi may get more terms).

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-chinese-provinc... "EXCLUSIVE Chinese province targets journalists, foreign students with planned new surveillance system"

[2]: https://www.newsweek.com/china-harassing-intimidating-journa... "China Harassing, Intimidating Journalists With Surveillance Built to Curb COVID-19"

[3]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29685703

[4]: https://georgetoparis.medium.com/obamas-a-promised-land-on-c... "Obama’s “A Promised Land”, on China"

[5]: https://www.bannedbook.org/en/bnews/baitai/20201121/1434392.... "Obama recalls his first visit to China and was under surveillance"

[6]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29684626

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