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Comment by frgturpwd | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I personally would be less nervous visiting China.

Maybe marginally, but I'm still not visiting any county where I would be in trouble if the government/police knew my opinions of them. That's not just the obvious ones like US, Russia and China, but also countries like Thailand, Egypt, UAE, Israel to name a few. I like seeing the world, but not that much.

In China I would expect to be kicked out for having the wrong opinion as long as I didn't cause a big fuss. In the US I'd worry about being imprisoned.

China is known to hold Canadians on the excuse of being spies… spying for them is oftentimes filming without prior approval in non coastal but still civilian regions.

But weren't they... spies?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...

> According to a report by The Globe and Mail in November 2023, Spavor sought a multimillion-dollar settlement against the federal government for involving him in espionage activities without his knowledge. Spavor alleged that he provided Michael Kovrig with intelligence on North Korea, which Kovrig then secretly gave to the Canadian government and its Five Eyes allies without Spavor's permission, leading to their arrest and detention

The article clearly indicates the gray area. Your comment oversimplifies that dramatically.

Americans, too. My understanding is that there are a couple of hundred Americans being detained in China now. Some of these people are expatriates who gave up their PRC citizenship for American but China still claims to have dominion over (for what that's worth), but at least some have no colorable argument at all.

I'm surprised that we don't hear more about this from the American government and media.

This has become a running joke with a couple of the people in my office who have recently visited China (from the UK).

The next 2 years will be interesting for democracy as a whole.

China actually wants people to visit them and spend money.

And although I don't agree with the CCP ideology the Shanghai subway is ridiculously impressive.

Remember most of the Chinese train infrastructure was built in the time since the Hyperloop.

Chinese train infrastructure also had a lot more casualties than any modern Western nation, even with a conservative estimate of the covered up ones. Building fast is a lot easier if you can break some eggs.

You mean casualties among workers building it? Or casualties among the passengers traveling on it?

I was not impressed when I was sent there on business trip, from what I remember their subways were not as big as in Beijing or other CN places and I hit there my head, obviously anything is better than HK/London. Normally I'm not claustrofobic, but in HK subway...

Something I think is funny is that a lot of Chinese police think of themselves as catching up to the US in terms of surveillance tech. Think about how many internal migrant workers China has coming to the cities for work then back out to the rural areas.

this reminds me of the fact that Adolf Hitler learned his craft by trying to emulate how the USA treated native americans

At this point I'd be less nervous about vising North Korea.

I haven't been to the US since Trump first got elected, but even before that, immigration agents often seemed oddly adversarial, whereas immigration agents in China just don't really seem to give a shit.

From what I read about them (never had the honour and pleasure of interacting with one) it seems for some time they have had too much power with almost zero accountability and consequences.

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