China is always used as the primary example of a surveillance state, people constantly talk about how dystopian it is and how everything you do in public or online is tracked. I have always been skeptical about these claims and know how hypocritical they are because of the amount of surveillance that happens in the west but I want to know if China is really that bad in regards to privacy.
I have a hard time parsing this too because there have been many people claiming to be visited by the government for saying milder things than I have probably said in various places on the internet. They usually just get told to stop, so I don’t believe they’re getting sent to forever jail, but at the very least the govt is a little more likely to react to comments whereas it would probably take a direct threat to have that happen in some Western countries. Which leads me to believe that the CPC has either greater surveillance or pays closer attention to try to stop things before they escalate.