Given that the NSA and that surveillance capitalism is everywhere, and given that I really dislike that, would it make sense to seek what I like about the internet (the potential for openess, anonimity, and privacy) in China without worrying about technical or political pushback of any kind?
Indeed. Totally agree. That’s why the “and other measures to achieve privacy and anonimity” in my question is tricky. In practice, it’s hard to know what it means. In theory, it could mean that open source software is a necessity, which makes Whatsapp unsuitable, just as you point out :)
It’s much more than that. Signal is open source (https://signal.org/en/) but it’s not secure, despite the marketing blurb on that landing page (“Privacy isn’t an optional mode — it’s just the way that Signal works. Every message, every call, every time.”). See it turns out that security is hard work and the sheer variety of attack vectors that can be used to breach it is inconceivably large to even visualize, let alone protect from. (One of the myriad of ways that Signal is insecure is that it still uses the IME of the device, and I guarantee you that third-party IMEs for entering Chinese characters like Baidu’s, Sogou’s, etc.—all the popular ones you are likely to be using, and if not you then the person you’re talking to—are phoning home with what you typed or searching for keywords or the like.)