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 can’t imagine how the surveillance in China could possibly be worse than in the west. We have CCTV cameras everywhere, the government has a backdoor into every major software platform, smart devices are passively listening to everything we say and do, feds are constantly reading social media and infiltrating message boards, etc. It’s probably the same in China, but the idea that our dystopian panopticon is meaningfully less intrusive than China’s dystopian panopticon is cope.
Western media loves writing stories about things that happen in China that are not unique to China, but that are bad and scary because they happen in China.
Well said.