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This is just how Western societies are sold China-style censorship and surveillance.

• ithkuil 8y ago
  Honest question: why can't China sell it's own surveillance in the same way?
  • archibaldJ 8y ago
    That will be unnessary and inefficient for the Chinese government. The social operation system runs very differently in China. And you can still feel the impact the Cultural Revolution has on how the modern day population thinks in general when it comes to politics (e.g. when you ask people about their opinions on a certain lawmaking decision by the Communist Party).
  • adventured 8y ago
    Speaking broadly, nobody is afraid of Finland or Denmark genociding its own population (or large sections of it) and moving to a Mao or Stalin style authoritarian model. Liberal democracies are generally given more of a benefit of the doubt when it comes to their anti-liberal policies (eg Patriot Act), as it pertains to the seriousness of the threat they represent to the well-being and freedom of the population. That is, it's not anticipated or widely feared that those policies will next lead to vast gulags and the near total elimination of all human rights. Human Rights Watch just put out a hundred page report on what's going on in Xinjiang. To paraphrase their findings, what's going on in China is the most repressive large-scale effort seen in the country since the cultural revolution days of mass murder and purge. With China, given they're already an authoritarian dictatorship with few human rights, and they're regressing rapidly from the small gains they had made, there's a built-in legitimate fear of its surveillence programs being directly used for terrifying things. Indeed, it's happening right now.
• ionised 8y ago
  No, western societies get spied on by their own governments because terrorists hate our freedom, or some other such nonsense.