Access to a greater quantity of information is totally meaningless if it's curated to exclude dissent and support the CCP's agenda. And mass censorship is curat

Access to a greater quantity of information is totally meaningless if it's curated to exclude dissent and support the CCP's agenda. And mass censorship is curation; Someone who has been selectively denied knowledge against the CCP is more repressed/controlled regardless of what other neutral information they have. Greater quantities of "information access" is simply not a sign of less control. An educated physicist brainwashed into supporting the CCP is not any less repressed than an ignorant idiot brainwashed into supporting the CCP. This is like saying the added pillows and larger airholes in your prison cell points towards less detainment. Frankly, a hypothetical hardline policy like you speculated would be less dystopian as it would at least be clearer what's going on and harder to dismiss with totalitarian apologia. And however much we might quibble over whether "small" is the appropriate word, it doesn't change the fact that the size of the internet allowed in China is far, far smaller than could be honestly called a real internet. I call it small because it's an unacceptably small fraction of important available information/communication that is just as effective, if not more, at repressing citizens. You can call it large and be no closer to arguing that this represents less of a repressive dystopia. Beyond filtering and site blocks, China also does: Targeted human monitoring: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveillance-xinjiang.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/world/asia/china-surveill... International surveillance and censorship: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-helped-china-surveillance/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/12/18/zoom-he... Propaganda in search engines and social media: https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/28/chinese-tech-firms-fueling-beijings-repression https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/09/28/chinese-tech-firms-fueli...