"The foreign perspective is straight up cartoonish and the "all seeing superpowered computers monitor you 24/7" narrative could be straight up out of futuristic

"The foreign perspective is straight up cartoonish and the "all seeing superpowered computers monitor you 24/7" narrative could be straight up out of futuristic Japanese anxieties of the 80s." It's 'cartoonish' for someone who has not yet been on the receiving end of the negative externalities of such system to fathom that it doesn't exist. Why don't you, as an 'Enlightened Ex-Pat in China' go around making posts about the history of Tiananmen, or write a critical piece about the police state in Xianjing, and then see what happens? Or any number of other things? "In reality life in China today is not much different than it is anywhere else." Of course it is - because most of us are preoccupied with normal things. Life in Russia is 'mostly the same as everywhere else', even right now, as we speak, isn't it? And yet, witness what is happening in Ukraine. 'Life in China is mostly the same as everywhere else' is true, just as up to a million people are being interned on the basis of their ethnicity. The OP is effectively correct: although 'bias' may not be the correct term, certainly the simple participation in absolutist and totalitarian systems without oversight is a problem, and the attitude that somehow this is 'normal' and 'without externalisations' is what OP was referring to as 'bias'. Your own dissonance is similar, and it's at the root of the problem. "My life is normal, ergo, the system is relatively normal" is the myopia that allows for these things to happen.