When I worked in China nearly a decade ago, the general mindset among my Party friends was "there's no way this will last." Most of them had sent their kids off to get Canadian citizenship because they weren't sure there would even be a PRC in the long term.

I haven't been back in a while but my guess is things have sort of "settled in" more. The Chinese Firewall is absurdly effective - last I heard it was difficult to even get a VPN through.

That mindset comes from generational memory of high-risk political instability. In the PRC, there has yet to emerge a population without a cohort that personally experienced first-hand, or was passed by oral history with strong impressions like second-hand recitations, political upheavals that involved substantial loss of life, on the order of thousands or more. Get caught, even if incidentally, on the wrong side, and there are dire consequences. What will be interesting to monitor is whether or not the children of your Party friends (the ones who were sent off to obtain Canadian citizenship) do the same with their children. If they all do, then that's not a good signal. If there is abatement of the trend, then that's encouraging.

That's what they said about the current state of affairs twenty years ago. Uproar follows sudden changes. Slow and steady makes the totalitarian state.

They're probably afraid some guy will jump up and shout anti CCP 'propaganda'. It also means they'll lose face if they then proceed to put this guy in the prison.