Surprisingly this may not be the case.
Sitting next to a young Chinese national at the train station who goes to school in the USA ... he told me he likes that the 'state controls the press' for the following reason: 'because some crazy person could just, you know, get a knife and start killing people'.
It was all rather odd: that it's all about public safety, and avoiding 'crazy people with knives' - but oddly - he was living mostly in the USA. I asked him 'do you feel unsafe right now, in the US, that someone could come at you with a knife'? He replied that he did not. But the irony was lost on him.
There are a lot of people who support the 'one state / one party' thing even if they might disagree with some of the tactics here and there, they just see it in a different way.
In much the same way Russians on some level are very aware of Putin's curruption and yet look past it.
He most likely isn't aware of the big knife attacks in China because of censorship. But once the party collapses or the censorship breaks down (whichever comes first), Chinese citizens will find lots of bad information out in the open. Things that will make them angry, like the billions of dollars communist party bosses have escaped with to other countries. Or that their water supply is grossly contaminated.
Of course this happens everywhere, but it's a pretty big deal when it does happen.
I think China is kind of odd - because you don't immediately get the sense that the government is watching everyone. I mean - there are far fewer people in prison. But the 'eye' is there and if you do specific things ... well ... the silent alarm is tripped.
It is just frustrating that there are so many regressions. The opening up of the mid-late 80s was of course crushed after 6/4, but then there was the opening up that happened before the Olympics that was then throttled back really quickly (and indeed, internet censorship became much more harsh than it ever was). Annoying to say the least.
Not so much 'surveillance' but watchfulness anyhow.
That's quite an assumption. The CCP appears to be getting better, not worse, at controlling information. They are accumulating institutional experience and technical competence. I see no obvious reason beyond reflexive 20thC shibboleths why this direction should inevitably reverse.
This may sound counterintuitive, but it's not.
The issue is that organisations that can control information want that power for a reason. That reason is always the same: it's economic. Even in the west, where control is much less pervasive. They want it, frankly, so they can steal from "the people" without them noticing.
Currently China is lying about economic things. And people don't care. The government says things are going well, and it appears things are going well. Until that changes there won't be large scale changes. But there's kinks: How many people got fired in the massive mine cuts last year (everything growing at 7% per year, then "boom!", massive protests followed by executions in a dozen cities. Protests that were big enough that suppression didn't work. Everybody knew someone who was aware of the protests). How badly the metals industry is doing. And the macro Chinese economy. How many loans, and where. People are currently largely trusting the official stats despite them being somewhat obviously falsified. There's a few high profile somewhat-loony exceptions (e.g. Kyle Bass). This can't end well ...
And once it hasn't ended well, needless to say, people notice once the cheese is actually gone. No amount of information control is going to change that. That's when information control fails. That's when people start trusting the word of a drunk sailor more than the official newspaper. That's when every organisation that matters switches to it's own internal information gathering.
That will happen. It's a matter of time. There's lots of variables in it, but how good the CCP is at controlling information is not actually one of the variables.
"Entropy may be understood as a measure of disorder within a macroscopic system. The second law of thermodynamics states that an isolated system's entropy never decreases. Such systems spontaneously evolve towards thermodynamic equilibrium, the state with maximum entropy."
They aren't able to suppress information completely which is why they resort to the sort of shambolic behaviour described in the article. They lost control of it when the internet became widespread and since then they've been trying their best to firewall and block and censor, for what? Why censor anything if there is no appetite for it anyway? We can assume therefore that there is some percentage of the Chinese population that wants to know and will know despite their governments efforts.
What they're vulnerable to isn't information leakage, but a future failure to deliver the goods (in which respect they're not that much different from liberal democracies). So far 3 decades of predictions that they would fail to continue holding a lid on the public sphere, and 10 years of predictions that they would fail to deliver the goods, have all been wrong. Which is unsurprising given that those predictions were rarely based on anything more substantial than a priori and ahistorical liberal dogma.
This probably has more to do with economic success then the effectiveness of the great firewall. The firewall itself probably persists because of bureaucratic inertia more than anything else.
I formed this opinion after reading an article posted here about the influence CCP exerts over Chinese Expat students in the US.
But there is little to be gained in a discussion, where one feels that one country's patriotism is "true" and the other's is "fake" because of pure propaganda.
In China's case, sure the government is actively covering their misdeeds. But that isn't the point I was referring to. All I'm observing is the CCP has been pretty successful in convincing (or indoctrinating) their people, to the extent that a one-off event like disabling the firewall would have practically negligible effect in disrupting the society.
You might need freedom of thought to become a philosopher or sociologist, but you certainly don’t need it to become an engineer, mathematician, businessman, etc.
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."