The government has many "legal" means to "take everything away" from someone, including taking away their means of doing business or their access to power, running stories to defame them, using threats of tax issues, fraud, sexual crimes, national security violation, and other means of control. Sound familiar?
If you think human nature is different because there is some scrap of paper from two hundred years ago you may be sorely disappointed when trying to redeem on your protections and rights, which it sounds like you've never had to do. This, mind you, is the same scrap of paper that claims all men are created equal.
In the US, a certain level of person has nearly carte blanche against scandal, against being accused of crimes or pursuing pathological policy positions. Of course, in the US, a small person's life can be snuffed out if they annoy the wrong cop and their life can be made miserable if they go up against the justice system or other powerful forces.
I'm sure what how well the two system play against each other on the world stage at this point.
Is US / the West fair? Not by a long shot. Tons of shitty stuff happening, from George Floyd, to Harvey Weinstein, to Jeffrey Epstein, to Julian Assange. But at least we know about them.
But compared to China? You won't even hear about the "small person's life". I'm sure life in China can be great, unless you're Muslim, or Buddhist / Tibetan, or Falun Gong, or Canadian, or ...
I don't know about you, but for me, there's no question which of these systems I'd prefer to live under. Even if I were black! (Notify me when China gets a black president.)
I would prefer live in the West also. I also know a lot of people in the world value security over free expression.
Just as much, I'm reasonably sophisticated in my reading of the news and the open expression here allows me to pick the truth reasonably easily out of a stream of lies. But the stream of lies is there, every day I encounter people online who instead fall for the stream of shrill claim sloshing around both the Internet (aside from Murdock crap, you have "Russian Bounties", etc). Again, the US still looks better to me but the way things are going, the US is not doing a good job selling it's model.
Of course, if you mention Epstein, everyone here knows about him but few-to-no US paper, "pedophile, apparently murdered in prison by persons unknown" and people in China know often know the operations of the state to that degree, at points when the real story is obvious and the state isn't that concerned. Admittedly, there are stories about prison officials moving Maxwell around the prison to prevent her from also being murdered - but directly calling officials for Epstein's murder, not visible (no, I don't miss him but his murder was clearly to protect the guilty and nations should pretend the rule of law at least).
The US definitely has more free expression, of course.
In the US we have been selling off our privacy and ability to affect public policy through our leaders for much the same reasons, ie short-term gains for the few. Difference is we gave it voluntarily.
The probability of that happening is not so big considering people from such areas tend to have low quality schools around them, which tends to mean low test scores, maybe even involvement with the "justice" system, no real opportunity to land a semiconductor job.
What you said sounds nice, but I doubt happens much in practice.
I have friends living in Shenzhen, I asked them, and they said they never saw such signs. It could be that they are visiting different groups of restaurants or hotels etc.
[1] https://twitter.com/BlackLivityCN/status/1249011762638266374
Not necessarily. You could also lose your job and get totally screwed professionally if you speak against the last political trend. University professors could for instance lose a job over a pronoun matter. Sharing a memo have also been proven risky. The actors are different (state in one case, mob and PC in the other) but the end result can be pretty similar.
Try organising a Tiananmn protest, or criticising the Uyghur internment camps within China