Okay, so your argument goes like this:

1. US domestic surveillance is different than China’s because Americans can change things by electing different politicians.

2. Americans cannot actually in practice change things by electing different politicians.

3. If you don’t like it, you can leave.

This is a very poor argument.

Points 2 and 3 seem like mischaracterizations of what they wrote. I'll try to paraphrase based on my interpretation. They seem to implicitly claim that Americans can change things in practice, but that the system can be changed to be made more representative. If someone doesn't believe in that future, they can leave because it's a defeatist view in which nothing they see as possible would really satisfy them. Neither of these points imply Americans can't in practice change things, or that people who don't like the present system should just leave.

i remember back around 2003, just after Bush invaded Iraq, when the bobbleheads on Faux and Toby Kieth were responding to critics of Bush's Global War on Terror by telling the critics "America, love it or leave it."

i also remember how this made the pundits on the Left very upset and reconfirmed in their minds that Bush and the Neocons who hijacked America were open Tyrants who eventually embrace stripping American dissidents of their citizenship and deporting them.

so when you say we are free to leave, it reminds me of that.

why should i leave the place where i was born and abandon my people after i conclude "there is no political solution"? that is PRECISELY the moment to stand and FIGHT. it's what George Washington and Jefferson and Madison and Franklin etc would do if they were us today.

i dont want to roll the life dice and pick another lesser country to escape to. what do we do when there is no political solution because the entire edifice of govt from Federal down to local is rotten and hopelessly unfixable?

we seize territory from that tyrannical govt and create a new country with a new govt, that's what we do.

that's also what the people in China ought to be doing too.