If their governance model was so good, they wouldn't have to oppress their population so much. The fact that Western governments are adopting some of the same techniques is a sign that either technology makes it too easy/cheap to implement these systems without thinking, or that Western governments are becoming less representative and thus need to rely on systems of oppression more to maintain their grip on power.

To give some possible examples of what I mean by "less representative", let me suggest that growing wealth inequality makes the poor realise they are not being heard by the rich; that communication technology allow niche ideas to spread causing the balkanisation of reality (which causes cracks that governments can't easily paper over); and that in some countries the voting system doesn't allow the healthy evolution of parties to respond to the new realities (exacerbating "future shock").

Thank you for the thoughtful expansion. I completely agree with you on the level you're thinking about this, and I also agree that our tech level in collaboration is basically amplified mob rule, same as 100 years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051178 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051412

But zooming out, I think a society/government's job is preventing destruction and growing. That may not be in a way that's dangerous to other governments, but high relative growth can make other governments irrelevant. I'm claiming that the value from unabashed large scale data surveillance that CCP gathers is very large, and that might be a significant enough factor moving forward that privacy-first countries might simply not be able to keep up with it, and become irrelevant.

From this viewpoint, if the EU is doing this, we have no large diverse conglomerate that can serve as an experimental control any more. We can't even tell if privacy "is a good thing", for the final metric of growth. Not US, not EU, not India. Africa is still not in the same league.

Every single one of them have basically succumbed to privacy vs. security false dichotomy (https://signal.org/blog/private-contact-discovery/). Every single one thinks the way forward (at least for now) is mass surveillance.

Maybe they think the gain from not having public crime is big enough to justify the cost. In which case CCP was "right" - convergent evolution means something (for now).

The government's job is to defend individual liberties. Full stop.

The rest is fluff that should be put down with violence if necessary.

> The government's job is to defend individual liberties.

You must find data coming from the real world very hard to analyze through this lense. You might want to try these popular alternatives:

"The government's job is to defend the privileges of the few"

or the latest trend:

"The government's job is to defend itself"

You mistake the way western governments are structured with "governance of a society". The CCP is far more than the traditional there branches of the western democratic government.

Societies self-govern and create structures. Some of those structures are companies, some are government. Sometimes the government regulates companies, and sometimes companies regulate the government.

Edit: even in the US for example, ONLY the judiciary is concerned with defending individual liberties. If that's all that's necessary then we wouldn't need elections, just a military and that's that.

You seem to heavily discount the amount of work it takes to become post-scarcity - most societies in the world fail to achieve this, even for simple things like cell phones in 2021.

That the CCP is far more is clear indication that it is too much.

(In the US) The judiciary is very obviously not the only branch concerned with protecting individual liberties. Law makers pass laws with the intent to do so and the President can command the military to do so if necessary.

The world is on track to completely eliminate starvation and abject poverty in a few years, maybe a decade or two.

Projected life span and quality of life is at an all time high on average, and crime is overall down which is another indicator of plenty rather than lack. It is utopian minded idealism that everyone should have everything they want (including cell phones) and the world should become 'post-scarcity' (whatever that means). I have found utopian minded idealists to be the least experienced with regards work.

Why does it mean they're right? These EU states are using this tech because it's easy. Doing the right thing is usually not the easy way.

Also, economic growth is not the measure of a state that's good for its citizens. I think we're doing a lot better than China there.

This just means we have to keep fighting it.

Yes, but prioritization is everywhere - maybe the EU finds that their ideals and principles were an instance of the XY problem, and privacy doesn't matter at all.

I'm not saying they're right, I'm saying they're "right". I'm redefining "right" as "long term success".

It's like everyone uses mobile phones now and the luddites who don't are simply irrelevant. Maybe the anti-tech folks are actually right in terms of harm it causes, but because of the other party's success, there's they're not relevant. The right-ness is not relevant for this case.

Similar to how you might do pagans-vs-christians. Maybe we as a society will evolve to support and encourage pagans and diversity and stop encouraging supremacist religions like Christianity, BUT - they've "won" against all the pagan religions in the middle east and europe. With Islam, against everything all the way up to central asia and SEA, down into Africa. Maybe the holdouts like the Hindus in India will ultimately build better and more resilient societies (they haven't been converted yet, unlike many others) but so far, nothing.

The question requires time and more data to resolve - but the tentative resolution is that people don't care about privacy. So societies don't care either.

That said, I'm a huge privacy/crypto nerd - I even think privacy-vs-security is a false dichotomy. THEY don't. Apple doesn't. Most VCs and Google thing privacy and valuable insights from data are dichotomies and mutually exclusive too, but they're mathematically provably wrong. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_encryption

Better governance model based on what? How are you drawing that conclusion? (Genuine question)

My metric here is "grabby success" or growth. I alluded to this in my comment but essentially, if you have a society, civilization, entity, species, w.e., it's almost guaranteed to be different in some way to other such entities.

And because effective resources are generally limited, these differences will lead to relative difference in market share, like maybe how many people one entity can sustain.

From there, it might lead to differences in how productive each person and the entity itself is, which leads to a spread of that productivity to other entities. The US has generally enjoyed the crown here for at least a hundred years - even now, cutting edge research is still in the US. The US "culture" is essentially internet culture and it will rub off on everyone who uses most US services (even innocuous ones like Google).

In sum, I'm equating long-term relative growth rate to societal/governance success. China isn't a great comparison to the US, but it's a very good comparison to, say, India (with caveats).

Over the next 50 years, I think it's a decent comparison to the US/EU as well, as the populations are now more similar (with immigration).