> “I was involved in a project that uses face recognition to track residents going in and out of communities … Data from such a system was also entirely managed at the local level and not automatically shared with the provincial or central governments.“
> “In all fairness, I consider it to be extremely easy to stay off China’s social credit ‘blacklist’ - just be reasonable and avoid breaking the law.”
It went through the whole progression from “it’s not happening” to “it might be happening but it’s not a big deal” to “it’s happening and you deserve it” in just a few paragraphs. Impressive.
It's like working at BlueApron and claiming that the NSA definitely isn't spying on Americans because they aren't tracking their meal plans.
In reality life in China today is not much different than it is anywhere else. And I think it's borderline bizarre if not straight up insulting to suggest that the author does not have a 'Western point of view' despite living in the US since he was three years old. Chinese parents, like the Chinese state, contrary to popular imagination do not have brain altering superpowers.
It takes Olympic level mental gymnastics to get to "all-seeing and all-powerful secret government" from "my local DMV can barely fill out a form correctly."
I'm sure all world governments would function much better if there were in fact a limitless supply of extraordinarily capable employees willing to work for government salaries.
So tell me, how do you get there from "my local American DMV can barely fill out a form correctly"? Because it happened. And it will continue happening if we forget history.
You can construct an oppressive regime simply by dedicating enough people to it, but they still can't exceed the fundamental ceiling of wage:job_tenure:performance.
Consequently, every example you mentioned routinely failed.
In aggregate they accomplished oppression, but emotional pleas about "forgetting history" don't change the fact that we're talking about bureaucracies. And bureaucracies only ever approach a semblance of competency via brute force, either in resources or manpower.
It's 'cartoonish' for someone who has not yet been on the receiving end of the negative externalities of such system to fathom that it doesn't exist.
Why don't you, as an 'Enlightened Ex-Pat in China' go around making posts about the history of Tiananmen, or write a critical piece about the police state in Xianjing, and then see what happens? Or any number of other things?
"In reality life in China today is not much different than it is anywhere else."
Of course it is - because most of us are preoccupied with normal things.
Life in Russia is 'mostly the same as everywhere else', even right now, as we speak, isn't it?
And yet, witness what is happening in Ukraine.
'Life in China is mostly the same as everywhere else' is true, just as up to a million people are being interned on the basis of their ethnicity.
The OP is effectively correct: although 'bias' may not be the correct term, certainly the simple participation in absolutist and totalitarian systems without oversight is a problem, and the attitude that somehow this is 'normal' and 'without externalisations' is what OP was referring to as 'bias'.
Your own dissonance is similar, and it's at the root of the problem.
"My life is normal, ergo, the system is relatively normal" is the myopia that allows for these things to happen.
but they aren't. Regulation of tech really only started in earnest only a few years ago. Before that there was barely any privacy frameworks, there was hardly any oversight into anything, and as a result the Chinese tech sector was basically in a Wild West state which accounts for much of its very rapid growth. The state was so absent that private tech companies tried to sabotage each other to gain advantages.
One interesting example from the last decade is the "3Q War" between Tencent and Qihoo, which ended in Tencent essentially blocking use of its own messaging client when they detected that people used Qihoo 360. It's as if Youtube decided to stop operating on any device that had TikTok installed.
There's countless of startup stories like this that would have ended in front of a judge or regulator anywhere else within a week, but in China for a very long time nothing really happened. Chinese 'growth hacks' and profit driven behaviour makes SV look well behaved in comparison.
This completely wrong idea that somehow every aspect of the Chinese economy is strictly regulated is one of the results of this distorted overhyped view people have of the Chinese government.
* For the west part, I recently saw an old video of Biden (still senator) mocking post-Soviet Russia for thinking to look at China for prosperity.
Which is insane when you look back on it. Since we didn't become prosperous under liberalism either. Nowhere in the west did liberal democracy bring prosperity. The US wasn't a liberal democracy when it became rich. We are the wealthiest nation in the world decades before liberal democracy arrived. The same goes for the british, french, etc.
P.S. Xi wasn't the paramount leader yet back in 2011.
It's not that China doesn't have democracy. China's democratic system was created by itself based on its own national conditions. It is completely different from Western democracy, but it does not mean that there is no democracy.
It is recommended that you read the history of China objectively and understand how this country with a long history has developed step by step to today. Oh I believe your opinion will change.
Taiwan is a special case because it came after years of KMT oppression and the death of Chiang. His son was more lenient and then his son's successor opened the door for democracy. Taiwan is much smaller and had more exposure to America than the mainland, which definitely helped.