> They are not afraid of that information being used against them
O RLY?
> unless they are doing something wrong
The thing about the law in most countries is, the government can usually find you to be doing something wrong, if it wants to.
> They directly see how surveillance has reduced child trafficking, theft, and other such hard to trace crimes
Interesting that they can "see" what is at best a conclusion of multiple long-term comparative studies, and at worst an unsubstantiated claim.
> They can [etc. etc.]
Well, the Chinese people can apparently make many poorly-supported over-generalizations about themselves! Oh wait, that's _posts_ about the Chinese people.
> We've already lifted the vast majority of our people out of poverty
Hmm. Tell that to hundreds of thousands of homeless people in the US. Or anyone who tries to get medical treatment and asked to shell out tens of thousands of USD.
Whether this is an empirically correct attitude or not is not the topic of conversation, the fact is that average Chinese citizens are overwhelmingly in support of a surveillance culture because they feel the benefits are obvious and bring meaningful quality of life improvements while the downsides are acknowledged and not regarded as serious enough to outweigh the benefits. Even citizens who are quite critical of the Chinese government in other respects rarely bring up surveillance as a gripe they have.
Thank you. This is the entire argument I was trying to make. I think people are getting confused because I'm talking about how people feel rather than talking about explicit facts. That how people feel about a government body can be very different than how that government body actually acts, and recognizing both is extremely important.
O RLY?
> unless they are doing something wrong
The thing about the law in most countries is, the government can usually find you to be doing something wrong, if it wants to.
> They directly see how surveillance has reduced child trafficking, theft, and other such hard to trace crimes
Interesting that they can "see" what is at best a conclusion of multiple long-term comparative studies, and at worst an unsubstantiated claim.
> They can [etc. etc.]
Well, the Chinese people can apparently make many poorly-supported over-generalizations about themselves! Oh wait, that's _posts_ about the Chinese people.
> We've already lifted the vast majority of our people out of poverty
Hmm. Tell that to hundreds of thousands of homeless people in the US. Or anyone who tries to get medical treatment and asked to shell out tens of thousands of USD.