[mastazi]

Points 4-6 (financial freedom, rule of law and freedom of communication) are all long-standing problems in China, and personally I believe that, if not fixed, they will prevent China from becoming, in the long run, a developed economy. However I don't have evidence that the situation is now getting worse in relation to these specific 3 points. I would be interested in reading reliable sources related to the above.

[mikeash]

6 is definitely true, just from personal experience. It used to be that you could just ssh to a server, tunnel your traffic over it, and you could visit whatever sites you want. Last time I was there, this past October, almost nothing worked. I could still ssh, but if I tunneled web traffic, they somehow detected that and killed the connection. OpenVPN didn't work. I tried a dozen VPN providers, most aimed at the Chinese market, and only found one that worked at all reliably. That one was pretty expensive and it's probably just a matter of time before it stops working too.

[kristofferR]

5: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/is-china-h...

5: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/pursuing-c...

6: http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-seeks-more-legal-muscle-to...

[mastazi]

Thanks. I'd like to add this one, which came out with today's edition of The Economist.The Economist | Chinese politics: Beware the cult of Xi http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21695881-xi-jinping-st...

[seanmcdirmid]

4-6 seem to be getting noticeably worse. Xi is very different from Hu. Basically, things have been going backwards since 2008, but the backward momentum picked up in the last few years.