[avar]

As a westerner outside China I'm not under the impression that the CPC cares much about your private or semi-private conversations with your friends and family, unlike notably the Stasi or early Soviet censorship.

But I bet you'd be running a very different mental calculus before saying some of those things you'd say in closed circles on your widely-read blog under your own name.

That's the thrust of what the GP is talking about, which I think you're taking a very selective view of in thinking that by "chilling effect" they're talking about Stasi-like censorship. Even if can get away with certain speech 99.9% of the time in a totalitarian regime just having to worry about the 0.01% has a huge chilling effect.