In many cases you probably never even have to leave Wechat. That's assuming you even needed your phone at all and the waiter didn't just scan your face to pay.
Well I was recently at a US airport that had automatic "scan your face to board the plane" gates (non-optional) instead of providing boarding pass + passport, so from there to "scan your face to pay" it's a very small leap. They already know all about you and have your biometric identity, what's tacking a payment method to it?
Sorry, I was responding in the original context of GP talking about Newark airport's terrible system. In it, scan your face to pay doesn't seem too far fetched; outside of it, I agree, pretty scary stuff.
Somehow I always end up defending China on HN but really I'm just sharing what I have seen/heard during my time there.
The majority of the Chinese do not worry about those things.
The great firewall is probably the greatest inconvenience you listed. However, the Chinese that come here and see FB and Google say, hey, maybe the firewall is not a bad idea. It's easy to circumvent anyway. It just blocks the majority of the population from western media.
The social credit system I don't know anything about, sorry.
The camps, AFAIK, are for Uyghurs classified as dangerous or high risk. At least, that's what the Han believe. The general understanding is if you do something like text "terrorism" as a Uyghur - you disappear for a while. I think part of this is because they are terrified the US will radicalize the muslim extremists. The truth is we barely have to - they hate the Chinese enough there are recorded events of the Uyghers just running around killing Han Chinese with knives. This was before cameras were super popular, but there is potato footage. This is partly why large cities in Xinjiang have such high security (think officers with MP5s outside every K-6 school) So, the Han do not protest at such camps.
Looks like the great firewall worked well for you. Painting an entire ethnicity as terrorists who slash away randomly at people is exactly the kind of propaganda it serves. Israel does the same for Palestinians. Yes, terrorism exists and should be supressed, but you can’t de-humanize entire populations based on that.
Picture yourself being jailed, taken away from your family, forced to learn another language and change your customs because “people who look like you can be dangerous”.
Internal destabilization by manipulating group fractures is a known specialty of US foreign policy.
China has valid reasons to be concerned about such methods given explicit admissions from the US government at the highest levels, that they are considered an enemy.
I'm in Thailand right now. The US is attempting to destabilize Thailand with the coming elections in order to break its strong ties to China, ties that are quite reasonable and rational given the cultural and economic ties between the countries. The Americans are seeking to get rid of the Thai monarchy, which the average Thai is not particularly interested in doing.
The fact that you think this is something you should be concerned about when sending your kid to school shows that you lack critical thinking and base your idea of the US on agenda pushing media instead of rationality.
Even in the US your kids are not likely to get shot unless they're involved with youth drug gangs, that's where most of the child gun deaths come from. In France they trade the mass shooting incidents in for truck or bomb attacks.