[giancarlostoro]

There's definitely people who blindly praise and romanticize China and ignore how dystopian all the monitoring systems there are, there is essentially no privacy. Even chat apps are infiltrated or Chinese run in some way, shape, or form.

[squidsoup]

While that’s true, the Chinese government does also seem to be motivated to keep the cost of housing and food low for its citizens, and provide services and facilities for the public good.

[vondur]

Ha, you really believe that? You can't live in area without the permission of the Government. The current Chinese regime seems to be really going kinda crazy with their new leader. They've lost their more practical leadership since the new guy has consolidated power.

[squidsoup]

It’s not a matter of belief - cost of rent and food in Chinese cities are 50-70% lower than US cities. There are hundreds of sources that will confirm that.

https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_countries_resu...

China’s food policy is also well documented https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_policy_in_China

[frm88]

You can't live in area without the permission of the Government.

This comes up every. single. time. It's so undifferentiated to be basically misinformation. Huji, household registration has existed in China for centuries. The modern form, hukou was designed to control mass migration and rapid urbanisation which is, with a population of 1B, understandable if you want to avoid clusters of slums with populations in the millions. Besides, they are lessing this more and more since 2012.

https://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202312/05/WS656e7f76a3109...

with their new leader

New? Xi Jinping has been leading China since 2012, that's almost 15 years.

[giancarlostoro]

Not to mention buildings last maybe 25 years before they start falling apart. Compared to 70 in the US.

[Matl]

I am not endorsing what China is doing in terms of surveillance by any means, but their argument would be that every nation not subservient to the US got overthrown by CIA backed forces the moment they opened up.

The surveillance tech that is much more likely to be deployed in the US and that few are talking about is Israeli tech used to spy on and suppress the self determination of Palestinians. Especially given the recently proposed fusing of US/Israeli military tech.

[giancarlostoro]

> Especially given the recently proposed fusing of US/Israeli military tech.

This has been a thing for a while to be fair. Not sure if you're just mentioning of some new project instead? We've given and gotten back tech to and from Israel.

[Matl]

https://responsiblestatecraft.org/israel-us-military - this goes beyond previous technology sharing

[pasquinelli]

usually people romanticize china when they're comparing it to the united states. are chat apps in the US not infiltrated or run by america?

[JuniperMesos]

Signal genuinely isn't, or other end-to-end encryption chat apps. But yeah, WhatsApp and Discord and others are run by American companies that follow US law.