# of times in the average person's day when it is useful to be able to Google Tienneman Square: ~0
# of times when functioning public infrastructure is useful: All day every day.
So shrugging your shoulders and saying "whelp, that's the price you pay for freedom of expression" is not a good enough answer. Sooner or later people are going to decide the price isn't worth it if their government isnt capable of doing anything that actually benefits them
That said, there's a lot of fear in China about how long the government can keep the house of cards standing. The CCP derives its legitimacy from its successes - if things really start to go badly, there could be internal strife well beyond anything imaginable in the west. Their attempt to totally control information is really an indicator of weakness and paranoia, not strength. One would hope that if they can actually navigate the coming storms and build a genuinely healthy economy, the need for all that will gradually diminish. Of course, if they can't... well, I can see how being able to technologically inhibit massive rioting might be an appealing tool in the belt.
The Three Gorges Dam wiped out 13 cities, 140 towns and 1350 villages and dislocated 1.24 million residents. There were probably protests, but how would you know and what do you think happened to the protesters? Here in Britain we're having a permanent crisis building one more airport terminal.
Autocratic regimes are completely opaque in their finances and budgetary priorities and care more about publicly visible results, of which flagship infrastructure projects are a prominent part.
When you have such a complete monopoly on force and authority, you can tell people to build bridges or else; hell, you can chase crackpot economic development ideas that starve tens of millions of your own people to death if you want.
Remember Snowden moved to Hong Kong to get his story out.
The internet makes China out to be this place where everyone is just always working, have almost no rights anymore, constantly surveiled so they can't have fun or enjoyment, just NPC's making womens underwear for 2 cents an hour.
I think it's just projection from the failures of their own country to be honest.
Also the fact that you seem to equate shopping with freedom strikes me as very American :-)
If Snowden was in HK with Chinese state intelligence (or more likely, details about party leadership scandals), he would not have been able to leave the country unscathed.
Are you serious or just trolling? The US has intervened more than any other country over the last decade. As we speak unmanned US drones are killing and dismembering innocent people.
> And despite a bunch of nasty undemocratic stuff happening in the US, there were a lot of underhanded things going on in recent political events in HK.
That's why I said on par with US and Europe. HK is not Switzerland, but not the undemocratic hell some are making it to be.