The vast majority of people aren't brutalized and shot by the police. If it does happen, it goes through a trial and the court systems.
The vast majority of people talking out against the Chinese government will be jailed or re-educated in China...that's the difference.
The claim was that people in China live in a state of fear, and I refuted it. Let's not conflate things.
That wasn't the claim, so you refuted a strawman. The claim was that China governs through fear, not that Chinese live in fear. When people disappear and are "re-educated" against their will for speaking out about the government, as an official policy of your government, you are governing through fear. Refute that.
And so what I'm saying is that you fail to understand that it's people do not, as a majority, have that view of their government. You are applying an outsider's horror of their actions in your thinking and assuming it's people are 1) fully aware of it and 2) would look on it poorly when in fact they tend to view such things as the government's protection of them from harmful influences. They have a fundamentally different view of free speech, they do not view it as a an unqualified right, they view it through a lens of "speech that harms social harmony is wrong."
You simply do not understand the extent to which China's propaganda to it's people actually works. As a result the people are not afraid. They feel protects. Because it works, there's also a high degree of self censorship. Not because they fear the consequences, but because they actually believe they are acting in their society's best interests. I have actually had someone say to me, "Even if I thought the government did something wrong, I would not talk too much about it because it would be harmful to social harmony."
China gave them the blue pill, and they took it, often not knowing the red one exists. There is no need to live in fear when you have been convinced the awful things your government does are in your best interest.
I am not just guessing on this matter. I have, first hand, had conversations on the topic with Chinese nationals. And it's infuriating, because it's much like the conversation you and I are having now: It seems obvious to us that they should be afraid, that they should look on their government with skepticism, cynicism, and fear. But they do not.* The propaganda works. The dissidents are an extremely, vanishingly small group and yes, I'm sure they live in fear. But you cannot extrapolate from that to the billion+ people who have little direct knowledge of such things, for whom such things are vague abstractions, and wouldn't care much if they knew a bit more because the propaganda works. They see someone jailed, and they think "He/she must have done something wrong." *The propaganda works."