Something funny and illustrative about the PRC for me was getting into shortwave radio. Let me explain. Sometimes certain people will tell you that the CCP isn't so censorious, that it's all Western hyperbole and propaganda, that most other governments are equivalent. But then you spin your dial through the shortwave broadcast bands and, no exaggeration, every 6 broadcasts or so will be the CCP jamming another broadcast from Taiwan, the US, the UK or elsewhere. No other country on Earth, apart from NK and occasionally Cuba, treats its people with such contempt. And all this energy, literal and figurative, just for shortwave radio.