Chinese Workers Abandon Silicon Valley for Riches Back Home

Last paragraph is terrifying, does China not have privacy laws at all?

More interesting than prospects for some may be the sheer volume of intimate data available and leeway to experiment in China. Tencent’s now-ubiquitous WeChat, built by a small team in months, has become a poster-child for in-house creative license. Modern computing is driven by crunching enormous amounts of data, and generations of state surveillance has conditioned the public to be less concerned about sharing information than Westerners. Local startup SenseTime for instance has teamed with dozens of police departments to track everything from visages to races, helping the country develop one of the world’s most sophisticated and extensive surveillance machines.

Are you truly having a hard time understanding how life under a Communist dictatorship and a Representative Democracy would differ for the average citizen?

It's really confounding to me that the younger generations seems to have such a hard time with this.

Do they not teach comparative history in schools anymore?

In my experience as a non-American, a lot of younger Americans have adopted a sort of dark, distorted view of history that casts the US as a villainous entity. For these people, any suggestion that other states, particularly non-Western ones, are even more villainous is met with scepticism.

Maybe they understand the differences between a representative democracy and an authoritarian regime in theory but believe there's no real difference in practice. It's a deeply unfortunate type of cynicism.