Just more victims of the new ‘soft tyranny’ now being employed by the Chinese, Russian and Iranian regimes (among others). Instead of prohibiting freedom of movement, freedom of choice and freedom of expression, instead harass, censor and inhibit what cannot be controlled, and only those who oppose you.
Control what can be controlled with a variety of ‘independent’ fronts, (TV, Radio, Newspapers) and use them to ostracize and marginalize your opponents. Because most of the population won’t read online news or seek alternative sources of information (uncontrollable media), most will support the regime until they themselves are affected.
In such a regime, you’re free to travel, express yourself or to choose what to do. So long as you’re not opposing the regime. Then you will be persecuted, repeatedly detained, slandered, travel and protest applications put under indefinite review and followed into your home by strange men at night. Maybe you’ll end up shot dead by ‘gangsters’, or tragically killed in a car crash.
But not imprisoned. After all, that would violate the citizen’s rights and freedoms, and no representative government would ever do that to their people. You can’t be charged for opposing the regime, and there’s no charge for expressing yourself, so you’re free, and don’t you forget it. But you’re to be charged with tax evasion, and buried under legal bills instead.
And so a regime successfully maintains a facade of liberty for those who accept the regime, and increasingly turns life into a living hell for those who choose to oppose them. Not only that, but the myriad media outlets controlled by the regime slowly persuades the majority to perceive the opposition as foreign agents, troublemakers and naive activists. In this way, autocratic fictions have become truths for the majority.
Your description is accurate but I would change “most will support the regime” to “most will ignore the regime” or “most will accept the regime as something that can’t be changed”.
Also, there is plenty of reading online news in China. Some sites are blocked, like youtube and facebook to name two, but many are not, including this one. As a matter of fact, in the cities I traveled in recently (including some fairly rural places in the Southwest) wifi service in bars, restaurants and even barber shops was ubiquitous and the connection speeds all the way back to the US were amazing.
I think the point of this article (and your post) is that the Chinese have learned that a lot of easing up is perfectly consistent with an iron-fisted one-party full-authoritarian (I hesitate to say totalitarian since that does imply micromanaging daily life) state.
I also believe that their new formula of targeted oppression was developed against the Falun Gong. I always thought that the Falun Gong posed zero threat to the regime (most Chinese think they are silly) but that the authorities used the Falun Gong as a convenient target to practice their new style of highly-efficient and modern authoritarianism.