I appreciate your boots-on-the-ground report on China. Be aware, yours is an extremely limited view (one in a nation of billions) and is very anecdotal, but it is appreciated nonetheless.
Some of these reports are likely true and you haven’t been effected, such as the Social Score story that appeared recently.
And some of these reports are pure bullshit.
For what ever it is worth, I am married to a fine Chinese wife and I am quite established in China. I have a large network of friends and business associates all through China. In fact, my network is far, far, FAR larger than anything that I ever had in the States.
Whenever there is an issue, I’m usually made aware of it.
(1) When the corruption police was cracking down on pollution emissions, I found out about it promptly and followed the issues earnestly.
(2) When the Zhejung government started cracking down on non-bank loaning efforts, I was smack dab in the middle of it.
(3) When the “Great firewall of China” went up, I watched it closely. My IT was busy and we were very involved making sure that our access to gmail and skyPE was not adversely affected.
In general, must of what we read in Western Media are distortions of what is really going on. Sometimes the distortions are so terrible to be far removed from reality; they are unrecognizable.
To which, I must say... UNLESS you experience something personally, it’s all potential fake news.
Hey! Those potholes in Pennsylvania still aren’t fixed. Even after a couple of hundred of tax increases. But, I guess that is not as exciting to read about. You want to read how the Chinese have mastered Big Brother technology and using social media to control the people.
Well...
How about, instead of reading about this you actually get on some Chinese social media platforms yourself. Then you can see how it affects you. WeChat, QQ, are just for starters.
That’s all that I am saying.
Seriously people, stop being spoon-fed the “news”. It all stopped being news two decades ago. Now it is all computer generated manipulation.
People... the MOST DANGEROUS news, is the news you WANT to believe. For then you are most prone to manipulation.