Comment by Markoff
11 hours ago
Nobody in China cares about your phone/laptop.*
*Unless you are (well) known dissident/journalisy/politician.
US is much more totalitarian than China. Lived in China for years, had multiple times various visa/residence permit issues with police and guess what, nobody cared about my electronics or was sending me to any detention, all I've got were quie helpful officers trying to find workarounds for me to deal with the situation.
Same thing on my last trin in summer 2025, we didn't stay in hotel, didn't go to register to police as you are supposed to and when crossing province border checkpoint guess what happened - they let us go to our tourist sight and told us to just register after weekend and as usual officers in police station couldn't care less, they just registered us without any issues.
You can complain about plenty things in China, there sure is a lot of bureaucracy but when you actually have to deal with them, they are pretty laidback and trying to be helpful usually.
By these standards and my experiences with registration in police stations in other two EU countries I can tell you China was the friendliest most laidback and convenient experience.
People who claim China is totalitarian dictatorship clearly never been to China and should get off their high horse, China nowadays make less trouble for their own citizens than EU hating them trying to make lives of EU citizens as inconvenient and expensive as possible.
Were you a Caucasian in China? Foreigners, particularly those from powerful Western countries, tend to get much more deferential treatment than locals.
Obviously, if you do your research you will not go as black (partly also brown) person to China/Japan/East Asia unless you have any other option (though I guess students from poor African/*stan countries don't have many options).
I would disagree with different treatment compared to locals vs whites. It's not like whites/foreigners have only benefits, good luck booking ANY hotel (I guess this improved since visa free policy) or renting an apartment as foreigner, which was a shit show or even good price in some markets in past (this was solved by online shopping). But you will get definitely different treatment as white foreigner vs "darker the skin worse the treatment" foreigner.
In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.
For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.
There seemed to be a tacit agreement between the people and the Chinese oligarchy: if you let those in power just keep doing what they want, they'll just ignore you.
However, China is a pendulum. It was very much the opposite at the time of Tienanmen Square; from the late 90s into the 10s there was quite a lot of freedom; but now with Xi's power having been consolidated, it's swinging back toward authoritarianism again. I've seen people describing more recent conditions there as the start of Cultural Revolution 2.0.
> In the past I've felt the same way in China. At a macro level there may be a lot more restrictions there. But when it comes to day-to-day life, it seemed like people had much fewer regulations bearing down on them.
in general I would agree (also pretty low taxes for small businesses and employees), but:
> For example, you'll see farmers on the Shanghai streets come in from the countryside to sell their produce - and doing so with impunity. In, say, NYC there are vendors still, but they've got their wares on a blanket that they can quickly scoop up and get away when the police come by.
this is bad example, chengguans are infamous for scaring away street sellers, which is one of the reasons why people operate their business from (electric) tricycles, so they can get away, when you see chengguans are coming they will disappear quickly same as those blanket sellers in the West, alternatively in evening you will see car trunks open with people selling their stuff from there, but it also depends where you are, I'd assume Beijing is the strictest since in BJ suburbs where I was staying last summer this didn't seem to change much over last 10-15 years
I used to work (among others) in Xi'erqi subway station neighborhood (Xiaomi HQ) and what happened around the station is happening all across China - cleaning streets/gentrification, there used to be huge market next to subway station where you could buy all kinds of food and things from street sellers, but when I was leaving they effectively shut it down. Same thing happened at my parents in law town, though it's not so strict in BJ suburbs, people still operate from sidewalk, but there used to be for instance nice bakery market which was shut down, same with small local police station, now everyone needs to go to big central one and many other (small) places shut down, while city keeps growing. So they are clearly cleaning the streets and regulating street sale especially in Beijing. Though when I walked last summer around my other workplace across CCTV in CBD (downtown) there was guy operating from relatively big folding trailer, but I guess he has permit, didn't see any jianbing/jidanguanbing small sellers on sidewalk as I used to frequent on the way to work.
I agree China around 2010 was peak China when it comes development balanced with freedom, I remember how we thought upcoming Xi will open China even more, we couldn't be more wrong... On the bright side at least now you can go 30 days visa free to China, which is a bug positive compared to past, 30 days should be already quite enough even for regular tourist to cover China, those previous 15 visa free days was pretty much useless.
What region of China was that?
Beijing/Hebei, I've done paperwork/lived long term only in these two regions, worked on business trips in more provinces, but don't have any experiences with bureacracy over there other than HK where you have to go if problem with visa