But it’s also a ban on other socialist parties, not just capitalist ones, and it plays directly into the talking point that socialism is an authoritarian system that is imposed on people, not chosen on its merits. If the CCP really has enjoyed resounding, unwavering support from the proletariat for 75 years straight, why appear so weak by never allowing any competition whatsoever?
Okay, but we are talking about a country where you aren’t allowed to form a political party that opposes the CCP, right? How can we tell the difference between “hell yeah, my country is making my life great” and “there is exactly one answer to this survey question that will not get me in trouble”? I always try to keep in mind that I am not immune to propaganda, but I’ve personally known Chinese people who have very explicitly declined to offer any criticism of the Chinese government or go against the party line, even in private conversation, because they didn’t want trouble.
Apple proposed something a few years ago, when governments were making similar threats, that attempted to strike a middle ground. The idea was that upon uploading an image to iCloud Photos, a on-device scan would be run on that image and an encrypted report generated to be sent up along with the photo. There was differential privacy involved, the report would also sometimes be generated for entirely normal photos, so seeing a report didn’t necessarily indicate anything, and they had set it up such that the server would only be able to decrypt the reports if it had a sufficiently large number of photos that had been actually found to be CSAM by the local scan, so there would have to be many false positives to incorrectly get flagged.
It was incredibly controversial, and they ended up not doing it after all. In my opinion, it’s probably the lightest touch and most responsible way to do something like this, and obviously they always pick the most worthy cause for invading privacy… but I still viscerally dislike the idea that my computer would have code designed to try to get me sent to prison under certain circumstances (not that I’d ever be triggering that code with anything but a false positive of course). Somehow it’s worse than just saying “in the cloud you have no privacy, your photos aren’t encrypted on our servers, and if you upload CSAM we’ll drop a train on you.”