China isn’t really that centralized and Zhongnanhai has less control than the White House does. Local party bosses are basically little kings and the average Chinese citizen sees less of the government than the average American does, ie one of the factors of the Chinese illegal immigration surge last year was that China basically has zero social support for pensioners or people who lost their businesses in lockdown
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-08-14/china-...
The thing that stuck out to me the most in the west were the long string of articles about the social credit system & the fear around the surveillance state. The surveillance state is probably about the same level as the UK, and the social credit system doesn't run anyone's lives like its described.
I've heard somewhere that the social credit system is really misrepresented in the West - it's designed to track financial scammers and people who set up fraudulent companies. It's meant to weed out untrustworthy business partners, just like how the Western credit system is designed to weed out untrustworthy bankers. (Weird how the only 'group' in the West who gets implicit protection against scams are the banks)
It doesn't really concern the everyman on the street.
The few high profile cases where it was used to punish individuals who ran afoul of some politically powerful person or caused some huge outrage are red herrings - if the system didn't exist, theyd've found some other way to punish them.
The articles functionally stated that you couldn't get an apartment, or pay for a hotel room if you were caught jaywalking or walking around with a scowl on your face.
Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Pretty sure that's not true.