> They feel incredibly safe and don't have to worry about being victims of crimes, having their packages stolen, walking around late at night alone, etc.
Em. I think feeling incredibly safe has more to do with the media telling people that no crime exists and all criminals are caught, rather than a reality of zero crime.
There is evidence that crime started being systematically under-recorded in China since they started assessing police on proportion of recorded crimes they solve.
https://archive.is/20250624235740/https://www.economist.com/...
Sorta yes and sorta no? You're factually correct; but practically missing the point a little bit. At my relative's place, which has many tall buildings around a hub, package delivery people leave all of the resident's packages on a very exposed and busy sidewalk. People walk by these packages all day and none of them are ever stolen. Could you imagine an Amazon delivery driver just leaving all of the packages for the Flatiron building on the sidewalk in NYC? It'd be a perverse Monty Python skit because the packages would all disappear before the delivery driver even left the area.
This sort of shared expectation of courtesy and safety is more common there; and it exists because of the surveillance state. I'm not advocating to live in a surveillance state; they're oppressive—the cons certainly outweigh the pros. There's no debating that. But the silver lining in that is borne of that cost is one that I think people there enjoy.