US citizens warned they face arbitrary arrest in China

I've been to China a few times, most recently in late 2018. I traveled overland by train from Beijing to Xian and then to Shanghai. Everything as a non-chinese citizen was just harder than it was when I visited in 2014. Buying train tickets was a massive hassle without a Chinese ID. Paying for anything was difficult because many places no longer take cash and you can't really get a proper WeChat account as a foreigner.

The entire time I just couldn't shake the feeling that I was living in a dystopian future. Security around Tiananmen Square in Beijing was so overdone it would almost have been funny if it wasn't scary. Facial recognition scans on the metro system. In Shanghai they use facial recognition at crosswalks and then put up the name and picture of violators on a huge screen at the intersection (I can only assume they also deduct from their social credit score).

If this is the direction China wants to continue to go in, I no longer want anything to do with it. As long as the CCP is in power I won't be visiting again. And now that includes Hong Kong sadly.

Completely agree. I lived and worked in HK a number of years ago and find China and Chinese people to be some of the most beautiful and interesting cultural assets in the world.

So it sucks that I likely will never visit again in my lifetime. China is already dying, the oppressionist leadership just is self-deluded and doesn’t understand it yet. The further you move away from liberal democracy with deliberately decentralized power, the more isolationist your economy becomes.

On the scale of years, sure you can manipulate markets, send elite spy teams to kill foreign dissidents, pressure other developed economies to buy your exports and respect your authoritarian escalations.

On the scale of decades you can’t. China foolishly underestimates how smart and hard working everyone else is, how easily a generation can be disenfranchised from Chinese exports, and how little of a threat Chinese cyber warfare truly is.

China is just a large, slow North Korea with enough starting capital to superficially appear OK in the short run.

I get the impression that we're now in an undeclared Cold War with China.

Not just arrested but tortured, as we've seen with the two Canadian Michaels and the British Simon Cheng.

Edit: British-employed not actually British

It will be on the second or third page in a few minutes, after a few "trusted" HN members object. That's the extent of the "algorithm".