just curious, have you visited china before? or seen first hand what's it actually like? you seem to have a very strong opinion, yet i'm not sure if they are based on reality or not.
This is a weird comment. Gp wasn't talking about day to day life or what cities look like or anything like that.
Going to China wouldn't teach you much about its government structure and governance. It's not like you can just walk in and observe party cells interacting with company leadership.
You don't need to go to China to know what the government structure is, what foreign policy it conducts and what kind of economic behavior is clearly not just condoned (small scale hacking, data harvesting) but encouraged (fishing other nations' territorial waters) or even demanded (foreign business ownership requirements, IP transfer requirements) by the party.
You don't need to go to China to hear reports from dissidents experiencing internment, forced labor and cultural genocide. Or to see all the broken international agreements and sovereign promises, eg the early destruction of a free Hong Kong. Or to see the territorial expansionism in salami slicing illegal maritime boundaries.
Or... most importantly, to understand that a despotic cartel that doesn't believe in individual human rights is a terrible form of human organization that has terrible externalities for the whole species and planet.
