>>469918You're not entirely wrong to point this out.
However in China it's not really the state in a smartphone, it's the party in a smartphone. The Chinese state is very much a paper-machine. Party membership is mostly optional. Only the military and a few security related branches of government require party membership.
party membership also might be an unofficial requirement for certain strategic sectors in the economyIronically enough if you want to do the American Yeoman rugged individual lifestyle about being a farmer that lives off grid while generating produce for cash, that's very easy in China because the state will even subsidize that, as long as it's a cooperative or family business.
That said China is pretty terrible on tech rights too, if you're a non-tech savy person buying the default-config tech gadgets, those have atrociously malicious anti-user features just like in the west. China also has tech illiterate politicians making stupid laws too, they even tried to ban ad-blockers. That said in the Chinese legal system laws are much more temporary. Rules are considered experiments and if people hate it, shit gets overturned very easily. So once the generation of people who grew up with technology enter the political system it's likely going to improve alot. In the west laws are like bricks in a castle-wall, fixing shit is very difficult and takes ages. If you had asked me 5 years ago of what civilization would win the race of making user respecting (satisfying the Richard Stallman standard of ethics) technology the default, i would have guessed that either Europe or the US would win, but with recent developments i'm not sure about that anymore.
China is also an ML system, so as long as you don't criticize the government too much, pretty much anything goes, which might sound unfree on the face of it, but considering where the west is headed, that might end up being less oppressive. Keep in mind that right now people in Germany are being prosecuted for having the wrong opinion on the Ukraine war.