That's one of the contradictions of capitalism. As wages are pushed down, so does the ability to purchase the wares and services they produce. This also hurts the profits of companies.
It's not. The author's own dad publically called him out as a liar about his story (I believe the author claimed his dad was dead). It's a fabricated story, like almost all defector stories from North Korea. Stories like his sells well, and there's no way to verify any of it.
The dystopia in the US has mostly to do with the scale of global surveillance, that way surpasses anything any other country is doing, including China, the oppressive legal system that incarcerates an unjustifyably high proportion of the population, adversarial and racist "policing" of the citizenry, their global and unusually brutal military aggression and coercion, and economic inequality, even forced upon other "vassal" countries through various political and economical means. So I don't think China is anywhere comparable to the US in this regard.
That being said, what we're discussing here is the manner of which political dissidence is allowed domestically. Political dissidence is just not allowed in the US to any real extent. People attacking the democratic party are not dissidents of the capitalist system. Republicans themselves as representatives of the capitalist political system are just as vile, and I suspect many of them are privately jubilant about the same extremes the most right-wing conspiracy theorists raves about. Doesn't mean that both Republicans and Democrats stand shoulder to shoulder against the menace of real political dissidence. It is actively being suppressed into nothing.
In decades prior to now it has existed, but it has been systematically and super-judicially been suppressed in violent and non-violent ways. Today, all american-owned social media plays along, and follows US intelligence orders to the letter, as they are required by law. Most politically disturbing media content comes from other countries nowadays, and the US has been quick to outright van and cencor foreign social media, and anti-US voices on american social media.
Obviously polital dissidence it's not allowed to a wide extent either in the US or China. But people in the west generally don't recognize how propagandized the western narrative is, even weaponized, and how global social media is a central part of it.
Of course no american social media, or product, like Bing will be allowed to conduct such information warfare in China. But remember that VPN servives are widely available in China which circumvents the domestic rules. Those are still allowed to operate. The US has actually recently ruled VPN usage as liable to get you prosecuted for terrorism or aiding terrorism.
By the way, do you have any idea how many hundreds of billions of dollars are yearly poured into creating negative media content about China and esp. the Tianamen Square incident (which happened 30 years ago), directly from the US state? I.e. propaganda for the world to consume?
The political orientations you describe don't threaten or oppose the political system, it's part of it and leveraged by the ruling capitalist class as its defenders. A better question to ask is, how does publicly voicing and acting with _real_ opposition get treated in the US? That's way more dystopion. See COINTELPRO for a historical example. Its modern equivalents which has only intensified the hunt for real, opposition does have extremely dystopian tendencies, through cencorship and political persecution.
It's curious that cybercrime in the news is almost always attributed to enemy state actors like Russia, China and North Korea. Don't western countries have hacker groups, other than ideological groups like Anonymous?
Blaming North Korea for cybercrime is a convenient way of 1) shifting focus from uncomfortable facts (e.g. if the hacker group comes from an ally, or is domestic) - 2) justify our inability to do anything about it, and 3) to further western propaganda surrounding North Korea. Continually blaming North Korea for things without proof is one way of justifying the severe economic sanctions/blockades that have been in place for decades.
ASBMilitary was banned from Twitter. They said their reporters in Ukraine were threatened due to the nature of their reporting, which challenged the Ukrainian narrative we're fed in the West.
Of course all Russian-friendly media platforms are banned. The narrative they bring is dangerous to the false image we're creating here in the west.
Social media platforms are waging war on "misinformation", removing content and opposing views en masse. This is not a secret. We're shielded against "propaganda", not aware we're steeped in propaganda.
The funny thing, even western news media reported on the resurgence of the far right and the prevalence of Neo-nazism in Ukraine, as well as its connection with government post-euromaidan. Referencing these very articles gets you stamped as a Russian bot these days.
The fact is that NATO countries are funding and militarizing neo-nazis in Ukraine in order to undermine Russia. And they're shielding them from bad press. Moreover, government forces (of which the neo-nazi militia is part of) has bombarded civilian areas of the seperatist regions for 8 years, and still do, which has killed about 14k civilians. There's complete silence about this injustice in the western press coverage of Ukraine.
What's most concerning is how normalized it has become to hate Russians.
Try and go to a Russia-aligned (or at least not Ukraine-aligned) subreddit, copy a defense of Russias actions, or a condemnation of the Ukraine government, and see how it fares on big subreddits, like r/news or r/europe. You'll almost certainly get banned, esp. if you link to media articles that support your argument. Even if your entire argument is factual and supported by western media articles.
Moreover, it's not a well-hidden secret that Reddit is a very popular target for information warfare on behalf of western intelligence. Information warfare and media operations with the intent of controlling the narrative is extremely widespread. It's not surprising that Russian media are blacked out and labeled misinformation. Closing ones ear to the opposing viewpoint had already become a prime virtue, and isolating out dissenting opinions is an important part of this kind of information warfare. Western news media is absolutely steeped in pro-Ukraine propaganda, obviously much more that even Russian media is with pro-Russia propaganda. It's a case of fish not knowing they're in water. It's insane to me to see the extreme extent of demonisation of Russia, and even ordinary russians on reddit. You won't see this universal kind of demonisation in Russian media. Controlling the narrative is a powerful thing.
That's not true in general, because import prices go up during inflation, and foreign investments go down, which might lead to foreign investors pulling out, and other effects. The US is in a unique position due to them keeping the USD stable internationally by being the world reserve currency, a status the US government abuse by printing an excess of dollars. US inflation is in practice a taxation of the international community who must mostly purchase oil in USD, and are otherwise financially tied to the US.