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.