Ethnic Minorities and People of Color

This is just one reason out of many but it is the most representative one. The 80s-90s-early 00s in China was absolutely chaotic. It was not safe to be outside. The most dangerous jobs in the country were taxi driver, long-haul bus driver, and truck driver.

Taxi drivers got robbed and/or killed all the time, and there was even an informal “peak season” for taxi driver killings. I know a cab driver in Beijing, the older model cabs had a barrier that could be activated by foot. The idea was that you would flip the switch if someone was holding a knife to your throat and it would slam up and break their wrist.

For any moderate-length road trip it was almost a coin-flip whether you would be robbed and/or extorted somewhere along the way, possibly multiple times over. There were entire tiny villages that had their economy essentially built on robbing people passing by.

Things reached the worst point in the 90s. There were quite a few bus drivers who refused to work during peak travel season because encountering armed thugs was basically guaranteed. If the long haul bus you were on got boarded and robbed it wouldn’t even make the news. If your entire family got killed on a road trip that wasn’t newsworthy either. If an entire bus full of people got killed it would get mentioned in a summary segment at the end of the evening news. Oh, and calling the cops (or, more realistically, walking overnight to the nearest government office after you get carjacked to report it) was basically a meaningless token gesture.

In the mid-90s the government implemented the “严打” scheme which can be loosely translated as “maximum enforcement”. You can look up pictures from this time; banners were placed all over cities and villages saying that robbers would be shot on sight. Sometimes an ambush would be arranged where they would drive around a fake cargo truck packed with soldiers. However strange it seems to today’s China they would sometimes get into gunfights with robbers.

Around 2002 the government issued a statement that there would be not only be no criminal consequences for killing anyone who tries to intercept or rob a vehicle, but there would also be a financial reward. And unlike FBI rewards they actually paid out. This statement was plastered on every form of public transportation. The official advice was to keep going no matter who or what you hit.

Ancillary to this, traffic in general was a total disaster and basically nobody followed traffic laws.

This is all within very recent memory (anybody born before 1995). Public safety made a complete 180 from ~2005 to ~2015. Nowadays getting robbed on the road is practically unheard of and would be front page news for months on end.

Now, obviously the improvement of material conditions contributed in large part to this, but the proliferation of CCTV technology is credited with this also. Especially in terms of improving clearance rates for solving crimes and basically ending the concept of the police chase in China.

If you go to bilibili and look at the comments of people reacting to the Fox “mass surveillance” segment it’s split between people mocking them for inflating the amount of the fine by 25% (and lying about getting one in the first place) and people talking about what life used to be like.

There is a good bilibili documentary on this. If I have time I’ll sub it and upload it here.

Of course this is not to say what they have in China is what we should aspire to, even in a hypothetical communist utopia. However if this is what Chinese people want for China then I’m not really in any position to say they’re wrong.