Great video. The narrator mentions ubiquitous surveillance and facial recognition multiple times as bad things. We have that in the USA and Europe too, getting more surveilled all the time, and lied to about it. At this point calling attention to the Chinese surveillance state as if America, Britain, Australia, or Canada occupy a moral high ground seems disingenuous and misleading.
Visiting China recently I was surprised by how often your ID needs to be presented. Inter city train travel, tourist attractions, etc all require your ID (or Passport for foreigners). Camera surveillance maybe ubiquitous now, but the ID checks everywhere are a level beyond that.
You used to be able to ride the train without a passport, back in 2007 while I was waiting for my work visa to be out into my passport, I took the train from Beijing to Shanghai and no one checked. This was before they added security, but I think you only need your passport to get your tickets (circa 2016, things could be really different now).
If you live in a Chinese city, you technically need to carry your passport around all the time, although I never did. But I wasn’t going to tourist destinations either. I’ve never been to SZ before (just GZ A couple of times), but southern cities are generally more lax than northern cities so if it feels like you need to show a lot there it would be more stressful in Beijing.
