The Ancient Chinese Wisdom of Having Cameras Everywhere. You’ve never been more free & safe in China. When’s the last time anyone, any media, any politician in the US Gov’t ever told the American public that the police in China don’t carry guns and exist to serve and secure and actually help its citizens? Funny, right? I could easily imagine that as an SNL skit. 到處都有相機的中國古代智慧。中國比美國更安全自由! 美國政府中的任何人、任何媒體、任何政客最後一次告訴美國公眾，中國警察不攜帶槍支，存在是為了服務、保護並實際幫助其公民，這是什麼時候？很有趣，對吧？我很容易將其想像為《週六夜現場》的短劇 By MARIO CAVOLO JUN 25 2024

Needless to say, the western world doesn’t understand that the police exist in China to serve and secure the needs of the households in the society. The police don’t keep busy here primarily because of crime because there’s a lot less crime here. Alot less. Its amazing actually.

And since the police in the United States exist primarily to insure law & order & deal with criminal situations, the general public are certainly not told by their own U.S. govt and media that that’s what the police do in China. It sounds way too nicely utopian and therefore unbelievable. It couldn’t possibly be true.

Arnaud Bertrand, one of the most insightful writers out there on China, recently published a Twitter post with a couple of fun stories of how the police and surveillance cameras helped foreigners who lost their stuff like passports with the point that this actually makes the world, the community, a better place to live.

That is, if you live in China. Because that’s not the kind of happy talk you’ll ever hear about the police and having cameras everywhere back in the United States, is it? You’re told this place is an evil communist surveillance dystopia and that camera surveillance takes away your freedom, rather than giving you more freedom, which is what it actually does.

So let’s follow the logic. That is to say, in reality, if you go to the police with a problem here in China, they actually do the job of trying to solve the problem because that’s a big part of their job.

Therefore, that’s why they put cameras everywhere.

Why?

Because having cameras everywhere solves a lot of problems that people in society and governments want solved, making the society a better place to live.

Such as?

1. Losing stuff… the police help find it. In America, its not the police’s job to help you find your lost credit card. They won’t check the street cameras to help you figure out where you were. That’s literally just not their job. But it is their job in China and they couldn’t do that job if? If there weren’t any cameras.
2. Getting stuff stolen by petty theft… it’s much easier to catch the thief and the thieves know that. The presence of cameras is a remarkable deterrent for those few people in society inclined to not care at all that they are going to make you a victim.

Magically the crime rate goes down a lot and yes, that’s good for everyone, for the majority of the citizens, not just the rich ones who get to live in their safer bubble.

3. To see what really happened in a vehicle accident because people will lie and now they can’t victimize you by lying. This personally happened to me. The other guy on the scooter was going the wrong way. He was happy to lie about it, thus screwing me over. The traffic camera foiled his dastardly plans to be a bad citizen.

So the point is that these are fundamental reasons the cameras were installed in the first place, that’s why they’re actually being used, to serve you, not to spy on you.

They don’t make you feel less “freedom”. Quite the opposite is true. I live here 25 years. And I never think about the fact that the cameras are everywhere. I feel as free as loving anywhere. Until I need them, and then i’m glad they’re there.

Now I know many of you are gonna say that you’d rather live in what you think is a free country without cameras.

The problem is you don’t live in a free country without cameras.

The country you live in, such as the US, the UK, likely has lots of cameras too, even just as many cameras as China. They’re just not used to serve & secure the public in the way i’ve explained they are used here in China.

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