I have visited China multiple times. My wife is Chinese-American. My children are half-Chinese and will, hopefully, be fluent in Cantonese, Mandarin, Vietnamese (MIL is Vietnam-born Chinese and a Vietnam War refugee), and English. A lot of our extended family still lives in China, in Hong Kong and the mainland (and even Taiwan). I am critical of China, online and off, and I have been for many, many years.

This isn't even that new to us, specifically. We decided in 2014 that we were not willing to go into the mainland anymore. Most of my wifes paternal family left Hong Kong after the hand-off in 1997 -- the writing was on the wall for anyone willing to pay attention. Given everything that has happened in Hong Kong in the last year or so, I don't think we'll ever visit family there again, either.

More on topic, though... It's bad enough that I have this nagging feeling in the back of my head about what sorts of bullshit the NSA, etc..., (and how they probably share this data freely, if asked, with the FVEY, allied intelligence agencies, etc...) are getting up to with my data, but I've learned how to deal with that without experiencing too much of a chilling effect. I don't have the mental capacity to fight this on yet another front, especially when my own understanding of Chinese state politics is so inadequate. Thankfully, I can easily opt out by simply not installing and/or using TikTok, or any of the other Chinese state-sponsored spyware, on any of our devices.

> Living outside of the PRC, it's harder to imagine what kind of practical use they'd put that same data to

Their reach doesn't end at their borders. The same can be said of every modern government / state on the planet today.

If you want a specific example, the Blitzchung controversy is worth understanding. [0] There's a list of censorship-related issues on Wikipedia, too. [1]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blitzchung_controversy

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overseas_censorship_of_Chinese...