I find it funny how all the americans talk so negatively of China from a few experiences making it seem like it is barely livable there. But, I can assure you that the majority of the 1.4bn people that live in China are not affected by these problems. These small problems that you read or hear are insignificant in painting the picture of what really happens there so stop talking so negatively and so almost arrogantly to try and give your view which is not 100% valid. You are, like I said before, misleading many people about a different culture with a few bad experiences which are not representative of what really happens. It is just ignorance, the main culprit is definitely baal.
"My wife's take is that the whole thing from top down is business as usual in China, and happens there daily.", where is the validity in this statement? It is just a way of deceiving others that may not know much by using other views to back up your own.
You seem upset at what I wrote, so let me clarify a few things. First, my wife is Chinese. Second, we own property in China, which we bought after we got married, the idea being to divide our time between there and the US after we retire, which is still our plan, and hopefully it works ou --, and if it doesn't it is more likely to be because of stupid things my government does. Ironically, it is about a 90 minute drive from Chengdu.
We would not do that if we thought it was some sort of communist hell hole. We quite like it, especially Sichuan province. I believe that the players will not disappear, or be imprisoned, and they won't be suspended, and either Ma Long or FZD will win the Olympics in 2020. China is not North Korea. It is a lot freer than Saudi Arabia! But the players will feel some pain we won't see, I am sure they will take a big financial hit, and if they weren't superstar athletes, the hits they would take would be a lot more severe. You can see this by the very fact that
their social media accounts were frozen, and clearly
they have been compelled to allow the posting of these silly apologies in their names, and you can see it in the wording of these "apologies". That is simply amazing to people in the west. I have no idea why they fired LGL. We may never know. He isn't going to come back.
But..... here is the part that is true, and is what I meant. China controls and censors social media as much as they can. There are limits to what they can control, and anonymous bloggers and posters there have increased the freedom of discourse there more than they had in the past, and the government reluctantly tolerates it.
Still, China does not like large visible protests. The legal and judicial systems are not what people in the west would tolerate (ask anyone in Hong Kong). And I know for a FACT that people who protested in Sichuan show they were dealt with after the large earthquake were punished for it. You can see it in high visibility cases if you have opened up a news paper in the last few years. And yes, lawyers who have acted too stringently in defense of their clients have had problems of their own.
Even the wording in the "apologies" the players were compelled to have posted in their own names paints a clear picture. China does not tolerate dissent. Ordinary people live perfectly reasonable ordinary lives, the quality of which has risen quite a lot in the last 30 years. But you can't rock the boat, and importantly, you can't cause powerful party officials to lose face unless you are an equally or more powerful party official. And the consequences of that happen every day to ordinary people.
By the way, I am a college professor, and one of the places where the Communist party is particularly vigilant in crushing any sign of dissent is in universities. Universities have a president and there is also a top party official assigned to the university, and they are not the same people, and the latter is there to keep an eye on the former.
). Even though China is communistic I still believe the former cases like 1966 (superstars suicide?) Etv. Can't possibly be made to happen in 2017. 
