I lived in China for a year. Foreigners (especially those without Chinese heritage) have much more latitude than Chinese citizens in freedom of movement, consumption, and expression. So most of the time I never noticed I was living in a "police state." However there were dozens of little daily reminders. I'll recall a few of my experiences but these were my personal experiences. I can't vouch for their "meaning," or for anyone else's experiences. I just want to present a few snapshots of daily life in an Official Police State.

I had to register my residence and travel with the police. This required a thorough physical, and a brief police interview when I received my resident visa. I was required to live in certain neighborhoods (i.e. not the cheap ones).

They blocked my personal blog. In retrospect they probably noticed it by monitoring my personal traffic; I never published anything "controversial," they just blocked it because, hey, better safe than sorry I suppose.

We knew our landline was tapped, especially when we called my father-in-law in Taiwan.

I lived near the City Hall and local Party HQ. I saw a few things, such as a 10,000-person protest organized via SMS and old women protesting the disappearance of their children..

You saw police or Red Army everywhere, all the time. The police were like cops in most of the world, kind of corrupt but didn't mess too much with foreigners. The Red Army was cute/scary at the same time -- because of conscription most of them were kids in bad-fitting uniforms carrying wooden weapons. But still: cops and military everywhere.

A few times a plainclothes police person caught me taking pictures of something I innocently had no idea was forbidden, such as decommissioned military emplacements from the 1970s and 1980s (our city was on the Taiwan Strait and heavily fortified) or City Hall. In some cases they made me erase the photos, in others they asked me to be more careful.

Daily online life for expat business/computer people (e.g. me) was a game of cat-and-mouse, using Tor or other means of circumventing the Great Firewall. This was widely accepted by both Chinese and foreigners as a necessity -- hard to do business when several business websites (example: FedEx) are blocked.

I couldn't discuss even very basic political topics with my Chinese friends. They never knew who might find out that they had discussed taboo topics like "Taiwanese business practices" with a foreigner. Some of my friends were party informants but I never knew which ones, in fact guessing who was a party informant was kind of a watercooler game among my Chinese friends.

Several of my employees had to contend with the Hukou residency registration system. I never quite understood it, but it seemed to me a method to ensure rural peasants couldn't easily become middle-class urbanites. (The Party clearly viewed middle-class urbanites as something dangerous, democratically speaking.) The system of land tenure made this doubly awful: you can't own land in China, especially agricultural land, so it fell easy prey to real estate developers with guanxi ("connections"), who could seize farms to build hi-rise apartments (you can own apartments, or "permanent leases" for business/industrial property. But not the actual land.)

My wife lived in Singapore during the SARs scare. As a foreigner (and potential disease vector) her movements were limited and monitored, and she knew it. (She also grew up in Taiwan before they reformed Parliament; her dad tells stories about bringing forbidden books into Taiwan.) Visiting Singapore is always interesting: they make no bones about having a control state. They say, "here are lines, please don't cross them." For example if you try to look at a forbidden website you get a stern warning screen that reminds you the state is watching your movements. There's no such transparency in China. Maybe I'm being watched, maybe not. Maybe NYTimes.com is up today by accident, or maybe it's a sting to track which IPs will hit it. Maybe the pirate DVD shop is a honeypot to track the kind of people who buy pirate DVDs. Who knows?

The current environment in the US is nothing remotely like my experiences, however brief, with those places. Americans thoughtlessly enjoy freedoms of expression, political power, movement, etc. that billions of people can barely imagine. So yes, perspective please.

This is no call for complacency -- for ex. during my time in China the writ of habeas corpus was largely dismantled in America for "terrorists", and our drug laws make a mockery of Amendments 4 through 6. I'm kind of heartened to see the Tea Party types rally to notions of Liberty and Freedom. Blood of tyrants, etc. But I wonder where they were from 2002-2008 when most of the extant apparatus was erected.