You wonder why the Chinese offer internet at all? It’s to capture dissidents, of course. People have been taking advantage of each other for thousands of years in their culture, so everything always has a hidden motive.

Mao Zedong did something similar when he briefly allowed “a hundred schools of thought” to fluorish in 1964. Dissident intellectuals took the bait and criticized Mao, so he executed all of them.

There is a business book written in the early 90s called the “Asian Mind Game” (written by a Chinese-American woman), which offers lots of anecdotes like these. A Canadian fox-fur dealer was dumb enough to bring his hundred live foxes to China with him, so Chinese officials killed half his foxes in “quarantine” so he would give in to a lower price.

China doesn’t need an official domestic spying agency — they let neighbors tell vicious stories about other to local government committees. The internet is a way to extend this even further.