Freedom and Perspective: What Restrictions Quietly Take From a Society

Shanghai should feel like home.

It is where I went to kindergarten, elementary school, and most of middle school. It is where so much of my childhood happened, where streets should feel familiar and where returning should feel natural. Yet coming back today, I felt something different. Not hatred. Not rejection. Something heavier than that.

It felt suffocating.

The city was still beautiful. The lights were still bright. The food, the language, the buildings, the small habits of daily life still carried pieces of familiarity. But underneath that familiarity, something felt closed in, almost like a cage. I saw parents scolding their children for what they did wrong, but not teaching them what they could have done differently. I heard people at dinner speak as if there was only one side to every story. I looked around and felt as though part of the city’s culture had been replaced by something more restless, more controlled, and more afraid of wandering too far.

The feeling of isolation became clearest in the smallest ways.

Most of the apps I use every day in Toronto are banned here, replaced by versions used almost only by Chinese users. I had to download an entirely new page of apps on my phone. Somehow, even that made the separation feel real, as if the screen itself had become proof that this place was cut off from the rest of the world.

I had just come back from an international relations summer school in D.C., where every discussion was filled with multiple perspectives. Even controversial ideas were encouraged. People disagreed, challenged, questioned, and argued. No one treated disagreement as something dangerous. It was part of the learning.

Here, when government or politics came up, I noticed the warning in people’s eyes. The quiet hand gestures. The small signals telling each other to calm down, to stop, to not go too far.

That hurt more than I expected.

Because I care deeply about perspective. I care about disagreement. I care about the freedom of the mind to wander. Only after coming back did I truly understand what it means to study in Toronto, where at the very least, I have been allowed to question, argue, and speak.

Censorship is often discussed as if it is only about politics.

A website is blocked. A post is deleted. A journalist is arrested. A keyword disappears. These are the visible forms of control, and they matter. Freedom House’s 2025 report describes China as having the world’s worst conditions for internet freedom for more than a decade, with authorities censoring, manipulating, and punishing online activity. Internet users can face consequences for sharing news, discussing sensitive beliefs, or communicating with people overseas.

But restriction does not stay on the screen.

It enters the way people live.

When information is divided, people begin to inhabit different realities. The apps on my phone in Toronto connect me to one world, while the apps I need in Shanghai connect me to another. The difference is not only technological. It is emotional. It changes what people read, what they hear, what they assume everyone knows, and what they believe everyone is allowed to care about.

A blocked app is not just a blocked app. It is a closed door.

And once enough doors are closed, people may stop noticing the size of the room they are living in.

The most obvious kind of censorship is external. A platform blocks something. A government bans something. A post disappears.

The quieter kind happens inside people.

It appears when someone pauses before speaking. When a conversation gets lower in volume. When a political topic comes up and eyes move around the room before anyone answers. When people do not need to be directly silenced because they have already learned how to silence themselves.

That was what I noticed most clearly when I came back. Not just restriction, but caution. Not just rules, but the habits created by rules.

Human Rights Watch has reported that Chinese pro-democracy students in Australia altered their behaviour and self-censored out of fear of being harassed, reported, or creating consequences for themselves or their families back home. That example matters because it shows how censorship can travel beyond borders. It does not only exist where the law is enforced. It exists where fear has already been learned.

This is what makes self-censorship so powerful.

It does not always need punishment in the moment. It survives because people remember the possibility of punishment. Over time, fear becomes instinct. Silence becomes manners. Avoidance becomes wisdom.

The most visible form of censorship is a blocked website.

The quietest form is the moment someone decides not to finish their sentence.

Perspective requires exposure.

To understand an issue fully, people need to hear different sides. Not because every side is equally correct, but because complexity cannot survive in a room where only one interpretation is allowed. Disagreement forces people to sharpen their thinking. It reveals blind spots. It teaches people that truth is rarely as flat as a slogan.

At my summer school in D.C., controversial ideas were not treated as threats to order. They were treated as the beginning of discussion. Even when I disagreed with someone, I had to listen long enough to understand how they arrived at their view. That process was uncomfortable sometimes, but it was also freeing. It made thinking feel alive.

In a restricted environment, that habit becomes harder.

If people only hear one side, they may eventually mistake repetition for truth. If disagreement feels dangerous, people may stop practising it. If politics becomes something people whisper about instead of something they discuss openly, public thinking becomes smaller.

Censorship does not only remove information. It reduces the range of acceptable imagination.

A Stanford summary of research on bypassing censorship in China found that exposure to uncensored internet increased students’ awareness of events such as protests in Hong Kong and the Arab Spring. The same research also suggested that censorship works not only by restricting access to sensitive information, but by suppressing people’s demand for it.

That is terrifying.

Because the deepest danger is not only that people cannot find answers. It is that they stop asking questions.

Restrictions change society from the inside.

When people cannot speak freely, they become less used to hearing disagreement. Conversations become safer, but also thinner. Families avoid certain topics. Friends learn which jokes not to make. Teachers become careful. Students absorb the message that some questions are not worth asking out loud.

Over time, this affects more than politics. It affects empathy.

Empathy requires imagining another person’s perspective. But if a society constantly narrows which perspectives are safe to express, people lose practice in holding difference. One-sided conversations become normal. Certainty becomes easier than curiosity. Scolding replaces explanation. Agreement becomes more valuable than understanding.

That is part of what made Shanghai feel painful to return to. I was not only seeing censorship in laws or websites. I was seeing a broader culture of caution and control. I was seeing how quickly people could shut down complexity, how easily disagreement could be treated as disruption.

A society does not become closed all at once.

It becomes closed through small habits: not asking, not answering, not challenging, not pushing further, not saying what everyone already knows is dangerous to say.

Politics depends on public truth.

Citizens cannot question power if they do not have access to information. They cannot hold leaders accountable if journalism is restricted. They cannot participate meaningfully if public debate exists only within approved boundaries.

This is why press freedom matters. Reporters Without Borders describes China as the world’s largest prison for journalists and says the state conducts repression against journalism and the right to information. In the 2025 World Press Freedom Index, China ranked 178th and remained one of the worst environments for journalists globally.

A society without free journalism does not only lose news.

It loses one of the few tools ordinary people have to question power.

When information is managed from above, public truth becomes fragile. People may know that something is wrong, but not have the language or evidence to discuss it. They may sense contradiction, but lack access to alternative accounts. They may distrust what they hear, but also lack anything trustworthy to replace it.

That kind of uncertainty is politically useful.

When truth is unclear, people become tired. When speaking feels risky, they become quiet. When every source feels controlled, they may stop believing that participation matters.

Political restriction does not only control what people say about the state. It changes whether people believe they have the right to speak about the state at all.

Censorship is often defended as a form of stability.

Control protects order. Restriction protects society. The argument suggests that limiting certain freedoms can prevent chaos, protect national interests, or preserve social harmony.

But control has costs.

Innovation depends on exposure. New ideas rarely emerge from isolation. They come from friction, disagreement, comparison, collaboration, and access to knowledge beyond one system. When information is restricted, imagination becomes narrower. Researchers, students, entrepreneurs, and artists may still create, but the boundaries around creation become tighter.

A 2024 Yale economics working paper studies whether protectionist barriers can foster domestic innovation in the context of China’s Great Firewall. The broader question behind that work is important: whether restricting foreign digital access strengthens domestic development or limits the flow of knowledge needed for innovation. Other reporting has noted concerns from Chinese scholars that the Great Firewall can harm scientific progress by limiting access to global resources and collaboration.

Economic growth is not only built from factories, investment, or technology. It is also built from information flow.

A society may protect control in the short term, but lose openness in the long term. It may create domestic alternatives, but reduce the friction that comes from competing with unfamiliar ideas. It may produce efficiency, but weaken originality.

If creativity depends on seeing beyond what already exists, then restriction does not only limit speech.

It limits possibility.

The deepest cost of restriction is internal.

A person can live under censorship for long enough that it becomes difficult to separate external rules from personal instinct. You begin by not saying certain things. Then you stop writing them. Then you stop asking them. Eventually, the question disappears before it fully forms.

That is the scariest part.

Freedom is not only the right to speak. It is the ability to think without fear constantly interrupting the thought.

When I compare Toronto and Shanghai, I do not think Toronto is perfect. No society is. There are still pressures, inequalities, biases, and limits. But there is a difference between living in a place where disagreement is uncomfortable and living in a place where disagreement feels dangerous.

That difference changes a person.

It changes the way you sit at dinner. The way you answer questions. The way you read the news. The way you joke. The way you notice silence. The way you measure the distance between what you think and what you are willing to say.

And once you have lived somewhere that allows your mind to move more freely, returning to restriction feels physical.

It feels like the room has become smaller.

Freedom is often imagined as something loud.

Protests. Speeches. Rights. Elections. Public debate. These things matter deeply, but freedom also exists in smaller moments.

It is the ability to ask a question without watching the room tense around it.

It is the ability to disagree without immediately calculating the risk.

It is the ability to read different versions of the same event.

It is the ability to change your mind because you were exposed to something new.

It is the ability to let your thoughts wander somewhere unexpected.

That is what I felt I had taken for granted. Studying in Toronto did not only give me access to different classes or resources. It gave me practice in perspective. It taught me that disagreement can be productive, that questioning can be ordinary, and that ideas do not become dangerous simply because they are uncomfortable.

Coming back to Shanghai made me realize how fragile that is.

A society loses something profound when people are taught to be careful before they are taught to be curious. It loses creativity, honesty, trust, accountability, and the emotional courage required to see the world through more than one lens.

Restrictions do not only block information.

They quietly take away the habit of freedom.

And maybe that is why Shanghai felt so heavy. Not because I stopped loving it, but because I could feel how much smaller a place becomes when people are afraid to let their minds fully speak.