Depends on where she lived. Beijing, Shanghai and other first tier cities are ok for foreigners. The further away you get, the more blurry situation gets.
We usually do have to present ID these days, but more importantly a credit card. There is no registration with the police as you say, America has nothing like the hukou system either.
How can you tell if a hotel registers you with the local government? I am not saying they are (never bothered to cross the Atlantic) but you have no way of knowing what they do.
My assumption is they all do, directly or not. I mean, 2013 did happen. Guess not everyone was paying attention
Spoken like someone who's never spent any time in or around the US service industry. People will gossip, and something like this would be known - hell, I'd likely know it, just on account of knowing some folks who would know and would want to talk about it. I don't live in a tech monoculture, either geographically or socially, and I'm friendly, personable, and good at explaining complex systems simply. Because of that I get a lot of questions from acquaintances about everything from phone and PC repair to what human life might look like after a hard-takeoff singularity. Those conversations go lots of places, but often tend to converge on people's worries about tech in general, as they take the chance of a discussion with someone knowledgeable to check their anxieties against reality. So the surprise, if this were happening, would be more that by now someone hadn't mentioned it, over drinks or otherwise, in my hearing.
That said, I don't find that lack at all surprising. What you're thinking of here is more of a Stasi-style "informers everywhere" kind of deal, and US domestic mass surveillance really doesn't work that way. Much more likely would be something like NSA watching payment card transactions en masse for debits from hotels and associating those with cell tower and identity data, and maybe also having quietly penetrated the major booking systems to spot cash purchases. In light of Snowden's 2013 revelations, it wouldn't surprise me to hear about either of those, and indeed I assume they are both being done. (Not least because that's probably how I'd build it. Why deal openly with a bunch of separate businesses and fractious employees when you can much more quietly and easily learn all you want from what's going over the wire?)
And aside from all that - not for nothing is it so common a theme in our popular media, especially these last couple of decades, that by and large we'd really just rather not know. You've mentioned that you don't really understand America, and that checks out; if you did, you'd neither be surprised that the response to Snowden was mostly a yawn, nor need telling anything I've said in this comment. Our intelligence agencies certainly don't.
The “local government” are my neighbors the Sheriff and the County Commissioner.
Then there are freedom of information requests, journalist, whistleblowers working for local government, and whistleblowers working for hotels.
If the Sheriff knew who you were and had probable cause he could get a warrant to get your credit card transactions from your bank and from that see you were in a hotel.
But that’s pretty far away from “hotels register you with the local government.”
There was actually a hotel owner who took it on himself to report suspected undocumented immigrants to ICE a few years ago. We know about it because it quickly made its way to the papers, and caused an enormous uproar.
What? The US doesn't require anyone to register with the local government when traveling, foreigner or US citizen. Where are you getting this kind of misinformation?
going through whimsicalisms posts, and it's actually hard to build a picture of state-run propaganda. They talk about Taiwanese independence like it's a given, for example. This could possibly be a cultural misunderstanding.
I don't know about the us, but in some places in Europe , the police or a security agency passes by daily to pick up a form that's filled out when checking in.
Source, friend worked in a hotel and I have seen it with my own eyes.
