this post was submitted on 22 Nov 2024
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You do understand that free speech that doesn't threaten the government is tolerated everywhere, right? Us having more free speech here is just a function of the US government feeling more secure in its power, you can still find examples of free speech being punished in the US when it has threatened its power.
You can make that exact same argument about dropping bombs.
When countries are threatened and dropping bombs relieves that threat instead of increases it, then they do. It's just that right now violent escalation doesn't benefit China, so it stays in the realm of sabre rattling
Sure, if you know literally nothing about the military industrial complex and government capture and its role in creating war, and you want to buy into the propaganda that the US only attacks when it feels threatened.
Settler-brained-as-fuck idea about how conflict works
This was not a defense of the USA you braindead idiot. I did not offer "feeling threatened" as an excuse for the USAs behaviour. The USA is threatened by the mere existence of successful countries that are not hypercapitalist (although tbf the tool used in this case is usually a coup, rather than bombs).
Not all countries consider the same things to be threats.
Lmao "free speech that doesn't threaten the government is tolerated everywhere"
This statement would still be true if you were talking about Oceania. It's totally meaningless. Who decides what speech threatens the government? The government. I can say fuck Joe Biden, fuck Donald Trump, and fuck every member of Congress and the Supreme Court. Can you point me towards someone living in China who's comfortable openly saying "fuck Xi Jinping?"
Uhuh. In other words, governments restrict speech that they think threatens them.
First off, how many Chinese people have you actually talked to? You know there are Chinese people on the internet that you can talk to, right? And foreign exchange students? You can even visit the country if you want.
And yes, you're free to say things that don't actually threaten the US, like saying fuck Trump or Fuck Biden. You're allowed to be as ineffectual as you'd like. Compare your statements to all the black lives matter organizers who've been found to commit suicide by bullets to the back of the head or public hanging from trees.
I haven't actually met or talked to a lot of Chinese people, on account of not speaking the language, and the Great Firewall. I wonder why that's there
You've acknowledged that I'm allowed to say things that don't actually threaten the US government. Does comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh actually threaten the Chinese government?
You know plenty of Chinese people speak English right? And Chinese citizens can pretty trivially bypass the firewall, the point of the firewall is protectionism for China's tech sector.
Well, it depends on what the government considers threatening.
The mere suggestion that the state is illegitimate in China would have gotten me disappeared. But I could join protests in the US denouncing the government in front of government-owned buildings without much worry.
But then we look at how China continues to develop and grow their sphere of global hegemony, while the US is collapsing before our very eyes. So it makes you wonder if ruling with an iron fist and crushing dissidents has some merit after all.
China has a smaller surveillance state than the US, so I doubt it. Also yeah, the US hasn't faced serious coup attempts in the last 50 years.
Their execution or imprisonment stats must be much higher than the US! Wait. I'm just hearing.. oh dear.
The justice system in the US is inexcusable, but China's is also not great.
The vast majority of arrests lead to informal "administrative" detentions wherein you are held for (usually) a short time—a few weeks, maybe more if they don't believe you're reformed.
You get picked up one day and they tell you to confess. It's in your best interests to confess to something, even if you think they have the wrong person, because they tell you it will go to trial if you don't, and that would just be so hard on your family, right? They'll highlight their impressive over 90% conviction rate too, so you know if you don't confess you likely go to jail for years and your life is over.
You confess, you go to a detention center, any number of things can happen because it's all informal and left to local officials, and then one day they just shove you back into the street like nothing happened. You're likely out of a job now since you haven't shown up in days, and you get some fun new restrictions on your ability to travel. But at least it wasn't prison.
It's also worth noting all this time that your family probably doesn't know what happened to you.
Another factor that contributes to China's lower incarceration rates is that they often choose not to prosecute "personal" crimes. This would be things like robbery, sexual assault, etc. where the victim is another individual citizen. Usually those are handled via financial compensation, essentially the victim can sue for damages, and there's no need for trial or imprisonment if the offender just chooses to pay.
That's the neat part! There aren't any. China doesn't publish their stats on executions and they don't permit any external auditing of their justice system. What I do know is that, unlike the US, China does not bother with long prison sentences for those sentenced to death. Usually it just happens right after the trial, so those sentenced wouldn't contribute to the imprisonment rate. But I don't buy into the vague estimate of "thousands" that the UN and Amnesty International claim, so that's probably a negligible statistic anyways. But I would certainly believe China is close to the top globally in terms of executions, even if they didn't advertise it to those of us living there.
On the other hand, we should also start counting "shot by police" as an act of execution in the US. Might level the playing field after that.
TL;DR: Who needs high imprisonment rates when you could just go hard on the Panopticon Effect and make your entire society carceral in nature?
Tons of these crimes aren't prosecuted in the U.S., either, especially claims of sexual assault. And here are some sentencing guidelines from China that address both those crimes, which they don't have just for fun.
You probably don't understand Chinese law as much as you think you do, and you're definitely exaggerating the idea that it's uniquely unfair or arbitrary. Pre-trial incarceration happens all over the world, police telling suspects to confess happens all over the world, collateral consequences of arrest and imprisonment happen all over the world.
There's also a ton of context needed to determine whether any of these things are even bad in a given situation. Pre-trial incarceration has all sorts of issues, but if someone goes on a shooting spree and has a history of not showing up to court dates for prior arrests, it's appropriate.
Wow that is a lot of citations needed.
[1] China's administrative punishments law. Note the inclusion of 行政拘留 under 第九条.
[2] the carceral outcomes of China's social credit system.
[3] An overview on Baidu of how party members can be held extrajudiciously. Baidu is basically just the Chinese equivalent of Google but they have their own sources cited.
[4] the administrative litigation law outlining the process of claiming compensation for personal acts.
[5] Like I said, dubious figures, but if anyone believes UK-based Amnesty International is a credible organization, here's their uncited claim of "thousands" executed in China.
Then China must feel real threatened. According to this, it's against the law in China to even say you don't agree with the law.
"A citizen, when exercising the right of freedom of the press, shall abide by the Constitution and the law, and shall not oppose the basic principles established by the Constitution or damage the interests of the State, the society or the collective, or the lawful freedom and rights of other citizens."
A million Uyghurs, whose only apparent crime is being Muslim, have been sent to labor camps and undergone forced sterilization.
Tiananmen Square started out as people peacefully protesting government corruption, and ended in the state murdering them.
With respect to free speech, there's not even a comparison there with respect to America. It's not "potato potato".
Your link doesn't support this, and it's nonsense on its face, anyway.
"Do not oppose the basic principles established by the Constitution" is not "you can't even say you disagree with the law," as anyone familiar with the difference between a constitution and subordinate forms of laws (e.g., statutes) can tell you. And of course you obviously can say the constitution should be changed; how else do you think they amended it in 2018?
Do you know the sources of these claims? Because you're repeating stuff that was first spread around by a German Christian nationalist (a euphemism) employed by a cia front group, which had already been debunked, and could be debunked by anyone looking at his methodology who is able to read mandarin.
Why is this myth pushed so hard by western countries which slaughter Muslims by the millions, and are engaged in genocide against a majority Muslim population as we speak?
Why do Muslim delegations visiting uniformly support the way China has treated its minority Muslim populations? Before you say sectarianism, investigate and realize that the delegations were intentionally multi-sectarian.
How violently do you think the US would have responded to US protestors trying to overthrow the government when they start burning and lynching to death unarmed soldiers? You can still find photos online of mutilated PLA soldiers corpses from june 2nd. 300 or so dead, including the soldiers that were killed, seems pretty light. Oh wait, the US military would never show up to a protest not armed to the teeth, silly me.
Just produce some evidence. I'm sure it's easy, it's not like you'd have to resort to something weird like pointing at a fraction of a percent difference between censuses as evidence of a genocide.
Just to be clear, that was sarcasm and is what the allegations of genocide are entirely based upon - dig into any allegations of uygher genocide and you can link back to Adrian Zenz's "study".
To be clear, I never said "genocide". I honestly don't know that that word applies to this situation.
For evidence that what's going on is not good, here's one of the first hits I find on searching the internet. It mentions a tribunal in the UK, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all reaching similar conclusions and I find no mention of Adrian Zenz in the article or on the tribunal's web page nor any mention of population change.
Maybe if you tried even the briefest line of investigation into who any of the groups named are and how they reached their conclusions you wouldn't be embarrassing yourself by naming organisations that are very publically recorded as basing their opinions on his work.
You should be embarrassed at how little effort it took me to find that link.
lol
guess its fine for you to make claims but not fine for others to make counter claims. the free market of ideas at work.
Yep, that's it.
hey, at least you're honest
The US tried to foment division in China by funding and organizing terrorist cells in Xinjiang, and once those efforts failed, it concocted and promoted a genocide narrative. Antony Blinken is still pushing this slop.
The “forced sterilization” nonsense is especially silly when even NATOpedia says otherwise. As part of China’s affirmative action policies, the Uyghurs and other ethic minorities were excepted from the One-Child policy, and in Xinjiang they have grown in numbers relative to Hans as a result, and this happened similarly with other ethnic minorities.
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The blueprint of regime change operations