The notion that China lacks 'proper civil society' is in my mind rooted in a western sense of orientalism and good old fashioned racism. I'm no defender of China, but let's recognize that the same nations trying to punish China because 'human rights'(US, UK) are the same ones responsible for killing close to 1 million Iraqis and creating the largest humanitarian crisis on earth(Yemen).
The usual counterpoint here is the US incarceration rate.
By all means cite %, and still does not make it a concentration camp.
Further the DAs are themselves elected locally in many jurisdictions or appointed by locally elected officials and people can vote for change if they want it.
Can you though?
Gui Minhai was a Hong Kong bookseller who had become a Swedish citizen. He was kidnapped while in Thailand and was moved to China. There he was denied consular access.
This whataboutism really needs to stop.
Is putting other countries citizens in concentration camps somehow morally superior?
> They're using machine learning to generate social scores.
America also has this they just call it a "credit score" or "klout".
> If you don't like America or the UK, you can leave.
Wow all my US expat friends who constantly complain about having to pay US taxes despite living here in the UK must have things totally wrong then.
> it's not racist to not like these horrible cultural values or to go against them.
No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
You can always tweak law to make criminal out of anyone inconvenient. Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
Most of the people in the US who make a stink about the Uighurs and forget about US human rights transgressions would quickly forget about the Uighurs if they moved in next door.
And this would be immoral and if you are suggesting the US is doing this you would need to actually back that up.
> Wasn't Assange's consensual sex relegated to rape?
Even if it was, that is not an example of tweaking the law to make a criminal out of anyone inconvenient, it is a case of tweaking the truth to fit the definition of something which is a crime, and should be a crime.
If you are a US citizen, you are expected to pay a certain amount of US taxes even while living abroad. Presumably, this is because you still benefit from bring US citizen while living abroad.
> No it's racist to ignore the injustices we commit in the west while condemning Asian countries for doing the same thing with different branding.
No, that's hypocrisy, which is a totally different thing from racism.
This is not the same as being physically restrained from leaving, and they would find these stop if they renounce US citizenship.
> The argument isn't "China is good actually." It's "We do most of the same stuff you are accusing them of."
But we don't, neither to the same scale nor intensity.
It's not racist to criticise the actions of another country, even if your own isn't perfect. You can criticise both, and you can call out which is worse.
In this case it is the undemocratic nation suppressing speech and political expression, while commiting racist, demographic genocide within its own borders.
Our credit system is bad and theirs is worst. Next topic?
They can at any point renounce their citizenship, but they don't and continue to pay their taxes.
I grew up with cultural values, and I don't like the Chinese ones. Does that mean the US is perfect? Of course not.
Whataboutism is cushioning the evil creeping, instead of trying to stop the incoming flood, you're busy mopping up the puddle.
Would like to see some examples of this, and numbers of this. I really doubt this is widespread.
And further, if it does happen, it would have to get through prosecutors, jury, governors, etc - all of who will completely eaten alive by the press if the kid could even be misinterpreted to be a minority in the USA and the whole world would know about it. Where if someone mentions China is not exactly a good actor we get a whataboutism shitstorm.
This has nothing to do with the topic at hand and was another whataboutism off shoot from the main topic.
However:
- Snowden was an American citizen. Gui Minhai is Swedish.
- Snowden didn't get kidnapped abroad. The possibility seemed real but, for whatever reason, that line did not actually get crossed.
I certainly wouldn't defend the US in this (let's not pretend that the US has a good reputation regarding world politics). But the things the US does pale in comparison what China does.
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
Anyways, here is an overview of the US extraordinary rendition program : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1...
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
I also want to point out that the reason I mentioned Gui Minhai was to counter the claim that escaping the grip of China was a simple matter of moving abroad.
With respect to this original topic, there are also various examples where Chinese who moved abroad are threatened either by phone calls from China (with reference to their family) or by Chinese agents (presumably) in the new country. (I could list some if you want, but I assume you're familiar with them.)
These are things that the US does not really do.
But, yeah, US's track history in foreign policy is terrible. But China has its own take on terror and it's not pretty by any means. If you care about things like democracy or freedom of speech I will assert that China is emerging as the bigger threat by far.
(I take terror to refer to the systematically frightening people with the threat of violence, to make them behave in a certain way.)
If you are an enemy of the USG, you can't leave the US. If you are an enemy of the Chinese State, you can't leave China. I fail to see the difference.
I assure you that US citizens that move abroad and act in ways that conflict with the USG are also surveilled. The tactics are different, because the US has sufficient power to surveil you without needing any threatening. If ever the threat of violence is judged effective that is what will threaten you. First under the threat of extradition (which is violence), if that fails the US will make phone calls to the government of the country where you live in, and if that fails and you're still worth it then it's covert action.
Maybe if you live in the Anglosphere China is a bigger threat, but in that case it's not a big threat at all. But for people that live anywhere else in the world or have done so the US has done enough terrorizing and threatening to see that the US is a bigger threat to your freedom. What good is democracy when the US controls your economy and defence? What meaningful freedom do you have of acting according to your interests when that boot is against your neck? Both China and the US are exactly the same threat. It is absurd to give more power to the US to isolate China. If what you care about is freedom, the best scenario is actually to have both China and the US in economic competition.