Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

This kind of thing is going to play out a lot over the next few years. It's a tough question: how to marry globalisation with the political realities. When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has. But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on. Let us hope they do so as quickly as possible, not least for the sake of the Chinese people themselves. And let us work to improve our example and unity too in countries where we do have these things, however imperfectly.

> "Proper civil society and human rights" - like the ones afforded to Julian Assange? Or the treatment of the Grenfell tower victims' families?

Now imagine a society where every dissident is treated like Assange, and every poor nobody is treated like the Grenfell tower residents. And with no recourse. And no free media to spread the outrage. And no reasonable expectation of privacy to even discuss the matter privately as a third party with other third parties. And no way to even talk about voting out those responsible.

That's China. Take your false equivalence elsewhere.

> Now imagine a society where every dissident is treated like Assange, and every poor nobody is treated like the Grenfell tower residents

The British colonies over the years? Possibly Britain itself as far as the treatment of poor nobodies.

Look, China's a repressive regime, but: (1.) A bit less so than it's described by Western media, and (2.) Britain and the US are not categorically different, they're just, well, different in the contexts and degrees in which they oppress more and less.

> The British colonies over the years?

Sure. I don't see anyone here defending that in this thread.

> Possibly Britain itself as far as the treatment of poor nobodies.

Currently? Are you serious?

> Look, China's a repressive regime, but: (1.) A bit less so than it's described by Western media,

"Western media" is such a large set as to be meaningless. If you mean the mainstream media, please provide an example of two of where they claim China is more oppressive than it actually is.

> and (2.) Britain and the US are not categorically different, they're just, well, different in the contexts and degrees in which they oppress more and less.

No. There is a categorical difference between being democracies with major flaws and being a totalitarian state, between having real struggles in their open and adversarial justice systems and having arbitrary arrests as the norm, between abhorrent detention of immigrants and outright concentration camps based on ethnicity.

Placing the dystopian hellhole that is China in the same category as Western democracies is an affront to those that suffer under CCP rule and highly unproductive with regards to fixing the serious problems we have at home.

> please provide an example of two of where they claim China is more oppressive than it actually is

I'll give you one. Pretty much every single mainstream media basically says religion is banned in China. However to my detriment, every time I go back to China to visit my paternal grandma (who is a catholic), I get asked to go to Sunday mass with her. So, where is religion banned in China? Let me know your thoughts about this, do you think religion is banned in China?

> adversarial justice systems

You do realise that "adversarial justice systems" only pretty much exist in Common Law countries right? Whereas Civil Law countries don't use an adversarial system, which is pretty much the legal system of the whole of the EU and pretty much all of Asia including China. I've even read arguments from British barristers that the adversarial system can be an inferior system. I mean, the adversarial justice system certainly didn't do too well for the incarceration rate of black people in America now did it?