The goals of the organizations doing these things are not always aligned either, since many of them do have to maintain consumer trust they aren't always on the same page as the government, and that's a meaningful friction that doesn't exist AFAICT in China.

I hope Americans don't get cynical enough to discredit that we have more rights and they are worth fighting for, because it could always get far worse.

Following the state of the law with regard to providers and services in the United States, I think you've overemphasized the capability for companies to fight back, as the pressure from the state is incredible and at every front. Primarily, PR is used to emphasize that businesses are really on consumers' sides: that they'd like to not provide data and access. But in actuality, being a successful company at the scale you need to survive means working hand in hand with the US government. We saw how large ("trusted") brands worked hand-in-hand with government by the Snowden documents and we've watched it slip further since.

> I hope Americans don't get cynical enough to discredit that we have more rights and they are worth fighting for, because it could always get far worse.

We have the same rights worth fighting for that the Chinese have.

Government does not give us rights. The rights are independent of government. Americans and Chinese have the same rights. Both governments are impeding on them. Washington DOES NOT give Americans more rights than the Chinese. Rights have never been something Washington can give.

What you are seeing is Washington taking rights, and pointing fingers at the Chinese, telling you that they're taking more.

You want to fight for rights? You can't fight the Chinese for your rights.

You have to fight Washington for your rights.

No, it doesn't, because the ACLU has a degree of power and legitimacy in the US which the Chinese government would not allow to any equivalent organization. The ACLU has actually won cases in court which effected a change in law and/or behavior.

> I myself have been harassed (followed, gaslit, personally surveilled, and threatened) by state police in America, for sharing Snowden documents and their contents. My mail between my relatives and I were opened. All subtle hints and threats: stop being outspoken.

Without minimizing the wrongness, illegality, or harm those things have done to you, I have to imagine that in China, a) Snowden documents would never have seen the light of day, and, b) If you had attempted to share something like that you would have been imprisoned without trial.

As the parent poster said, the difference between some and none is significant.

I do agree with the ultimate statement of you post, about fighting for rights.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weiquan_lawyers

> I have to imagine that in China...

a) Had Washington had its way the documents never would have seen the light of day. They broke international law to ground planes in search of Snowden. They blocked as much of the documents as they could from being shared. They spread rumors about malware on Wikileaks. They worked with the media industry to not cover the contents and to work on the messaging to the American people: "This is bulk collection, not mass surveillance." Their official and public statements on the contents and scope of the programs were repeatedly shown to be false. They passed a law legalizing and expanding authorities and passed this off to the public as their stopping the programs, while the media ran 24/7 news about Caitlyn Jenning. The UK infiltrated the Guardian at gunpoint and destroyed the documents.

b) The laws are in place for exactly this. Snowden, had he been caught, would have been in military prison. His lawyers are arguing today the terms of a trial for him to come home, with senior members of our government calling for his execution. The US government under the Obama Justice Department has compromised on a secret jury-less trial in the Virginia legal subsystem (notable for prosecuting National Security cases, and siding with National Security over individual rights). Remember Chelsea Manning's court case? I don't.

It's absurd to compare this environment to the ACLU.

In 1986, Gorbachev released Andrei Sakharov from internal exile. I guess you would have been saying: "That's it, the West can stop harping about human rights in the Soviet Union, it's all equal now"...?

To my knowledge, there has not been a case of an ACLU lawyer being jailed or harassed simply for taking on a case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Human_Rights_Lawyers_Con...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Constitution_Initiative

You read the first Wikipedia article looking for reasons to dismiss it.

There's plenty of Civil Rights activity in China. It's a myopic American view that there is none and "no true Scotsman" all the civil rights law firms, attorneys and court cases should be dismissed out of hand for consideration.

In China, most disputes are resolved without institutional involvement whatsoever. Off the bat it's difficult to point to institutions and institutional processes and claim China doesn't have equivalence.

You are right. China is different. But it's not some wasteland dystopia from a fantasy novel. It has a wide and active civil society. That civil society is uniquely Chinese, and frankly, it's exciting to see it blossom as it has been since the 80s.

The most shocking thing is that the United States thinks China and Chinese society is a country to compare itself to. The ignorance of these comparisons is nearly as shocking.

Your argument could have been made about the Soviet Union in the late '80s. I grew up in Finland, and I remember people actually saying that: defending the Soviet human rights record, saying Russia is different, and pretending that a sprinkling of perestroika has fixed everything. It was complete bullshit then, and it's the same today in China.

Because Hong Kong is part of China, probably?

Are there open debates about Chinese civil rights on Chinese websites?

Indeed, it's hard to find a place on American social media where dissenting opinions can be argued. There's either an administrative agreement to shut the ideas down, or places (such as HN) don't like the idea of having opinions on their site for whatever reason (harmful to the community) so they shut it down.

I'm certainly not getting thrown in jail. But you won't hear any dissenting opinions.

By the FBI?

Do you think some government agency actually complained to the owner of Y-Combinator threatening them with reprisals unless they evict you?

I think that both countries are on equally slippery slopes. I want to appeal to an American sense that this is something in our fiber, and civil liberties are as important to being American as baseball and apple pie.

The US has far more legal protections and better rule of law than China has ever had. And, crucially, America is a democracy with constitutionally protected free speech. American citizens have much greater ability to challenge the actions of their government than Chinese citizens do.

I think it does a disservice to those defending civil liberties in the US to not recognize that the two countries' situations are vastly different.

That's a really good point--those of us in America are lucky to be here. Do you think people are fighting enough, though? Amy Goodman was nearly thrown in jail just for covering the Dakota Pipeline Protests--what punishment will be handed out in response to that egregious attempt at violating civil rights in America. Right now it looks like: none.

Another example: At least one Journalist has been physically detained, searched and had equipment seized for travelling to cover the Dakota Pipeline Protests.^1

What about the fact that the Iraqi government was desperately trying to prove they did not have chemical weapons or weapons of mass destruction, and the Bush administration hid this from the public?^2 Even though that is a proven, factually-substantiated conspiracy, and it is not technically censored, how many Americans would you guess are aware that happened? In my experience, most aren't.

What about whistle blower protections? Human rights abuses? Guantanamo? Police brutality? Legalized propaganda? Our actions in Syria? Government harassment of Greenwald, Poitras, and others for covering the Snowden leaks? The list goes on and on.

If we lost just a few of our best 'freedom fighters:' the ACLU, the EFF, and people like Amy Goodman and Glenn Greenwald, my best guess is that the world would start to turn into a different place. I'm not sure if we are fighting enough.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/blog/speak-freely/does-what-happened-jo... [2]https://theintercept.com/2016/12/15/if-donald-trump-is-so-up...

In contrast anyone Chinese that are active online effectively has to be capable of understanding both english and Chinese.

I find that hard to believe. I know it's not true for Portuguese native speakers, and China seems to be even more keen on providing native alternatives to foreign sites.

Tibet might disagree

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibetan_sovereignty_debate#For...

http://www.globalresearch.ca/democratic-imperialism-tibet-ch...

This is alarmingly disturbing nonsense; it doesn't even make any sense. What does "are in and have not been in wars" mean? The Chinese engage in lots of wars, they're just not that loud about it in recent history.

Hah. Their aggression in/with South China Sea, Vietnam, Korea, Japan, India is just fake news right?

The South China sea stuff is indeed China throwing its weight around, sure, but need I remind you that China's foreign interventions has been far more restrained than, say, the US (Iraq 1 and Iraq 2, Afghanistan, Libya, Panama) or Russia's (Afghanistan, Ukraine, Syria) even in the last three decades.

Going back slightly further, Japan invaded and occupied half of China and killed millions of Chinese people over the course of a decade, while it was the US that invaded, nuked, and then occupied Japan, even though the US never suffered civilian casualties from Japanese attack. Yet you don't see the Chinese government crying out for bloody revenge, do you?

One the one hand, we have China asserting claims to sea resources and sea lanes there are right in its back yard, where it has a legitimate strategic and national interest. On the other, we have the outright invasion, occupation, and overthrow of sovereign governments. Which country is objectively more peaceful?

If you read more history of China, you will also notice that the Han ethnicity prefers letting others adopt Hans customs and cultures instead of actively adopting or adapting to foreign cultures. That's another striking characteristics in my opinion.

Also, 80,000 Chinese soldiers invaded Vietnam in 1978, with the intention to take Hanoi. It was by no means a minor skirmish.

The US had repeatedly sworn to not cross the 38th parallel in the past. Once the US decided to invade North Korea proper, Truman's promises to stop at the Yalu River no longer seemed credible to China's government. Note that Beijing is very close to Manchuria, and both the Manchus and Japanese invaded China along this route in the past.

The US has certainly threatened war against any foreign powers that interfered anywhere in the entire Western hemisphere [3] -- not sure how anyone can then turn around and fault China for reacting to American troops driving right up to its Manchurian border. Remember this was in 1951, the Cold War was getting warmed up, and the US had nuked Japan only a few years earlier. No responsible Chinese government could have ignored the very real and credible threat of another invasion.

The Vietnamese invasion has an interesting history -- the PLA invaded, failed to achieve its main objectives, then marched right back less than a month later. Certainly not a full-scale invasion nor an occupation, considering the proximate cause was to 'punish' Vietnam for invading Cambodia.

[1] http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Hao%20Chinas%20Decision.pdf

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_War#China_intervenes_.2...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monroe_Doctrine

""" Qing dynasty rule in Tibet began with their 1720 expedition to the country when they expelled the invading Dzungars. """

""" For several decades, peace reigned in Tibet, but in 1792 the Qing Qianlong Emperor sent a large Chinese army into Tibet to push the invading Nepalese out. """

""" As the Qing dynasty weakened, its authority over Tibet also gradually declined, and by the mid-19th century its influence was minuscule. Qing authority over Tibet had become more symbolic than real by the late 19th century,[35][36][37][38] although in the 1860s the Tibetans still chose for reasons of their own to emphasize the empire's symbolic authority and make it seem substantial.[39] """

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet#From_1950_to_present [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_(1912%E2%80%9351)

If it's the former, I don't think the US will be joining it any time soon. US military grand strategy depends on its ability to deploy marines with its navy anywhere swiftly in the world. That's why the Panama Canal was built: to allow the US Navy to swiftly move between Oceans to reallocate force posture. This is why the United States rejected the UNCLOS court juristiction over its boobytrapping the coastal regions around Nicaragua - the US refuses to be bound by this international law (the other major one, I would suggest, is the International Criminal Court/Rome Statues).

If you mean the second, the Chinese have argued that this is a territory dispute, in which case UNCLOS itself (article 299, IIRC) agrees it has no authority.

Certainly UNCLOS is a major aspect to understanding the South China Sea situation, and should be linked.

I think the US bombing various places is a bit more nuanced than it seems at first sight. For example, our military action in Libya - which is entirely contained to one coastal town - is with the support of the Libyan government, the vast majority of the Libyan people, and the United Nations. It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.

I personally don't support our airstrikes in Pakistan, but they have definitely been effective (although at a devastating price to civilian lives that I find unacceptable.)

In some cases, the US government is an unimaginable force for evil; we've dropped chemical weapons on a civilian population as recently as 2004, in the 2nd Battle of Fallujah - one of the worse battles of modern times. In others, it's an unimaginable case for good.

For example, during the Indian Ocean tsunami, governments around the world donated billions of dollars. America promised unimaginable quantities of food, fresh water, and support. Within days, American aid began arriving - in the form of two aircraft carriers, basically floating cities. During the crisis period, American forces delivered the daily food requirements for 100,000 people every 24 hours.

In the end of March 2005 - remember, the tsunami was in December 2004 - the Indonesian and Sri Lankan governments reported that they had received precisely none of the money promised by foreign governments. They did report receiving some food; the Thai government in particular received many donations of rice from the governments of Israel and China. To demonstrate how pants-on-head stupid that was, Thailand is the world's largest exporter of rice, and that year they had their largest crop of rice in all history.

So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.

Libya is a failed state. There is no recognized, coherent government of Libya.

> It's an air campaign against an ISIS stronghold, and it's pretty black and white in that most people agree that it should be done.

I don't think this is the case. But if it were, it would be an argument ad populum - a logical fallacy.

> So yes, America can be horrible. But America can also be the world's largest source of good, especially when other governments can't step up to the plate.

I think this is exactly right. It depends on how America chooses to use its power.

Today, it looks a lot like containment, of aggravating and funding extremist elements, of playing proxy war, of pursuing its interests behind a cloak of public relations.

The American incentive at this point of world history is to prevent, at all costs, other countries from becoming influential enough to challenge American decision making.

That's not just on the battlefield. America has been trying to block countries from lending money, from industrializing, and even from building independent news media industries. It has refused to join international institutions of law, such as the Convention on the Law of the Sea and the International Criminal Court, it has an overt first strike nuclear policy - the only of its kind in the world.

The United States faces a choice:

A.) allow other nations to grow, in a completely peaceful and benign manner, wealthy and strong enough risking that it will no longer a hegemon capable of making unilateral global decision making.

OR

B.) disrupt the growth of regions of the world, delaying the growth of competitor states, guaranteeing America maintains its 'critical leadership role' in the world.

Judging by actions rather than words, America chooses, and will continue to choose B. America is the country with the incentive to start wars.

The world should be multi-polar, and where it there is need for violence to rectify or prevent violence, it should be under international leadership with international decision making.

Of course, given the current state of Libya, there aren't exactly pollsters walking around asking peoples' opinions on the Sirte strikes. But given the bipartisan support, it's pretty clear that they have good support in Libya itself. The fact that the UN supports the strikes - especially given that the UN can't even say "water is wet" without someone vetoing - says something about their international support.

I agree that America has been blocking countries from doing some pretty basic stuff. I recently traveled to Iran, and the American sanctions have shaken the country to the core.

But even things that seem obviously good are in fact horrible ideas. Every tiniest change in our laws affects the outside world in a massive way. In 1993, Tom Harkin, the junior Sentator from Iowa, introduced the Child Labor Deterrence Act, which prohibited the importation of products that have been produced by child labor. Sounds simple, right? Who on earth is in favor of child labor? There were concerns about the effectiveness of the bill. Well, as it turns out, the bill was devastatingly effective. In 1993, Bangladeshi employers, in fear of losing lucrative American contracts, dismissed over 75% of child laborers in the textile industry. In 1997, UNICEF investigated what happened to these children after being laid off. They found that most children found themselves in much worse situations: crushing stones (leading to horrible particle inhalation illnesses), scavenging through trash dumps, and begging on the streets. Most of the girls ended up in prostitution.

Things aren't always as simple as they seem, especially when you're as big as America. Smaller countries, like the Netherlands, can take grand actions like banning child labor imports, or banning arms exports to Saudi Arabia, or establishing relations with countries the US is at war at (e.x. North Korea.) But the tiniest little movement by the US can completely shake the world. Think about that the next time America seems to face a clear choice between good and evil.

I strongly disagree. I think all human beings have the same basic rights, and so we should condemn actions that undermine them no matter where they happen in the world.

Furthermore, governmental violations are complicated and so for each government we need separate articles describing what it is doing wrong. And that is what we indeed get in many media articles linked to here at HN, including lots at The Economist.

That being the case, why is it that you condemn describing what the Chinese government is doing wrong, but think it is good to do so for the US? I don't know, but one possibility is that you are a troll paid by the Chinese government to promote its propaganda.

The line of 'their restrictions on human rights are worse than ours' seems like at best a race to the bottom. I feel western democracy should be setting a standard so far above what this article describes that there are no comparisons to draw. In which case the OP has a good point

I condemn the Chinese for all of their civil rights infractions, watch: China has a serious problem with gross human and civil rights violations.

Anyway. People tend to react to accusation that the United States government commits serious human rights attrocities with a knee jerk - accusing the other person of being employed by other governments, etc.

This is not the case.

Let me put this out there, because I think it's important to understand.

China has been drastically improving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is UP.

America has been drastically devolving in the field of human rights over time. It's trajectory is DOWN.

Is that concerning? Why do Americans feel that China is even a metric for comparison?

No government gives their people rights. Rights are inalienable.

The United States government has been taking away their people's rights.

Articles such as the above make China seem like the problem, or the most important problem.

If you are an American and you are concerned with human and civil rights, you won't win them by fighting the Chinese. You will win them by fighting your own government.

I take the allegation that I am a paid Chinese propagandist seriously. I reject this accusation fully.

Can you be more specific? You tried to post the actual Snowden documents (whatever that means...Are you Glenn Greenwald, or Snowden himself?)? Or you posted a story about the Snowden documents? AFAIK, there's no public repository of the Snowden documents, something that Wikileaks has been keen to snark about: http://www.businessinsider.com/edward-snowden-and-wikileaks-...

I tried to post actual Snowden documents (that means PDFs hosted on the internet, on CDNs, on mirrors and on news websites).

I also tried to post articles about Snowden documents (Der Speigel articles and Guardian articles).

Public repository of Snowden Documents: https://search.edwardsnowden.com/

There's actually a few of them, for example Cryptome had them hosted.

In fact, the article I think does a poor job overall doing compare-and-contrast. It has a paragraph (two?) on the United States, and dovetails into an opinion (without covering America much at all) about why China is worse.

Americans need to understand that they can't fight the Chinese for their rights. They have to fight Washington for their rights.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/16/opinion/now-america-you-kn...

I am referring to the well known and well regarded Chinese policy of non-interference and non-intervention, and the Chinese leadership of UN Peacekeeping missions, as well as their lack of having been in a war with any external country for a very long time (and then their being the defenders in those wars).

Let me guess, you are American.

Come on man, seriously? Tibet? rings a bell?

Calling us out on Tibet is nice and all, but it does get so very boring.

If you are a CCP employee, please contact me to give me my 5角, cheers!

As a matter of fact, people who can see your comment certainly would not support a government that do not let them use Google. But this group of Chinese people are tiny.

I guess at least 90% of Chinese citizens do not know Google.

So the problem is not that Chinese citizens like totalitarianism, the problem is that they do not see it as totalitarianism, or even think it's truly democratic. Like many people here believe that Trump is for the people and will be serving them faithfully (I am not saying that Trump will not do that, I am saying that it should not be taken as a thing that will happen for sure), which has to be the case if people can put Trump in check and hold him accountable.

But I don't know how to educate 1.3 billion people...

I don't know China history, but have they never lived in a democratic fashion at least in the last 50-60 years?

You may be an american citizen, but what are you ethnically? My guess was you were Chinese.

By the way, you guys should brush up on your English some more.

Plus they have done nothing to me and I love all the Chinese people I have met.

You are they.