Interesting, I hadn't heard that the United States government was wholesale surveilling its population, with no oversight, with an open tap in Facebook data, and using that information to imprison people for thought crimes such as having a religion.

False equivalence doesn't pass for me. The USA has surveillance issues, but it isn't the prc.

In many ways its worse, PRC doesn't arrest or extrajudicially murder people that have never visited China from what I understand.

Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes.

> Julian Assange would be surfing in Australia with his family right now if he exposed Chinese war crimes.

We certainly don't know this to be true or false, because China hasn't had a Julian Assange yet.

What we can work with is available data - China has tens of thousands of thought-criminals in reeducation camps, and is actively killing them for their organs. America has leveraged its extrajudicial international powers twice in recent memory - once for Julian Assange, once for Kim Dotcom.

5 eyes, Prism, ATT fiber tapping, windows NSA key etc.. And how do you manage to conveniently forget about Snowden revelation?

Still not even close. The U.S. has a constitution that gives its citizens legal recourse when they feel the government has gone too far and gives them some basic rights. The U.S. has elections to hold leaders accountable. China has none of these things.

I admit the U.S. govt probably envies the system China is putting in place and would love to emulate it, but the system of checks and balances built into the American political and legal system makes that impossible.

It is specifically the lack of checks and balances in China that makes what is happening so frightening. Their surveillance state is really just beginning. I wonder just how dystopian it will become in the next ten to twenty years.

How does elections hold leaders accountable?

Leaders always know they have to answer to voters. So They cannot just do whatever they want. The communist party in China does not have to answer to voters. So they can do whatever they want.

I concede that perhaps there are internal checks and balances in the communist party that I am unaware of.