The US does imprison more of its citizens on a per capita basis than any other comparable nation.
The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be.
I’ll stop there.
> The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be.
Agreed. I think one difference being that Citizens can, with great personal peril to their own safety and well being, use the Right to assemble and protest to effect change to address systemic corruption.
As an activist with a background in protests in various demos myself, I just wonder what the World would have looked like if this had happened in 2008. There have been countless examples of senseless, illegal police brutality and murder during that time. I'm no fan of the movement but Occupy members were tazed, beaten, sprayed on a regular basis; and most of them were middle class white US Citizens.
The Legal system has not been a viable option for most to find redress to these ills, let alone justice, so they make taking to the streets the only option.
In the PRC doing that means you will be disspeared, and it can cost you your life if you speak out as seen with Li Wenlian, who's wife just had their child:
https://tucson.com/news/world/widow-of-chinese-whistleblower...
> On June 4, 1989, however, Chinese troops and security police stormed through Tiananmen Square, firing indiscriminately into the crowds of protesters. Turmoil ensued, as tens of thousands of the young students tried to escape the rampaging Chinese forces. Other protesters fought back, stoning the attacking troops and overturning and setting fire to military vehicles. Reporters and Western diplomats on the scene estimated that at least 300, and perhaps thousands, of the protesters had been killed and as many as 10,000 were arrested.
> The savagery of the Chinese government’s attack shocked both its allies and Cold War enemies. Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev declared that he was saddened by the events in China. He said he hoped that the government would adopt his own domestic reform program and begin to democratize the Chinese political system.
In two weeks of protests around the country, 19 people are dead: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/06/08/14-days.... Three were possibly shot by the police, under circumstances where the allegation is they opened fire first. Two police officers are dead as a result of drive-by shootings.
The contrast with China couldn't be starker. Here we have protests that involved burning down police stations, and a heavily-armed country where gangs have used the protests as pre-texts for shootings. And we've had a handful of officer-involved deaths. In China, by contrast, police killed hundreds of people at a peaceful protest involving a disarmed population.
I hate to make this point, because it sounds like whataboutism, but perhaps the relative population size of China and the US is worth taking into account.
Let's assume that the 300 figure is the most accurate, since these (Western?) reporters and Western diplomats may have had some incentive in the Cold War to over-estimate the number of deaths. In 1989, China's total population was apparently 1,110,000,000 while the 1990 US census counted 248,709,873 people. That's a scale factor of about 4.5 times.
An interesting comparison then is the 82 people killed by the US government in the 1993 Waco siege, which is equivalent to 366 people if scaled up. Obviously the circumstances are different, but in terms of the magnitude of the number of lives lost, we should probably think of the two tragedies as similar.
But those same organizers weren't shipped to Guantanamo for indefinite periods of time for "reeducation."
The USA suffers from some of what it accuses the PRC - it is still not the PRC.
But Ramsey Orta essentially was.
The difference in the USA is solely one of pervasiveness, focus, intensity, not any particular outcome.
They also challenge the sovereignty of Taiwan regularly - it was China who refused to allow two sovereign nations of Chinese origin when the UN switched the Chinese seat to the PRC.
Different countries different tools. The PRC has only really come into its element in the last 3 decades. The USA's foreign policy advocates-through-violence (CIA) don't have the best track record for success but they do have 80 years of experience. Give China time and I expect they'll start doing the same.
> Give China time and I expect they'll start doing the same.
Fair enough, but I hope the US and China incentivize each other to not impose their will on the rest of the world.
Is that a bad thing if we're trying to promulgate our values?
Trump is doing trump but a lot of politicians and others have spoken out and marched - would that happen in China?
To be a moral beacon here America doesn’t have to be perfect.
They just have to be able to say that their hypothetical leader is doing a bad job and that he should be replaced ...or not of they want to.
From that all else follows.
I think that most people can obviously see who has the worse laws, regarding things like censorship.
Would you accept prison or murder as counter-argument to this or other opinions of yours? If not, you prefer free speech.
> The US isn’t the moral beacon it was billed to be.
Who billed it thusly? In my books, the US or other nations don't determine the value of free speech, their respect for free speech determines their value.
It doesn't mean that we are objective on this regard. On the contrary, at least for me, it comes from the subjective feeling that as I dislike the sentiment of being oppressed and I do feel empathy for other people, I wish them not to be oppressed either. This is all subjectivly grounded, and it's fine - to my mind at least.
Let's not pretend that something is objective just because it's deeply rooted into the best part of our hearts.
I have to say that China did a lot of things wrong but it couldn't care any less about religion. Most of the issues aren't religion related. It only makes matters more opaque and hide real issues. Hence I disagree with debates/discussions based on perceived perspectives and use these labels such as 'attack on religion'.
https://nypost.com/2020/02/01/how-chinas-xi-jinping-destroye...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict#Re-education...
The world in general has concluded that planned economies (communism) is strongly inferior to market economies, but during the early days of communism it was not so obvious. Even in modern times there are people that argue communism was implemented prematurely and would be able to thrive during "end-stage capitalism". You also have plenty of people who while disagreeing with a complete communist revolution would still support nationalisation of key companies or even the more radical "workers being in control of the means of production".
Free speech is even less clear. With america winning the cold war there was a recognition of the american way including the strong support of freedom of speech being the superior system. However lately, especially after 2016 the west seems to have lost confidence in the absolute freedom of speech. Challenging the supremacy of the freedom of speech is the idea that citizens are not capable of judging speech on it's own merit and "misinformation" "speech glorifying violence" etc should be banned. It's not really a clear cut issue, you can for example argue that limiting free speech leads to a more harmonious society (the position taken by China, and also lately the reason given by New Zealand for their decision to ban the Christchurch manifesto)
It’s not as hard as you might think. For instance, when the British East India company came into India, they banned the practice of Sati, revenge killings, etc. It really boils down to what version of history you subscribe to. Do you believe in the principles of the Enlightenment or not? If you do, then you’ll realize that colonization is actually a net positive for the world. Some cultures need to be told how to behave. Not all cultures progress equally or linearly.
What exactly are you getting at?
This is a straightforward lie.
Even if the US, peer pressure is often enough to get political dissenters banned from their social media accounts, jobs, etc.
Many people use the cope out that it's different when it's done by the government or by a private company, but I don't see it as being that different.
With your apparent standard for freedom of speech, isn't pretty much every country excluded? So now everyone is the same as an authoritarian one-party state that outlaws opposition parties and actively censors all internet websites.
Many conservatives or "alt right" types get censored in the west, and some of them have to find hosting in Russia (or on Russian social networks like VK), a country we condemn for censorship. I'm not under the delusion that Russia hosts those people out of respect for freedom of speech, of course, but I find it an interesting observation.
It's hard to blame China for censoring people it deems terrorists, separatists, enemies of the state or whatever, when in the west we're so quick to do it with the enemy-du-jour, sticking a label like 'Nazi' to demonize them (currently, it's the far right/alt right, previously it was communists, who knows which group it will be in ten years).
In addition, the few people and organizations that have been deplatformed from social media and other hosting solutions in the west have had that fate befall them due to companies making a decision that it is not in their financial interest to allow that type of content on their platforms, given its unpopularity among other customers.
This is a completely different situation to China, where companies are directed by the government to explicitly censor certain types of content, and individuals are routinely arrested and imprisoned for creating or sharing content that the government does not agree with.
"Angry mobs", as you put it, are just ordinary people freely expressing their opinions to companies that they choose to do business with. No company is forced to comply with the requests of an "angry mob". No government agency is going to punish a company that doesn't comply. Nobody is getting thrown in prison for something they said online.
Please, it does a disservice to those who are actually experiencing real oppression at the hands of an authoritarian government to make this comparison. Here is just one list of people who have been imprisoned in China largely for expressing themselves online: https://www.chinesepen.org/english/category/writers-in-priso...
Meanwhile, the "many conservatives" who you suggest have been censored in the west are still free to broadcast their content to anyone who wants to listen.
We were talking about people being banned/censored/"de-platformed" from social media companies, in China and in the west. I'm aware that, otherwise, human rights abuse are way worse in China.
As for the idea that abuse only matters when done by a government, it's absurd. We're seeing now private companies talking about censoring the US President, so it's pretty clear who has most power. You can hide behind technicalities like them being private companies or whatever (I note that this argument does not hold when a small mom and pop company refuses to bake a cake, but apparently much larger companies can do whatever they want), but it just means that those companies have the power to censor speech _in practice_ (which is what actually matters in the end), and at the moment they're following angry mobs and not elected officials to define those censorship policies.
A Nazi getting banned from Facebook isnt comparable to a human rights lawyer being stuck under house arrest for years.
America is no better than China when it comes to repressing dissent. American military industrial pharmaceutical organisations are better at usurping insurrection and revolutionary movements, however.