> 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.