Xinjiang internment camps: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_internment_camps

Censorship in China: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_China

Four Cardinal Principles (enshrined in the constitution): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Cardinal_Principles

Open Constitution Initiative (shut down by the government): https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Constitution_Initiative

The issues are plain, endemic, and well-documented. It is not propaganda.

By what criteria is it worse than things in United States? You could look at prisoners per capita and say USA is worse. Your selections seem arbitrary

By all human rights measures, it is worse. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion … you name it.

Feel free to read the yearly reports from the HRW:

https://www.hrw.org/world-report/2023/country-chapters/china

Random selection from the report:

> In May, a court in Hainan province sentenced former journalist Luo Changping to seven months in prison for a Weibo post that questioned China’s justification for its involvement in the Korean War.

Details on his case: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luo_Changping#Arrest

> Sanya Ji'an Police Bureau summoned Luo for investigation into his "illegal remarks" suspected of "insulting heroes and martyrs".

Sure, but China has lifted nearly a billion out of poverty in the last half century. Would it be superior if that didn’t happen but there was no censorship?

Let's makes this clear: when we say China is bad, we mean the government. The CCP. We're not saying Chinese people are inherently bad.

Credit the "a billion being lifted out of poverty" to "China" (remember in this context we're talking about the government) is just like saying "the US" invented PC, network, lightbulb and the other thousands of good stuff we rely on today.

No, some smart people in the US did that. But it can't be simply credited to "the US".

Chinese people worked hard to lift themselves out of poverty. Did some policies help? Absolutely. But it's not "China lifted them out of poverty".

If it's true, we can even say the US lifted them out of poverty, since the China economy boom came in place when it became the major trade partner of the US. See? The US' foreign policy helped!

If there wasn't censorship and the regime that produced it, many of those people wouldn't need to be "lifted" at all. In a normal country, there's no special effort required from the government to "lift" people from anywhere. Surely, there are still poor people, but not mass poverty that requires heroic efforts to overcome. When did you last hear that Swiss government lifted people out of poverty, for example?

Prior to my post, were you aware of the Four Pests Campaign and its results?

Human rights and human prosperity aren’t mutually exclusive.

On top of which, they did such a terrible job of lifting people out of poverty, they unnecessarily killed tens of millions in the deadliest famine in human history:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1127087/

Sure. Im saying they did a good thing, you’re saying they did bad. I think lifting a billion out of abject poverty is overall net positive against freedom of speech. There’s no objective way to say one way or another overall.

If you look at removal of poverty China is unquestionably better. There’s simply no unbiased way you could say China is better or worse overall. Any weights you apply to certain things are inherently biased.

Yes, there is an objective way to say that you don't have to institute a fascist totalitarian regime to make people not starve. It is witnessed by the fact that many countries do not have a fascist totalitarian regime, and still do not starve. In fact, mountains of evidence - including in recent Chinese history - point to the fact that a fascist totalitarian government is more likely to cause a mass starvation than to prevent one. Yes, the current fascist dictatorship finally learned how not to make people starve. It doesn't prove it is the only solution to starvation, and the choice is either starvation or fascism - it only makes this particular totalitarian dictatorship a bit less horrible. But still plenty horrible.

I don’t believe you’re engaging in good faith; you are employing tactics meant to stifle discourse:

1. False Equivalence: Suggesting that economic progress and freedom of speech are interchangeable or mutually exclusive is intentionally misleading.

2. Relativism: By stating there's "no objective way" to compare, you are deflecting any form of critical evaluation.

3. Unfalsifiability: Your assertion that any evaluation is "inherently biased" is an unfalsifiable claim meant to immunize your argument from critique.

I think it’s fair to say that the CCP has hindered that lift more than helped. You could argue that it might not have happened without their involvement, but I think it unlikely that history would be much different. Other than China being a free market economy of course, and maybe everyone learning Chinese instead of English.

> By all human rights measures, it is worse. Freedom of association, freedom of speech, freedom of religion … you name it.

I don't think anyone is saying China has "more freedom". But that does not seem to automatically imply that's "worse", which seems to be your ground assumption!

If you believe more freedom is always better, do you agree that social media should have absolutely no moderation? If you don't, then it seems to me you concede that freedom is good, but up to a limit. Then the question become, does China have the right amount of freedom or the USA does? How about the EU, which is quite noticeably less free than the USA? I don't think the answer to these questions are nearly as obvious as you seem to believe by making such blank statements, which leads me to agree with the other person that this is something someone helplessly affected by good old propaganda would do without realizing it (good propaganda is like that, you have no idea you're affected, trying to recognize that is very important).

You have conspicuously avoided addressing the specific, systemic human rights abuses unique to China.

Instead, your post employs a series of rhetorical tactics aimed at stifling constructive dialogue:

First, you assert a false equivalency between China and the USA/EU by trivializing the qualitative difference in freedom levels, thereby attempting to normalize authoritarianism.

Second, you use a slippery slope argument about social media moderation to suggest that all limitations on freedom are essentially the same — equating limited, private content moderation with systemic human rights abuses by government.

Third, you engage in an ad hominem attack by accusing me of being influenced by propaganda without providing substantive counter-arguments.

Were I to adopt your approach, I could easily make similar sweeping ad hominem accusations based on your behavior here.

This response is comic. Are you sure I am the one stifling dialogue?

I did not assert any false equivalence, that's your mistaken interpretation. Given your poor reading skills, I agree there's no reason to continue a dialogue, actually.

Your false equivalency arises out of trivializing the qualitative differences in freedom between China and the USA/EU, in an attempt to gloss over the severe and concrete human rights and governance issues in an authoritarian regime like China.

If you can’t understand your own incoherent argument, I can’t help you.

Wikipedia is so funny. I like to read topics about contraversial stuff related to my region of Balkans, both hr. (Croatian) and sr. (Serbian) versions. For the same topic, one side says national heroes, the other war criminals. One side's terrorists are other side's freedom fighters. One side's nazi collaborators are other side's innocent communist victims. And so on.

So, what's the truth? I guess whatever one chooses to believe. I like to create my truths from many different, contraversial or sometimes completely opposing sources on same topic. Your links are all in english language, in en. section of Wikipedia.

It is the objective fact. China is ruled by a fascist totalitarian dictatorship (who for historical reasons call themselves "communist" but it doesn't have any meaning anymore), America, with all its faults, isn't yet. The former is objectively much worse than the latter.

Objective here is subjective. From the point of view of the CCP I’m sure everything is going swimmingly.

Existence of "point of view" does not make it subjective. You can think the moon is made of Swiss cheese, that doesn't make its composition subjective, it just makes you wrong.

Yeah, I’m fairly certain that does not apply to ‘Is my country doing well’, since the measures used are human defined.

If you put zero value on personal freedom (which isn’t objectively better, that’s just pure opinion) the equation changes.

Criteria like "not starving", "not being murdered", "not being raped", "not being put into concentration camp for following your own religion", "not being imprisoned for criticizing the government" is pretty objective, and I have yet to see a culture where being raped and murdered is praised and desired by people. I am sure whatever are the cultural differences in China, they like starvation, rape, murder and imprisonment as little as we do. So the country which does such things to its citizens, massively, is not "doing well", even if its citizens aren't allowed to say so aloud (and that's another sign it's not doing well - "I can't complain" can mean two things, and in China it means you'd be in prison if you do).

America is ruled by a fascist, totalitarian-authoritarian military junta, masquerading as a republic, in control of both political parties, using the revolving door between the CFR and Joint Chiefs of Staff to camouflage their activities.

This military junta has demolished countless other sovereign states around the world, deemed inferior by the oligarchic ruling classes that use that revolving door to enact evil deeds across the worlds' horizons.

This isn't a conspiracy theory - its how a significant percentage of the worlds population actually views the US empire, and its minion, puppet states.

You see? This kind of hatespew is equally applicable, and just as useless to those of us interested in peace.

Put yourself in the shoes of a political dissident.

Would you rather be a citizen of China or USA?

Yes, let's see how many of you volunteer to be the Black Lives Matter leaders that died in mysterious accidents and car fires.

Are you claiming that was government organized?

Are you claiming that the main target of the protests, police, or their allies aren't prime suspects?

Julian Assange, currently being chemically lobotomized in one of the Wests' most heinously vile palaces of torture - without trial, without justice - would like you to very carefully reconsider your position with regards to political dissidents.

So would Australias Witnesses J, K, L, M, N and O .. who have been disappeared into a military Star Court, for the sake of political dissidence.

Be very careful with your castigation of China. We have far, far more political dissidents in our prisons than you know about. And that is by design.

I'm aware and I'm not an apologist for US.

What I mean to emphasize is that net net, one expects more of the semblance of a rule of law in western jurisdictions. It's why cases like Julian Assange are as controversial as they are, with public organizations in USA willing to make the case to support him and inquire on his well-being.

Our media is controlled but there is semblance of free press. You don't have even that in China. If you're a dissident in China you'd be hard pressed garnering support from any org.

I don't presume to have a complete picture. Maybe if I did it may suggest USA is in reality more like China. But from all that I've seen, authoritarian governments like China continue to have serious shortcomings in the kinds of freedoms we take for granted in the West.

>one expects more of the semblance of a rule of law in western jurisdictions

This is a fallacy, though. There is nothing about Western jurisdictions which isn't also attainable in the "Eastern" ones, wherever they are. This moral altitude is a fallacy and drives so much enmity, disaster and calamity in the world. We do not have the right to demolish countless sovereign states in the world, and then call out China, which hasn't even come close to the level of calamity that we, Western citizens, support with our apathy towards our own governments. We might have a 'semblance' of rule of law at home - but it is absolutely not what we export to the rest of the world.

We destroy nations - China builds them.