Read: being denied an exit visa, arbitrary detention, torture, being disappeared, being executed.
These are all things that the Chinese government does as a matter of course.
For instance, this Australian woman spent 3 years in detention and was tortured for releasing a government report a few minutes early:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/oct/17/like-...
Police harassment, re-hiring police officers fired for having wrongly killied and harassed ex-gf several times during the exercise of their duty, executions of a baby at the wrong address, SWATting of a person 18 times in 2 days are also not only a thing, but a routine. Police is its own axis of power in the USA, plus the National Security Letters, plus the undue wars and Colin Power agitating “proof of WMD” at the UN Security Council…
I can’t stand that people are taking the high ground for an Australian woman being unduely tortured for 3 years in China. This is routine in the West too!
If you want to be so lenient that you claim those are individual mistakes which have been indemnified to the victims (right, Colin Powell?), then at least understand that our mistakes make China pass as an angel here.
So tell me again, where did Edward Snowden flee?
China is a state with a poor human rights record and unlike the US will systematically deny people basic human rights for entirely political reasons.
I can't even begin to understand your comment; obviously Edward Snowden fled to Russia, because if he fled to a country with an extradition treaty with the US he'd be extradited. I can't see a white, English-speaking dude trying to defect to Cuba or China if given the choice.
The US is not perfect, but it's leaps and bounds better than the PRC when it comes to human rights. FFS, the latest party line from the CCP is that human rights are not universal, but rather a Western-centric idea that is being unjustly pushed on the world!
China’s whole censorship legal framework is based on self censorship, so there would not be much difference.
Annual meetings are apparently organized by local groups who lobby/compete with one another. China has a very large SciFi readership and the group from Chengdu was very active when it came to lobbying and gathering votes. It wasn’t until later that people started to realize this may not have been the best decision, e.g. with visa applications and so on.
As far as the actual scandal, there’s also discussion about whether there was any actual government intervention or if this was mainly the result of self-sensorship.