> read: penalties for everyone involved

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-...

Excuse me but USA does it at scale, I’m not talking about offshore interrogations which they also do, but police threats are so brutal that 95% of jailmates are there on a plea deal, which means no other proof was presented to the jury than the accusee’s own signature.

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?

Look, I hate pulling out the fallacies list, but this is literally the dictionary definition of tu quoque. Nobody mentioned the US here, and it's not relevant to the discussion.

Being held without legal representation or fair trial is extremely uncommon in the West and normally reserved for military custody.

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!