> Then ask yourself why people can't equivocate between similarly "bad" US / PRC actions without customary muh freedom/democracy/violates are exceptions narrative.

Pretty much nobody on this site (besides particular corporate sycophants) will deny that the US has nightmare-inducing surveillance capabilities. It's not hypocritical to call-out and identify another authoritarian overreach in another country that also threatens it's citizens.

This isn't a slight against Chinese citizens or American citizens, for that matter. We know exactly who to blame - Google, Apple and Microsoft for rolling over when governments asked them to get backdoored. This started a privacy-shattering precedent that undermined trust even further than ever before, but now we accept it and readily spread it to our family in the form of a smartphone. Look at how easily all of us were fooled.

Promote software freedom. Get people off proprietary shitware and bugged hardware. That's what matters to me, and any government that better enables me to do that earns my respect.