Coming from a third world country, whenever I see someone contrasting human rights abuses of US and China, I instantly realize the person was born and bred in the west, and does not have a meaningful realization of the level of depravity that can exist. Not saying US doesn't have his problems, it has plenty. But comparing to China is, at risk of being flippant, laughable.
Yep. Response to protests in the US is greeted with rubber bullets, lost eyesight, and maybe broken bones.
Response to protests in China leads to people being crushed into literal chutney, and deaths in the 10s of thousands. That was the nature of deaths in tiananmen square, the photos of which often do not get shown in western media.[1]
On the other hand people become complacent when they achieve relative wealthiness. Economic success is also the basis of how the Chinese regime stays in power.
The Tianmen Square protests are well known in the west (tank man is a very iconic picture known by basically everyone) contrary to your claim and if the sources on wikipedia are to be believed did not result in 10s of thousands of deaths (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Tiananmen_Square_protests...).
In general I think it is a constant struggle to keep society free from tyranny, and you should not torpedo that with comparisons with places that have it worse.
Speaking of the complacent wealthy, China disappeared Jack Ma two months ago for getting too comfortable and mildly criticizing the regime. He's China's Jeff Bezos, and he just went away with a poof.
>they are usually killed by right wing extremists who are unofficially sanctioned by government and often not prosecuted.
Big citation needed here. You'd be hard pressed to find any deaths here that weren't obvious, often video-documented cases of self-defense. Even then, the state has zealously prosecuted them, in Jake Gardner's case overriding the local prosecutor's determination that no crime had been committed and leading Gardner to suicide. Most ridiculous of them all, Kyle Rittenhouse is facing murder charges when every single one of his so-called victims is on video assaulting him.
I read it as a commentary on where the US could hypothetically end up if one just lets morals to erode slowly without bounds.
Obviously comparing in terms of absolute metrics is not going to be very similar since US and China are very different countries, but at the same time, if the hypothetical came to pass, it wouldn't be the first time in history that a "modern", "powerful" country fell into ruin.
Is it possible you also view the US with a certain rosey bias? Check out any of a bunch of major metrics, like murder, infant mortality, homelessness, healthcare, police brutality, and it must be said Covid mortality. Visit the south side of Chicago. If all you can say is "at least it is better than China, a third world country," then you aren't saying much, and in plenty of cases it actually isn't true.
> Coming from a third world country, whenever I see someone contrasting human rights abuses of US and China, I instantly realize the person was born and bred in the west, and does not have a meaningful realization of the level of depravity that can exist.
The purpose of these comparisons is to identify the similarity to the behavior of a country known to be worse. "China is worse." Yes, that's the point. We don't want to be like them, so we have to stop being like them.
Except the US is not. That's the point s/he was trying to make. Exaggeration only pushes the discussion to the most radical corners and ignores nuance.
They're trying to prosecute someone for the exact thing we need journalists to do in a free society. That's what China does, it's wrong, and we shouldn't be doing it.
You don't get to say we're not doing it until we're not doing it.
Of course it's not. But in some ways it is. China is totalitarian which the US isn't, and the US doesn't execute as many people, but still the US locks up a larger percentage of its population than China.
The US is better than China, but that's a low bar, and in a few areas it's only barely clearing that bar.
In other areas it's a lot better of course. Censorship is the big one. Also, the way China has oppressed some minorities (Uyghurs) hasn't happened in the US in decades (black people, native Americans). And the oppression did happen in a different way. But "different" isn't always better.
Actually I think the posters who make that false equivalence are often of Chinese sympathy. Whether they know they are doing false equivalence is a matter of debate.
I've heard people compare the imprisonment, re-education, forced labor, and organ harvesting of Uigher minorities in China today to the US internment of japanese in the 1940s.
Needless to say, both are bad, but if you need to reach back 75+ years in US history to find a comparable example, then the difference between the level of civil rights abuse in the two countries should be crystal clear.
It's obvious on the surface that the US still has many problems, but government sanctioned organ harvesting isn't one of them.
Whenever I see someone blindly assume everything is worse in China which just reached its goal of eliminated poverty for its massive population, I realize that person is a Trumpster
Yes I have. Have you? Eliminate poverty is not making everyone billionaires. Its getting rid of homelessness like tent farms in California. People are getting modern condos.
Btw it looks like yours is supporting Trump propaganda. Wow pot calls kettle black.
Coming from the US, it astounds me how uninformed people from third world countries are about the US and its staggering record of human rights abuses. I do understand that Hollywood and such are one hell of a marketing dept, but you are aware that the US has more Black people in cages than China has Uighurs, yes? I mean, when we're talking about how many lives each is destroying on a daily basis, I think they look pretty comparable.
