China’s firewall plays a crucial role in shaping the country’s digital landscape, preventing foreign intervention, and maintaining national security. While often criticized in the West, the firewall provides China with the ability to control information flow, shield its population from foreign influence, and protect domestic media.
Yeah it’s equally naive to believe that the Chinese firewall acts purely as a hostile censor, Chinese people aren’t uneducated, oppressed, impoverished individuals, they are accomplished, politically active, and well to do. The Chinese people have comparatively derived a larger individual and collective benefit from their government than Americans have in the last 50 years.
If you read actual comparisons of “censorship regimes” there are tons of commonalities that are just ignored by Westerners and their Chinese counterparts are made out to be uniquely evil and beyond the pale. For every news article you read about how the National Security Police invites a satirist to “drink tea” you’re ignoring all of the times the FBI does the exact same thing, and uses various psychological tactics to escalate into a position of legal authority to get around their limited authority to collect evidence.
You know why it’s “soooo hard” for the cops to arrest rich people even if they know where they are? It’s because the tactic of escalatory arrest (an arrest that happens without a warrant as the result of an “investigation”) doesn’t work on rich people, they have gates, intercoms, staff, and know their rights. They aren’t easily cajoled into the position of opening their home to a cop, or allowing a cop access to their body. Isn’t is very strange that these very technical legal distinctions aren’t told explicitly to the “freedom loving people” of America? Meanwhile the agents of “evil Chinese government” don’t need to play games like this, because the cards are all on the table.
People in other countries get “dissapeared”, but when ICE or the Department of Corrections shuffles prisoners around for political purposes such as Mahmoud Khalil. People in other countries are “political prisoners” but in America we have the WGAD which is a nice rhetorical trick so that the government can “honestly label” it’s political prisoners (upon a opaque and deliberatley difficult review process only undertaken by those who actually want to go through it for the benefit of being labeled a political prisoner. WGAD has not authority to enforce anything.
People in other countries get thrown in jail because of political corruption, in the US saying such a thing is insulting the honor of the judiciary as a whole, a judiciary that allows the same practices the jailed Stephen Donzinger for the crime of taking on a legal case against Chevron in Ecuador. Furthermore it’s processes are abused to provide legal procedural punishments for missteps in engaging with the system such as the contempt charges the Donzinger case. Donzinger is still disbarred and cannot leave the country, despite winning all of his appeals. All at the behest of a corporation that doesn’t want to create a precedent that it must pay for poisoning people.
The reality here is that you’re not actively comparing things, you are just going on hunches or whims, and if you take a look that’s how a lot of information you receive is actually structured. That is what allows labels like “authoritarian” to have a spooky evil weight. In essence the US has simplify codified the abuse into law, which is how it gets around these icky little moments of “Are we the baddies?” the reply is a thought terminating cliche of “No we’re all just following legal orders, in the freest country in the World”. China doesn’t need to Nuremburg because it’s goal of social cohesion ensures that people understand how and why things are happening to them.
You? I like you.