• mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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    8 months ago

    About 2,300 people have been arrested in the US this week.

    About 10,000 people were arrested in the months of unrest in Hong Kong – so the rate of arrest per unit time is much lower than in the US. On the other hand, three years later, about 7,200 were still in custody without charges yet being brought. (More statistics in the link) We can quibble about whether you want to call that, or someone getting renditioned back to the mainland, “disappeared,” but I would define it as much worse than someone getting tackled or gassed in the US and then released a couple days later with either a misdemeanor or nothing but their injuries.

    This isn’t some whataboutism to excuse the US response; the US police do some fucked up things to people who try to protest their country’s barbaric global policies and this week was more of the same. And they seem to be experimenting with ludicrously overcharging protestors, moving slightly in the direction of the system China uses, although still well short of it.

    But comparing all of that unfavorably to what China does to people who protest is pretty silly IMO.

      • sinovictorchan@lemmygrad.ml
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        8 months ago

        My family who have the wealth and connections to flee China immediately before the Communist takeover allleged that murder and authoritarianism are good to prevent violence over insufficient resource for survival from the overpopulation. Although my family are victim of Communism, their accounts of China could never describe the lives under Communism since they fled China before the Communist period. The only information that they have about Communism are from highly biased source of the British empire like the video of the ramming of a truck by thugs in plain clothes in the Tiananmen Square false flag terrorism which contradicts the Pax Americana claim of shooting, the claim of attacks by people in military uniform, and the question of the existance of plot armor to take video of attacks without danger of attack. The iconic tank man video in the slanderous propaganda by the Western European diaspora also ironically reveals that the PLA will never harm citizens even when provoked, that anyone can attack Chinese soldiers without repercussion from the military, and that anyonecan freely take record video and photos in front of PLA without consequence.

      • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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        8 months ago

        About 10,000 people were arrested in the months of unrest in Hong Kong … three years later, about 7,200 were still in custody without charges yet being brought. (More statistics in the link)

          • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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            8 months ago

            As everyone knows, it was impossible to tell in 2022 what had happened in the three years since 2019.

            However, there is a good point to be made there. It’d be nice to get more up-to-date information about what was the disposition of all these cases, and see if these people are still in prison years after they were allegedly part of a protest.

            Since China unlike the US upholds a commitment to the basic norms of transparency in a democratically operated prison system, there’s a web page where I can just look up who are all the people, where they’re being held, and what the disposition of their charges is, and see records from the trial, or even go and be there in person and watch, if I feel like it.

            Oh wait

              • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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                8 months ago

                Yeah, and they let him go 90 minutes later instead of him being still in custody with still no trial after three years. And that was such a disturbing big deal that four years after that, the last time I brought it up and what a bad thing it was was was… yesterday. I saw another poster bring up the same incident earlier this week, too.

                The US police does some fucked up stuff (and they accelerated it up to like 5% of a China level under Trump, including that exact thing you cited). Any level is bad; it’s like not the China doing something excuses the US doing it, nor vice versa. But saying the two are comparable in the level of injustice in their prison and court system (let alone that China is superior in that regard) is transparently absurd.

                • ghost_of_faso2@lemmygrad.ml
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                  8 months ago

                  The US police does some fucked up stuff (and they accelerated it up to like 5% of a China level under Trump

                  my brother in christ, the US has the most people locked up out of any country currently, in history.

                  • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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                    8 months ago

                    Yeah. And a lot of them get abused; it’s more or less legalized mild-to-moderate torture for most of the time you’re in. And if you don’t have a bunch of spare money in the bank, trying to defend yourself against even bogus charges drops you into a Kafkaesque nightmare where your defending attorney is overworked and jaded, and the cops, judges, and prosecutor are generally all on the same team which has effectively infinite resources. It’s the worst system of all the ostensible democracies, easily, by a clean country mile.

                    They just closed a women’s prison in California that was more or less a legalized rape-playground for the guards, that everyone had known about for quite a while, but no one could really raise up the inclination to do anything about. Because hey, what the fuck, they’re prisoners. So who cares.

                    So imagine what a bone-chilling nightmare the Chinese system must be, to manage to be worse than the US by quite a bit.

          • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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            8 months ago

            Well this looks like exactly the kind of outlet that would produce hard-hitting criticism of China’s actions, in the hypothetical that any of that were ever warranted

            • GreatSquare@lemmygrad.ml
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              8 months ago

              Fuck off then. The topic is not about China. The HK police was just used as a comparison vs US police in terms of their response. You quoted a source that is particularly unreliable on HK riots because that’s just a sign of how butthurt China makes you.

              US is complete shit. HK police were far far better. To call their behaviours similar is complete bullshit.