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Comment by egao1980 | Hacker News Reader

egao1980

How this is worse than US extraditions / kidnapping of foreign nationals abroad? Never mind Assange there are plenty of people arrested outside of US and moved to US prison.

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For every thing the American judicial system does wrong, China does a hundred things worse. The conviction rate in China is well over 99% (if they want to find you guilty, they will). You can be detained with no access to a lawyer or family indefinitely. There is no separation of powers (the legal system isn't independent of the political system, and the constitution isn't worth anything). Torture and forced confessions are common. Roughly a million people are currently being held in concentration camps without any trial.

I know it's popular to be critical of America, and it's good to shine light on the darkest parts of America, but there is no comparison between it and what goes on in other parts of the world.

Which countries China has recently invaded and currently wages war against?

Tibet.

Recent?

Ongoing is as recent as it gets.

One could argue it is still occupied

I'm addition to Tibet they threaten Taiwan and all countries sharing a sea zone with them currently.

Whatever country Uyghurs reside in. So, seemingly... China itself.

This is because China lacks the rule of law and the CPC considers the very notion a threat to their power. They're probably right. The rule of law would diminish the CPC's authoritarian principals.

The only rule in CPC China is whatever the CPC says is the rule, at the time they say it. The consider human rights to be dangerous to the CPC. The fundamental opposition to human rights is spelled out in "Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere" in 2013.

It's interesting that Japan also has a conviction rate that exceeds 99%, and Canada has a conviction rate of 97%.

the USA ("Western") system has to at least fabricate some charges or destroy the target's reputation.

the PRC doesn't seem to have such 'cumbersome' restrictions.

Tell that to the guys in Gitmo. Though they might be not nice and totally guilty nobody bothered to formally charge them.

The guys in Gitmo were captured on the battlefield so the alternative is that they could be dead.

But let's focus on the lack of process in taking them captive instead of just killing then.

There are international treaties about handling prisoners of war. The thing is that US found a loophole not to admit that they are prisoners of war. What US did is similar to what their enemies like Taliban do.

The US didn't "find a loophole." Prisoner of war protections under international treaties only apply to state participants, meaning members of a state army.

Terrorists and other non-sanctioned armed forces are not protected by treaties between states because they are not fighting on behalf of a state. This is a recognized and intended exception to the rules governing POWs.

This is a very good point, and it's part of the reason that much of the western world abhors the US' practices in Guantanamo Bay, and criticizes them for it. It's a black mark on the USA's reputation.

You probably won't find a large audience here that defends gitmo though (probably). I expect most of us would agree about this.

it is my understanding that those who ended up in gitmo are typically associated with, and placed there under the understanding that they are suspected to be associated with actively violent "terrorist" organizations (the actively violent rogue groups is the point here, not the terrorist label, whatever that means lmao). It's not just people expressing dissenting opinions disappearing. This seems very very very different to me. Look up the communist student group at peking university in china (who are criticizing the capitalist tendencies and corruption of China) who are __currently__ disappearing. Edit: Not excusing gitmo on moral grounds, just pointing out it's pretty different than a country making its own dissenting citizens 'disappear'

They were threated worse than the prisoners of war are exepected to be treated. This is a weak excuse. An army is a violent group too, do the soldiers deserve such treatment when captured?

Could you please stop using HN primarily for political and ideological battle? It's not what this site is for, and it looks like you've been doing it exclusively. We ban accounts that do that, because HN exists for intellectual curiosity, which is destroyed by this sort of thing.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. You might also find these links helpful for getting the intended idea:

https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/hackernews.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/trolls.html

http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html

Who said it was worse? What matters is that it is wrong.

The article doesn't talk about the US or Assange at all. Why are you even bringing it up?

Why moving criminals from one part of China to the other part of China becomes bigger issue than US kidnapping people all over the world?

I don't think people are arguing that this is a bigger issue, but merely that both issues are bad.

Perhaps you should be protesting the detainment of suspected criminals in Gitmo, then, instead of commenting here.

What do you mean? If America is abusing its power for evil purposes then its fine if China does the same?

What is your solution, then? The demonstrators should realize the futility of their position, give up, go home, and allow the situation to deteriorate further?

Engaging in whataboutism just encourages the bad behavior you're highlighting here. It's a logical fallacy that leads to learned helplessness and a nihilistic worldview that actually ends up perpetuating the same vicious cycle I assume you wish to prevent.

Hong Kong is China though it has a formal autonomy. Anyone who thinks differently is heading for a nasty surprise.

Protests with street violence are making nice picture for Western media but will only bring trouble for individual local protesters. Criminal convictions, lost jobs, ruined careers.

This benefits only external actors that coordinate unrest and trying to get leverage on CCP in foreign affairs.

Those committing violence -- the people in uniforms attacking protestors -- are not going to get criminal convictions or lose their jobs. This is China we're talking about.

An anti-China thread isn’t complete without a whataboutism or “and you are lynching negroes” response.

To be fair, at the times you've mentioning US _was_ "lynching negros".

Here we have situation similar to US extraditing criminals from Puerto Rico. Why this suddenly become an issue?

Because this extradition arrangement is a very clear and specific violation of the agreement that brought HK under Chinese rule.

Whataboutism is relevant here. After all, one of the many reasons the right-wing elements became predominant in Japan in the first half of the 20th century is because Western powers were not willing to recognize it as an empire, even when they had done the same type of land grabs that Japan was trying to do.

edit: to clarify my clumsy statement a bit, I am not saying that criticism of America specifically is relevant here, or that America is just as bad (I agree that this is a ridiculous notion) but that the competing narratives and the past have direct consequences on politics. You can certainly see that on the discussions on climate change.

Please don't do this tired trope on HN. The threads are bad enough without it.

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

I appreciate that you're trying to maintain HN as a place for civil intellectual discourse, but I'd argue that people in these threads constantly implying China to be beyond criticism because "well the US does bad things too" is the actual "tired trope" here, not the people rightly calling out that fallacious logic and labeling it as what it is.

They both are. There's no law of conservation of tired tropes.

Fair enough, but at the very least both should then be called out as such, no?

Sure, but we can't come close to moderating everything, or even seeing everything. I've certainly replied to many such comments on HN. If you see a particularly bad one that didn't get scolded, the likeliest explanation is that we didn't see it.

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