It seems likely other governments are using the same techniques and that our, I'm assuming, Western view of China as overbearingly authoritarian is tainted by a lot of cultural baggage: that the hostility of the Chinese security services towards their own population isn't as markedly different as we imagine it to be, because I - for example - have been carefully inculcated into the idea that Western governments are beneficent in their spying whilst other governments are malicious.
Decades of careful propagandised hatred for the Commies, or the Reds, or whatever slur, is hard to shake off too.
Or maybe you're right. But it's impossible to trust what our own governments say to us now.
> it's impossible to trust what our own governments say to us now.
Sure, but throwing up our hands and assuming that all states are basically the same probably takes us further from the truth.
We've got to make our own judgments somehow, and it's prety clear that despite the many flaws of our Western countries, they are meaningfully more open and tolerant of dissent, investigative journalism and the like than some other countries, including China.
Every piece of information should be taken with a grain of salt, and it makes sense to add a few extra grains when it comes to countries that we have been trained to be suspicious of. But that doesn't mean we should bury it all in a salt mine and ignore it.
>they are meaningfully more open and tolerant of dissent, investigative journalism and the like than some other countries, including China. //
I'd agree with all that. I just don't have any evidence to suggest they're watching us less or have greater ethics when it comes to invading citizens/subjects privacy in secret.
That's fair, but I also think absence of evidence is meaningful in proportion to the likelihood that, if evidence existed, it would be gathered and disseminated. In other words, the more closed the society, the more we should assume the worst when the facts are unclear.
In absolute terms whistleblowing is a dangerous game in the west, so it is likely that there's plenty being successfully hidden from us -- and the evidence we do have suggests that surveillance is very intense and intrusive. But I still lean toward the belief that it is probably relatively more restrained, and less likely to be used in completely dystopian ways, than in more secretive and repressive states less constrained by the rule of law.
The US is still actually pretty good to it's citizens by global standards. For example as an American I don't have any worries that the government will come after me if I speak out against it and a politician can't have me thrown in jail without a trial.
But I mean of course as an American I would care more about what the US does because it affects me more. The war on drugs especially is an authoritarian nightmare (and practically had ended up racist) and the war on terror has eroded due process but China has a type of authoritarianism that just isn't the same as the type we have in the US.
USA Drug War was always meant to be racist, and it always has been. See the statements of e.g. Anslinger and Nixon. Seeing mere contingency where intent is clear is a tawdry sort of privilege.
I was just making a weaker claim because honestly I didn't have enough time to properly defend a stronger one on the internet and in my experience ascribing racism explicitly to things takes a lot of effort to defend (though in this specific case that isn't true). Apologies if it was insensitive.
