I don't see how... Yes, the US has a classist bias and certainly some mild corruption. That still seems a world apart from a single party system that routinely flouts its own constitution.
Also, executive orders and legislation are bound by the constitution in theory and practice. While they may result in abrupt changes from time-to-time, they are limited in scope. That seems materially different to me than a single party system that can pass, overturn, or utterly ignore whatever legislation it likes overnight.
Hear, hear! In Anglo-Saxon England, the King too needed support from his lords. Clearly all of these systems are all exactly identical and there has been no progress in the intervening millennium.
The King needed a varying amount of support from lords, one church or another and a developing parliament depending on when in time it was.
And at every step along that journey, it was proclaimed as the best possible way of doing things, ordained by god, etc etc. Not just politics, we actually have the ideal system here.
To be clear, my response was satire. You suggested that the Supreme Court was functionally the same as the CCP politburo on the basis that there is some non-zero amount of politicking in either case. I pointed out that the same was true of Anglo-Saxon England to expose the ridiculousness of the equivalence, but you're ignoring that point and making a new point, utterly unrelated to the previous one (in fairness I would also abandon that position)? Something to the effect of, "Because some Americans and Anglo-Saxons thought their systems were the bees-knees, they must be equally terrible"? Am I getting this right?
The “constitution” isn’t an adjective, and I didn’t mention “freedom”. The US incarceration rates are suboptimal, but China is operating actual concentration camps and sterilizing women based on their ethnicity. In 2020 the US had a record year with respect to brutality against journalists and it still would have been the best year China has had in at least the last 70 years. China still practices slavery in all but name. 60 years ago the CCP was waging genocide against its own people. If “corruption” feels too abstract for you, hopefully those things can provide some context about “where the rubber meets the road”. If you still think these things are on the same level as the US’s problems, we aren’t going to be able to have a productive debate.
So, just to pick one of your accusations there -- forced sterilization in China is a global policy if you have too many kids. It's not ethnically targeted, and until recently, minority populations were allowed to have more kids than Han Chinese.
This is easily verifiable if you talk to anyone from China. Too many kids, you get sterilized, them's the rules (unless you're rich/connected, of course). So why do our media always report cases involving minorities out of context, creating unfortunate assumptions? Who benefits from that?
You'd think the free press would surface the most accurate story, right? Just like the awesome judiciary shouldn't lead to world-leading incarceration rates. This set of gaps is what I'm talking about, not China's sins or virtues.
> This is easily verifiable if you talk to anyone from China.
Is it conceivable that China is not entirely honest with its citizens about its various atrocities? If this seems far-fetched, perhaps we could examine the CCP's track record of disinformation, misinformation, and censorship campaigns against its own populace.
> Mass Birth-Prevention Strategy. China has simultaneously pursued a dual systematic strategy of forcibly sterilizing Uyghur women of childbearing age and interning Uyghur men of child-bearing years, preventing the regenerative capacity of the group and evincing an intent to biologically destroy the group as such. According to Government statistics and directives, including to “carry out family planning sterilization,” “lower fertility levels,” and ”leave no blind spots,” China is carrying out a well-documented, State-funded birth-prevention campaign targeting women of childbearing age in Uyghur-concentrated areas with mass forced sterilization, abortions, and IUD placements. China explicitly admits the purpose of these campaigns is to ensure that Uyghur women are “no longer baby-making machines.”
> Asking a citation for how the one-child (now two child) policy has worked for the last 40 years is pretty telling.
Come now, you're being willfully obtuse. Clearly I was asking for a citation about your claim that it's not ethnically motivated beyond "ask any Chinese citizen".
> I sure am glad we have experts rather than security state propaganda.
Well, you don't trust the media, and you don't trust independent researchers, but you totally trust the Chinese government, so I don't know how we're going to make progress. Seems like we should just agree to disagree.
TL:DR; -- Historically, minorities were allowed to have way more kids on paper and the limits were rarely enforced in fact. Since ~2018 there's equality, via raising Han Chinese limits and applying even enforcement, so it's a change and there's some upset about it, but it's the removal of favoritism rather than the imposition of discriminatory measures. It got to even.
..
As far as who I trust. DC natsec think tanks are absolutely at the bottom of that list on ANY topic, they are guaranteed to be entangled with the military-industrial complex. I trust our actual military more than I do those think tanks. (And the one you chose turns out to be funded by... gulenists??? I did not expect that, frickin wild -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_University_of_America)
On THIS topic -- the hard evidence points towards internment and mandatory patriot camp, which are bad, but no genocide, slavery or any of those other crazy accusations thrown about. This is.. not great but also exactly what the Chinese government says they're doing. They put out press releases saying, "yeah, it's mandatory job training and harmony camp". Western media are the ones throwing unsubstantiated claims around.
They ACTUALLY INCLUDE a Chinese newspaper page that they're selectively and deceptively quoting from. As an image, though, so you can't copy/paste it into Google Translate. The source that THAT THEY ARE USING is a story about a state-run "gig economy for cotton picking" program where people with small farms can work on bigger farms during their downtime, one guy is super stoked that he made 5k RMB ($800) in a month (quite a lot for the third world). They pull ominous-sounding quotes about 'organization' out of this story out of context while implying forced labor, right in front of your face, just banking on you not being able to read Chinese. If you read carefully, there's never even a hard accusation, let alone any evidence. Just lots of innuendo.
So who should I trust? I don't know if or why Sudworth was run out of town, but his track record shows a lot of bias and disregard for the truth. Maybe some zealous local party members made him feel unwelcome, maybe he was pressured by higher-placed people in the party, or maybe he's just making a play for an easy headline. I don't know.
A single party system sounds very scary, because how can you vote them out? But... that's just not how China's system works. I'm not an expert on China at all, and I don't mean to claim to be. I'm just an internet dweeb, but I'd still like to try to explain what I mean:
Within a party like China's, there isn't just bland homogenous unity. There are factions, with histories and ideological alignments and family connections, aspirations, and so on. Xi Jinping's ascendance was part of a long political game that came along with specific groups, ideas, and policies to the forefront of Chinese political power for a period, and it was supported by the prevailing milieu within the party, and could not have happened without them.
Over time, that milieu changes, and so do the party's goals, priorities, and actions. That happens as the course of external events and affairs, internal politics, economics, public sentiment, fortunes, etc. all unfold to shape it. Jinping has acted to maintain his power and continue his own work and vision, which appears to still be supported by the political powers that surround him. Changing their Constitution (to allow further terms) is a legal action, and they followed a process to do so. It would have required significant political capital to see that process through. It was hardly flouted, even if we balk at the result.
Fundamentally, what is done by the Chinese government is always simply work to preserve and extend: China's sovereign power, the well-being of its people, and the wealth of its ruling class. This is basically true of all nation states.
In America, it is difficult to change the Constitution. Maybe more difficult than in China; constitutions have different levels of significance in different places. But there is similarly a process for it that has been executed many times.
If someone really needs to, they can try to accrue and expend the required political capital to get an amendment done. There's been talk that the Koch brothers and some associated folks have been working on that for years[1]. In the meantime, Presidents, at the behest of whomever they are politically beholden to, work hard to get Judges in place to interpret laws however they may need, and those interpretations vary wildly.
Meanwhile, the two parties in America change as their cultural milieu forged by similarly shifting economic, political, etc. forces unfolds. They consistently line their own and their friends' pockets, start wars, create secret courts, surveil people, and so on.
So how different is having Just Two Parties who take turns depending on a very big vote, but that think in and act in many fundamentally similar ways... from Just One Party with an ever-changing internal makeup, whose leadership takes turns depending on a smaller vote? Ultimately, the American government still and always works to extend America's sovereign power, the well-being of its people, and the wealth of its ruling class.
To repeat myself a little from another post, I'm personally much happier living in a Western-style democracy than a Chinese-style system, where we at least maintain the illusion of real popular control. But the changes we can really effect as individuals, and the power we really have, in either system, are quite limited. While different tools are employed, the aims, the justifications, and the results are broadly similar in the end.
Perhaps you think the United States differs fundamentally in that it can't or won't use violence or underhanded political tactics against its own citizens, to keep the dissidents it really fears down? Read about Sandra Bland, Fred Hampton, or Martin Luther King. There are many, many examples here -- the mask of just benevolence slips off pretty easily.
What I'm ultimately saying is that, if the United States government needed to, it could and likely would use the same tactics the Chinese government does. It already does from time to time in limited contexts.
We, the people, get to choose as long as it's between Harvard and Yale, and if we got really dangerous and started to forcefully demand, say... anything really different? The string of unfortunate coincidences would come out first, and if we somehow kept our momentum up past that, well, then the gloves would come off for a while, until we quieted down.
We feel good about our worldview precisely because we are able to imagine that those gloves cannot come off, or that they wouldn't ever unless it was really justified, and then we'd be on the right side of it, right? But in reality they don't serve 'justice'. They serve the extension of America's sovereign power, the "well-being" of its people, and the wealth of its ruling class.
All that to say, I still feel like it is pretty similar.
I don't know how you can confidently compare (post-war) China and the U.S. this way. No doubt the U.S. has some degree of corruption, but surely we can recognize that corruption isn't a binary and indeed China is in a different corruption ballpark than the U.S. Similarly, you listed a handful of names of citizens who were killed by the U.S. government and indeed these are tragedies, but how long do you reckon the complete list is, and how does it compare to China's? So if you're only here to argue that the U.S. is imperfect, I don't think anyone here disagrees--no one has argued that the U.S. is perfect in this thread, and indeed I began it with an admission of U.S. imperfection. But I don't see how anyone can contend that the gap between these countries is small.
I don't see how... Yes, the US has a classist bias and certainly some mild corruption. That still seems a world apart from a single party system that routinely flouts its own constitution.
Also, executive orders and legislation are bound by the constitution in theory and practice. While they may result in abrupt changes from time-to-time, they are limited in scope. That seems materially different to me than a single party system that can pass, overturn, or utterly ignore whatever legislation it likes overnight.