> It really doesn’t matter that China is worse. It’s not a competition. The fact that people in other places have even less privacy doesn’t make me feel better.
This is exactly the sentiment I wanted to convey. I'd feel far more comfortable if we didn't settle for "at least we're not as bad as..." levels of rhetoric. Unsavory surveillance practices in one country shouldn't give us a justification to accept the declining status quo here.
There is a lot bad going on in the US, but China is ten or a hundred times worse. For instance, the web is massively censored, and political dissidents get sent to jail by the hundreds or thousands.
Furthermore, in the US we still have enough freedom of speech that we can criticize surveillance at places like HN, and even organize efforts to resist it, even political campaigns, but in China that is completely impossible.
It seems to me that if people were to come to believe that things are as hopeless in the US as in China, then they would give up all efforts at resistance. I think that would be a terrible mistake.
>> In China, I was able to leave my computer at my table in a cafe without fear of it being taken because I knew every square inch of that cafe was in the view of cameras.
> China's state surveillance and massacres of dissidents is not something to be prideful about.
East Asian countries tend to be low-crime anyway even without blanket surveillance.
I didnt say we were way worse than China I said we are looking way worse (this is in regards to spying not human rights, pollution or other issues). Its one thing to claim China is conducting corporate espionage abroad. But its also pretty bad to say we are indiscriminately spying on people in entire countries. Literally the entire country.
> I've noticed that too. While there are legitimate criticisms of Chinese surveillance over Chinese social media (just like there are legitimate criticisms of American surveillance over American social media), I can't help by worry about something else: that this is how it begins. I worry that people who look like me will be deemed suspicious and discriminated against.
Let's not draw a moral equivalence between US surveillance and Chinese surveillance. Chinese surveillance is explicit, and profoundly more invasive and pervasive than the US's. It's also explicitly used as a political tool - to enforce the will of the party, not the state. These are extremely critical differences that it is irresponsible not to continually and stridently point out. What China is doing to its citizens is infinitely more frightening than anything the NSA has ever done.
> Also, although there may be some China bashing in the background, I don't see anything about the US being better.
There is a surprising amount of people that think of China as the bad communist state and the US as the superior nation. Even here on HN where I usually would expect the average commenter to have even some basic education.
It is the same population, I suspect, that is totally oblivious of the state of surveillance in their country and how this actually is bad and won't stop crime of any sort.
> I am en EU citizen, therefore an outside observer
I don't recall asking, but while we're throwing bona fides around - so am I
> I find the amount of state surveillance in both China and the US to be way beyond what is acceptable.
The fact that both are bad in no way means both are remotely equivalent - far less equivalent than your altitude analogy would imply
> Btw, I don't think you're as reasonable as you think, in not wanting to discuss the kind of hypothetical scenario I'm proposing. It was very common back in the days of the Cold War with people defecting from the USSR to the US, etc.
I'm apparently reasonable enough to recognize the world has changed since the cold war - not least of which China - sufficiently so that it's hardly a reasonable point of comparison
>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.
> but is the US that much better in terms of authoritarianism or surveillance?
Who knows? The last guy who touched upon it had to hide in freedom-loving Russia afterwards.
The PRC has it easy. They don't have to hide their actions behind contortions of "national security", which makes it difficult to compare the extent and pervasiveness of US and PRC surveillance.
> China is looked down for its draconian surveillance. However US is just another side of the same coin.
This is not the case - almost all major countries have surveillance agencies. It’s not the fact that China has surveilance that is looked down upon, it’s the lack of checks and balances. Most democratic countries have surveillance to ensure national security interests and they have strict checks and balances to minimize abuse and ensure that intel is used only for national security reasons.
China’s surveillance has no such checks and balances and does little to prevent abuse and that is worth criticizing. Perhaps this may change someday but the current party does not seem to be heading in that direction.
>The US system is superior to China because we have checks and balances that actually: 1) uncover this stuff, 2) share it with the public, 3) have a system to provide feedback, 4) courts to uphold rights.
1) surveillance of citizens in China it is public, no need to uncover anything
2) in China their government already shared it with the citizens since it's official policy
3) since when the feedback started to matter?
4) that it's very naive to assume that the laws and the courts will always be free of abuse and will always protect the freedoms of the citizens, protect their interests and protect the innocent, we are far from living in a perfect world: the only way to make someone can't abuse his power is to not give him that power. And they have courts in China too, if that matters.
>As someone neither American nor Chinese I feel China's far less likely to come along and bother me when I'm minding my own business than America is.
I'd rather be "bothered" by the US than "bothered" by China because in the former you can at least make the case that they shouldn't be bothering you and expect it to be considered. Government as the sum of all the bits that make it up behaves like a power hungry sociopath. Given the choice I'll take the sociopath that at least nominally respects human rights.
> This different priorities argument comes out every time China is discussed.
So you're trying to invalidate the argument by saying it's mentioned to often? I don't think this is how this works.
> Just because someone doesn't particularly care about censorship and surveillance doesn't mean they don't adjust their behavior accordingly though.
Of course they do, and if you knew Chinese culture you'd clearly see that. The average person trying to make a living might not, but it's the same in the west. Who even cared about the snowden revelations? Certainly not your bus driver. When bringing up the argument how companies like Facebook and google know more about you than your best friend, and government access is just one court order away, how many people counter you with "well I got nothing to hide"? I'd go as far as saying I can at least give the Chinese gvt the props for being upfront about their censorship and surveillance. Before snowden, if you claimed the NSA would be running a huge surveillance program tapping into the country's and world's largest internet exchanges, you got a confused look or were told to put your tinfoil hat back on.
Bottom line is, people in China genuinely think their country is heading in the right direction and the vast majority doesn't care about censorship and surveillance, anyone who's been to China for more than just a couple weeks quick travelling and didn't just spend time with other expats would quickly have learned that. Whether they truly understand the implications of this is an entirely different matter and not even part of the survey. But then again most westerners also don't, they just happen to live in a very free environment and don't realize what they got themselves there, or just don't care (Facebook point from above, voter turnouts).
> Things like National Security letters and the PATRIOT act make the US to me, as a European, seem very hypocritical right now.
These are not even remotely comparable. China is an outright police state. Not saying the United States doesn't have a lot of work to do with regards to personal liberty, but the Government here has nothing close to the iron grip control that the CCP has; they may want it, and what Government doesn't, but they don't have it and a ton of our internal legal mechanisms are designed specifically to prevent it.
> I'd rather be spied on by a western democracy than China.
Why? What has china done that's worse? Did they nuke a country? Wipe out entire races of people? Did those nasty chinese invade dozens of countries? There is nothing inherent in a western democracy that makes it good.
> Our intelligence agencies are out of control but there's still better mechanisms for reigning them in than China.
There are no mechanisms for controlling any intelligence agencies. All intelligence agencies around the world are state actors. No law applies to them. Ask the people the intelligence agencies murdered, drugged, experimented on, etc.
Unless you are chinese, you are far better off being "spied on" by the chinese than a western democracy because the chinese don't have any jurisdiction over you. This is all common sense. China isn't going to arrest you and put you in jail. A western democracy will though.
> I'm seriously wondering whether there is a better chance of establishing a reasonable dialogue with China than to stop you guys from messing stuff up.
IMHO China is much much worse, ranging from censorship (often over very small issues, like comparing Xi Jinping to Winnie the Pooh resulting in all of Winnie the Pooh being blacklisted), to the massive invasive surveillance state they've got and are expanding, to things like the concentration camps in Xinjiang.
For all the faults in the current US political landscape, it is still vastly better than China.
> the murder rate is literally 10x worse in the USA
I would be more likely to believe crime statistics published by the US government than the Chinese government.
> That's what they value here and it brings a type of freedom that you can't enjoy in the USA.
Well, that would be a single freedom, if those statistics are to be believed, that China apparently has that the USA doesn't. I would much rather have a greater chance of being murdered in a democratic and free society than feeling supposedly 'safer' in a country like China.
> Do you really feel safer in a country where you can get jailed without trial, where you can jailed, deported and banned from re-entry based on a urine test at the whim of some provincial government official that you crossed paths with? In China, the biggest threat is the government.
Being foreign to both countries, the difference is not obvious. Formally, this could happen to me in both countries. Even culturally, the "They only do it on strangers, so that's fine" argument before and during the Snowden files makes me doubt of the support I would get as a foreigner (and I'm on the good side of being a foreigner, not being a visible foreigner).
This is exactly the sentiment I wanted to convey. I'd feel far more comfortable if we didn't settle for "at least we're not as bad as..." levels of rhetoric. Unsavory surveillance practices in one country shouldn't give us a justification to accept the declining status quo here.
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