And west is trying to return the favor a few centuries later by trying to introduce basic human rights and/or democracy in China but so far, with not much success...
What seems to be the case is that they're shooting for slow incremental improvement, moving from less touchy areas to more touchy areas. They've gone from not talking about corruption to cracking down on it higher and higher up the ranks. It's a very slow sleigh of hand, with the distraction being economic growth, and various distinctly communist tasting programs (the current one should be 中国梦(Chinese Dream), if I recall correctly).
But their fear doesn't seem unjustified. There are still spontaneous uprisings which are usually nipped in the bud before they can escalate by means of information and communication monitoring. That's what they care about. Expats in China using VPNs? They don't give one.
Whilst I'm all for democracy, introducing it to China right now would work about as well as introducing it to the Middle East. Groups feeling under-represented would fraction off, there would likely be civil war, widespread devastation to one of the most populous countries of the world, and worst of all, whilst Iran getting nuclear weapons seems like a looming threat, China does have them. The sheer pandemonium would make Syria look like a backwater stand-off. I may be exaggerating, but then look at the bloodshed of the cultural revolution.
I grew up in Germany, so it's not like I'm opposed or unfamiliar with the idea of democracy, it's an incredible system. But for China right now? Well meant, but not practical. It'd be a less bloody affair to turn the US into a monarchy (to make a comparison). In 20 years, maybe, though it might take longer.
Thinking China can be fixed with a fair heaping of democracy and human rights ignores a lot of very significant details in a country that works contrary to a lot of accepted wisdom in the west.
/rant
PS: There's lots of interesting things going on here, playing churned lover with western ideals is literally the least interesting thing to talk about. The day before yesterday they announced changes to the Visa regimen, coming into effect in March. 72-hour visa free visit in 4 yangtze river cities, and some streamlining of visa/green card programs for tech people and entrepreneurs working in China. Maybe I should have chosen a less ironic user name, because this is starting to sound like a sales pitch.
The new visa regimes are interesting, but it hasn't seem to trickle down yet to us tech PhD people's. Really, China doesn't like foreigners, and they merely tolerate us, making us register at police stations after every trip, making us renew our visas yearly, not giving us access to the same services as natives.
The regulation I'm referring to seems like a pilot program in scope. It allows foreign students to work for and start tech businesses in the Zhongguancun area, as well as allowing people that have worked for 4 years or more for a technology company here to receive a residency permit. That's been exciting me the last 3-4 days since I heard of it, since I've been playing with the thought of doing exactly that.
It does feel like people well versed in technology are the bottleneck for startups over here. Investment is plenty, people with ideas are a RMB a dozen, but tech people knowing more than some PHP or how to set up Bootstrap? Not nearly as many, at least where I'm hanging out.
It's certainly an interesting couple of years ahead, as long as they keep tolerating us here.
It is not there yet but not much success is too negative imho. Looking at Apple and other western brands here I think it even went too far. Mao would not be happy.
You mean kind like you're free to go wherever you want in prison, as long as you don't try to walk out of the door of your cell? :P
Here's a really sobering thought though:
> You can have a lot of political 'change' in the United States, but will it really change that much? Will it change the amount of money in someone’s bank account? Will it change contracts? Will it void contracts that already exist? And contracts on contracts? And contracts on contracts on contracts? Not really.
> So I say that free speech in many Western places is free not as a result of liberal circumstances but rather as a result of such intense fiscalization that it doesn’t matter what you say. The dominant elite doesn’t have to be scared of what people think, because a change in political view is not going to change whether they own their company or not; it is not going to change whether they own a piece of land or not. But China is still a political society, although it is rapidly heading toward a fiscalized society. And other societies, like Egypt, are still heavily politicized. Their rulers really do need to be concerned about what people think, so they expend proportionate efforts on controlling freedom of speech.
-- Julian Assange
My sister's home town in Michigan says it's illegal to spit on the ground. America threatens jail time for possessing weed!
Despite leaking state secrets, Snowden's life was never threatened by US officials. Yes, he's a whistleblower, but his actions are far more serious than developing software. Even then, US officials talk of imprisonment at worst.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2013/06/11/ron-paul-us-gover...
http://www.businessinsider.com/us-spies-talk-about-killing-s...
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/edward-snowden-...
Your second link cites Buzzfeed as a source, and the Buzzfeed article[1] claims some unnamed low-level officials would like to kill Snowden. Yet these anonymously-quoted people also admit that they wouldn't do it unless they had approval from higher up. Pretty close, but still not a threat.
Your last link is about a retired government official making a joke in very poor taste.
None of these are actual threats, let alone by US officials. They're either idle musings, or bad jokes, or "I want to, but I'm not going to." I certainly don't agree with the people making these despicable statements, but they're qualitatively different from, "If you don't stop leaking state secrets, you will die."
1. http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/americas-spies-want-edw...