Not necessarily, or they wouldn't need to coerce apologetic confessions:
http://www.economist.com/news/china/21689620-what-current-vo...
Their interrogation techniques have been known to be extremely brutal right up until the moment you apologize -- even if it's just two people in a room with cameras off -- because the Chinese government wants it that way. They want the rules to be extremely well known.
Everyone knows you get beat till you go back on your "disruptive" ideals. Sometimes they permanently cripple people or put them in a coma. 99% of the time, though, they release them. That way, everyone knows, when they see that the dissident is basically fine, that they betrayed their own beliefs, even if it was in private, even if no one saw.
Completely irrelevant aside: it's stuff like this that comes to mind when people talk about how dysfunctional the American government is. The Chinese government can have complex policies with parts that a lot of people find uncomfortable or wrong, and still have the whole system the way that will be most effective instead of most comfortable -- their astounding urbanization and rise in not just wealth but advanced skills and it's relation to the hukou system is a good example -- but when you have unchecked power... this is another consequence.
North Korea is a Stalinist state. They have elections and refer to themselves as a democratic people's republic. China does not have elections or refer to themselves as democratic.
Also, China is much more straightforward in prosecuting descent. They just say that someone belongs to an illegal non-harmonious organization like Falun-Gong or whatever and that's illegal. Send them to prison. No fancy trumped up charges or subterfuge needed.
It seems like governments are somewhat uniform in the laws they pass, but fundamentally fickle about which laws they choose to enforce. In my state, for example, it's a felony to be a member of a subversive organization...
http://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=9.81.030
...e.g., the Communist Party...
http://app.leg.wa.gov/RCW/default.aspx?cite=9.81.083
...but it would be unthinkable for them to actually prosecute anyone for it.
Edit: My mistake, it was 1958, but they took legal action in the 1960s (Loving vs Virginia, 1967), and despite the Supreme Court's ruling, some states kept such laws on the books as late as 2000 (Alabama), which is actually probably what you were referring to.
The comment by the judge in 1958 is (almost) unbelievable:
Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow,
malay and red, and he placed them on separate
continents. The fact that he separated the races shows
that he did not intend for the races to mix.
Presumably God wasn't as fussy about non-red races in the legal profession in North America.I wish the federal government and every state had a lawspeaker -- for statute laws anyways.
Bear in mind that for each of the prominent people made to confess all sorts of crazy things in the Moscow Trials, hundreds of thousands were more or less straightforwardly sent to the Gulag:
- Did you refer to Comrade Stalin as a fool in your letter to A?
- Yes I did but look...
- Art. 58, 25 years.
ba-dum bum
Is that true? The number of Americans in prison is somewhat over two million. It's hard to find numbers for the USSR, but the conservative number I was able to find for the peak of the gulag system in 1950 is about 2.5 million, and that's out of a population a little over half the size of the current US population. Others claim the true numbers were much greater.
Note: not defending the US in any way here. Our prison population is absurd. The fact that the numbers are even this close is unacceptable. This is really just nitpicking.
http://www.sott.net/article/300679-American-Gulag-US-has-mor...
The interesting part isn't how China behaves, it's that the US - supposedly on a higher level than China - behaves much the same way, it just tries really hard to cover it up.