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Comment by tuxracer | Hacker News Reader

> they're words on paper that governments or populist movements can easily ignore

For example, China's constitution also contains "Article 35. Citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration."

However various words and phrases to even mention Article 35 itself are banned in some chat apps, etc... in China even though the full text of the constitution is available anyways.

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They can do it without any cognitive dissonance by either classifying certain persons as non-citizens (hence not granted those rights) or by raising some unclear limit to these rights (so those who break national unity, "harmony" or some such aren't covered).

An example outside of China: Venezuela's Maduro, paying attention to international sensibilities, now classifies opposition to him and his government as "hate speech".

https://hosted.ap.org/article/8b39037f0c71478784778e4dcc8bb4...

Why go to China for examples? That's how we do it in the USA, too.

Free speech zones? cough

like censorship doesn't happen in the usa. remember all that media coverage sanders got when he was packing stadiums while Clinton could barely fill a highschool auditorium? me neither.

how many mass shootings china had last year? oh wait

how about all those bombs dropped daily in the middle east? ah ooos sorry, america again.

USA USA USA

That’s not censorship. Censorship is when the government restricts speech. The government doesn’t control American news media.

With that said I have no disagreement about the hypocrisy of USA bombing foreign countries.

As for shooting, how would we know if this happened in China since the government does control the media there. They could suppress anything they reflected negatively.

China's constitution sounds very unlike their real policy. Is there no recourse for Chinese citizen's to challenge unconstitutional actions?

You must be mistaken. China's Constitution matches exactly with daily life in China. Of course there's a way to challenge unconstitutional actions, through the Communist Party member dispute process where you can escalate to each level of political officers in the township you live in.

If you go high enough, you might get personal attention from the regional or even provincial governors, who also have to make sure they have enough food, water, shelter, jobs, and prisons to fit the population of their jurisdiction.

I do not understand this comment. Is it sarcasm? Or do you use some unusually restrictive definitions of "freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration"?

China has literally just banned the word 'disagree'.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2018/02/27/china-drowns-critics-l...

It's sarcasm. Note the last element in the list.

No, there isn't. Try it and you'll be put under house arrest or worse, and you won't get any due process.

China is not a rule of law country, so whatever it’s constitution actually says isn’t very important legally speaking.

Even this two-term was just a speed bump to be repealed quickly if convenient by a rubber stamp congress.

The US is just one branch of government away from the same fate.

Right, FDR pulled it off.

Get the joke?

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