The last time there was a big organized push for democracy was the Student Protests which led to the Tianimen Square massacre "US Government files declassified in 2014 estimated there had been 10,454 deaths and 40,000 injured. This figure was from internal Chinese government files obtained from the Chinese government headquarters in Zhongnanhai."
edit: I am not saying its impossible to fight for individual liberties there but it is definitely nothing like the west.
https://youtu.be/tzY7qQFij_M (for the reference)
marketing is the best thing that has ever happened to humanity.
North Korea GDP per capita: $500
There's definitely some aggression going on against the North Korean people.
I'm making a similar point and showing why "speaking up" is hard by showing how the Americans haven't done so in the same conflict, where they are actually to blame rather than the Chinese.
Note the difference between the observation that they don't care, and the claim they shouldn't care. I'm just making the first one here. You may believe that is wrong, but it won't change the facts on the ground.
As a result, it's not a relevant comparison, because there's no coercion in the case you cite.
In practice the local police have really screwed up protecting people's rights in recent years but it doesn't change the fact that achieving big goals like changing US foreign policy is HARD.
The difference is in the US change like this is HARD. Not necessarily DANGEROUS. If you can achieve political action and change you are RESPECTED because it is HARD. You are not FEARED because you are DANGEROUS.
Right now people in China are mostly content with the current ideology.
This design actually matches reality very well: while US apparently chose Freedom ideology, China chose Order ideology. China would finish impressive large project faster and more efficient, with the cost of dictatorship.
http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Ideology_(Civ5)
(Civ5 got a lot of these right, including a technology called "the Great Firewall" to counter the cultural influence from other civilizations http://civilization.wikia.com/wiki/Great_Firewall_(Civ5) )
It's an abstraction to allow for fun and balanced gameplay.
It doesn't match reality at all in fact. The exact opposite is true for nearly all cases (China being the sole exception).
The major liberal economies are radically more productive than countries like China, much less the other 'order' type nations. The order economies, save partially for China (which is still extremely poor in the bottom 2/3), are on average impoverished, backwards, and with very low productivity. Even China is still shockingly backwards at a lot of common economic tasks, such as farming (they have ~1/40th the farming productivity of South Korea).
The liberal economies have dozens of major success stories, from Germany to Canada to the US to Sweden. The 'order' group has one, and only insofar as China liberalized its economy and moved away from a rigid command & control economy.
Autocratic doesn't get you a superior military. It typically gets you an economy that is bled and debased to feed the military, which ultimately is self-destroying. See: Russia, whose people are very poor ($8k GDP per capita; $4,000 median net worth). Meanwhile Putin diverts vast resources they can't afford at all, into military spending.
Liberal economies produce superior militaries pound for pound, because they can afford to sustain them over time.
[1]https://books.google.com/books?id=YQOhVb5Fbt4C&lpg=PA92&ots=...
[2]http://theweek.com/articles/757554/china-now-just-another-au...
[3]http://www.observa.it/the-technocratic-trend-and-its-implica...
With the lengths that it goes to censor information, how could we know that? Lack of civil war / turmoil does not imply full consent or approval.