There will never be a Snowden in China. You can guarantee their life, or their love one's life will be held hostage.
So not only does the "West" ( So to speak ) has a system in place protecting these people, they also have a system to vote them out and elect a new form of government should the ultimate worst come to play.
What can you do with the CCP?
The reason there will be no Snowden in China is primarily that China doesn't hide its spying, and secondarily becaue China does not maintain the pretense of moral superiority on international scale. Snowden-type leak from China would not change the way Chinese citizens perceive their government, and nobody else would care, much less exert outside pressure to change things.
Leaks and whistleblowers will happen, though - they do happen even in most oppressive of regimes.
(Also excuse me, but I don't believe US wouldn't try to exert pressure on you through your loved ones in a case like this.)
Scooter Libby was prosecuted during the subsequent investigation and of course pardoned by Trump.
Because they don't have to, because they cannot be democratically removed from power and their people accept a high level of human rights abuses as status quo. US citizens do not.
Maybe, maybe not, but there is precedence in America for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg
> Daniel Ellsberg... precipitated a national political
> controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers,
> a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-
> making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York
> Times and other newspapers.
>
> On January 3, 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage
> Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy,
> carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. Due to
> governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering,
> and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School
> professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr.
> dismissed all charges against Ellsberg on May 11, 1973.
For an accusation like that you should always provide substantiated evidence, otherwise you're just flaming the anti-Chinese racial flames. Because as terrible as you may think the Chinese government is, it still has the legitimacy and support of a vast majority of the Chinese population.
Not the best coming from the Guardian admittedly, but still. Top result in google.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/26/chinese-activi...
What is that supposed to mean?
It's one of the few "left" newspapers in the UK.
Since you have brought up the subject of the genocidal CCP having the support of the Chinese population, let me ask you this: isn't it true that the feeling amongst Han Chinese is that they are superior to other races and and cultures, and are meant to rule them? Isn't that the policy CCP is following now?
https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/07/10/liu-xia...
It take's a rather famous case to make it into the Western news, but I have a close Chinese-national friend who's under the strong impression that dissident activity would be bad for her parents.
Has anything changed after Snowden revelations? New form of government?
Insane diplomatic incident.
You are right, USA wouldn't kill him if captured. They would only psychologically torture him for years, like they did with Manning.
Snowden would have been in a US jail if Russia hadn't found him to be a useful symbol of US hypocrisy. Snowden originally went to HK but the authorities were ready to extradite him, as were most countries that didn't want the US breathing down their necks.
At the local and state level, you can strategically implement gerrymandering to create electoral districts that are strongly advantageous to you. How would a political challenger not belonging to the dominant party win there?
Authoritarian regimes frequently win elections with 80-95% of the vote. That tells me that the people "can" vote him out.