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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who has done even a tiny bit of research into the Chinese government wouldn't need to ask that question.

Here's a preview: https://www.hrw.org/news/2011/09/22/why-are-people-disappear...

See also what's happening in Hong Kong right now.

> On Aug. 24, Chinese state media announced a proposed change in the Criminal Procedure Law which would allow police to legally detain individuals and hold them incommunicado in secret detention for up to six months without contact with either their families or legal counsel.

Up to six months! That's not bad, considering the fact that some prisoners have been held in Guantanamo for 10 years+ and can be detained there indefinitely without trial and subjected to torture [1].

[1] https://www.amnesty.org.uk/guantanamo-bay-human-rights

The Chinese don't intend this for terrorists who are blowing up rice markets filled with women and children in Iraq, they intend this for journalists and protestors.

Who are allegedly blowing up rice markets filled with women and children in Iraq. Remember, there is no trial.

Also, according to the HRW article:

> The Chinese government is pitching the proposed change as merely an extension of the conditions of the existing practice of residential surveillance, or “soft arrest,” to suspects in state security, terrorism or major corruption cases. “Soft arrest” allows police to confine criminal suspects to their homes for up to six months without trial or due legal process.

Or for guys who had an opportunistic neighbor who wanted his land and was willing to "rat him out" to the US forces desperate to capture some bad guys.

Or some poor schmuck whose name was blurted out by some other poor schmuck who thought that reeling off some random names would make the torture stop.

Have you ever spoken to a Chinese? They have their own good intentions too. Besides that, why do you always trust that our governments’s label of “terrorist” is never self-serving or opportunistic? The civilians we bomb every week might have a different perspective

Here, read about one of the many people detained and tortured by the United States who turned out to have absolutely nothing to do with terrorism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khalid_El-Masri

A different Khalid al-Masri is a suspected member of al Qaeda. So they tortured the wrong Khalid. Oops.

This is why basic things like the right to a trial, open court proceedings that journalists can attend, the Geneva convention prohibiting torture, etc etc are so important.

To trust a government to decide guilt in secret is to be ignorant of history.

Enough with the whataboutism. Everybody knows about the dirty business the US gets up to. It doesn't excuse Chinese authoritarianism and human rights abuses.

The US does intend it for terrorists, but the US also intended to neutralise "WMDs". So, believing either US or China is crazy.

Scale also matters.

According to your link about one thousand people were sent to Guantanamo. Right now in the region of Xinjiang about 1 million Uyghurs are being held in re-education camps (about 10% of the Uyghur population of the region).

Even if the USA compare terribly to the (rest of?) civilized world regarding human rights, as a non-American and non-Chinese I fear less the US government than the Chinese. (The fact that I'm not from a Middle East country probably helps...)

[1] https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2018/09/china-up-to-o...

America sent all its US citizens of Japanese descent to Manzanar at one time. Many died there. The CIA overthrew the democratically elected government in Chile on September 11, 1973 leading to the deaths of 11,000+ people. Iranian-Contra, Bay of Pigs, United Fruit Massacre, The School of the Americas ... I mean, America isn't at the same scale because it's 300 million people vs over a billion.

Anyone who's done research would understand China is the one country that has no reason to make the effort of developing a backdoor because it's required that all companies will hand out their data through the front door, and the vast majority of Chinese people seem to be okay with the security vs privacy trade off.

The one country? Come now, dont be so shy: the CLOUD Act of 2018 puts the USA on the same list.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/CLOUD_Act

Yes see what's happening in Hong Kong. It's a problem of their own making to get rich quick by property, not due to Mainland. Please read this:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/07/22/world/asia/ho...

It will give you true picture of how Hong Kong lost to mainland cities in terms of quality of life and innovation. So economy is the main root of all this frustration and protest. Extradition bill is just the spark.

The people of Hong Kong are capable of caring about their economic situation and their political governance at the same time.

Listening to them, it's pretty clear the extradition bill and the erosion of their human rights is a driving force.

Lived long enough in Hong Kong before 1997 and after 1997 and being a Hong Kong family can understand it from inside/out. So sorry to break your bubble they can not take care of their economic situation without China, it was true before 1997 as it is today. Hong Kong's survival is China, which did not tax it yet like other cities of China with better GDP, but spend on it. Hong Kong got rich when China was closed acting as middle man and earning US$ 5-20k, doing nothing just some paper work on each container shipped from China. Easy money, I was one of such beneficiary.

If you want to talk about human rights, please read through the first instance of re-interpretation by China of Basic law of Hong Kong, when Hong Kong people requested China to re-interpret the basic law against basic Human Rights not to allow mainland spouses to enter Hong Kong. So Hong Kong is still denying the most basic human right of a family, but at that time it was in the interest of Hong Kong people and bad for Chinese spouses, so no protest against it neither any backlash. Indeed overall society was very happy at the cost of infringing human rights. You do something wrong once and open the doors, it will come to bite later. If at that time Hong Kong people would not have involved China for re-interpretation, it would have brought 150,000 people from across the border, along with it some more hardships, but would not have eroded the freedom. Hong Kong people chose prosperity over freedom and now will pay for it.

So fighting for human rights now is just a farce, main reason is, get rich quick does not work, majority live in prison cell size apartment(again by choice) and have no way to change it.

This doesn't answer any of the questions asked.

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