Over-incarceration is big problem yes, but a red herring to the direct targeting and silencing of all political opposition.
For example , It is hard for me to see why drugs are criminalised so much in the U.S. a little weed could get you 10 years in prison till few years back ,civil forfeiture, abortion laws or why laws in your country all horrify me.
To understand guns laws , I will have to understand the rationale of second amendment the long history of gun ownership.
Similarly to under China today , there is 2,000 year history you will need to keep in context .
Again not defending China , it is important to see how we see things coloured by our own biases.
Oh please, give me a break. There's no rule of law in China, only rule by law. Just ask the Canadians that just happened to break some law right after Meng got detained in Canada.
Also, "damaging property" as a crime and being detained near the scene of a protest turned violent is way more universally accepted as illegal than whatever trumped up charges of "spreading false rumors" that the Chinese legal system levies against dissidents.
There's an epidemic of extrajudicial killings in the US right now. Indefinite detention without trial and torture have been normalized under three presidents, and one can't expect change there under Biden, so we're looking at a quarter century of these policies at a minimum.
The danger of whataboutism is that the US doesn't have a leg to stand on anymore.
The most recent execution of Canadians in China have been on drug charges. They had trials, it's crime and punishment by the books. Sure, it's politically motivated, but is it worse than a drug dealer getting shot dead while running away from a police officer?
And when we look at the history of criminalizing drug use and possession, who's responsible? China started cracking down because the British demand for opium was harmful to the Chinese people. The US started, and continues to wage, a "war on drugs" which was really a war on marginalized populations and an excuse to exercise imperial power in the middle east and south america. Rule by law, indeed.