What happens when the CCP decides that you need to die
mattparlmer.substack.com
mattparlmer.substack.com
Please review the site guidelines and use HN in the intended spirit: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Nationalistic flamewar is not ok here. Slurring groups or individuals who disagree with you is not ok here. Cartoonish accusations about communist agents and spies secretly manipulating the thread is explicitly against the site guidelines. It is also, frankly, foolish and a little embarrassing—anyone reading this thread or any other, whose emotions aren't pre-inflamed on the topic, can easily see what's going on: people with different backgrounds and therefore different views disagree with each other and feel strongly. I've studied this problem in depth for years; I've pored over voting data, flagging data, and lots of other data, and I can tell you that the evidence not only confirms that, it's probably the most solid evidence of any kind I've ever examined [1].
The value of this site is curiosity [2]. The goal is curious conversation. When the needle goes this badly into the red, curious conversation is impossible. Worse, we get the internet thread equivalent of a world war. That's a grandiose analogy because internet forums are so trivial—but the emotional dynamics are not trivial. The anger and accusation here are the forces which, in the extreme, make people to try to destroy each other.
One can derive a significant conclusion: if HN is to have a chance at achieving its mandate—which is in all our interests, because it's only that which makes the place interesting—then we all need to work on these dynamics in ourselves.
Here's one way to do that: don't see the other person as an enemy, a demon [3], a communist, or a brainwashed Westerner. See them as someone who doesn't have the same information you have. Share information with the intention to communicate, not defeat the other. Don't expect to persuade them—deep things like this can only shift slowly. When someone responds with information that you feel is false or, worse, might have some truth to it, tolerate the painful flare-up that will inevitably surge in your system. Wait for it to subside—don't let it power your response. Remember that you're talking not only to one person who perhaps strongly disagrees with you—you are broadcasting to an entire community of readers. Practicing these skills is the only way to make your case to the community that can actually do any good, so even if there are brainwashed Westerners or sinister manipulators or communist spies, it's what we need to be doing anyway [4].
[1] As I've said elsewhere, the odds that someone who was posting about Julia in 2015 is a communist agent who was planted to manipulate HN round to zero. That, in the median case, is who you're talking to here.
There are years' worth of explanations about this problem at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme..., for anyone who wants more.
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
[4] This is the "sufficiently smart manipulator" (SSM) argument: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If you know the Chinese language, go to Weibo and find announcements of rulings on high profile murder cases, rape cases, etc. Most likely you’ll see that people overwhelmingly call for tougher punishment; comments expressing dissatisfaction with non-capital punishment are often voted to the top.
It’s a different culture, the majority or at least an extremely vocal minority (I highly doubt it’s a minority, but that’s a possibility) expect an-eye-for-an-eye punishment for murder as well as some other morally outrageous crimes. You may find it barbaric or whatever, but it’s a different culture.
See also (on the largest Chinese language Q/A site, like Quora):
https://www.zhihu.com/question/25084350 Why do you support capital punishment?
https://www.zhihu.com/question/25084336 Why do you oppose capital punishment in China?
You can gauge the relative popularity of opinions from the stats alone. Mind you, the user base of that site is relatively well-educated and progressive.
With that out of way, I can objectively say that I’ve never seen cases of political dissent announced anywhere. If you ask me, I’d say such cases, if there are any, wouldn’t be publicized. Additionally, if there were to be such cases, I suspect (private) opinions would be more divided than murder cases but still tilt the “wrong” way. By my observations, people tend to sympathize with little guys adversely affected by corrupt officials or big corps, and you can see that kind of stories retweeted on social media, a lot, as people love to “spread the word to get the attention of higher-ups”; but “human rights activists” are usually met with sneer. The high profile activists tend to be the butt of jokes in my experience.
You can see this on reddit too for american crimes.
> The PRC executes between five and ten thousand people per year
Anyone got a source for that claim? Amnesty estimates "1000's" but doesn't actually give a figure and claims to not know it. I'm guessing the worlds biggest human rights org would love to know Matt from substack's source?
For comparison we have the Saudis, Iraq, Egypt and Iran coming in with a few hundred executions each while certain other allied countries refuse to publish and are also hidden away behind government secrecy.
I would guess ramblings from some dark Falun Gong blog, as clearly he has no issues quoting them elsewhere on the piece, which on my eyes for as gruesome as the topic might be takes a huge amount of credibility away of him and the piece
It's like whenever people insinuate Tianamen 2.0 will repeat for xyz events like China is trapped in some pre reform time bubble in terms of culture and capabilities. Somehow a modern China with 14T economy is going to have deal with problems the same way as post war China with 200B economy. I've never seen so many seemingly intelligent people go full smooth brain on this subject matter including in this thread. It's particularly hilarious to see people claim their very smart PhD Chinese colleagues being brainwashed, when theses colleagues have experience in both east and west - they're not the ones with singular perspective and the information deficit. It's not their brain washing, it's yours. Chinese diaspora reciprocate stories of how brainwashed their western coworkers are.. Queue reactionary 50c accusations when 50c doesn't operate in English inside or outside GFC.
China is ~50X wealthier since 89, a wealthier China with riot gear and information control doesn't need to Tianamen dissidents haphazardly. A wealthier China with lethal injection doesn't need to shoot people in back of head in open fields and bill family for bullet, nor execute as many when it's economical to lock them away. Which is largely what happens outside of most egregious crimes / drug smuggling charges. Not to mention much of China executes XYZ for bullshit reasons media reporting turns out to be China sentences person to "death sentence with reprieve" - a symbolic sentence that's functionally life imprisonment. Things aren't the best, but they are generally trending in the right direction.
The main difference I found between China- and Western-style brainwashing is that, in general, in the West people have much more negative attitude toward killing others, no matter what narrative is presented. Whenever USA tries to wage a war, there are many demonstrations against the war, and societies at large are anti-war and opposed to all forms of killing.
The Chinese, on the other hand, seem to believe in consequentialism to a larger degree. They argue that sometimes killing is necessary to prevent more killing, for example. This is presented in a way very accessible for a Western person in the wuxia Hero (2002) where it is the main point of the movie.
All in, I consider the Chinese more brainwashed because Western people have access to all kinds of propaganda - American right & left, Russian, Chinese - whereas the Chinese have much more limited sources because the government is putting an enormous amount of effort in controlling the sources of information, and given the size of the population, they're extremely successful.
Without exaggeration, PRC ascent and border resolution is unprecedentedly peaceful relative to human history. In terms of modern dispute management, it's has been the most peaceful. Japan has disputes with 5/5 her maritime neighbours. And she's an island.
> At least in America we (almsot always) give you a trial before we kill you.
lol what is this, modern China has trials too. Maybe one day China's foreign policy will use paperwork to make enhanced interrogation not torture, and droning combatants not random civilians.
Moral calculus is clearer when growing up without basic needs met. But more or less.
>access to all kinds of propaganda
Access to information does not make one more informed. Chinese who live through daily propaganda inherently understands nature of propaganda. Very few trust official news sources. Outside extremely partisan media platforms, western manufactured consent is more subtle and sinister. Most global south diaspora in the west will tell you how absolutely bullshit western reporting is in general, a free fifth estate is frequently seemingly indistinguishable from state propaganda from those who know it intimately.
It's a matter of comprehension. There are more Chinese diaspora multilingual Chinese with English fluency able to share news from across the wall. You can't say the same about anglosphere and Chinese information literacy. The amount of absolutely ignorant western commentary on China is staggering, where as Chinese net actually has western perspectives that somewhat comport with reality.
Chinese information control doesn't generate brainwashed people as much as create political disengagement. The more ideology Xi pushes the less believers there are are outside of the inevitable proportion of fierce nationalists / new generation of little pinks. But much of CHinese society skew old, have through Mao/Deng - they've experienced the spectrum of propaganda and understands when the levers are being adjusted.
Modern western ecosystem generate extreme dogmatism without media literacy. Too many think access to information is the same as being informed. The debates people have on the effects of social media are similar lessons learned through the "lived" propaganda experience of just growing up in China. Recognition of the issue frequently doesn't generalize outside of the domestic realm, i.e. China issues. The fact that this story, a substack post by a non-subject matter expert using biased sources is generating this much engagement is more or less illustrative of the point.
This is a highly emotional topic on both sides, and that makes it more important to follow the rules, not less: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I know all too well what you're experiencing from "seemingly intelligent people", but fulminating not only doesn't help, it reinforces the very things you're complaining about. We all do this, and in that sense we're all creating our own enemies. It's a trap and it takes a lot of work to even begin to become aware of it, but what choice do we have? Certainly if HN is to be a place where people have curious conversation, everyone needs to work on this.
We will probably never know the real number. Please also remember we have under-estimated for a very long time the victims of the Soviet Union until we found out more about the gulags and all other repressive systems they had in place.
So then why use such numbers, when there's no expectation of accuracy?
My high school teachers would have been rather upset at me had I been so liberal with facts
The exact number is not important when considering the massive scale.
GDP is about the only thing we can measure objectively from this country, and air pollution when we point our satellites at them.
Run society like nothing is going on.
There's a reason NK and China made sure there were televised cities with people packed like sardines.
Not sure how this could be any clearer.
I think it's a good thing to include these images, we've become too used to content moderation that we're desensitized to a lot of the atrocities that are still happening daily around the world.
That doesn’t make it any less brutal or disturbing, but it serves as a reminder of how often we are willing to turn a blind eye to atrocities when it’s economically or politically expedient.
Let's dissociate the country from the political apparatus. What's evil is the CCP, not China in itself - it's not like the citizens can vote the current regime out.
In nearly all parlance talking about countries you reference those countries directly 'the US invaded Iraq' for e.g.
It's a shorthand for 'the govt of xxx'.
because most other countries we talk about have some kind of representative system where the people actually have a say in who governs them. Of course it's all relative, no representation is ever perfect, but in a dictatorial regime there's no representation at all.
Why aren't you saying نظام instead of Iran? Why not 'Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela' instead of Venezuela?
Come on man.
For Venezuela, people did vote for Chavez in the first place right? Which then made the turn to dictatorship. Which is what you should expect when when you elect a Marxist.
And yes, the same should go for Iran and Venezuela. But it's easy for CCP because they officially made the acronyms by themselves...
You do realize that Iran is a republic right?
They hold legislative and executive branch elections every few years with different political parties and all....
Poor example, EU is not a country and represents a political apparatus, nothing else.
"Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."
Overwhelmingly, this stuff is just internet-style cloak-and-dagger fantasy, and cheap rhetoric. How do I know that? Because when I look at who the actual users are who make these votes, and I see they were, for example, commenting on HN about Julia in 2015, the odds that they are a communist plant round to zero. This reality is so absolutely remote from what comments like yours are insinuating that it's hard for me to believe that people are willing to go there. Yet here we are, with spies in every closet and foreign agents under every bed. The only word for this is cartoonish.
The truth is that this is a very large, very international community, with millions of users having all sorts of backgrounds and views, and they disagree on divisive topics like China. That is the extremely mundane—albeit emotionally charged—reality of what is going on here. Accusing people who hold different views of being spies and foreign agents is the fastest way to poison the community, so we don't allow it, especially when there isn't a shred of anything resembling evidence to support it.
This entire dynamic is determined by tribal identifications on both sides. That leads people to hate and ultimately want to destroy each other. That's not compatible with the value of this site, which is curiosity. People can't be curious with each other and want to destroy each other at the same time—the nervous system doesn't work that way.
If anyone wants more explanation, there are arbitrary amounts of it at https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
When an account posts like this in various threads:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25583482
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25445883
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25029414
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24855732
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24721883
...it's painfully clear that this is not curious conversation but a pre-existing agenda.
Next thing you know the executions start for DMCA violations and so called hate speech that will radically change in 40y.
As george carlin famously said we are all circulating the drain.
And I don't see how "standing up" in the US would ever do you any good, with the sheer force of militarized police and actual military. I hope this is not leading into a tired "if only Germany would've had guns" point.
People who 'get triggered' are too sensitive. They have to train themselves. We are on planet earth, we live then we die. This is a fact. Emotions are tools to allow us to navigate our lives as members of society. They are useful, not something we should be shielded from.
We need negative emotions just like we need hunger to know we need to eat, thirst to know we need to drink, pain to know we need to avoid physical harm, etc...
IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
>IMO, those who can't face reality shouldn't be involved in shaping it.
What is this even advocacy for? Voting rights only after you sit through a slideshow of graphic violence?
The association with the horrible imagery needs to be created or else people will not understand what they're reading with the appropriate degree of emphasis when the term comes up in the future. We will be a nation of apathetic, sedated cowards.
In the old days, people actually saw these horrors with their own eyes, not merely seen pictures; so they understood very well what 'war' meant. Probably why we haven't had a major war for so long.
It is funny reading this after not even been two weeks since the last attack on the US embassy compound in Iraq after the US denied Iraqi calls to remove US troops of the country it invaded 17 years ago
I don't know where you have been these last 70 years, but western powers have been "doing this" for a long, long, long time
What we really need is to listen to some Angela Davis speeches on what has been going on in the areas that The Media is too cowardly to report
We shouldn’t be supporting China, we should bring skilled work back to the USA.
However, you do correctly point out how this article appears to draw people in and then goes for maximum shock effect. I'm sure that whoever created this article did that on purpose. Even if the cited numbers happen to be accurate, this kind of tactic is rather typical for propaganda. The same can be said about producing "facts" that are either hard or impossible to verify.
To be clear: I am not saying that this is propaganda, but it does at least raise a few red flags about potentially being just that. Further research needed.
EDIT: to be even more clear: I have no doubt that the CCP have committed horrible crimes. But that will not make me just believe whatever somebody might write about it.
Trying to find my thoughts on this. The Einsatzgruppen pretty much started the Holocaust via mass shootings (before all other methods). They switched to gas vans (according to this article, China uses this too? What in the fuck) for some vile cognitive gymnastics where they convinced themselves it was too demoralizing for the goons to have to shoot that many people without being drunk all the time (to carry out the deed). They sought a more efficient, less taxing method, and that’s where the gas vans came in.
The Nazis did this to anyone that they could lump into ‘a national threat’ bucket, so Jews that were also communist Russians were instant kill (as opposed to German Jews who initially got put in labor camps).
If the CCP ever decides routine shootings is taxing or inefficient (like the Nazis), things wouldn’t be so far off to having an “efficient” death camp to just handle it en masse.
I tend to always over-fit the Nazi parallels, especially with China, but China’s prime issue is scale. Whatever they do, they must always consider scale.
Crackdowns will happen at scale (Hong Kong), censorship will happen at scale (speech/internet), imprisonment will happen at scale (Uighurs), and mass executions (if we were to ever get the numbers) will happen at scale.
As hard it is to not turn away from that picture in the article, I would sincerely like to know what that woman’s crime was.
Not just imprisonment, mass raping of Uighurs women as well: https://www.insider.com/uighur-activists-mass-rape-chinese-m...
This book makes an interesting point about the bottom-up theory of what really started the Holocaust (this is an unforgettable read, I feel like author literally accounted for every death batch (and yes ‘batch’ has to be used due to the scale):
https://www.amazon.com/Bloodlands-Europe-Between-Hitler-Stal...
Basically, it was simple broad directives that got interpreted by these disparate elements of the Nazis in the Eastern front. What does it mean if someone is not only a Jew, but also a communist Russian? Pretty much an instant threat, and forward deployed units liberally interpreted it into mass-killing vs forced labor camps. Once that genie was out of the bottle, you would look unproductive in the regime if you weren’t upping the ante.
What is the CCP creating here? You want units with blood on their hands ratcheting up new and interesting ways of currying favor with the regime? Hey bosses, I found a great new way to promote CCP Authority, forget Uighur camps, get a load of this. Suddenly you have a macabre competition within a peculiar institution that can only become darker if left to find it’s own logical purpose (be the very best ccp you can be, whatever that means, and oh John the guy you started with recently rose the ranks doing this, not saying you should too, but take some initiative).
No master plan, just a dark organic evolution.
Sadly mental gymnastics seem to do their work often enough. For example firing squad style executions also tend to use mental gymnastics, by introducing blank rounds the individual members of the squad are no longer certain that they will fire the lethal shot, making them less hesitant to aim and shoot correctly.
The fact that the images are a 'shock' to some people shows just how disconnected they are from reality. They are powerful images but they should not be shocking... The term 'killing' should already embody these emotions without the images.
The emotions that people feel when looking at these images, that's exactly what 'killing a person' means.
I'm sorry, I can try to understand the well-meant intent behind this, but what, and pretend the world is all roses and rainbows?
No. Leave the images on. You first world city folk need to SEE the horror that goes on beyond your ivory towers, some of it enabled by the very work that you do.
If you need to see brutality to empathize with the brutalized, then go ahead and look at the gore. But I think most people are emotionally capable enough to realize that executions aren't pleasant experiences without photo evidence.
At 99.9% they do become the same.
What is the conviction rate in your country of residence?
What does conviction rate actually mean in the context of the legal process in your country and Japan?
If you don't know the detailed answers to those questions I suggest not making such grand claims about equivalence.
Here is a short radio episode explaining this topic.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w3csz3s5
Edit for clarity:
The parent has for some reason edited their comment and now it looks like I was defending China's rate in my reply. They originally made an equivalence claim between Japan and China and I wanted to add information explaining that this stat doesn't necessarily mean what it's often at first glance interpreted to mean. The parent then replied to my comment with a reply that suggests their edit was in fact malicious. But I can't be sure of that.
https://qz.com/246696/chinas-criminal-conviction-rate-is-99-...
Why would you do that?
Obviously this sounds bad so in the interest of balance, let me point out that there are many problems with the US system but they are out of this comment.
The sword as they use in Saudi Arabia also seems rather brutish but certainly less painful
That's a completely arbitrary right. Depending on wherever you are from it's not some kind of shared obviousness at all. Some countries actually execute people for possessing hard drugs (which I don't agree with, but that's the reality: don't assume 'rights' are universal). Most of these countries are in South East Asia and have suffered in the opium days so there's a history behind that decision too.
If you did, then executing someone solely for whatever they did makes no sense, because:
1. If you were in their place, you would've done the same thing (no free will).
2. You can imagine what you'd feel if in their place you'd hear the sentence, (then empathy would kick in).
3. “No man is completely useless; he can always serve as a bad example.”
Then in an ideal world, we would have the knowledge, and resources to figure out what went wrong, and "fix" the abusive behaviour in the subject, making them a happy and productive member of society again.
Of course we are living in an imperfect world, so this is not yet a viable solution..
I'm not sure about this one, but maybe someone more knowledgeable can chime in.
I would have thought the same thing, but my wife is from Slovakia and I was surprised to learn that no such thing happened. It seems that everyone was involved in government somehow, and everybody was just doing their thing to live a decent life.
The real violence came from grabbing the new opened up market, and so trying to grab as much of the newly opened market and money as possible. Not so much revenge of what happened because of the government.
I definitely want to know if this was the case in other countries too.
I am still cautious because they are a centralized platform. But glad to see they allow this type of stuff.
There is a 99.9% conviction rate in crimes in China [2] (which is the same as basically having no rule of law) and political prisoners seemingly 'disappear' all the time.
China are known for lying consistently about almost everything and keep a tight lid (as much as they can) on anything that would cause them to 'lose face' both within and without the country so any estimates are likely significantly low.
[0]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_Go... [1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_re-education_camps [2]:https://qz.com/246696/chinas-criminal-conviction-rate-is-99-...
Even if it is an optional thread property depending on the nature of the link posted, and is at moderator’s discretion.
You mean well educated?
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"; Wikipedia and lots of writeups tracing back to the singular source of Adrian Zenz are not it sadly
This is what cognitive dissonance looks like.
Incorrect, that's what someone on mobile in public transport looks like, but thank you for the benefit of the doubt (?)
I would be still interested in non-Zanz related sourcing to the original comments if you have any
Personally, the dissonance around China has come to an extreme. Is most reporting incorrect, or has CCP become the most efficient and durable totalitarian regime in history? Or is it a form of social engineering that has actual mainstream support in China? Or is it a doomed experiment, just like all other previous authoritarian regimes in history?
There is something quietly unsustainable building up.
Not really, here are just forces at play which would benefit if you thought so
We are in due time for the US and Western public to have a new evil boogyman presented to them. People are getting too unruly these days, so this will help keep them in line
> Or is it a doomed experiment, just like all other previous authoritarian regimes in history?
The Pharaonic system which was may be the most despotic ever created lasted for nearly three millenia. The current age of all “democracies” (~ representatively guided states with some kinds of power separations) pales in comparison. And regarding the robustness of those regimes the only continental country to not crumble when confronted to the shock of the blitzkrieg was the USSR (operation barbarossa lead to the death of 5 millions people in 200 days to give an idea).
I am not trying to defend authoritarian regimes but the questions of which political system is the fairest, which one is the most legitimate, which one is the most stable and which one is the most robust are not the same and should not be conflated
The thing about authoritarian impulses throughout history is that they flare up and, for time, keep a country firmly gripped. Then they relax, and are somewhat forgotten about, even reconciled, until something comes along to trigger it again, in a replica of the abuse cycle. And China is not going to be different in this respect - moments where things get more oppressed for a time, and then moments of relief. The Xi regime has been relatively more oppressive in most recountings by Western sources. This is believable yet also not meaningful, since clearly the apparatus was there before.
IMHO, just because China has gotten this far with its current model says little about tomorrow. There is propaganda coming from all directions these days, so I'm always a little hesitant about "real truth" coming from random sources, but simultaneously suspicious of the official ones too. It's that climate, in itself, that damages the credibility of all regimes; it leaves truth and credit up for grabs to those who can forge a new path that makes the world cohere better. It's hard to defeat the real truth in the long run.
Neither. Most Americans and Europeans have zero idea what life is like in China. The media doesn't help. Anyone who knows something about the country has noticed the rising level of hysteria and propaganda about China since Trump was elected.
China's been persecuting Mongolian, Moslem, Christian, Buddisht minorities for a while and I recently read about concentration camps for Uighurs minorities on the BBC.
I want change, will my purchase decisions have any affect and are boycotts even effective?
Also I have a pretty big influence on procurement where ever I contract. I could bring to discussion the UK gov advisories on using Chinese network and IT equipment.
I just don't know if this is enough or I can do more?
China is like a facelifted third reich turned inwards.
Trigger warning: facts ahead. The lead image is a woman executed for "intentional homicide" (that's what the sign says, "intentional homicide - her name")
The article makes a handful of irresponsible accusations. It claims China is executing "probably many more via militarized kangaroo courts," insinuates China is doing "“social cleansing” of undesireables like petty drug abusers, liquidation of badly-behaved members of minority groups, or outright political murders of people within the CCP hierarchy", and mislabels China's legal system as "state terror", getting almost poetic with its description of how it imagines this operates: "Effective systems of state terror rely on a dance between the known and the unknown in the mind of the public," which seems like the opposite of the very obvious "known" of a public execution where the criminal carries sign expressing their bona fides, and flies in the face of the author's own description of "Regular judicial personnel handle identity confirmation and terminal legal dispositions".
So where could this invention of "state terror" and all these imagined tentacular bogeymen of "state terror" come from? Perhaps from the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, which the author neglects to mention. Or perhaps from the period of Japanese occupation and the mass killings and disappearances of ordinary folk that the author again neglects to mention. Where does the author get his (or her, it's hard to tell if it's a pseudonym or not) picture of China? One possibility is biased Western media which for the last few years has worked its readership into a frothy fervor of China hatred, mostly based on such misrepresentations and lazy accusations. Which if the author has his (or her) biased view of China from the media he consumes, presents a further interesting possibility.
It seems that a "dance between the known and the unknown in the mind of the public" would pretty well describe the constant state of confusion and conflict instigated and inflamed by the media apparatus of certain unnamed "free" countries. Perhaps the author is projecting his experience of such "state terror" onto a place he doesn't know about (but feels justified to misrepresent and smear), in some sort of "fantasy idyll dystopia" that lets him feel he has it lucky to be where he is?
The essay also expends a paragraph on Nazis and Soviets, and spends quite a bit of time imagining the dastardly inner workings of the state he fabricates, and how the dogma of spreading responsibility for illegitimate killings onto as many people as possible ensures their coercibility. Hmm, sounds like the typical blackmail-type coercion engaged in by state security and intelligence organizations, and their proxy sex crime rings, in many unnamed "free" countries. Again, possibly the author is projecting his own experience of this kind of "coercive covert control".
Especially likely given the vast majority of Chinese see their state's legitimacy as totally solid and, if anything, complain of the forgivingness of their punitive systems, rather than their harshness. To the reader unacquainted with Chinese history beyond the ancient anodyne depictions of flowery courts, silk-clad concubines, and scurrying sneaky eunuchs....this bloodlust (or "Justice boner"?) might seem unaccountable and odd. But a closer look at Chinese history (even 20C Chinese history) will quickly correct such ahistorical readers of their delusions. They gave the world the 20C's bloodiest revolution. And it was a popular revolution, not a "illegitimate tyrannical crackdown", so the people are pretty accustomed to using blood and death to reshape things how they want.
I know it's a compelling and soothing fantasy to try to, in one's mind, delegitimize the Chinese state, and pretend a "kinship" with all the "oppressed Chinese masses", and feel like your own country is so much better, but honestly, you'd all be better off fixing the problems in your own countries, and looking to China as a source of strength, inspiration and partnership, rather than persisting in these "feel-good" fantasies (which frankly reek of being demented and intoxicating swansongs to a dying "Era of Western dominance"). Even if your goal is to complete with and beat China, you'd be better served by being able to see it clearly, which these feelgood Western fantasies of "China bad", only cloud. Honestly if you want to make yourself as "the enemy of the Chinese state" you'd be far better served by seeing it clearly first, as these sort of self-deluding fantasies (which are, incidentally, embarrassingly racist and blind to such in their snooty fake-righteous didactic criticism), only play into the hands of those you want to define as your enemies.
The uncomfortable truth that the country that is soon to be seen as (or in fact already) the largest economy, with all its foreignness to Western minds, to have that suddenly thrust upon the world stage in first place, is understandable very hard for many people in other countries to accept. It's hard, and not helped that your native medias have gone into a "2 minutes China hate" overdrive. That they resort to these sort of made-up but soothing fantasies is understandable, as it both plays into the hands of your domestic politics always hungry for the next weapon of mass distraction, and somebody to blame. But you shouldn't show "contempt before investigation" you should keep your mind open, and be vigilant against such implanted fears and fabrications, lest you become instruments of the will of power brokers the intentions of which you do not understand. You have much to learn from, and much the benefit from China, if you'll only keep an open mind, instead of engaging in, quite frankly, this tired mental masturbation that is all these sort of lazy accusatory fake narratives amount to.
Not that there's anything wrong with that...but it's not going to help you and it's not going to make it easier to deal with the facts. And it really doesn't have to be that hard. Just keep an open mind, start with a neutral (not "we are better" or "we are worse" mindset) and think for yourselves. You can't travel right now, so at least, travel in your mind, and adopt the same open-minded curiosity you employ when traveling physically. Look for the good, and be on the look out for dangers, but don't go hiding in a cave of your own fear and invention because somebody pointed to a geopolitical map and told you, "there be dragons."
It is just so interesting this year seeing the Trump administration ratchet up the rhetoric pressure on the Chinese government and make strong use of Falon Gong, which are just renowned to be.... Unreliable in their narratives to say the least, as a spearhead and baseline to build a PR campaign against the country
But yeah, lacking a horse on the race, in my case, it is just interesting seeing how the knots of war are slowly tied