However, I'm surprised that more comparisons haven't been made to the way the West has erased Julian Assange, and how easily he disappeared from our collective consciousness.
The real difference, as the old story goes, is in the quality of the propaganda. The west has managed to convince its people that Assange is a bad person, a rapist even. Whereas China has not managed to convince many of its people that Peng is a bad person, rather they are simply crudely prevented from talking about the issue online. The west is much much better at propaganda than China.
This is the typical level of Chinese propaganda: https://twitter.com/manyapan/status/1454346638596743173
Is their aim to be harmful in the west? My impression has always been that they’re pretty ambivalent about that, they’re more concerned with the internal effect.
I don’t know that people even do think Chinese propaganda is clever! In my mind their skill is overarching control over communication. It’s dumb and brute force but it seems to work.
But I've seen plenty of people paint everybody who have a non-mainstream opinion on China, as paid undercover propagandists.
Who would do that but a paid shill?
HN is one of the few places online that both allows free speech and isn't riddled with bots/spammers/shills. I'd like to keep it that way, meaning you should fuck off. No one is buying your shit, anyway, as you might have found from the replies your posts get. It's a lost cause.
I compare arguments from both sides and I make up my own mind. I have my own agency and my own opinion, thank you.
If you're gonna call me a "paid shill" even though I have 20 years of online history in a different field, you're gonna have to prove it.
If you don't like what I have to say, then fine, don't listen to me. But don't prevent others from listening to me and don't prevent me from speaking.
Ultimately I want peace and understanding between both sides.
You’re being extremely rude here, accusing people of being shills and telling them to literally “fuck off”. If anything goes against the HN ethos and rules, it’s terrible behaviour and bad faith behaviour like that, not a veteran Hacker News member with an account that’s twice as old as yours arguing a refreshingly non-mainstream perspective.
The difference is that the West has the media which puts its own propaganda, people on the internet putting their own propaganda, etc. There is a market. In China, that market is limited.
A closer analogy would be the accusations that were made against Bill Clinton. Those would (presumably, and hopefully) be dealt with differently today than they were at the time, but to echo your sentiment, it is a bit amnesiac to point fingers at China for behaviour that the West (or perhaps just some Western countries) has just barely started to change.
One difference is that rather than censorship, allegations of sexual abuse by the powerful have long been simply ignored by the police, judiciary, media, etc., rather than censored. The end result was much the same.
For now there's recent news that he's getting married, but that isn't going to be frontpage news
A much more comparable incident is something like this ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_sexual_misconduct... ), where nobody was "disappeared" - on the contrary, for several months, the media talked about it pretty much every day.