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Comment by conductr | Hacker News Reader

Out of curiosity. What do those videos mean to an average Chinese person?

What are the opinions of illegal immigration over there? How do they police it? (If at all).

Does this look like normal government activity? Or are they appalled at the lack of “freedoms” in America?

I am truly naive on their culture or politics around this and how they would use it to show the US as boogeymen government and how their government is better. Is it a grass isn’t always greener type thing for them or is it a way to actually think we’re evil and should be stopped.

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Don't forget that the regular operation of Chinese policing is already much less free than what Americans are used to, plus the restrictions on internal freedom of migration (Hukou, less onerous than it used to be, plus the two SAR of Macao and HK). Mandatory state-issued ID, linked to your phone and bank account and so on.

As well as racial profiling. There's not that much immigration to China in the first place, legal or otherwise.

How so?

My experience in China was that the police were a bit on the bureaucratic side but otherwise far less obtrusive than in the US.

They divide their police forces into civil police and armed police. The civil police tend to be bored looking middle aged guys lounging around in guard booths at museums. They don't have weapons. The only armed police I saw stood at attention at the airport except when they had a changing of the guard ceremony.

As near as I can tell, China only allows immigration if they think that will benefit China. They've been pushing hard on academic scholarships and, in recent years, they've managed to shift net visits from the US to China.

They also seem to be pushing really hard on increasing the number of visiting African scholars. That's likely straight out of the US playbook; they see China as a rising power and want to make sure that their emerging leaders were educated in China and have ties to China.

Isn't it the case that Chinese police don't need to be as visible because everyone fears what they can do, and doesn't commit crimes? A bit like how Iran has to send in military force to kill 50k protestors, but the UK can just spread a few messages that people will be arrested, and then they don't protest.

I doubt it.

As near as I can tell, there are essentially 2 kinds of laws; laws that people agree with and laws that they don't.

For the second type, governments often have trouble enforcing them consistently so they often try to compensate by making the punishments harsher (eg mandatory minimum sentencing). As near as I can tell, that tends to fail miserably.

Our government here has been shooting people in the streets and that hasn't stopped protesters from pouring out.

When you see a bunch of people peacefully following laws the most likely explanation is that they just think those laws are reasonable.

I think the issue there is just that people in the UK have less immediate cause to protest than people living under the Iranian regime. The idea that British people are more afraid of their police than Iranians seems a bit wacky.

That’s kind of my point. through their eyes, is any of this really shocking at all? is kind of my question.

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