Shouldn't every country be barring people from leaving the country if they've been charged with a crime? At least if there's a good chance they will flee justice.
This seems like a side issue from the question of whether the charges are legitimate.
This seems like a side issue from the question of whether the charges are legitimate.
Every person has a nationalistic solipsism that renders them incapable of understanding events that occur outside of their own country. China and the US are two countries where this tends to be most severe, people outside these countries seem to believe they possess a profound and innate understanding of events there that renders them capable of offering a complete opinion (and, in reality, that opinion will almost always be entirely self-referential, 20% of the comments on this thread seem to be talking about the US).
At a high-level, the characterization of China as a lawless dictatorship is undermined somewhat by the higher levels of crime in almost every other country. You will see this interpretation of China from people in the US who live in places where there are constant, visible signs of crime.
Team coca-cola and team pepsi are both evil and illegitimate.
The number of, presumably, left-wing people who advocate for the most extreme forms of libertarianism is truly incredible.
I myself find the numbers that engage in political reductionism and sophism to be truly incredible .. easily a double digit percentage of any population, actual billions in total globally.
Wait, is that actually "incredible" though, or just merely "expected"?
You are falling back on whataboutism. This is irrelevant. If we were having a similar debate in the middle ages, you would probably say something like:
> Every church is burning witches and heretics at the stake. Doing it is a central function of having a church.
The CCP has abducted these individuals and is preventing them from leaving the country. This is not ok. You can't justify this by saying "yeah, but they're the government, so it's their right to abduct whoever they want". A government is just a corporation with a bit more power than the others, not some sacred entity that sits above us.
Well yes, a government doesn't need to be sacred to sit above you, it need only have more power. It's legitimacy is conditional on maintaining a monopoly on violence.
“Beneath me” is _my_ value judgement that I pass on this government and its appendages as in “it has been weighed in the balance and has been found unworthy”. That this government has more power than me doesn’t make it sit above me as a moral absolute, and it doesn’t magically give it legitimacy.
The government's legitimacy comes from it's stick being bigger than yours. It's not sacred, it's not magic. It's a bigger stick. Your value judgement would have weight if your stick was bigger. The guy with the bigger stick decides what you (or Jack Ma) is worthy of.
By the same argument, are Somalian warlords and Mexican drug cartel also legitimate in the territories they control? I don't think "legitimate" is the word you are looking for to describe pure power dynamics, since "legitimate" is imbued with a moralistic judgement (look up is vs ought etc.). But yes, in practice, if I have a gun pointed at my head, I could be forced to do things that go against my judgement (within limits!).
So long as the warlord can make good on that agreement, you have political order. Over time many abstractions emerge, but backing it all up is the big stick. Now, I'm with you, from a moral standpoint it's all abhorrent. As an anarchist I view civilization to be a hack on the human condition, and I see all states as fundamentally authoritarian.
So it's all just game theory to me. China blocked the Manus acquisition as a matter of national interest. The US also ignores international law on matters on national interest at its own convenience.
If a law is unenforceable is it really a law? Anybody can declare a law. It is only meaningful if it can be enforced.
There are regions of Mexico where cartels hold the monopoly on violence, and the longer they maintain that control the more legitimate they become.
I think we are not really in disagreement, it's mainly an argument over the semantics of "legitimate" at this point :) Rousseau and Hobbes were both right.
I would definitely rather be a trapped Chinese trying to escape than a trapped American.
The reason why NK have stopped is largely either NK enforcement or being caught while in the PRC without permission to reside in the PRC. Both of which are highly mitigated for PRC citizen (PRC citizens can have issues spending time in cities they're not authorized to live in, but less so with merely "visiting" countryside).