As a person neither leaning East nor West who is an avid HN reader it's always interesting to read the comments under such topics where the collusion between US private companies come up. Comparing it to the reactions when tenous connections between Chinese companies and the CCP are characterised as a threat to freedom and human rights.
It reminds me to be wary of my own biases. Because from where I stand they are all two sides of the same coin.
Courts in the US are generally quite independent of the political process. Abuse of the court system is prosecuted fairly heavily. This is "rule of law".
On the other hand, courts in China do whatever the CCP tells them. These are not equivalent.
I think this depends on what you define as "abuse". Many suspects are railroaded into plea-bargains to avoid bankruptcy or the risk of more severe charges regardless of actual guilt[1]. There are also abuses like civil asset forfeiture or false DMCA takedowns that rarely see any punishment.
I think it's possible to get justice in the US court system if you have money. This isn't really "rule of law" as one might commonly think of it though.
Also, on a technical level, let's not equate a government apparatus that both controls and records anything and everything you do online, with a government asking a private company to identify people who searched the name of a girl who was murdered.
I believe it's in degree. The great firewall, a massive centrally controlled effort, vs random judges with asking for narrow data related to specific events.
Cops can search your car if they have a reason to believe you've committed a crime, but if they just start rifling through every car in a public lot someone is getting sued.
> Courts in the US are generally quite independent of the political process.
I'm not sure what to make of this statement.
To become a judge at the federal level is a deeply political process. Judges are nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Nominated judges are usually the same political party as the president but must also be acceptable to at least a majority of senators, and there is often some bargaining to make this work. Every SCOTUS nomination in recent history has had senators question nominees on their political opinions. Federal courts frequently break along ideological lines such that the balance of liberals to conservatives on a court is important to parties and voters. Some state courts mirror this, with the governor nominating and a legislature confirming. How could this process be described as apolitical?
This is different from an apolitical process where a neutral body like a bureaucracy or bar association selects judges based on merit. The US is distinct from many European countries in this regard.
Where is this judicial fantasyland you live in with apolitical judges and independent laws? They're written, passed, judged, and enforced by heavily partisan actors, now more than ever. You're kidding yourself, and no one else, if you think the US judicial system is politically independent.
Given that judiciary being subservient to the Party is an intentional feature in China, no competent western system would do "worse" in judicial independence than China.
The GP is literally always correct in relativistic terms. If that makes people in the West feel more comfortable with the government, I guess I could say good for them? :)
The Supreme Court itself is a partisan institution, now more than ever, and every reading of the Constitution has been subject to partisan biases since forever. That's not to say we have no checks and balances, just that they are not independent. More like interdependent and part of a vicious cycle; biased legislators appoint biased judges who exonerate biased executives who reward biased legislators. I think the cycles of the last few years have made that abundantly clear, but any cursory reading of US history should reveal this is not a new pattern. It's just how the system has always worked, our folklore notwithstanding.
If you don't think life appointment makes someone politically independent, I have to wonder what possible office would qualify. Divine monarch? Fürher?
Does your ideology radically change over your life? Why would theirs? They judge with their own biases, and are often out of touch with public sentiment. They're just people, and in case of at least one, a rapist with powerful friends.
A bigger court elected by the people could help solve that problem. Not lifetime appointments with zero accountability. The Supremes are just another fascist and anti democratic institution, like the electoral college or the party apparatuses.
Lifetime appointments just mean they get to force THEIR politics on the rest of us, instead of being accountable to ours. It doesn't make them magically apolitical. They are partisan hacks appointed by shitty legislators elected by an antiquated electoral system participated in by a disenchanted and uneducated mass. The Supreme Court doesn't have a great track record of being some sort of enlightened wise guru above the fray, they're very much a part of the broken model of American representative democracy and its inability to cope with the issues of modernity.
And if we're arguing semantics, there is a tendency for conservatives to label "things done differently than before" as "political" and the status quo as the sane default, which it rarely is to anyone not in line with their ideology. Everything in civic life is political, especially in a democracy as ragged and divided as ours. The more precise question, I think, is not whether some person or institution is "political" (they are, unavoidably, especially if they don't even see their own politics) but whether they are responsive to democratic whims. The Supreme Court by design is way less so, vs the House say. And I'd argue that's a huge part of their problem. Society and needs didn't evolve as quickly when that institution was designed. It simply cannot keep up. 9 old farts who don't understand technology have no place governing the future of 300 million.
I don't believe you understand the concept of "tenuous".
I have worked in China, China is a totalitarian communist State. There are no tenuous connections between the CCP and Chinese companies, companies ARE the CCP.
For example if you go around China you will see children with a red badge around the neck. This badge represents that the kid is a good student and the kid is forced to wear it.
In China the best students automatically enter the CCP, there is a spy apparatus that controls them once people travel abroad from friends and relatives. If they do something abroad against the CCP they take retaliation against their families.
If you want to create a company in China, you must enter the CCP. How tenuous is that?
People that have not lived there just can't understand what totalitarian means, there is no rule of Law and not free press. The "dictator for life" Xi Jinping can kill anyone in China with no consequences, and he regularly kills competitors or threats to his power.
Having said that, people in charge in the US or the financial elite would love the world becoming their own totalitarian regime, just like China but on the entire world. They lobby for that every day.
Those guys really love power, because they have power, they want more, they want it all like the song says.
It is really nothing new. Just like the Romans wanted to conquer Cartage to own the entire world. Philip II of Spain wanted the same thing conquering Britain, later it was Napoleon, and then Hitler and Stalin.
Now it is the US who would love to conquer China and Russia if they could. Also China would love to expand by force if they could.
The only reason they don't is because nuclear weapons.
The price of liberty for normal people is eternal vigilance.
One can be against heavy-handed authoritarianism both at home and abroad, while still seeing the (quite distinct) shades of gray between the US security apparatus and the CCP, or between the CCP and North Korea, or between the US and the EU. Different governments and processes give different weights to due process and human rights vs bureaucratic efficiency and national security.
It should not be controversial to say that the CCP is more heavy-handed when it comes to government reach into private lives. That doesn't exonerate the US by any stretch; our government does a ton of shady shit, much of it arguably unconstitutional or extrajudicial, from warrantless wiretaps to drone executions of US citizens. But these make the news, which indicates 1) at least there is a relatively free press and 2) they are unusual enough as to be noteworthy, as opposed to commonplace and not discussed.
China doesn't share the same values as the West. The individual is deemphasized for the collective good, as defined by the current CCP elite of any decade. That doesn't mean their political system is inferior or superior -- our fragile "democracy" is threatening to devolve into civil war and take down the whole country, if not world with it -- but it IS a very different government on a different part of an authoritarianism <--> libertarianism continuum. It's not useful to equate them in this context just because the West does shady surveillance on its own citizens too.
> That doesn't exonerate the US by any stretch; our government does a ton of shady shit, much of it arguably unconstitutional or extrajudicial, from warrantless wiretaps to drone executions of US citizens. But these make the news, which indicates 1) at least there is a relatively free press and 2) they are unusual enough as to be noteworthy, as opposed to commonplace and not discussed.
Does what is reported by the media equate to the sum total of US malfeasance? I sometimes wonder if there is an Overton's Window for the public's appetite for corruption and exposure of systemic exploitation.
> China doesn't share the same values as the West. The individual is deemphasized for the collective good, as defined by the current CCP elite of any decade.
Could the 2 power structures have different approaches to how the individual is de-emphasised for collective good? Perhaps the US has a more diffused and opaque strategy of achieving the same end? I say this because Americans signal opportunity and the virtues of social agency to one another at all levels of society - but each time I travel there it seems like a social nightmare where few are actually contented once you get past the small talk.
The cultural gap is because America's political leadership is mostly lawyers and China's is mostly scientists and engineers. So people hailing from the latter background tend to think along more utilitarian and technical lines.
> It should not be controversial to say that the CCP is more heavy-handed when it comes to government reach into private lives
I'm not so sure that is true. If anything the US agencies seem to be quite a bit more technologically advanced, and I'd bet they sit on more undisclosed zero days than the CCP.
You're definitely correct in the difference in ideological values, and this difference might make up for the technological gap between the surveillance capabilities of the two governments, but I honestly would say it's still a 50-50 to me which one comes out on "top".
Can you explain/rephrase? Are you just talking about surveillance in particular? If so, I apologize for not being clearer... I meant heavy-handed as in forced disappearances, labor camps, censorship, behavioral modification, etc. (or in the US, forced reproduction/sterilization, manipulation of educational curricula, etc.)
China's recent attempts to curb the influences of their Big Tech and online gaming sectors come to mind, vs the fuck-all we've done with ours over the past couple decades. Soon Facebook is going to become a supranational organization that can drive new laws just by enraging enough people through algorithmic manipulation... our watchdogs are whimpering puppies against that kind of power. Our government is way weaker in terms of its ability to regulate business or personal behavior.
And for the common person, sure, our government might know everything we're doing (they all do, these days), but by and large it does not really care. The data it collects is often so disorganized even its own agencies don't know how to share it with each other, much less use it to systematically oppress -- for now. Our discourse and dissent is THRIVING, free speech is alive and well, and we have so much freedom we've self-organized into alternate reality bubbles, absent state guidance and with a deliberate disregard of expert opinion. China doesn't allow its society to fracture like that. Ours has no choice but to allow it to happen, and our elites encourage that sort of fragmentation because it makes for easier power-mongering at the top when the commoners are divided against each other.
The Chinese are oppressed by a heavy-handed, paternal government. Americans are oppressed by a government so weak that capital, charisma, and convenience govern our society, not our supposed laws or values. Other developed countries, democratic or not, tend to fall in between those extremes, from the UK & Australia closer to us (weaker gov) to the Canada & EU (stronger govs) to the Nordic and Asian democracies (stronger yet), yet China's is way way way stronger than all of those.
It reminds me to be wary of my own biases. Because from where I stand they are all two sides of the same coin.