[CathayRe]

Nice, Huawei Finally pointed this out, so the next step is hopefully somebody pointing out the difference.

There will never be a Snowden in China. You can guarantee their life, or their love one's life will be held hostage.

So not only does the "West" ( So to speak ) has a system in place protecting these people, they also have a system to vote them out and elect a new form of government should the ultimate worst come to play.

What can you do with the CCP?

[TeMPOraL]

I disagree.

The reason there will be no Snowden in China is primarily that China doesn't hide its spying, and secondarily becaue China does not maintain the pretense of moral superiority on international scale. Snowden-type leak from China would not change the way Chinese citizens perceive their government, and nobody else would care, much less exert outside pressure to change things.

Leaks and whistleblowers will happen, though - they do happen even in most oppressive of regimes.

(Also excuse me, but I don't believe US wouldn't try to exert pressure on you through your loved ones in a case like this.)

[EpicEng]

>China doesn't hide its spying,

Because they don't have to, because they cannot be democratically removed from power and their people accept a high level of human rights abuses as status quo. US citizens do not.

[pjc50]

Anyone remember the Plame affair? Not in the same category, but blowing the cover of a CIA operative in retaliation for their husband not following the party lie on Iraq.

Scooter Libby was prosecuted during the subsequent investigation and of course pardoned by Trump.

[Leary]

The West has a system in place to protect people like Snowden?

[throway88989898]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sQKUe96TAh4

[fucking_tragedy]

Are you aware of the government using Snowden's relatives as collateral in order to get him to return to the US? Pretty sure they've been safe this whole time.

[Dylan16807]

The people that know him are protected. And that is definitely worth noting. But I'm far less confident that he would be treated fairly.

[archgoon]

> But I'm far less confident that he would be treated fairly.

Maybe, maybe not, but there is precedence in America for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg

> Daniel Ellsberg... precipitated a national political

> controversy in 1971 when he released the Pentagon Papers,

> a top-secret Pentagon study of the U.S. government decision-

> making in relation to the Vietnam War, to The New York

> Times and other newspapers.

>

> On January 3, 1973, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage

> Act of 1917 along with other charges of theft and conspiracy,

> carrying a total maximum sentence of 115 years. Due to

> governmental misconduct and illegal evidence-gathering,

> and the defense by Leonard Boudin and Harvard Law School

> professor Charles Nesson, Judge William Matthew Byrne Jr.

> dismissed all charges against Ellsberg on May 11, 1973.

[sbov]

Not only that, from what I can tell his girlfriend travels between Russia and the US to visit him.

[chrischen]

Can you cite evidence of Chinese dissidents having family members held hostage? Genuinely curious if this is true, because it doesn't sound like it's true as even the Chinese government is accountable to public opinion to a large degree.

For an accusation like that you should always provide substantiated evidence, otherwise you're just flaming the anti-Chinese racial flames. Because as terrible as you may think the Chinese government is, it still has the legitimacy and support of a vast majority of the Chinese population.

[King-Aaron]

> Can you cite evidence of Chinese dissidents having family members held hostage?

Not the best coming from the Guardian admittedly, but still. Top result in google.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/26/chinese-activi...

[chrischen]

There's really nothing that goes on in China without netizens talking about it (see chinasmack.com). It'd be really interesting to hear about the Chinese perspective on this. TO be honest the article seems really lacking on details. From an objective bystander perspective, there may actually be legitimate charges levied on the family members, but it's hard to tell.

[calcifer]

> Not the best coming from the Guardian admittedly

What is that supposed to mean?

[dijit]

Guardian is a newspaper generally perceived to be anti-authoritarian.

It's one of the few "left" newspapers in the UK.

[calcifer]

I know that. I'm questioning GP's apologetic tone that implies it's wrong to link to the Guardian.

[King-Aaron]

Two reasons really - one, it's a source of evidence coming from a channel which is often disregarded here as holding bias to a certain political agenda, and two - I'd normally like to offer several sources of evidence to support a point I'm making, but didn't have time at work to aggregate more links.

[uodtl]

If you know that then you know the answer. It's an anti-authoritarian paper so it's going to be biased against an authoritarian government.

[ardy42]

Liu Xiaobo's wife was kept under house arrest and nearly incommunicado for eight years, without ever being charged, on account of being married to Nobel-prize winning dissident.

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/policies-politics/article/21...

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2018/07/10/liu-xia...

It take's a rather famous case to make it into the Western news, but I have a close Chinese-national friend who's under the strong impression that dissident activity would be bad for her parents.

[claplouder]

are you seriously asking this about the same govt that has trampled on tibetan rights and is holding a million muslims in an internment camp?

Since you have brought up the subject of the genocidal CCP having the support of the Chinese population, let me ask you this: isn't it true that the feeling amongst Han Chinese is that they are superior to other races and and cultures, and are meant to rule them? Isn't that the policy CCP is following now?

[anticodon]

> system to vote them out and elect a new form of government should the ultimate worst come to play

Has anything changed after Snowden revelations? New form of government?

[YUMad]

You mean the Snowden whose supposed presence on a plane of a Southamerican president made US pressure couple European countries to deny him air passage and in effect force him to land, and then made the police of the country he landed in search his plane?

Insane diplomatic incident.

You are right, USA wouldn't kill him if captured. They would only psychologically torture him for years, like they did with Manning.

[rchaud]

> There will never be a Snowden in China.

Snowden would have been in a US jail if Russia hadn't found him to be a useful symbol of US hypocrisy. Snowden originally went to HK but the authorities were ready to extradite him, as were most countries that didn't want the US breathing down their necks.

[chrischen]

I guess Russia is part of the West now? Funny thing is Snowden first went to Hong Kong, a part of China, for that protection.

[kelnos]

Suggesting that HK is "a part of China" vastly simplifies what's going on there to a point of uselessness.

[chrischen]

I think the communist party has enough leverage to make it "a part of China" for the concerns of Edward Snowden.

[techie128]

lol, you really think the American citizens will vote out the government or impeach their president because they act unethically or immorally? I'd love to know what you're smoking.

[eddieplan9]

The question is not if they will, but if they can.

[rchaud]

Can they really? The popular vote isn't enough to win a presidential election, you also need electoral college votes which aren't allocated by proportion of population.

At the local and state level, you can strategically implement gerrymandering to create electoral districts that are strongly advantageous to you. How would a political challenger not belonging to the dominant party win there?

Authoritarian regimes frequently win elections with 80-95% of the vote. That tells me that the people "can" vote him out.

[pishpash]

It makes no difference if they will not, or if the activation energy is exorbitantly high. If you want to go with technicalities, so can anybody in the world, revolution is always an option.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

Can they?