[janalsncm]

I was in China part of 2020 (I entered before their border was closed). It was definitely a low point watching the heavy handed way in which police handled protests. And today seeing police with sniper rifles aiming at students, it is pretty far from the respect for free expression I’d like to see. Point is, China and Russia might be dismissing the right to protest, but the police are doing a pretty good job of that as well.

The other factor is the media, which seems to only be interested in the spectacle of the protest rather than the substance of it. Very rarely do they actually ask about the specific reasons people are protesting. They care more about whether people are protesting in the “right way”. It’s the kind of sanitized distant coverage you get when all media is consolidated into multinational corporations. Of course they will talk about how destructive protests are as a means of affecting change but never about how the most common method, lobbying, is just legalized bribery.