[skippyboxedhero]

Yes, everyone country does this. You can be barred from travel in a wide range of other circumstances in many other countries.

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.

[glerk]

Just because the US also does this doesn’t make it right for China to do it and vice versa.

Team coca-cola and team pepsi are both evil and illegitimate.

[skippyboxedhero]

Every country does it. Doing it is a central function of having a government.

The number of, presumably, left-wing people who advocate for the most extreme forms of libertarianism is truly incredible.

[guywithahat]

The horseshoe theory of politics continues to be true, just in new and exciting ways

[defrost]

Would that be lower or higher than the number of people who endlessly bang on about "lefties" and or "fascists", "nazis" et al.

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"?

[glerk]

> Every country does it. Doing it is a central function of having a government.

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.

[Fricken]

>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.

[glerk]

If we’re going to descend into pedantry, my statement was normative, not descriptive, as in “I agree this is what a government does, I disagree this is what it _should_ do”.

“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.

[Fricken]

The government sits above you because it makes you do things under the threat of violence. Why do you stop at the stop sign? because the government reserves the right to hurt you if you don't.

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.

[mothballed]

Luckily china has a litany of 3rd world countries land borders surrounding it with porous borders, and in a great deal of them no one who gives too many shits about some poor chinese villager crossing. Americans on the other hand have Canada which for LEO purposes is basically an extension of the US, and Mexico which due to the drug trade and other unique factors mean anyone getting caught jumping the border in either direction is likely to owe the cartel a massive amount of money or some extremely undesirable favors.

I would definitely rather be a trapped Chinese trying to escape than a trapped American.

[komali2]

Surveillance in the PRC is massive and centralized. There's a reason NK fleeing into the PRC plummeted when the PRC decided to stop turning a blind eye.