[pagnotta]

It is funny how american media is eager to depict China as a North-Korea, and how americans opinions end being formed by their partial media in the same way it happens under dictatorships. Have spent a decade in China, I have yet to see a cop carrying a gun. Cops in China are way more friendly than in US, and for me, way more trustable. people think they keep the chinese people under fear and draconian control, but if you spend some time in China and listen to the people, you see thats not the whole truth. American media call Mugabe a dictator and call Cameroon's President a "chief of state", but both countries hold the same kind of elections. Anyone saw the news about the recent death of the Arabian king? I didn't read any mention about him being a dictator, indeed he is, but he is an ally.

[ThisIBereave]

I lived in China for 6 months and saw plenty of cops with guns and saw undercover cops roughly throw around a street vendor who had gotten too close to the forbidden city for their liking. Your view here seems to be willfully obscured.

Having your opinion formed by the media is a necessity of living in a world where you can't get first hand information for everything, i.e. a constraint imposed by reality. the difference is that in the west you can choose what media you want to pay attention to, and the media itself is free to report what it wants.

[virtuabhi]

If media is free, then why is Glenn Greenwald in Brazil and Laura Poitras in Berlin?

[0] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2797916/filmmaker-di...

[dmix]

In China the citizenry is constantly fed lines how 'China is not bad, don't listen to the foreign critics, just look at all the awful things the West does'.

Pretty easy way to never look at yourself critically and fix problems. The west is bad sure, but why does that mean China can't be better? The self-maintained status quo by the citizens in China is incredibly strong. This is by design.

[api]

America is simply much more sophisticated in its methods of mass control. China deploys primitive ham-fisted stuff like web controls and their "great firewall," while America is much more skilled in the fine-grained use of soft power and propaganda to achieve the same effects. American oligarchs know better than to whack people indiscriminately with crude mallets or to show their hand too overtly. My guess would be that they learned this from the British elite, who are probably the undisputed global masters at weathering social and political storms through flexing and employing soft nuanced mechanisms to hold power. Britain still has a royal dynasty while most of the rest of Europe's royals lost their heads.

America excels at creating the illusion of freedom and at permitting enough freedom at lower levels of society to sustain that illusion, but at the top American corporations and the American national security state are almost indistinguishable. Ex-vice-presidents serve on the boards of major VC firms, and Google is basically the state department. That's not that different from China. When American financial elites get in real trouble, unlimited public funds suddenly materialize to bail them out. The same thing of course would happen in China. In both nations if you are sufficiently connected, neither laws nor the ordinary rules of economics apply to you... unless you are so crude and reckless that you overtly tip your hand in which case an example is made of you to preserve the illusion. This also happens regularly in China's "corruption crackdowns."

Americans value freedom of expression, and that's a good thing, but at the end of the day we have no real choice but to elect a Republican or a Democrat and our media is remarkably complacent and docile. I'd say the vast majority of our media are akin to BuzzFeed for government propaganda, and the rest are too chronically under-funded or intellectually out to lunch (e.g. conspiranoids) to make any difference. I highly doubt the condition of our media is an accident. The public is free to converse, but most of that talk is impotent.

I'm really not familiar with any large-scale society that is not an oligarchy. That being said, some are pragmatically better places to live than others. I'd rather live in the USA or another Western "democracy" than in most other places. Soft nuanced mechanisms of control generally don't kill you or send you to camps.

[dmix]

Great point. I'd go even further and say this is the natural outcome of representative democracy which naturally leads to a form of oligarchy. The 'representative' part is always given way too much credit as a means to fix problems, and is the means to placate the public, when the examples of it actually fixing the publics problems are limited but the only thing that matters is the perception.

The representatives more often reinforces existing power-structures over the interest of their voters. The effects of which is mostly unnoticeable - at first - and seems like it's an effective working model, but after a century or more the cracks in the model start to show. The power structures which were slowly reinforced over time start to become powerhouses and the wealth division becomes exponential.

It's like a slow moving wave which the public continues to lose more and more ability to do anything about.

Whereas China started with the tidal wave and is busy pretending everything is OK because America has reached a similar place.

[sholanozie]

Just wanted to say that this is spot on, in my opinion. After watching a documentary about North Korea recently, I couldn't help but feel like our Western governments are guilty of the exact same things that we openly mock North Korea for. The only difference is that we, over hundreds (perhaps thousands) of years, have mastered the art of disguising the mechanisms by which we control the population.

[api]

I think the comparison continues down the line -- the big difference is how crude or refined an oligarchy is at wielding power. North Korea is particularly crude and "lower class," simply offing people left and right and sending people to camps. American oligarchs are considerably classier.

[hga]

Indeed, and I don't deny our ruling class has become an oligarchy, see for instance the recent writings of Angelo Codevilla starting with http://spectator.org/articles/39326/americas-ruling-class-an...

But they, or we, are singularly peculiar. Outside of NYC and DC, all of us with non-felony or domestic violence records can buy serious handguns and rifles, the very same stuff (or better :-) than our police and military are issued. (Machine guns are under a weird regime, but given their very limited utility until you get to the weights of light machine guns or GPMGs, 15-30 pounds, that's not much of an issue, and in most states we can still buy them.)

Historically unique, not counting regimes where it was decided that the reliable subjects should be strongly encouraged to be proficient in the weapons of the day (I'm thinking particularly of the English and long bows, and after Henry the VIII, "reliable" generally meant non-Roman Catholic; I've also heard much less reliably that in old times one or more of the kingdoms in Korea could in extremis muster just about everyone including the women and have a good chance of saving the situation).

[dragonwriter]

> American media call Mugabe a dictator and call Cameroon's President a "chief of state", but both countries hold the same kind of elections.

"Chief of state" and "dictator" are orthogonal descriptions. "Chief of state" describes the ceremonial head of any state, whether or not they are actually the head of government, and whether or not they are elected, and whether or not they exercise dictatorial power.

"Dictator" refers to anyone exercising dictatorial power, whether or not they are also the chief of state (its possible, particularly, for a dictator to be head of government in a system with a separate head of government and chief of state, as might happen in a military junta in a state with a ceremonial monarch.)

[pagnotta]

I know that very well. The same goes for the term "President". I didn't say the terms are mutually exclusive, the point is the way they choose the terms to describe those considered allies and those considered enemies.

[dragonwriter]

> the point is the way they choose the terms to describe those considered allies and those considered enemies.

Well, you said that they were described differently despite being subject to the same kind of elections -- but the kind of election is only distantly relevant to whether someone is a "dictator", and not at all relevant to whether they are a "chief of state". It would be more relevant if you described a similarity that was relevant to the applicability of those descriptions, rather than one with limited relevance to either description.

Of course, the idea that the US media describes Paul Biya of Cameroon as a "chief of state" and not a "dictator" is also false; see, e.g., http://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-worlds-enduring-dictators-pa...

[bostonpete]

I think the strong negative opinions by many when issues like this come up is tied to how highly, in general, Americans value freedom of expression. The rationale for this is that no matter what injustices may be present in society at least if we can discuss them in open forums, there's reason to hope that the injustices can be corrected. China, with its track record of stifling expression and even attempting to write unfortunate events out of history (e.g. Tienanmen Square) has consistently trampled over what many Americans consider to be the most critical safeguard protecting people from a government that acts badly.

[malandrew]

Go to Xinjiang. Many of the police there carried automatic weapons. It was basically an occupied country AFAICT. This was back in 2006. I don't know how things are today. I reckon that the policy of "ethnic cleansing by dilution" might have changed things, at least in Urumqi. Kashgar I reckon has the same occupied country vibe.

[eva1984]

Not Entirely True.

Possibly, mainland China is the second last countries in the world, next only to North Korea, where hacker news audience wants to live.

NO INTERNET. End of story.

Disclaimer: Chinese.