Bliman, you started in this thread by saying, "How do you know that China is spying more than the US, what is your proof?" I gave you like ~10 sources, all of which are well known and easily discoverable
by you, that go into depth about the vastness of China's domestic spying program, and some of which compare it specifically to spying programs in other countries including America.
Your response was:
"I'm not going to read those because they don't answer my question." (which... they did...)
And then you shifted to, "I want to hear from more Chinese people," which you won't get an answer from because most people living in China either don't know about the vastness of the government spying program because there is no free press in China, OR they know about it and they don't care, OR they know about it and they're so scared about the consequences of talking about it because THEY KNOW talking critically about the government on the internet has consequences for them and their families.
And then, when presented with recent stories about China's vast and growing concentration camp system which is fed prisoners by the spying program -- all of whom have done nothing wrong -- you've shifted to, "Well how do you know that the results of the US' spying program aren't as bad?"
You are incessantly denying or equivocating any criticism of the Chinese government, the spying program, and what the results of it are. In your posts you'll say things like, "I think it's bad [concentration camps, massive crackdowns on free expression of religion, jailing people for no reason, etc], but how do we know the US isn't worse?" You're saying those things are bad but then making excuses for them by appealing to programs in other countries that do not exist in scale, severity, and reach. It's the argumentative equivalent of saying "I think the Holocaust was bad, but why are we always talking about Nazis, the US government interned Japanese people during World War II as well..." In which every informed person would say, "Yeah, the Japanese internment during WWII was shameful, but these two programs are not equitable and Nazi Germany
deserves criticism for the holocaust."
I don't know if you live in the United States or not, but if you do, walk outside. There is no vast camera system. The US doesn't even have a federal
voting system. We don't have federally controlled street lights. We don't have federally controlled health care. There is no infrastructure, personnel, or technology system to support an integrated camera system in most of our largest cities, let alone anywhere else. Beyond that, even if cameras and surveillance technology does exist, it's not owned or accessible by the federal government... For instance, the US government doesn't even have access to the tax filings of the most prominent citizen in the United States even though he filed those taxes
with the government, and yet federal law enforcement doesn't have access to documents
that the government has. Regardless of any of this, besides that it's plainly obvious that no Western government has the sort of sophisticated domestic spying program that China has and there is no vast prison camp system for religious minorities in the West, you keep repeating "I'm just asking questions..." or "but how do you know???"
Beyond that, nobody defends America's domestic spying program. I'd imagine all of us in this thread are very critical of it. But, we also aren't shutting ourselves off to other information that clearly shows that there is a difference in vastness and breath of the Chinese surveillance state, versus that of any other Western country -- like the US, UK, or Germany. How do we know that there isn't a vast surveillance state like that of China's? This is the conspiracy theory you've fallen back on several times. We have a free press in Western democracies. Now, sure, the American government gets in the way of the free press from time to time, requiring freedom of information requests, and so on, and there are times when even the free press can't turn up information until a leaker does -- like Edward Snowden's leak of NSA surveillance. But look at what happened in
the aftermath of Snowden's 2013 leaks, you had this massive blitz of hundreds and thousands of articles, media inquiries, government oversight reviews, congressional hearings, people being fired ... this simply doesn't exist in the Chinese surveillance state, there isn't any reporting from within China on it because there is no free press, there is no free disclosure of information.
I just implore you to stop self-censoring and click some of the sources others, and I, have shared in this thread. Here's one that you don't even really have to read, it's an interactive video/audio/text article from the New York Times:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/04/04/world/asia/xinjiang-china-surveillance-prison.html
And, really, I'm not even the staunchest critic of a company like Huawei, there are others here who are far more critical than I am. I am naturally a little skeptical of them and I would never personally buy anything they make. Part of why I'd never buy their products is because I work with a lot of Chinese ex-pats and the risk for them is just not high enough for me to buy a Huawei device, knowing Huawei's history and connection to the Chinese government and surveillance state.
