I upvoted you because you bring up a good point and I want to make clear that I'm not excusing their horrendous behavior or trying to imply that the good necessarily requires or even outweighs the bad.
I'm merely pointing out that at the very least, there was _some_ upside to go with the downside, at least for a while, and the upside was a planned outcome by its political leadership.
I don't think it was always that way, and it's too soon to tell if its current leadership is similarly wise or just coasting off of past successes.
I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
If someone says "government A has a bad policy on issue X" and then the response is "yes but government A also lifted people out of poverty", it's not addressing the original point about the failings of government A's policy on X. We know that governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty in the abstract because governments B, C and D also succeeded in doing so. And we know that the ability to lift people out of poverty is not directly connected to their policy on X because B, C and D each had varying policies on X and still lifted people out of poverty. So why even bring it up?
The discussion is not about which governments are capable of lifting people out of poverty, it's about whether it's a good idea to have laws that mandate communication providers scan all channels for CSAM, even those that are ostensibly encrypted. If you know something about the incidence of CSAM in China and how it compares to countries with less invasive internet surveillance, that would be something pertinent to share. Even a comparison of general violent crime statistics or terror incidents versus other East Asian countries with a similar culture could be interesting. Unfortunately it's hard to get trustworthy statistics from China on these topics precisely because the government is authoritarian and its censorship apparatus actively hampers this kind of social research and independent reporting.
> I understand what you are trying to say, but I also feel like these kinds of statements don't really add to the discussion. In fact, they distract from it.
Were you and I reading the same thing? The post I was replying to was a pithy one sentence sentiment, which was a reply to another pithy one-sentence sentiment.
If anything, I wanted to elevate the conversation thread beyond that, and based on the size of the replies I got, I succeeded.
I was saying their domestic mass surveillance is not directly tied to them becoming a preeminent world power. That their rise could've just as well happened without it.
You and I are in complete agreement on that front.