China is not totalitarian. Many people believe that China is still like 1950s-60s-era Maoist China, but it's just not.

tiananmen square was in 1989. Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light. Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses. You do not need to look back at the cultural revolution to see the prc for what it is.

> Hong Kong was snuffed out like a light.

I'm in Hong Kong right now. Seems like it is still here to me.

and the Kent State shootings were in 1970.

Being self-righteous and a yank doesn't make sense, country of war mongers, something that cant be said of China.

Kent state saw 4 people unjustly killed. Tiananmen killed 100 to 1000x as many people and that’s just in the area with the reporters. The crackdowns in the other 300 cities without cameras were almost certainly much more brutal.

Going further, discussion about Kent state won’t get you in any trouble in the US, but discussing Tiananmen in China will get a far different response from the government.

Comparing the two only highlights just how much more extreme and repressive the Chinese system is despite all the US moves toward authoritarianism.

Clearly I’ve hit a nerve if you’re stooping to whataboutism. Perhaps you should reflect on why that is.

Is your contention that Hong Kong is also a totalitarian society? Have you been to Hong Kong in the last 5 years? I feel like people saying these sorts of things are just completely divorced from reality.

> Covid saw people caged and sealed in their houses.

No. There were a few incidents very early on, when everyone was (quite understandably) panicking about a new, deadly virus that nobody had ever seen before, when some local city officials barred the doors of people who had just come from Wuhan. That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.

What China did do quite extensively was border quarantine, and during localized outbreaks (caused by cases that slipped through quarantine at the border), mass testing and quarantine measures. This was during a once-in-a-generation pandemic that killed millions of people. In China, these measures saved several million lives. The estimates are that China's overall death rate was about 25% that of the US, and these measures are the reason. By the way, Taiwan and Australia took nearly identical measures, and I very much doubt that you would call them totalitarian societies.

> That was a scandal inside China, and it was immediately reversed.

Tell it to the people in Wuhan, and Shanghai, Urumqi, and other cities that had lockdowns. I was in Shanghai in 2022, I was confined to my apartment for nearly 3 months, you couldn't be more wrong.

Shanghai was locked down as a health measure during a major outbreak in the middle of a pandemic that killed millions of people around the world.

Lockdowns were done in many places in the world, including in Taiwan. I get that you're angry about being inconvenienced, but you weren't living in a totalitarian state. You were inconvenienced because there was a massive public health emergency, and the government had the choice of either locking down one city or letting the virus spread to the rest of the country and kill millions of people.

God I wish I could just block you. So called inconveniences in the name of so called massive public health emergency? First of all it was the Omicron variant, we knew its mortality rate is low, second it did spread to the rest of the country by the end of 2022 and killed millions of people, so what was the fucking point? If you have to downplay all suffering by calling them inconveniences, I guess there's no one could convince you anyway, you better hope it doesn't happen to you.

Anyway here are few links and videos for those curious what happened

The Initium's timeline of the whole thing https://campaign.theinitium.com/20220506-mainland-covid-shan...

A viral video on Shanghai lock down https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mBdOXwdBn5s

Forced transfer to Fangcang quarantine center without testing positive https://youtu.be/NQfmOTB_naA

Spoiled food in groceries https://www.sohu.com/a/539911328_118622

Community effort to collect the names of those who died, whether it is covid or othe medical conditions or suicide(the og Airtable is down) https://github.com/augustuscaesarr/runrunrun/blob/main/%E6%9...

Here's a fun one, a fake app for Covid Health Code, which was required to enter any public space and private business and even your home https://ilovexjp.pages.dev/

And it is fit to finish with Shanghai protesters shouting Xi Jinping Step Down, Dec 2022 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vDAX8UO4ZQA