Earlier quoted context omitted.
On a meta-note, this seems to apply to every aspect of Chinese surveillance/repression. Every time someone here reports that a website is blocked in China, someone else will reply that it works for them.
Seems to me there is a large public relations push to normalize their authoritarianism in the view of Westerners. Then you hear about bloggers being imprisoned for pointing out corruption according to the government’s own definitions. China’s authoritarianism looks attractive when it’s about infrastructure and efficiency, but the underside of it, the collective silencing and destruction of debate, the “blank spots” i…
So, bigger than the push to make it appear worse than it is?
Because that has been a tactic with any competing nation/enemy du jour of the west for over a century...
Not to mention that everything is judged with US-norms and interpreted through US-preferences in all those articles (aside and above the interpretation through their national interests) -- as if, e.g. rugged individualism and puritanism -derived principles is some universal law and e.g. a collectivist spirit, or some religious-derived norms, or other such cultural ways, are by default bad.