Human rights record of the United States in 2012 (Chinese viewpoint)

We're not talking marginal variances (in which case people reply by saying that the US isn't perfect on x y or z either), we're talking the wholesale lack of.

I can Google "gulf of tonkin" or look up the spraying of black communities with zinc cadmium sulfide by the military in St. Louis in the 1950s and 1960s. I can read all about the bad things our government has done. In China they have to hide everything via censorship. The US is a basketcase right now, compared to the past, but it's approximately a million times more transparent than the Chinese system of government.

The U.S. is an outlier among liberal democracies in its constitutional insistence that access to firearms is a human right. It's also, significantly, an outlier in its rate of firearm-related deaths, with a rate of over 10 per 100,000, similar to Panama and the Philippines and three times higher than the next highest liberal democracy.

Canada, which has roughly the same culture and economy as the United States and shares the same continent, has a firearm death rate only one-fifth of the United States. Australia, which also has a similar culture, has a firearm death rate one-tenth of the United States. The United Kingdom's firearm death rate is one-fortieth that of the United States.

I get that many Americans believe their 2nd Amendment is what restrains the government from tyranny, but the evidence across all the stable liberal democracies manifestly discredits this hypothesis. What keeps a government from tyranny is not the threat of armed revolt but ongoing broad civic engagement in a dense, complex and mutually reinforcing fabric of democratic institutions, traditions, practices and civic values exercised in open, transparent and accountable ways at every level of resolution from the federal government to municipal affairs.

I would go so far as to argue that America's cultural hostility to the idea of government - the deep-seated belief that governments can never be trusted and will only behave (barely) under the constant threat of armed rebellion - is actually a major obstacle keeping the U.S. from becoming more functional and more accountable to its citizens.

It's a failed 18th century idea that is holding America back from joining the rest of the industrialized world's norms of civility, and it helps to explain why the U.S. is an outlier in so many varied measures of life, health and wellbeing.

But hopefully you realise that none of the above refutes the article in the slightest. You have not addressed a single point in it.

But faults? Mao killed tens of millions through forced famine alone, and he's practically worshiped as a god in China. There are no countries without bad marks on their records, but on the scale of recent bad marks, it's pretty twisted for China to criticize anybody.