in a nutshell china has been imprisoning christians for simply bringing and distributing the bible there for two decades.
total bullshit. There are major christian organizations operating in China, as well as public churches with people doing the whole kneeling, contemplating, praying thing, or attending services, or irreligious people like me just going in now and again to get out of the crowds.
To briefly set the record straight, I went to China by myself on a 125$ plane ticket, with about a grand of labourready dough in my pocket, I stayed there two years by hustling however I could, taking care of all my own visa paperwork, and yes, in that time I was hassled more than once by secret police, in the library, on the phone, I was arrested on a job I was doing in central china in a restricted military zone, and taken to a compound where I was held and questioned by mps, finally had to write a full "confession", old school style. Got the old lightbulb in the face treatment in Langzhou too, arrested for trying to register at a hotel with no passport, questioned many hours, full confession, yada yada yada. My daily life there was doing whatever kind of work I could, most of the time that meant being a bitch for some company or other, most of them local, some of them not, most of the time I didn't work, just hung out on the streets with my friends. So I think I'm in some limited way aware of life there (probably a lot more so than somebody travelling ON SOMEBODY ELSE'S DIME, ON A TRIP ORGANIZED BY A HOSTILE GOVERNMENT BODY), but when all's said and done, life didn't strike me as overall better or worse there, people are people.
I reckon I read more chinadigitaltimes and newsfeeds on China and things china-related than all of you put together, so please spare me the analysis of current socio-economic climate, because here it is:
these days China is villified in western media because they are getting a bigger piece of the pie, which scares those who have been stuffing their faces for so long.
Also, I appreciate that there isn't currently the extreme and constant repression here within US borders as people elsewhere do experience daily
are you fucking kidding me? I get hassled by cops and the state in some form or other way more in the north than anywhere else, that's just part of having a highly developed infrastructure.
Again, not denigrating the USA, just can't stand hearing people regurgitate media paranoia.
The north has more food and more access to health and education- that's what's better about it. But how we got these things has very little to do with the creation or existence of a "righteous" political system. A lot of what is good about the states exists despite the system, it shouldn't be so hard to imagine that life works that way other places too.