>"'Show me the man and I’ll show you the crime' is the fact of how western legal systems work, the rule of law is a tale that they tell to impressionable schoolchildren."
>"three felonies a day and the way China does it are fundamentally the same thing"
These are the statements that are incorrect for the reasons above.
Constraining the scope of those statements after the fact to narrowly apply to cases where individuals come to the particular attention of severe national security concerns in the respective countries allows for some "correctness" to the statement. But you have moved the goalpost if we are to read those comments so narrowly now - congrats! With appropriate qualifications your statements have become less wrong!
As mentioned, in contrast to the US, in China, social order and political security are scoped into the definition of national security - meaning that even if the mechanisms are the same, your ordinary Chinese citizen is far more constrained by the boundaries of the "national security" box than the US citizen. That an average citizen can successfully navigate the boundaries of their smaller box isn't the useful measurement when contrasting systems - all that fact does is convey that touching a hot stove gets you burnt and people learn from that. It does not change the fact that the Chinese legal system is fundamentally different than the western legal tradition in how it perceives rights and individual liberty and what recourse the average citizen has to challenge their encounters. This speaks directly to both of your claims at a high level.
>"three felonies a day and the way China does it are fundamentally the same thing"
These are the statements that are incorrect for the reasons above.
Constraining the scope of those statements after the fact to narrowly apply to cases where individuals come to the particular attention of severe national security concerns in the respective countries allows for some "correctness" to the statement. But you have moved the goalpost if we are to read those comments so narrowly now - congrats! With appropriate qualifications your statements have become less wrong!
As mentioned, in contrast to the US, in China, social order and political security are scoped into the definition of national security - meaning that even if the mechanisms are the same, your ordinary Chinese citizen is far more constrained by the boundaries of the "national security" box than the US citizen. That an average citizen can successfully navigate the boundaries of their smaller box isn't the useful measurement when contrasting systems - all that fact does is convey that touching a hot stove gets you burnt and people learn from that. It does not change the fact that the Chinese legal system is fundamentally different than the western legal tradition in how it perceives rights and individual liberty and what recourse the average citizen has to challenge their encounters. This speaks directly to both of your claims at a high level.