Comment by leonidasrup
7 hours ago
You should visit the Tibet region and ask the locals. But:
1. As a US citizen, you would probably not a get permit necessary for entering the Tibet region.
2. If you could get a permit for Tibet region and go there, you would be followed by police officers dressed in civilian clothing. The locals would be quite hesitant to speak to you.
(Source: been there long ago, seen it). China has many qualities, but freedom is not one of them.
Nor are civil rights, or civil litigation for that matter.
I don't think the poster you're responding to is writing in good faith; they're either an agent of an authoritarian power, or blind to the difference of being one.
People in China can say anything the government approves of, but they can't say "long live freedom and democracy," unless they want to be executed.
Neither, I suspect, will Chinese AI models make any statement in sympathy with personal freedom, democracy, or human rights; it would come at the expense of the people who paid to train those models, and that can't be allowed.
Fun fact: there are huge government-sponsored posters proclaiming Freedom (自由) and Democracy (民主) through China, because they're two of the official twelve Core Socialist Values.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_Socialist_Values
That is a fun fact.
I guess freedom means different things to different people. Do people in China just roll their eyes at that?
And are we perfectly free in America? No. But we can say whatever we want about the government or the corporations, provided we're nonviolent. And we're not commanded how many children we can or can't have, or what religion to practice or not, or forced to show loyalty to a political party.
Plus we can smoke weed, buy guns, vote the bums out every four years, and most importantly make money without having to pay off some party official.