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Chinese music student convicted in US of threatening pro-democracy activist (www.reuters.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

18 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Cross-posted from: https://feddit.de/post/8243678

A Chinese music student was convicted on Thursday of U.S. charges that he harassed an activist who posted fliers at the Berklee College of Music in Boston supporting democracy in China and threatened to report her activities to Chinese law enforcement. A federal jury in Boston found Xiaolei Wu, 25, who sent the activist online messages saying he would chop off her hands and demanding she tear down her "reactionary posters," guilty at the end of a four-day trial.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Not to minimize the role that China's educational indoctrination plays in this (because that is the underlying cause of the student feeling the need to defend China's reputation with threats), but I've heard gamers threaten the same kind of bodily harm in League matches.

I think it's tough to place the blame for this entirely on China, when he's living in a society (our's/ the US's) that also teaches violence against women as a tool to silence them.

Sure, China made him feel the need to counter criticism of China with threats (just as the Chinese government does), but did China alone make him feel empowered to make those threats ones of bodily harm towards a woman? Much harder to say.

This could just as easily have been a story about an American guy defending Trump by telling a woman he'd hurt her.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 9 months ago (1 children)

There is one difference though, will China punish him for doing so? I don't think so, will the US? Yes, they indeed are.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

In either China or the US it will depend on many factors.

Many cases will go un-prosecuted if there is no media attention. In China, negative public opinion is even more likely to result in a charge and conviction than in the US, due to how their judicial system works.

Ahmaud Arbery was run down and shot in the middle of the street, in public view, and it took 3 months of the video of the murder being posted online before any of the 3 men who murdered him were charged with a crime. Local police and the local DA's office had completely ignored the case, until media picked it up and started investigating, and that only happened because there was video.

Or the 215 bodies buried behind a prison in Mississippi, who no one ever was informed about, and whose causes of death (many while in police custody) will probably never be fully known.

I'd be interested to see statistics about whether a person of color in the US is treated more or less harshly than a Han (ethnic majority) Chinese person is in China; I'd wager that in terms of outcomes like sentencing, people of color in the US probably get a generally worse shake than Han Chinese people in China do, and white people a generally better shake.