Again, this is an unfair comparison, since in the US many detained journalists will not be charged, and if they are charged, they will almost certainly not be i

Again, this is an unfair comparison, since in the US many detained journalists will not be charged, and if they are charged, they will almost certainly not be imprisoned. That doesn't mean that the Trump administration hasn't overseen an alarming increase in violence against journalists. But Trump is out, so let's see whether that trend holds up. The Xi administration - like all previous CCP administrations - can and does hold journalists without a charge, and once charged there is a 99% conviction rate. In the US right now there are 0 journalists in prison. In China there are at least 50 (per CPJ[0]), and possibly more if you include citizen journalists (per RSF[1]). In China, the government sends memos to the editorial boards indicating how they should report on topics. China Media Project[2] has some good insights there. Anecdotally, there are a lot of Chinese people who have experienced first-hand both the mainstream media and social media "deleting" events from history. In the west we often think about June 4 incident (Tiananmen), but there are far more cases that never made waves overseas. In particular reporting around natural disasters in rural areas can quickly get scrubbed from the internet and written out of history, or retold to pin the blame for a poor response on a politically useful scapegoat. I can't personally speak to the accuracy of those stories, but this is what I heard from several different colleagues and friends in China. Even just living in China through coronavirus, I was there when they literally went back and rewrote history to rename what had originally been called the Wuhan coronavirus to instead call it the novel coronavirus, a silent edit designed to quietly lend credence to growing social media rumors that suggested the virus originated overseas. This kind of manipulation of the truth is standard practice in the Chinese media, on many topics. Countries that have a free press, where anyone can publish whatever they like, whether on Substack or WikiLeaks or wherever, where the majority of arrests are happening because reporters were tangled up in the middle of a protest (and not because the police came to their door to punish them for something they already published), it's really not the same thing. [0] https://cpj.org/ https://cpj.org/ [1] https://rsf.org/en https://rsf.org/en [2] https://chinamediaproject.org/ https://chinamediaproject.org/