People watching Chinese TV today are seeing what they say looks like a warzone in the US: Footage of journalists being arrested, blinded by rubber bullets, or pepper sprayed.
The pictures have stunned China, as many people have never seen such scenes. And in fact, had such scenes happened in China, they would inevitably have been censored outright.
Any protest in China, no matter how small-scale, goes unreported there, and the country is frequently ranked bottom by rights groups for having one of the most restricted media environments in the world.
There’s now an opportunity for many Chinese papers and social media users to criticise the US as having what they perceive as double-standards. China’s government says it has experienced “violence” from “rioters”, in Hong Kong, and is asking why the US has slammed the police presence in Hong Kong and claimed that Beijing was eroding local freedoms in recent months.
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The view on Chinese social media platform Sina Weibo is that the US unrest shows that “freedom is dead” there.
Netizens are also commenting that “the US police has lost all humanity”, with official broadcasters stressing that US police use excessive brutality on what they call “peaceful protesters”.
