Then give examples where they actually did far exceed what China does.
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.
I don't think debating counterfactuals is a productive way to have this discussion.
I also want to point out that the reason I mentioned Gui Minhai was to counter the claim that escaping the grip of China was a simple matter of moving abroad.
With respect to this original topic, there are also various examples where Chinese who moved abroad are threatened either by phone calls from China (with reference to their family) or by Chinese agents (presumably) in the new country. (I could list some if you want, but I assume you're familiar with them.)
These are things that the US does not really do.
But, yeah, US's track history in foreign policy is terrible. But China has its own take on terror and it's not pretty by any means. If you care about things like democracy or freedom of speech I will assert that China is emerging as the bigger threat by far.
(I take terror to refer to the systematically frightening people with the threat of violence, to make them behave in a certain way.)
The context of the chain is that you can leave the US or the UK, but you can't leave China. The original comment literally said - if you don't like the US, you can leave, but if you don't like China, you can't leave.
If you are an enemy of the USG, you can't leave the US. If you are an enemy of the Chinese State, you can't leave China. I fail to see the difference.
I assure you that US citizens that move abroad and act in ways that conflict with the USG are also surveilled. The tactics are different, because the US has sufficient power to surveil you without needing any threatening. If ever the threat of violence is judged effective that is what will threaten you. First under the threat of extradition (which is violence), if that fails the US will make phone calls to the government of the country where you live in, and if that fails and you're still worth it then it's covert action.
Maybe if you live in the Anglosphere China is a bigger threat, but in that case it's not a big threat at all. But for people that live anywhere else in the world or have done so the US has done enough terrorizing and threatening to see that the US is a bigger threat to your freedom. What good is democracy when the US controls your economy and defence? What meaningful freedom do you have of acting according to your interests when that boot is against your neck? Both China and the US are exactly the same threat. It is absurd to give more power to the US to isolate China. If what you care about is freedom, the best scenario is actually to have both China and the US in economic competition.
Snowden was just an example. The only reason why he didn't get kidnapped abroad is because the US failed. They were absolutely attempting to do so.
In any case, the CIA has an entire program devoted entirely to kidnap people abroad, move them in jurisdictions where they can be tortured, and then deal with them. It's called "extraordinary rendition".
I chose Snowden as an example specifically because he was a US citizen. If you want examples of non-US citizens, there are literal hundreds.
Anyways, here is an overview of the US extraordinary rendition program : https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13642987.2017.1...
There is pretty much nothing that China has done, that the US hasn't in living memory. From internment camps, slave labour at the industrial level, censorship, extrajudicial execution, systematic torture at home and abroad, ubiquitous and total surveillance, and so much more.
There are, however, things that the US has done that China hasn't, such as, I don't know, functionally annexing an entire island of a foreign country in order to torture prisoners held without due process. Or maybe systematic destruction of dozens of countries under false pretenses, killing millions, in order to accumulate power. Neither has the US shied away from imposing economic systems that essentially damn billions of people to poverty and cause millions of easily preventable deaths a year.
There is no country in contemporary history that has exported as much pain, suffering and death abroad as the US.
Now, I don't think that this is because the US is somehow fundamentally worse than China. In the same geostrategic situation, China would likely have acted largely in the same pattern. However, your claim that "the things the US does pale in comparison to what China does" is really, really absurd. There simply is no international force that exports and maintains atrocities to the scale of what the US does, because of the US position as the global hegemon and what it takes to maintain it.