They publicize lots of the information, even if they keep the total secret, and we know that crime rates in the PRC are very low in general. The police don’t even carry guns most of the time. Is it a perfect system? By no means. Is it a regularly improving, functional system? Yes.
How do we know the information they make public isn’t cherry picked to make them look good? It takes a lot of trust in the Chinese government take the cases they do publicize at face value and assume that nothing else is going on, because without the total numbers it’s impossible to know how many cases are being omitted.
I don’t think I could bring myself up to that level of trust. It’s not even anything against the Chinese government in particular; I don’t know if I’d trust any government to that degree.
You don’t have to take them purely at their word, you can look at tangential topics, such as crime rates, conviction rates, how the police work, etc to see if the claims match up. Even if they did post the totals, you’d still have people claiming they were made up.
But how do you know that if they keep the numbers secret?
They publicize lots of the information, even if they keep the total secret, and we know that crime rates in the PRC are very low in general. The police don’t even carry guns most of the time. Is it a perfect system? By no means. Is it a regularly improving, functional system? Yes.
How do we know the information they make public isn’t cherry picked to make them look good? It takes a lot of trust in the Chinese government take the cases they do publicize at face value and assume that nothing else is going on, because without the total numbers it’s impossible to know how many cases are being omitted.
I don’t think I could bring myself up to that level of trust. It’s not even anything against the Chinese government in particular; I don’t know if I’d trust any government to that degree.
You don’t have to take them purely at their word, you can look at tangential topics, such as crime rates, conviction rates, how the police work, etc to see if the claims match up. Even if they did post the totals, you’d still have people claiming they were made up.