It’s not that there’s nothing to criticize about the US and this example is one of the worst things the US does. However a key difference is that the CIA is not doing this to American citizens, we can be sure that if it were there would be considerably more outrage. In China this sort of treatment is on the table for anyone who crosses the line.

Ah that makes all the difference, and naturally CIA does follow the "law" and never does anything in-house.

Snowden and others in similar spots don't have any reason to worry about.

Ya, that occasionally happens in the USA. In China, however, that’s just a Tuesday.

Nothing to worry about then, just a statistic rounding error of a couple of poor fellows that were occasionally on the wrong spot.

Binarism (that there is only right and wrong, and not a large spectrum of gray scale in between) is one of those huge fallacies that allows one to claim that China and the USA are basically the same, when in reality, neither is white or black but one is much closer to black than the other.

True, yet acting as US is a country that should be a moral example where such things never happen also doesn't help, a country where having the wrong skin colour might be a death sentence when stoped by the police.

Not much different than being stop by the police in more dubious countries.

A scale it is.

Are we talking about China or the USA? Because having the wrong skin color is also dangerous in China as well (eg being caught African or Uighur in Guangzhou). I get it: the USA is more diverse so ethnic tension is much more common, but China has the same issues, even worse, just papered over a 90% Han majority focused into the east. Frankly, China’s ethnic tensions are a hundred years behind the states.