I think if it's coincidental, it cannot be fair right? Fair in the sense we're discussing here must mean a repeatable system. If a wrongful process arrives at the right conclusion, it's still not fair (e.g. let's say a bunch of people lynch someone accused of murdering a child, without hearing any evidence, and it turns out the suspect was really a child mudered: was the process "fair"?).

Or if you don't like the child murder analogy: suppose an FBI employee decided to betray the US to the Soviets out of money, not ideology (cue Robert Hanssen). The US is at this point in time still executing traitors to the state. They grab this Hanssen-type, send him to the electric chair (on faulty evidence or simply "vibes" of guilt), but later it turns out this person was really guilty. Was this process fair?

Maybe Sweden if relatively fairer, like you said. I suspect not. But even if it was relatively fair, what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?

It's possible for a meat grinder process to still be good at convicting, say, all murderers, at the cost of a few false positives. In a utilitarian sense that could be considered reasonable. And it might well be repeatable in a way. Even default-guilty is repeatable, and 'just' on those terms, as long as your pre-charging pipeline isn't kicking up too many false positives.

Really it's just about the definition of fairness or justness though. I'm not really disagreeing because I'm not putting forward definitions of my own either, but a lot of the comments here throw out the terms with some assumed meaning. For example, I'm pretty sure if you polled Chinese people, they wouldn't have a problem with the OP story's outcome. So does that make it democratic? Or good as a point of public policy? It's all a bit hand-wavey without specifying.

> what's with obsessing over Hong Kong and China if most of the world isn't fair?

Well we (I'm assuming) both live in the West and so we encounter the exceptionalist narrative of this place. Certainly HN is a Western forum. Most views of China held by people in the West are based on partial truths and thought-terminating cliches.

But that's kind of just how _people_ are the world over, no? Chinese people in Chinese forums have a parallel experience to this, just mirrored.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply. I think we're in agreement.

I too think the situation is probably mirrored from China's side. I hope there are some people over there who can also understand there's some middle ground, that neither side is totally right or wrong, and that we both perceive the world in half-truths and thought-terminating cliches.

And yes, because I live in the West (well, Latin America, anyway) I'm more upset about the distortions from "our" side. I don't really get to witness the Chinese side. I'm very skeptical even of what "our" side claims the distortions on the Chinese side are, since I don't get to witness them directly and I have reason to be skeptical of my side's narrative.