The Double Standard Between Chinese and US Police

During Hasans China Trip he made an effort to visit Tiananmen Square. At Tiananmen Square, Hasan and his group get stopped by security/police. The officers:

• Ask to see his phone background / whether he’s recording.

• Make him stop and show what he’s filming.

• In effect, are checking that a foreign livestreamer at the most politically sensitive square in China is not doing anything “disrespectful.”

His own summary is basically:

They thought we were there to mock Mao or do Logan Paul‑style content.

He complies, jokes about it, and then explicitly downplays the severity:

This is actually one of the things that I want to show Americans…people have this false notion that they will arrest you for a meme. It’s not like that at all. Okay, calm down.

But put this in the context of his U.S. content:

• In the U.S., he is rightly furious about:

  • Police demanding to search phones.

  • Warrantless access to digital devices.

  • Surveillance and harassment at protests.

  • He’s endlessly clear that handing over your phone to law enforcement on the street under vague suspicion is a civil liberties red line.

  • He's against the US Patriot Act that allows a lot of unjust searches.

If a Capitol police officer in D.C. demanded to scroll his camera roll to check he wasn’t “being disrespectful” at, say, the Lincoln Memorial towards Trump or Bush, you know very well he would:

• Call it out as unconstitutional.

• Probably refuse and lawyer up.

• Milk it for content as evidence of U.S. authoritarian creep.

In Beijing, the same kind of behavior — "show us what you’re filming; we don’t want mockery at the symbolic heart of the state" gets spun as:

• Understandable cultural difference.

• “Not what silly Americans imagine.”

• Basically harmless.

Context Matters

This is Tiananmen Square, where:

• You cannot legally talk about or commemorate 1989.

• Foreign journalists and livestreamers are watched particularly closely.

• Political speech critical of the Party is not protected in any meaningful sense.

He explicitly tells chat:

• “We’re in China. You can’t be cracking jokes like that. Calm down, stakes are a little bit higher, don’t you think?”

• He self‑censors, tells chatters to self‑censor, and treats that as normal.

In the U.S. he rightly argues that being able to make tasteless or subversive jokes at a politically sensitive site, and to refuse phone searches, is part of what civil liberties are about.

In China, he normalizes the opposite, because he’s a guest and because the power imbalance is different. That’s human and understandable but it is a double standard, and if he were being consistent with his own values he’d at least name it plainly:

“Look, this level of control around Tiananmen is oppressive and I would not accept it at home. I’m choosing to go along because it’s their turf, but let’s not pretend it’s fine.”

He doesn’t do that. And, it's incredibly painful for me to see those political folks I once looked up to fail at the first hurdle.

He'll wear a PRESS uniform in the states to avoid any police action against himself, and for what I think is poser behaviour more than anything else. But then drops all sense of journalism the minute he hits China.