by schoen | 2025-10-12 08:24:46+00:00
How about "our country should have a free market economy because I think that is morally correct"?

How about "our country should not be led by the Communist Party because Communism is a mistaken, harmful idea?" (or if you prefer, "because the Chinese Communist Party doesn't reflect the correct version of communism"?)

How about "our country should have a multiparty competitive electoral democracy with direct elections for the central government"?

How about "we should be allowed to directly access all foreign Internet content"? [I know a very large number of countries are having trouble with this concept lately, but here the question is about the right to say this rather than whether it happens.]

How about "there should not be a state, because state systems are not the ideal way to run a society" (or "because there is no way for states to acquire legitimate authority to rule populations")?

How about "as citizens, we should be able to directly recall individual members of the central government by secret ballot"?

How about "our political system should not formally favor any party and should not give any form of special status or position to any party; no political party should be identified by name in the constitution or any legislation"?

How about "some territorial units of our country should be able to have a process by which they could choose whether to continue to be part of our country"? [This is another one that many countries have been having trouble with, so again the question is whether people can advocate this.]

How about "we should have rule of law, with a legal system that binds the government as well as private parties, and that is applied by a completely independent judiciary, giving a fair and objective hearing to all sides in every matter, and is not required or expected to favor the state, government, or any party in interpreting or applying the law, and decides all cases openly and publicly on the basis of written, public legal principles and instruments"?

How about "high-profile court case __________ was wrongly decided, resulting in an unjust outcome, and we should try to figure out how to keep that from happening again"?

How about "our country was in the wrong in its conflict with ____________ on the occasion of ___________"?

How about "we should immediately begin a process to draft a new constitution for our country, with no political or ideological preconditions of any kind"?

Edit: I am thinking of all of these things as things that are either completely politically normal elsewhere or that are advocated by a noticeable segment of the population elsewhere. It's clear that people don't necessarily prevail when they advocate these things, like no state has dissolved itself because of advocacy by anarchists, and some states that don't have a process for secession or constituent assemblies or whatever haven't ended up creating those things just because people asked for them. (E.g. Canada and the UK created a process for a province to have a referendum on secession, but Spain didn't, and the U.S. only allows this for some kinds of political units and has never agreed to make the referendum results automatically binding. Or, in Germany, it might arguably be considered illegal to hold a constituent assembly to create a new constitution without a requirement to maintain some existing entrenched clauses from the existing constitution in the new text.) So again, I am not focusing on whether people can achieve each of these political goals in modern China through advocacy (some of them directly contradict each other), but whether they can advocate these things in a nonviolent fashion and avoid any form of punishment by the government.