I want to make it clear that I am not an apologist for China, but when we levy criticism and express our fears, it needs to be precise, sharp, accurate. They should not be attempts to fearmonger. This comment does NOT have the purpose to approve or disapprove of Chinese conduct on the international stage.

The only thing I want to do is point out that Russia has a nearly undeniable record of assassinating dissenters such as Alexander Litvinenko and Sergei/Yulia Skripal in the United Kingdom. China does not yet share this record with Russia, so I feel that your statement coaxes people to interpret China as a murderer on the same level as Russia ("Similar to how Russia murders defectors, it's not a good idea to be an expat and criticize China"). This is an unfair equivalency and I want to point it out.

Look up Anna Politkovskaya (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Anna_Politkov...): She was a known critic of Putin and shot/murdered mysteriously. You can search on Google for Russian critics outside of Russia being killed, but as far as I publicly discern, this is not true for Chinese critics. I'm not saying that people haven't been killed for criticizing China overseas, but I will say that publicly you and I do not know of people who have been killed, unlike the obvious case for Russia. My strongest plausible interpretation is that you are saying that it could be the next step for China, and I would agree that it is a possibility.

In fact, if we really want to be exhaustive about overseas assassination of critics, there is Henry Liu who was assassinated in California for criticizing Taiwanese leader Chiang Kai-shek (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Liu#Confession_of_Chen_C...). If I want to start being concerned about China murdering people, it's not a massive leap of the imagination to believe that they are capable of doing it, but so far, many similar nation-states have done more than China in this regard, such as Taiwan. However, obviously I understand that Taiwan is a fairly different place now compared to 1984 when Henry was assassinated.

In order to be charitable to your comment, I can ask, "Can you explain more about what you mean?" We can argue that China might be murdering critics, but that would be in the case of stuff that happens within its borders, not outside of it. We can also arguably say that China is imposing measures on critics overseas such as economic punishments, but they do not appear to be murdering people. Therefore, I do not think your anecdote about Hong Kong immigrants being killed in the USA adds value to the discussion because it is unsubstantiated to believe that it will happen. I would say that it's believable that HK immigrants could feel threatened or be afraid of retaliation from China through other means, such as online harassment or attacks from the 50 Cent Party (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party)

Having said all that, I do not want to wait until it reaches the point where China can shamelessly kill people in cities across the globe. My reply to the parent comment is more to point out that our criticisms need to be healthy and balanced, lest the discussion devolves into massive leaps of unsubstantiated thought.