20% of the worlds prison population

I think this is a good rule of thumb in general. When statistics agree with my preconceived notions, I consider them trustworthy, and if not, I assume that reality lines up with what I expect. For example, the referendum in held in the Baltics about leaving the USSR ended in favor of leaving, which I think is a good example of a trustworthy statistic. But the subsequent referendum in the remaining members ended in favor of staying in the USSR, and I think that's a little suspicious, don't you?

No, Occupied China doesn’t control DPRK or ROC

If we play that game we can’t trust American numbers either so the whole conversation becomes pointless

Per capita is misleading, it over represents low populations and under represents high populations

When you use it, it makes Canadian cities appear more violent than American cities as an example

Yeah but everyone knows the US has more people per capita than anywhere else

Let me address a few things. First, I didn't post my response because I think the incarceration rate in the U. S. is OK. It's not. Incarceration of non-violent criminals is especially aggregeous. Private for profit prisons are a horrible idea.

I responded because the OP posted an image comparing the incarceration rates of the CCP's cultural revolution to the current U.S. incarceratiom rate. The implication is that because the per-capita incarceration rate was lower in China during that time, it was a nicer place to live than current-day America. That ignores the part where the Chinese government starved to death 15,000,000 - 55,000,000 people, or put in Americanized terms: somewhere between the entire population of Pennsylvania to the entire populations of California AND Pennsylvania.

Claiming that a per-capita measurement normalizes all factors, makes a sampling error based on survivorship bias. It is highly unlikely that the overlap of people who starved to death during the CCP's famine had the same incarceration rate of those who did not. I'm guessing rich and party aligned individuals had a much lower rate of both starvation and incarceration.

This would certainly be true in the U.S; Incarceration rates are much higher for low-income individuals: https://www.prisonpolicy.org/reports/income.html. Low income individuals are also more likely to starve to death in a famine* (*citation needed). Now imagine if the United States government starved to death the poorest 10,000,000 people in the U.S. and then started bragging about how much it's per-capita incarceration rates have improved!

they have "re-education camps" though

Do they, though? You, as a champion of human rights in China, are aware that the reeducation camps are closed for years now, aren't you?

Nothing more American than privatizing and off-shoring our concentration camps.

In what way is it misleading? It seems straightforward to me.

How is a per-capita incarceration rate, with a reference to the superset included directly on the plot, misleading? Other than including more than El Salvador for the sake of external reference, which is almost certainly a size issue.

The previous user is a bit off base with the labor camps idea (not to say that the Xinjiang detention camps for Uyghurs aren't widely known), but it is worth noting that China does utilize administrative detentions/行政拘留 for smaller offenses which are kept statistically separate from prison counts.

If Raiden needs a source, the law covering administrative detentions can be reviewed here:

https://www.gov.cn/xinwen/2021-01/23/content_5582030.htm