When China's goal is to exceed our economy, shouldn't we work to prevent that? Why is it OK that China has laws like not allowing foreign ownership of companies / property? Why is it OK that China has virtually no IP enforcement? The world already collaborates and puts up with quite a bit, please don't confuse that with xenophobia.
> When China's goal is to exceed our economy, shouldn't we work to prevent that?
If we’re out here trying to prevent them from growing because we are afraid of being eclipsed by them, then it makes sense that they would want to grow larger than us so they can prevent us from interfering with their growth. But consider this! We could collaborate with them so that their growth helps our growth. We could import educated students and factory materials from China to build up our economy. We could import high speed trains in addition to building our own so we can grow a clean transportation network while creating many railroad jobs.
You’re basically saying “they’re competing with us so it makes sense for us to compete back!” Yeah, or it makes sense to rewrite the rules and stop looking at this as competition.
> Why is it OK that China has virtually no IP enforcement?
I strongly believe that intellectual property restrictions are a net negative for the world so it’s actually great that China does this.
The US is better off if it remains wealthy with the best military. Things are going to stay pretty cool for the US as long as they have the upper hand. I don't think it's particularly xenophobic. If the US needs to start playing second fiddle to China it's going to be quite an adjustment for its citizens. This is not something US politicians want.
I think that ship set sail when we decided to offshore everything. Now China has all the manufacturing and all we’re doing is limiting our own access to it. Sure we can set up factories and buy stuff, but I imagine we could be better off if we worked more closely with their government on the right initiatives.
I think we’re here telling ourselves we’re the best while they are just passing us by. Big military sure but how many PhD’s do we produce and how much debt do those students have?
I think you are right to an extent. This is why the US gov is pushing for domestic chip fabs since that's pretty critical.
I don't think they are really passing us yet, but I think their unified government could be an advantage. It is easier for them to push policy on a national level. Depends on how you measure it, but the US still leads in research universities and I think our public sector is healthy.
The US does work with China and has a pretty healthy trade relationship with them which has worked well for China. Ideally for the US they will continue to be an important part of world affairs, but not at the expense of US interests.
The Chinese have made it clear through their economic and legal policies that international collaboration can only occur on their terms and under their unilateral control. Nuts to any corporation or organization that tries to achieve equitable footing with their Chinese branch.
Israel’s treatment of Palestine is pretty similar if not worse and Saudi Arabia’s perpetration of the war in Yemen with direct US support has led to over 100,000 deaths from famine, the largest famine of the 21st century. Both countries are close allies with direct US military support. We could argue about this or that distinction but the point is we do not care about morals this is about maintaining what our aging cold-war era politicians perceive as US interests.
> We're the good guys because our concentration camps are smaller?
Basically, yeah. The US are way less worse than China. 700 people is a rounding error compared to China's camps.
> In other words, if China had camps the size of US ones it would be ok?
It would be better, yes.
I wish China had camps the size of the US ones since that means between 1 and 3 millions people wouldn't have had (and still have) to live/suffer in them.
The way I see it, it's only the people who don't have concentration camps that have the moral standing to complain about them.
You don't get to play "do as I say not as I do" on the world stage and the US should be laughed off it when it tries (this is happening more and more). That is the cost we pay for being evil.
> The way I see it, it's only the people who don't have concentration camps that have the moral standing to complain about them.
Well, no. If the American people doesn't want to partner with China because 1-3 millions in camps is too much to stomach for them (remember, they only had 700 people and it already was a huge problem for them) and they want to complain about it and maybe this could lead to force China to reassess the situation ? There's a better chance of things moving in the right direction with the US complaining than with Luxembourg or San Marino. I doubt disqualifying that course of action because of some absolutist Sith moral has ever been known to change things for the better.
> You don't get to play "do as I say not as I do" on the world stage and the US should be laughed off it when it tries (this is happening more and more). That is the cost we pay for being evil.
Yeah, and yet they still do. It's a process. There are backward steps and forward steps. The country recognizing it has a concentration camp problem of 30 people today is much further on the right path than the country denying it has a 1.8million concentration camp population problem. If it can call out the other's bigger bullshit and drag them along further on the right path then it's a good thing.
> Well, no. If the American people doesn't want to partner with China because 1-3 millions in camps is too much to stomach
That's the part you are missing. American politicians including the president and his family receive millions from China. US businesses, including Hollywood seem quite happy to deal with China and bend over backwards for them. Hell, lots of products sold in the US are likely made in the very labor camps they are complaining about.
> There are backward steps and forward steps.
That would be fine if the people behind the backward step weren't still in charge. We cant claimed to have learned anything if we can't even bother to replace a few elderly politicians who voted for a couple decades of war crimes.
> > Guantanamo is not comparable to the scale of Chinese concentration camps.
> Evil of that sort is a boolean not a scale. You are either the sort of people who do it or you aren't.
You are conflating the scales of evil and the people responsible for it. Identical crimes often carry different sentences because of the patterns and the context: For how long ? Why ? How many victims ? Etc.
Yes, the US have Guantanamo. Is it equivalent to China ? Definitely not.
Are you championing the censuring of criticisms under the pretense of morals ? Most likely. Does your argument boil down to whataboutism ? Definitely.
> You don't go to heaven even if your neighbor kept a million times as many slaves as you did.
I am not fighting analogies and I am not living in a black and white world. You deal in absolutes and frankly that's not a stimulating conversation to have and certainly not a general outlook I can agree with.
These things are not the same. I’m no fan of the US debasing itself from a policy and moral standpoint like it has with Guantanamo Bay, but they are not equivalent by a long shot.
> Beginning in 2014, the Chinese government, under the administration of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) General Secretary Xi Jinping, incarcerated more than *an estimated one million Turkic Muslims without any legal process in internment camps*.[2][3][4][5] Operations from 2016 to 2021 were led by Xinjiang CCP Secretary Chen Quanguo, who dramatically increased the scale and scope of the camps.[6] It is the *largest-scale detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II*.[7][8] Experts estimate that, since 2017, some sixteen thousand mosques have been razed or damaged,[6] and hundreds of thousands of children have been forcibly separated from their parents and sent to boarding schools.[9][10]
Not comparable either qualitatively or quantitatively. The US isn't sending people to Gitmo for ethnic cleansing reasons; and Gitmo has ever had under a thousand people, whereas over a million Uyghurs are estimated to be detained.
