There is a lot wrong with the US, and I (not American BTW) will criticise it quite freely and frequently BUT comparing the US to China is just ridiculous.
What the US does can be criticised by its citizens, and protested. People can be punished. Wrongdoing can be exposed. Plenty of people in the US criticise the invasion of Iraq. I doubt many Chinese will find it safe to criticise the occupation of Tibet.
Democracies can and do bad stuff, but internal opposition and accountability limit it, and often but an end to it.
> What the US does can be criticised by its citizens, and protested. People can be punished. Wrongdoing can be exposed. Plenty of people in the US criticise the invasion of Iraq.
You won't be protesting in the U.S. without significant risks to your economic and social status. BTW - The Iraq war was several wars ago, and most of the people chatting here weren't even born for the first Iraq war.
2017 became the year the censors and suspensions of anti-social media started. Now with A.I. mods owned by an entitled parasitic elite, we get a highly censored world were your only recourse is offline, often in solitude.
If you care to test your theory, that you can criticise who you like in the U.S., I suggest you protest Israel, loudly and often.
> If you care to test your theory, that you can criticise who you like in the U.S., I suggest you protest Israel, loudly and often.
People do, and are.
Go to China and protest about Tiananmen Square. You'll be picked up, and put away in minutes, no due process, no independent court, nothing. Who knows what happens to you, or when you get out.
yes the US has better rule of law and is an actual democracy, for sure. but China does not seem to be so bad by the standards that we hold our own allies to, so to me it is unclear why we have become locked into this neo cold war so quickly. some of our allies make china look like a saint in comparison
Israel, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Thailand, Vietnam. That's not counting those relations that aren't close nor adversarial.
The only authoritarian regimes not allied, nor neutral, with the US are Cuba, Iran, NK, Russia and Venezuela.
It's not present day but let's not forget the series of military genocidal dictarships supported, founded and allied by the US in south america in the second half of 20th century.
the demise of China’s rule by committee has been vastly overstated in the West imo.
i wonder about this ‘dictatorship inevitably goes to war’ - a glance at WW2 and you could be forgiven for concluding the exact opposite re: the Iberian peninsula
The americans had their own justifications for those actions that were supporter by a coalition of nations, and none of that was to conquer territory. China on the other hand is flatly trying to conquer territory and limit the freedoms of the people who live there afterwards. They are, in fact, the bad guys here.
It's about keeping western capital interests in line, stopping developing nations from nationalizing key resources etc. Bolivia is a good example of a country that has persisted against it.
That is the US role in the world - we are the Hegemon, it is what we must do to remain the Hegemon. China wants to be the Hegemon but they can't get there as long as we are.
China wants to change the entire ordering of the world - that is a much bigger deal than the US invading Iraq or Afghanistan.
The US government is a meandering blob of racoons in a trenchcoat. Occasionally a hand will _do_ evil but even odds whether they realize it or meant it. Partially depends on which particular raccoon is where. Some of the racoons are evil.
China is actively directed by a small group of well coordinated, evil raccoons. See, you know, the constant genocide.
The US Government has done incredibly stupid and catastrophically foolish and harmful things - being hoodwinked into Vietnam by the French, for example - but the Government is not inherently, actually evil, in any way, shape or form.
In all things, there are factors which encourage, and factors which discourage, and in the end, you get what you get.
The French worked as hard as possible to get American military support in Vietnam so they could remain the colonial power. They did a very good job of it.
It was all an appalling tragedy. All the Vietnamese wanted was independence, and in particular from the appalling misrule of the French.
> China has been engaged in a massive military build-up for many years now - and there is on the face of it no reason for that at all, because China is threatened by precisely no-one.
Do you realize the US is in the same position? The US has no credible threats to its territory anywhere. However it has the most massive military in the world and it is spread to every single continent. I would suggest that's exactly the reason why the Chinese have a need for a military.
It's logistically impossible for the USA to invade China.
The USA spends a few percent on its military, something more than say the EU, but the reason the military is so large is because the economy is so large. When we say the USA has the largest army, we're really saying the USA has the largest economy.
The Chinese economy is now comparable to the US economy, by dint of their being about three times as many people, but we're looking now at a massive military build up along with intensely threatening behaviour toward Taiwan. Do we forget the repeated massive military exercises to chastise "separative elemnts" in Taiwan, every time a senior US politician visits? do we forget the events in Hong Kong? the ongoing suppression of Tiananmen Square? and of the Uyghurs?
There are two as it happens - the other one is Eastern Russia - ethnically asian, although not Han. Notice how Putin is always present for the pacific exercises, even when one might think he had better ways to spend his time on the western front.
Just curious, do you apply this same logic to US government and history? What kind of evils get prescribed to the so called democratic land of the free?
you think it's a total non sequitur but im just asking what i think is a simple question: whether that logic is applied fairly and accurately within the context of being a world superpower. otherwise you just end up potentially looking like a hardline racist parrot to some readers.
Do I also need to include disclaimers about Russia, North Korea, Iran, etc, being bad anytime I criticize China as well? Or are they exempt for some reason? Are you following your own advice, to criticize fairly and accurately across the board?
I don't apply the same logic to any country's history. It wouldn't make sense to hold modern China accountable for the Qing, or the civil war, or the Cultural Revolution. Like the original commenter, my biggest concern by far with the Chinese government is their repeated public statements that they plan to violently conquer a neighboring country and integrate it into their own. The US has undertaken a lot of military adventures I don't agree with in the past few decades, but annexation is a red line that almost every country in the world agrees to and respects.
The CCP can certainly be held accountable for the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward. They're truly Mao's heirs, and whereas some previous leaders left Mao's path, Xi is firmly back on track.
I agree that China should be regarded as a particularly problematic country, but I would like the US to have a more comprehensive and introspective attitude. The US can stop the mutual bullying and take the high ground. That doesn't change the facts about China, but shifts in foreign policy and/or PR can at least give the US a better grounds as the primary opposing actor to China, if not incentivize China to change too.
I don't agree that a comprehensive attitude is appropriate. I have plenty of criticisms of US foreign policy, but China's plans for Taiwan are absolutely incomparable to any of them. There's quite a lot of diplomatic compromises that I think the US ought to make if they would secure Taiwanese independence, but right now the Chinese government are themselves completely unwilling to introspect or take a comprehensive attitude about it.
