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> China moves fast at the expense of the environment, safety, individual rights, etc. A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew

> China moves fast at the expense of the environment, safety, individual rights, etc. A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew up so fast by respecting human rights, the environment, other nations, international law. The lack of self-awareness of people like you genuinely scares me. You vote people who has the power to erase the planet with nukes and you consider yourselves superior to other races/nations. Truly hair-rising stuff.

jtdev 6y ago
You prefer a system where dictators and authoritarians concentrate power and the populace has no means of even airing concerns, much less reigning in dangerous leaders???
- cambalache 6y ago
  Sounds like America to me.From BLM to massive espionage by the NSA with no repercussion, from the mortgage crisis to Abu Ghraib, from the "suicide" of Epstein to nationals being killing by drones, to Mexican kids being held in jails alone. The average American citizen has as much to fear from their government than the average Chinese, that's why the unwarranted feeling of superiority is so scaring.
dragonwriter 6y ago
> A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew up so fast by respecting human rights, the environment, other nations, international law. Well, no, exactly like the West that did many of the same things as China at a similar stages in their development, with similar results (there's a difference between the hybrid of state capitalism and corporatism with central elites in practical control of "democratic centralism" in modern China and peak private capitalism with capitalist control of notionally democratic institutions in the early industrial West, but there are also lots of similarities), and very much like what lots of Western countries did later under slightly different systems than peak private capitalism that are also similar to China's current system (e.g., fascist corporatism) Which is exactly why "how China can do what they do" isn't at all a mystery or place the West needs to go to learn lessons. Its not that the West has never done the kind of things that China has done, but that its been there and moved on. Certainly not completely, and certainly with deep remaining problems. But a few pretty prestige projects for the elites and those willing to knuckle under for them aren't worth the cost of reversing progress on those fronts.
Zafira 6y ago
"The West wrecked the environment and everything else in the process of industrialization, so we [Chinese] are entitled to do it too," is a truly disturbing line and this isn't the first time I've actually heard before. Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up? Isn't that what progress is all about? Learning from your mistakes?
- disown 6y ago
  > "The West wrecked the environment and everything else in the process of industrialization, so we [Chinese] are entitled to do it too," is a truly disturbing line and this isn't the first time I've actually heard before. Because it's not terrifying. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. What's terrifying is nations like India and continents like Africa haven't followed and developed. Instead there are nearly 1 billion indians and africans without electricity, plumbing, etc. > Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up? Well, china didn't invade australia, canada, US, etc and wipe out the people and steal their land and destroy other people's environment to enrich themselves. So maybe they learned something. The hypocritical hubris is not going to do us any good. Over the long term, it's gonna be our undoing. Or maybe, there is no other option. In order to make an omelette you gotta break some eggs. And in order to develop, you have to suffer through some environmental degradation. Not only are the chinese entitled to it, so are the indians, africans, middle easterners, etc. Are they all supposed to languish in poverty while they wait for some magic development process to appear. While a privileged virtue signaler can comfortable whine about the environment, the millions of people living in poverty don't have the luxury.
  - SZJX 6y ago
    Well said. All the pretty talk about "human rights", "democracy" and "environment protection" and stuffs, they serve nothing more than nice-sounding justifications/facade for western superiority and the current world order: "We are more developed than you, and you are destined to do cheap manufacturing work or simply export raw materials for us, because you are simply inferior in all those abstract moral aspects. So just stay in your place while we keep reaping the maximum rewards at the top of the food chain". If one is serious, it isn't hard to take a look at how the industrial revolution happened over the past hundreds of years to understand how the West reached its current status in the first place, going through exactly similar stages. Development is a hard, long-winding process, and one doesn't magically get there overnight. There was an interesting study that looked at the corruption level in the US in the 1800s and found it to be 8 times more than the corruption level of 1990s/2000s China. When countries like Norway were poor before they discovered oil, it was not like they were exactly the model paradise of equality, green economy and "human rights" at all, while China now has the ambition to lead the green economy by 2050. As you said, one could simply look at a third-world African country. Are people there objectively suffering from more human rights abuses, more poverty, more environmental pollution, than people in China? Is the supposed parliamentary democracy working there? The West talks all the time about how they're supposed to help those countries develop by implanting all its system, while eventually all it does is to make it easy for the multinational western capitalists to reap the rewards. Nobody helps anybody else develop at its own expense for no reason. This is just how politics naturally works. China took advantage of the manufacturing boom to get out of poverty, which of course benefited the West a lot along the way as well, but China always also had a clear determination to grow out of such a "world factory" role, which the West clearly didn't foresee nor wanted to see. Thus the tension nowadays. China is pushing a lot of policies in Africa nowadays and of course it's also largely out of China's own geopolitical needs, but maybe some of its infrastructure projects actually benefit the population more than some previous foreign investments, or maybe some of them don't. The point is, in the end you have to look at what actually benefits the common folks the most, instead of all the hypocritical gesturing and varnishing talks on the surface.
SZJX 6y ago
Hmm, I'm not sure if the comment you're replying to is the best example of "lack of self-awareness" or "consider yourselves superior" as they also somewhat mentioned "balance is important". Discussions on this topic seem to always descend into inflammable territory. Though I agree that there are definitely tons of people out there who fit your description, that's for sure. A lot of the "environment, safety, human rights" stuffs originate from official propaganda by western state apparatus which want to contain China/feel threatened by China's progress, so they want to reassure themselves of their superiority and contain every country in their designated place in the food chain with a certain narrative, just like how China does official propaganda to paint the west in a bad light on issues such as COVID containment and affirm its own superiority. But people who unquestioningly gobble up such propaganda are definitely aplenty out there (I would guess the desire to feel superior/justified against an unknown threat/"others" could even be part of human nature, which however is what education and rational thinking are exactly supposed to allow us do better at).

jtdev 6y ago

You prefer a system where dictators and authoritarians concentrate power and the populace has no means of even airing concerns, much less reigning in dangerous leaders???

cambalache 6y ago
Sounds like America to me.From BLM to massive espionage by the NSA with no repercussion, from the mortgage crisis to Abu Ghraib, from the "suicide" of Epstein to nationals being killing by drones, to Mexican kids being held in jails alone. The average American citizen has as much to fear from their government than the average Chinese, that's why the unwarranted feeling of superiority is so scaring.

dragonwriter 6y ago

> A dire contrast with the west which since the industrial revolution grew up so fast by respecting human rights, the environment, other nations, international law. Well, no, exactly like the West that did many of the same things as China at a similar stages in their development, with similar results (there's a difference between the hybrid of state capitalism and corporatism with central elites in practical control of "democratic centralism" in modern China and peak private capitalism with capitalist control of notionally democratic institutions in the early industrial West, but there are also lots of similarities), and very much like what lots of Western countries did later under slightly different systems than peak private capitalism that are also similar to China's current system (e.g., fascist corporatism) Which is exactly why "how China can do what they do" isn't at all a mystery or place the West needs to go to learn lessons. Its not that the West has never done the kind of things that China has done, but that its been there and moved on. Certainly not completely, and certainly with deep remaining problems. But a few pretty prestige projects for the elites and those willing to knuckle under for them aren't worth the cost of reversing progress on those fronts.

Zafira 6y ago

"The West wrecked the environment and everything else in the process of industrialization, so we [Chinese] are entitled to do it too," is a truly disturbing line and this isn't the first time I've actually heard before. Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up? Isn't that what progress is all about? Learning from your mistakes?

disown 6y ago
> "The West wrecked the environment and everything else in the process of industrialization, so we [Chinese] are entitled to do it too," is a truly disturbing line and this isn't the first time I've actually heard before. Because it's not terrifying. China has lifted 800 million people out of poverty. What's terrifying is nations like India and continents like Africa haven't followed and developed. Instead there are nearly 1 billion indians and africans without electricity, plumbing, etc. > Aren't people supposed to do better knowing how much people in the past screwed up? Well, china didn't invade australia, canada, US, etc and wipe out the people and steal their land and destroy other people's environment to enrich themselves. So maybe they learned something. The hypocritical hubris is not going to do us any good. Over the long term, it's gonna be our undoing. Or maybe, there is no other option. In order to make an omelette you gotta break some eggs. And in order to develop, you have to suffer through some environmental degradation. Not only are the chinese entitled to it, so are the indians, africans, middle easterners, etc. Are they all supposed to languish in poverty while they wait for some magic development process to appear. While a privileged virtue signaler can comfortable whine about the environment, the millions of people living in poverty don't have the luxury.
- SZJX 6y ago
  Well said. All the pretty talk about "human rights", "democracy" and "environment protection" and stuffs, they serve nothing more than nice-sounding justifications/facade for western superiority and the current world order: "We are more developed than you, and you are destined to do cheap manufacturing work or simply export raw materials for us, because you are simply inferior in all those abstract moral aspects. So just stay in your place while we keep reaping the maximum rewards at the top of the food chain". If one is serious, it isn't hard to take a look at how the industrial revolution happened over the past hundreds of years to understand how the West reached its current status in the first place, going through exactly similar stages. Development is a hard, long-winding process, and one doesn't magically get there overnight. There was an interesting study that looked at the corruption level in the US in the 1800s and found it to be 8 times more than the corruption level of 1990s/2000s China. When countries like Norway were poor before they discovered oil, it was not like they were exactly the model paradise of equality, green economy and "human rights" at all, while China now has the ambition to lead the green economy by 2050. As you said, one could simply look at a third-world African country. Are people there objectively suffering from more human rights abuses, more poverty, more environmental pollution, than people in China? Is the supposed parliamentary democracy working there? The West talks all the time about how they're supposed to help those countries develop by implanting all its system, while eventually all it does is to make it easy for the multinational western capitalists to reap the rewards. Nobody helps anybody else develop at its own expense for no reason. This is just how politics naturally works. China took advantage of the manufacturing boom to get out of poverty, which of course benefited the West a lot along the way as well, but China always also had a clear determination to grow out of such a "world factory" role, which the West clearly didn't foresee nor wanted to see. Thus the tension nowadays. China is pushing a lot of policies in Africa nowadays and of course it's also largely out of China's own geopolitical needs, but maybe some of its infrastructure projects actually benefit the population more than some previous foreign investments, or maybe some of them don't. The point is, in the end you have to look at what actually benefits the common folks the most, instead of all the hypocritical gesturing and varnishing talks on the surface.

SZJX 6y ago

Hmm, I'm not sure if the comment you're replying to is the best example of "lack of self-awareness" or "consider yourselves superior" as they also somewhat mentioned "balance is important". Discussions on this topic seem to always descend into inflammable territory. Though I agree that there are definitely tons of people out there who fit your description, that's for sure. A lot of the "environment, safety, human rights" stuffs originate from official propaganda by western state apparatus which want to contain China/feel threatened by China's progress, so they want to reassure themselves of their superiority and contain every country in their designated place in the food chain with a certain narrative, just like how China does official propaganda to paint the west in a bad light on issues such as COVID containment and affirm its own superiority. But people who unquestioningly gobble up such propaganda are definitely aplenty out there (I would guess the desire to feel superior/justified against an unknown threat/"others" could even be part of human nature, which however is what education and rational thinking are exactly supposed to allow us do better at).