8 ms·

"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 lin

by 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.

by Zafira 6y ago

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.