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The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made

The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships. Enriching them has not encouraged them to become progressive, it has only made them more powerful. We have sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity.

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alephnan 5y ago
Would the west be as rich and Democratic without?
- belter 5y ago
  I am afraid the debt is now come due for payment.
  - alephnan 5y ago
    Exactly. My point here is that a lot of the Anti-China posters want to disregard and shed American’s responsibility. It’s just China that’s evil. Suddenly now that they’re rich and is/was on trajectory to surpass the United States. Where was the unified stance against China for the half century prior? The West and its consumers used China, but are now mad that the regime has always had its own agenda. It’s really simple. There’s been decades of opportunity to hold Nike accountable, but people continued to support sweatshop labor. Sweatshop labor is not directly related here, but it supports a system that does not value human lives. Offshoring labor, out of sight out of mind, to countries like China is a negative externality. Suddenly now China is the only one to blame when the externality is no longer external ( microplastics ). It would not be hypocritical if countries “internalized their negative externalities”, or maybe just not create negative externalities or internalities in the first place. e.g. demote consumption, but that would not be very American. Just look at the public / self storage industry. Americans have two door garages and that’s still not enough. That part is really not China’s fault, even though they are the enabler.
  - raxxorraxor 5y ago
    We still have the same business incentives. Why wouldn't any CEO of a publicly traded company reduce resource costs as much as possible? If he would not do that, the boards would install someone who does. As an employee for a restricted time, it is optimizing your numbers and economic success until your successor takes over.
- simonh 5y ago
  Growth would have been slower sure, but we were doing fine before and we'd have done fine without them, but they would still have rotted and by now may well have been forced to reform through economic failure.
  - alephnan 5y ago
    > we'd have done fine without them There should not be ongoing supply chain issues then. > they would still have rotted This sounds sinophobic. Your profile mentions you’re from London. Yes, China was doing fine for a millennia, too, then the British colonizers brought opium and drugged their people. > have been forced to reform through economic failure. Yes, they did that. It’s cause embracing capitalism and free trade.
  - user_7832 5y ago
    > Growth would have been slower sure, but we were doing fine before and we'd have done fine without them, but they would still have rotted and by now may well have been forced to reform through economic failure. May I introduce you to... colonialism? See also: how the battle of Plassey and subsequently income from India helped fund the industrial revolution. I can't speak much about Chinese colonial history (I expect it to be roughly about as brutal and violent as Indian colonial history) but boy does your comment ignore several centuries of history.
- iratewizard 5y ago
  Far richer, but with less plastic junk that has to be thrown away in a few months.
  - alephnan 5y ago
    > far richer In so far that there would not be supply chain issues causing massive inflation? How would Amazon, Apple, the world’s richest companies be so without China?
    - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
      They could all be running operations in Mexico. That could have become the North American SZ.
      - alephnan 5y ago
        > They This embeds a colonialist / Western bias presuming that Americans companies are leading the charge and orchestrating everything, and the natives are incapable of self organizing. This is opposed to American companies being customers, and Chinese companies offering them a cheap all inclusive solution with implementation details ( factories / labor ) already sorted out. Since you pointed out Shen Zhen specifically.
        kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Mexico would ultimately benefit from more investment. Throw in the trillions the US has wasted on nation building elsewhere and the Americas could have been built into having much stronger public institutions. It's not like Western Europe doesn't leverage its eastern neighbors and North Africa for cheaper labor.
      - pharke 5y ago
        Everyone always goes straight to outsourced manual labor as a solution. It's a bad solution. If we weren't a nation run by corrupt middle managers trying to inflate their own salaries and sense of purpose we'd have stuck with the tried and true method of innovating on the manufacturing process itself making it more automated and less dependent on human labor. Human labor is always slow, prone to mistakes, and expensive. It's the favorite tool of the incompetent. If you think that's wrong then ask yourself which is better, harvesting a field with 100 workers with hand tools or with 1 farmer and a tractor?
- fullshark 5y ago
  Capital owners would be less rich, laborers would probably be more rich.
  - alephnan 5y ago
    What’s the closest country currently in this regard?
- belter 5y ago
  Without the exploitation of cheap labor and China work practices, your iPhone would cost 10,000 dollars. Apple would be more like a Cartier or Tiffany...A few small exclusive shops around Monaco and the Cote de Azur.
  - alephnan 5y ago
    I’d prefer that.
  - STFUplz 5y ago
  - pharke 5y ago
    Without the exploitation of cheap labor and China work practices, we would have been motivated to automate the manufacturing process and your iPhone would cost 100 dollars.
    - alephnan 5y ago
      It’s paradoxical how companies aren’t self motivated. Look at fossil fuel car companies. But yeah, Apple would have automated things. Except the part where they pass the savings on to end customers. Furthermore in Apple’s case, they want China to be rich, too, because that’s a big market.
- moistly 5y ago
  I think we’d be way better off if our manufacturing jobs had stayed on our turf. Yes, things might be more expensive, but we’d also have many more people being paid good wages, we would have reduced GINI inequality issues, we would have better supply-line security, we well might have more workers unions, and we would be more incentivized to reduce our pollution. We would, on average, be richer and more democratic if we had retained our wealth-generating jobs. Instead, we gave the wealth-generating part of our corporations to Chinese labourers. As a result, China now has a rapidly-expanding middle-class and America has a rapidly-diminishing middle class. The only Americans who truly benefited from this move are the billionaires whose corporations profited by exploiting third world slave labour.
  - systemvoltage 5y ago
    The billionaires of America/EU sold its soul to dictatorships. The rust belt is struggling and the rise of Trump was direct consequence of that.
    - moistly 5y ago
      You need to re-read the stats on Trump voters. They are not all unemployed, uneducated, steel-mill hicks. Not by a looong shot. Your use of stereotypes is a poor strategy.
      - systemvoltage 5y ago
        Holy batman strawman. Elections are hinged by a tiny % of swing voters. These were the 80k or so voters in Swing states. I never said anything about the rest of the voter base. Respectfully, I suggest before telling others to re-read, some basic understanding of civics, electoral college, constituency and how elections are held would be helpful for yourself.
derefr 5y ago
Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power. Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously favored cooperation with a monarch, changed allegiances once the newly-empowered third estate (borgeoisie) gained enough economic power. Top-down power was effectively strangled by the combination of nobles + business owners collectively bargaining, refusing to e.g. build the monarch's war machine for wars they had no say in. Western democracies looking at this historical model of democratization, expect that the best thing to do for a country's democratic freedoms is to economically enrich the country's borgeoisie, to the point that the existing dictator-empowered oligarchs see more value in supporting the borgeoisie than they do in supporting the dictator.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  Notably, this model was repeated in East-Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. They managed to transition away from authoritarian rule and democratize without any excess of social tensions. More recently, Central-Eastern Europe has also been broadly successful following the fall of Soviet rule. People love to talk about democracy as if it's somehow in decline as of late, but this couldn't be more wrong.
  - shakow 5y ago
    I'm not sure I would qualify any post-Soviet Eastern European country (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, ...) as a boradly successful. Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains, their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″ and ‶corrupted even more far-right guy sucking on Russia/China tits″, rights of women are openly contested and dimnished, and they are on the slippery slope to the actually worrying part of the far-right spectrum.
    - 5y ago
next_xibalba 5y ago
Strategies that isolate hostile or naturally adversarial countries don't seem to work either. Just look at North Korea. Arguably, the North Korea situation has resulted in much worse net violence and human suffering per capita than, say, the West's fraught trade entanglement with China. > sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity The future is unwritten. Actors behave reflexively. Imagine how bad the future looked in July of 1940 after Germany conquered France. It must have appeared as though they'd soon conquer all of Europe, with the rest of the world to follow. And yet, a few short years later, Nazi Germy was annihilated.
- mrjangles 5y ago
  Bad example because the only reason the communist dictatorship in North Korea still exists is that they are propped up by China, and the only reason Chinese dictatorship exists is because they are propped up by the West.
- planck01 5y ago
  Yeah, but todays nazi's have enough nukes to cover every major city on earth.
daniel-thompson 5y ago
Getting strong flashbacks to that West Wing episode 20 years ago^ where Albie Duncan touches on this: "'Free trade is essential for human rights'. The end of that sentence is, 'we hope... because nothing else has worked.'" ^ http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTranscript&id=73 http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTransc...
Aunche 5y ago
I don't think that a nation that topples local governments to install dictator puppets [1] is so concerned about making countries more progressive. The idea that we're trading with China to make them more democratic was propaganda to sell a policy that would make the Soviets weaker and certain elites richer. This study sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is also propaganda. I don't think it's wrong, but it's worth noting that their dates to when China openly admitted to sourcing organ donations from execution victims. I wouldn't be surprised if China were continuing this practice, but I doubt that America genuinely cares about these execution victims any more than they suddenly started caring that Saddam's genocide in the 1980s before they invaded Iraq, or that Russia genuinely cares about Nazis in Ukraine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
vkou 5y ago
If the western world won't trade with dictatorships, where would all the raw resources that make western lifestyles possible are going to come from? Perhaps you are ready to give up your car, fruit, coffee, electronics, plastics, your detached suburban home, the ability to heat it in winter... And are ready to go work in a clothing sweatshop. But you'll have a hell of a time convincing your neighbours of this.
- gedy 5y ago
  I guess we'll have to extract these here and manufacture again vs letting NIMBY regulations and cheap labor goons push everything overseas.
  - vkou 5y ago
    So, you're suggesting that we should eat higher costs for everything, lower wages, harder and more dangerous work, and maybe throw in Beijing air quality as a bonus. Which of all of these new, unregulated extraction and manufacturing jobs will you be signing up to do? Will you be doing your fifty hours in the unregulated zinc mine, or your sixty-five in the Nike jeans sweatshop? Productivity isn't like money, you can't just turn on a printing press and make more of it.
    - gedy 5y ago
      I’m old enough to remember life before PRC manufacturing, and it was just fine. I’m not that old either. Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways.
      - vkou 5y ago
        > I’m old enough to remember life before PRC manufacturing, and it was just fine. Yes, it was just done in shining beacons of freedom like Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, with the resources to fuel it coming in large part from despotic regimes in Africa, or juntas in South America, or petro-sheikdoms. > Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways. It can always go up further. In the meantime, before we take drastic, widely unpopular measures, perhaps we could take baby steps, like not actively working towards creating more dictatorships..? We can do a lot on this front, by doing very little.
dudus 5y ago
Right, they should follow the nice democracies like the US which gives a death row convict the option to choose between firing squad and electrocution [1]. I'd take "Put me under and harvest all my organs" before "firing squad or electrocution" any day, but that's just me. Unfortunately for Richard Bernard Moore he doesn't live in an evil dictatorship. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-carolina-execute-death-row-inmate-firing-squad-electric-chair-rcna23668 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-carolina-execute-...
- relativ575 5y ago
  Even China official admitted that the practice is unethical, maybe you are too eager to shill for them? > China plans to implement a new national donation system which will allow the government to phase out next year the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners to be used in transplant operations. China’s health ministry said yesterday that a new national organ donation system is being developed after officials said using organs from death-row prisoners was neither ethical nor sustainable. [0] [0] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/2/china-to-cut-jail-organ-harvesting-programmes https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/2/china-to-cut-jail-o...
- moistly 5y ago
rascul 5y ago
> The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships Even benevolent dictatorships?
random314 5y ago
There was never any goal to make them progressive. The goal was always enrichment of the elites as CIAs numerous expeditions in south America and iran have proven. The only goal is alignment with NATO. The goal of "promotion of democracy" is a simple propaganda lie that doesn't stand up to even the most cursory examination.

deleted 5y ago

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deleted 5y ago

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alephnan 5y ago

Would the west be as rich and Democratic without?

belter 5y ago
I am afraid the debt is now come due for payment.
- alephnan 5y ago
  Exactly. My point here is that a lot of the Anti-China posters want to disregard and shed American’s responsibility. It’s just China that’s evil. Suddenly now that they’re rich and is/was on trajectory to surpass the United States. Where was the unified stance against China for the half century prior? The West and its consumers used China, but are now mad that the regime has always had its own agenda. It’s really simple. There’s been decades of opportunity to hold Nike accountable, but people continued to support sweatshop labor. Sweatshop labor is not directly related here, but it supports a system that does not value human lives. Offshoring labor, out of sight out of mind, to countries like China is a negative externality. Suddenly now China is the only one to blame when the externality is no longer external ( microplastics ). It would not be hypocritical if countries “internalized their negative externalities”, or maybe just not create negative externalities or internalities in the first place. e.g. demote consumption, but that would not be very American. Just look at the public / self storage industry. Americans have two door garages and that’s still not enough. That part is really not China’s fault, even though they are the enabler.
- raxxorraxor 5y ago
  We still have the same business incentives. Why wouldn't any CEO of a publicly traded company reduce resource costs as much as possible? If he would not do that, the boards would install someone who does. As an employee for a restricted time, it is optimizing your numbers and economic success until your successor takes over.
simonh 5y ago
Growth would have been slower sure, but we were doing fine before and we'd have done fine without them, but they would still have rotted and by now may well have been forced to reform through economic failure.
- alephnan 5y ago
  > we'd have done fine without them There should not be ongoing supply chain issues then. > they would still have rotted This sounds sinophobic. Your profile mentions you’re from London. Yes, China was doing fine for a millennia, too, then the British colonizers brought opium and drugged their people. > have been forced to reform through economic failure. Yes, they did that. It’s cause embracing capitalism and free trade.
- user_7832 5y ago
  > Growth would have been slower sure, but we were doing fine before and we'd have done fine without them, but they would still have rotted and by now may well have been forced to reform through economic failure. May I introduce you to... colonialism? See also: how the battle of Plassey and subsequently income from India helped fund the industrial revolution. I can't speak much about Chinese colonial history (I expect it to be roughly about as brutal and violent as Indian colonial history) but boy does your comment ignore several centuries of history.
iratewizard 5y ago
Far richer, but with less plastic junk that has to be thrown away in a few months.
- alephnan 5y ago
  > far richer In so far that there would not be supply chain issues causing massive inflation? How would Amazon, Apple, the world’s richest companies be so without China?
  - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
    They could all be running operations in Mexico. That could have become the North American SZ.
    - alephnan 5y ago
      > They This embeds a colonialist / Western bias presuming that Americans companies are leading the charge and orchestrating everything, and the natives are incapable of self organizing. This is opposed to American companies being customers, and Chinese companies offering them a cheap all inclusive solution with implementation details ( factories / labor ) already sorted out. Since you pointed out Shen Zhen specifically.
      - kevin_thibedeau 5y ago
        Mexico would ultimately benefit from more investment. Throw in the trillions the US has wasted on nation building elsewhere and the Americas could have been built into having much stronger public institutions. It's not like Western Europe doesn't leverage its eastern neighbors and North Africa for cheaper labor.
    - pharke 5y ago
      Everyone always goes straight to outsourced manual labor as a solution. It's a bad solution. If we weren't a nation run by corrupt middle managers trying to inflate their own salaries and sense of purpose we'd have stuck with the tried and true method of innovating on the manufacturing process itself making it more automated and less dependent on human labor. Human labor is always slow, prone to mistakes, and expensive. It's the favorite tool of the incompetent. If you think that's wrong then ask yourself which is better, harvesting a field with 100 workers with hand tools or with 1 farmer and a tractor?
fullshark 5y ago
Capital owners would be less rich, laborers would probably be more rich.
- alephnan 5y ago
  What’s the closest country currently in this regard?
belter 5y ago
Without the exploitation of cheap labor and China work practices, your iPhone would cost 10,000 dollars. Apple would be more like a Cartier or Tiffany...A few small exclusive shops around Monaco and the Cote de Azur.
- alephnan 5y ago
  I’d prefer that.
- STFUplz 5y ago
- pharke 5y ago
  Without the exploitation of cheap labor and China work practices, we would have been motivated to automate the manufacturing process and your iPhone would cost 100 dollars.
  - alephnan 5y ago
    It’s paradoxical how companies aren’t self motivated. Look at fossil fuel car companies. But yeah, Apple would have automated things. Except the part where they pass the savings on to end customers. Furthermore in Apple’s case, they want China to be rich, too, because that’s a big market.
moistly 5y ago
I think we’d be way better off if our manufacturing jobs had stayed on our turf. Yes, things might be more expensive, but we’d also have many more people being paid good wages, we would have reduced GINI inequality issues, we would have better supply-line security, we well might have more workers unions, and we would be more incentivized to reduce our pollution. We would, on average, be richer and more democratic if we had retained our wealth-generating jobs. Instead, we gave the wealth-generating part of our corporations to Chinese labourers. As a result, China now has a rapidly-expanding middle-class and America has a rapidly-diminishing middle class. The only Americans who truly benefited from this move are the billionaires whose corporations profited by exploiting third world slave labour.
- systemvoltage 5y ago
  The billionaires of America/EU sold its soul to dictatorships. The rust belt is struggling and the rise of Trump was direct consequence of that.
  - moistly 5y ago
    You need to re-read the stats on Trump voters. They are not all unemployed, uneducated, steel-mill hicks. Not by a looong shot. Your use of stereotypes is a poor strategy.
    - systemvoltage 5y ago
      Holy batman strawman. Elections are hinged by a tiny % of swing voters. These were the 80k or so voters in Swing states. I never said anything about the rest of the voter base. Respectfully, I suggest before telling others to re-read, some basic understanding of civics, electoral college, constituency and how elections are held would be helpful for yourself.

derefr 5y ago

Historians would point toward a pressure toward democratization of states that occurs as the middle class gains more power. Countries like France and Britain didn't suddenly decide on "parliamentary democracy" as a model out of nowhere; they developed a parliament first, when they were still monarchies, and then the parliament suppressed the monarch. The second estate (nobility) of these countries, which previously favored cooperation with a monarch, changed allegiances once the newly-empowered third estate (borgeoisie) gained enough economic power. Top-down power was effectively strangled by the combination of nobles + business owners collectively bargaining, refusing to e.g. build the monarch's war machine for wars they had no say in. Western democracies looking at this historical model of democratization, expect that the best thing to do for a country's democratic freedoms is to economically enrich the country's borgeoisie, to the point that the existing dictator-empowered oligarchs see more value in supporting the borgeoisie than they do in supporting the dictator.

zozbot234 5y ago
Notably, this model was repeated in East-Asian countries like South Korea and Taiwan. They managed to transition away from authoritarian rule and democratize without any excess of social tensions. More recently, Central-Eastern Europe has also been broadly successful following the fall of Soviet rule. People love to talk about democracy as if it's somehow in decline as of late, but this couldn't be more wrong.
- shakow 5y ago
  I'm not sure I would qualify any post-Soviet Eastern European country (Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, ...) as a boradly successful. Typically, they are highly corrupted, wealth amass in a tiny sliver of the population, they are hemorrageing their youth and their brains, their political spectrums can be resumed as ‶corrupted right-wing guy sucking on the EU tits″ and ‶corrupted even more far-right guy sucking on Russia/China tits″, rights of women are openly contested and dimnished, and they are on the slippery slope to the actually worrying part of the far-right spectrum.
  - 5y ago

next_xibalba 5y ago

Strategies that isolate hostile or naturally adversarial countries don't seem to work either. Just look at North Korea. Arguably, the North Korea situation has resulted in much worse net violence and human suffering per capita than, say, the West's fraught trade entanglement with China. > sown the seeds of our own destruction through our complicity The future is unwritten. Actors behave reflexively. Imagine how bad the future looked in July of 1940 after Germany conquered France. It must have appeared as though they'd soon conquer all of Europe, with the rest of the world to follow. And yet, a few short years later, Nazi Germy was annihilated.

mrjangles 5y ago
Bad example because the only reason the communist dictatorship in North Korea still exists is that they are propped up by China, and the only reason Chinese dictatorship exists is because they are propped up by the West.
planck01 5y ago
Yeah, but todays nazi's have enough nukes to cover every major city on earth.

daniel-thompson 5y ago

Getting strong flashbacks to that West Wing episode 20 years ago^ where Albie Duncan touches on this: "'Free trade is essential for human rights'. The end of that sentence is, 'we hope... because nothing else has worked.'" ^ http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTranscript&id=73 http://www.westwingtranscripts.com/search.php?flag=getTransc...

Aunche 5y ago

I don't think that a nation that topples local governments to install dictator puppets [1] is so concerned about making countries more progressive. The idea that we're trading with China to make them more democratic was propaganda to sell a policy that would make the Soviets weaker and certain elites richer. This study sponsored by the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation is also propaganda. I don't think it's wrong, but it's worth noting that their dates to when China openly admitted to sourcing organ donations from execution victims. I wouldn't be surprised if China were continuing this practice, but I doubt that America genuinely cares about these execution victims any more than they suddenly started caring that Saddam's genocide in the 1980s before they invaded Iraq, or that Russia genuinely cares about Nazis in Ukraine. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_regime_change https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

vkou 5y ago

If the western world won't trade with dictatorships, where would all the raw resources that make western lifestyles possible are going to come from? Perhaps you are ready to give up your car, fruit, coffee, electronics, plastics, your detached suburban home, the ability to heat it in winter... And are ready to go work in a clothing sweatshop. But you'll have a hell of a time convincing your neighbours of this.

gedy 5y ago
I guess we'll have to extract these here and manufacture again vs letting NIMBY regulations and cheap labor goons push everything overseas.
- vkou 5y ago
  So, you're suggesting that we should eat higher costs for everything, lower wages, harder and more dangerous work, and maybe throw in Beijing air quality as a bonus. Which of all of these new, unregulated extraction and manufacturing jobs will you be signing up to do? Will you be doing your fifty hours in the unregulated zinc mine, or your sixty-five in the Nike jeans sweatshop? Productivity isn't like money, you can't just turn on a printing press and make more of it.
  - gedy 5y ago
    I’m old enough to remember life before PRC manufacturing, and it was just fine. I’m not that old either. Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways.
    - vkou 5y ago
      > I’m old enough to remember life before PRC manufacturing, and it was just fine. Yes, it was just done in shining beacons of freedom like Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, with the resources to fuel it coming in large part from despotic regimes in Africa, or juntas in South America, or petro-sheikdoms. > Besides, cost of living isn’t that cheap in the west anyways. It can always go up further. In the meantime, before we take drastic, widely unpopular measures, perhaps we could take baby steps, like not actively working towards creating more dictatorships..? We can do a lot on this front, by doing very little.

dudus 5y ago

Right, they should follow the nice democracies like the US which gives a death row convict the option to choose between firing squad and electrocution [1]. I'd take "Put me under and harvest all my organs" before "firing squad or electrocution" any day, but that's just me. Unfortunately for Richard Bernard Moore he doesn't live in an evil dictatorship. [1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-carolina-execute-death-row-inmate-firing-squad-electric-chair-rcna23668 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/south-carolina-execute-...

relativ575 5y ago
Even China official admitted that the practice is unethical, maybe you are too eager to shill for them? > China plans to implement a new national donation system which will allow the government to phase out next year the practice of removing organs from executed prisoners to be used in transplant operations. China’s health ministry said yesterday that a new national organ donation system is being developed after officials said using organs from death-row prisoners was neither ethical nor sustainable. [0] [0] - https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/2/china-to-cut-jail-organ-harvesting-programmes https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2012/11/2/china-to-cut-jail-o...
moistly 5y ago

rascul 5y ago

> The biggest mistake western democracies have made is to trade with dictatorships Even benevolent dictatorships?

random314 5y ago

There was never any goal to make them progressive. The goal was always enrichment of the elites as CIAs numerous expeditions in south America and iran have proven. The only goal is alignment with NATO. The goal of "promotion of democracy" is a simple propaganda lie that doesn't stand up to even the most cursory examination.