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To me USA and China are both foreign nations, and USA is the one who is far more aggressive in terms of army and spies. So as a non USA citizen, I'm way more a

• piker 2y ago
  This is probably true, but at least in principle one of those foreign nations stands for free speech and democracy and the other stands for censorship and authoritarianism. [Edit: hey Europeans commenting and downvoting below, note the words "in principle" in the above comment and evaluate which of the two countries do or do not purport to stand for these things despite whatever your hot take may be on the current moment.]
  • guappa 2y ago
    [flagged]
  • littlestymaar 2y ago
    > at least in principle one of those foreign nations stands for free speech and democracy Only of of them is hypocritical, that's it.
  • chucklenorris 2y ago
    That's actually funny.. considering that the main reason TikTok ban was proposed was the lack of censorship of sensitive topics like a certain genocide
  • herbst 2y ago
    That's 2 words non US people usually don't think when they think US. Democracy is literally the last thing that would come to my mind right now. Edit:// "In principle" chinas gov stands for stability, economic development and national unity...
    • looofooo0 2y ago
      Lol, you can shitpost anything about any politician in the USA. Hang any flag on your car, house etc. and you will be fine. Try the same in China.
      • herbst 2y ago
        Huh? Does that negate the missing democracy, the political distrust and the political censorship within your country? I am happy for you and your flags. However I didn't claim that china is more "free" just that the US definitely isn't seen as that from the outside anymore. It's not always a direct competition
      • guappa 2y ago
        You can shitpost but the algorithm will make sure it doesn't get read :)
    • piker 2y ago
      > Edit:// "In principle" chinas gov stands for stability, economic development and national unity... As did Stalin, Mussolini, Hirohito and the National Socialist Party. It's the "how" that matters.
      • yard2010 2y ago
        Exactly. What's the big idea to be strong and stable when you have no respect whatsoever for human lives? You can just kill the competition! Sacha Baron Cohen's The Dictator is a piece of art that demonstrates this absurdity in the best possible way.
      • guappa 2y ago
        [flagged]
        • piker 2y ago
          Perhaps you might spend 5 minutes reading the quoted comment again and note the absence of "democracy".
  • easyThrowaway 2y ago
    Given the last few days, As a EU citizen I'm not so sure such distinction is fully accurate anymore. And I'm pretty sure in 2 to 3 years from today the distinction will be even less noticeable. I wouldn't trust a US data company to not capitulate to... "personal requests" by Musk or Trump any more than I trust it not happening in an hungarian, russian, turkish or chinese one with their respective leadership (official or otherwise).
• sausagefeet 2y ago
  If you woke up tomorrow in either USA or China, which would you prefer to wake up in and why?
  • grardb 2y ago
    I feel the need to point out that while many people might understand the point you're trying to make, the way this question is phrased doesn't do the best job of conveying it. If I was presented with two options: waking up tomorrow as the child of a poor farmer in a third-world country, or waking up as one of Donald Trump's children, I would definitely choose the latter. However, that doesn't mean that I trust Trump more than I would trust the farmer. In other words, quality of life (or a preferred way of living) are not inherently tied to trust, morality, or anything like that.
    • rthrfrd 2y ago
      Why did you choose to wake up as the child of a peasant in one country but the child of the president in another? Quality of life is inherently tied to trust and morality - both in terms of the effect of fear (a lack of trust) or isolation (a lack of moral consensus, or equality and sense of shared belonging).
  • guappa 2y ago
    If you want to pay me a trip, I'd gladly go to both, and leave my regular electronic devices at home while crossing both borders :D
  • bromuro 2y ago
    Living in these countries sounds to me like a nightmare (and I am from a 3rd world country). I’d prefer China because the ancient culture, history and thriving economy.
    • rthrfrd 2y ago
      3rd world country or not - I hope you appreciate that you are incredibly fortunate for "ancient culture" and "history" to be 2 of your top 3 considerations for where to live and the quality of life that would give you. Perhaps revalidate the "thriving economy" assertion before taking the plunge though (and be mindful of how hyper-localised that is).
• miningape 2y ago
  I think you're unaware of just how aggressive China is. Look at their neighbours and their policies - they don't have a single friend because everyone is afraid of their bullying behaviour backed up by their military. Look at conquered regions like Tibet and Xinjiang. Look at how they set up police forces in foreign countries to keep an eye on Chinese citizens living abroad. Even having kidnapped and illegally held Chinese citizens in England because they posted anti-CCP messages on WeChat. Look at countries like the Phillipines (not even a direct neighbour) who are trying to hold on to small fishing islands just off their coast because the CCP claimed those islands in the 1970s. Remember a few years ago when they ran a week long military exercise around Taiwan... because a US representative spoke to the Taiwanese president. Sure I agree with you that the US also overstepped a line here, but for your response to be shelling the waters around the island is excessive to say the least. Look at the aggressive nationalist and imperialist news they feed their own population, and the propaganda spread to make the Japanese seem like demons. Did you know there are several theme parks in China where children are encouraged to Bayonette a mannequin of Japanese Imperialist soldiers? Call the US as bad as you like, but I've never seen a theme park where children are actively taught how to kill and demonise the Taliban or Nazis.
  • spencerflem 2y ago
    You could say all of that about the American empire. We renamed it to the Gulf of America, talk about annexing Canada, own Hawaii, fund the colony of Israel, invented Manifest Destony, destabilize democracy via the CIA, firebombed Vietnam, etc etc etc And don't talk to me abt Chinese spying when the NSA and Five Eyes hoovers up and processes the entire internet. Re: propaganda, read your own comment. The American propaganda machine got you to demonize China pretty well And to top it all off, despite having a much smaller population AMERICA HAS MORE PRISONERS THAN CHINA. Its insane!
    • miningape 2y ago
      In general I do agree (except for the recent Canada stuff - I believe it's more of a bluff than anything else) But I want to respond to this: > And to top it all off, despite having a much smaller population AMERICA HAS MORE PRISONERS THAN CHINA. Its insane 1. The US publically acknowledges who is in prison, China doesn't. You can be disappeared in China without anyone knowing. 2. The Chinese operate several Black prisons both within and without their borders. These are Prisons without actual sentences, laws or rights. The public doesn't even know of their existence. This is where you land up as a political prisoner in China. 3. The Chinese have placed thousands of Uigur muslims in "re-education camps" (not prisons) - many of whom are only guilty by association (i.e. there's no direct crime the CCP arrested them for, other than being a blood relative of someone who did commit one of these "crimes") 4. Chinese police are already spread thin enough dealing with all the political prisoners meaning there are many dangerous criminals who are freely committing crimes in China. The CCP keeps this information under tight wraps so as not to cause a panic. As a result the Chinese are a lot less cautious than they should be so (unofficial) crime levels are much higher than they should be. It's not uncommon to hear of (or see) Children who were kidnapped and had their limbs chopped off so they could beg more effectively - there has never been a widespread crackdown on this behaviour and many perpetrators are still walking the streets forcing children to beg for them. 5. Not to even talk about the prison organ harvesting claims made by several groups who have been persecuted by the CCP. From Falun Gong practitioners to Uigur muslims. Also don't be lazy and just call this propaganda - I could easily do the same with other messages in this thread ("CCP propaganda") meaning it's not a strong argument to anyone on the fence / on the other side. Yes, it is very anti-China, but that's because I'm trying to bring it in contrast to the very anti-US message. I don't think either country is perfect and in fact I prefer to not live in (or near) either.
• animuchan 2y ago
  I'm thinking about this the same way, if a bit more selfishly: as a non-US citizen, I might want to move to the US in the future. Which is why I would like the US govt to have as little data as possible about me (who knows what the mainstream politics will look like, things that are very innocent today might be punishable by death in 10 years). Chinese govt, on the other hand, can have my data freely, since I don't think I'll ever move to the Mainland China.
  • latexr 2y ago
    > I might want to move to the US in the future. > (…) (who knows what the mainstream politics will look like, things that are very innocent today might be punishable by death in 10 years). Maybe it’s just me, but I don’t think I’d ever consider moving to a country where I believed politics to be so unstable that an action could go from “very innocent” to “punishable by death” in the span of a decade.
    • animuchan 2y ago
      You're right of course. Unless my current place turns into a (more) active warzone, I won't consider relocating. (I also understand that my outsider view on the US political system isn't well-informed. Still, better safe than sorry.)
    • echoangle 2y ago
      I couldn’t name a single country on earth where I would be certain that this could not happen. 10 years is a long time, a lot can happen politically.
      • latexr 2y ago
        We’re talking about going from fully innocent and legal action to full on death penalty in just over two terms (depending on country). That seems quite a stretch for many countries where the death penalty was abolished. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country It doesn’t seem plausible that in countries where even euthanasia isn’t allowed things could get so out of hand that the death penalty would not only be reimplemented but it would devolve so fast that you’d start executing people for things which aren’t even crimes right now.
• computerthings 2y ago
  That something else is even more toxic doesn't make poison not poison. It's not a choice between what poison you pick, but between accepting or rejecting poison.
  • TeMPOraL 2y ago
    A poison is not going to harm you unless it makes no contact with your body; what GP is saying is, regardless of which one is more potent, it's safer to pick the one you're least likely to ever find yourself near.
    • computerthings 2y ago
      It's safer to not ingest any poison. You don't extinguish fire with gasoline because kerosene might be worse. You don't eat rat poison because fentanyl would be worse. It's a false dichotomy.
      • TeMPOraL 2y ago
        It's not a false dichotomy - the entire analogy to poison makes no sense, because US or China spying on people's activity on-line is currently a complete nothingburger. If anything, adtech is actually doing real harm to people this way, but that harm is still relatively small and indirect, which is why most people don't care.
        • computerthings 2y ago
          > There's no way I am using a Chinese IDE with VSCode (w/ Coppilot) and Cursor existing after reading the privacy issues in the court documents with TikTok. I have to say, on second reading, you are right because I basically overlooked that Copilot implies having no problem with being spied on by US corporations. That honestly escaped me. But since you brought it up, for me mass surveillance and other abuses are simply a human rights issue more than anything. People can chose to not uphold theirs, or we can feel like we "have no other choice", but that doesn't change the human rights abuse, essentially. And we have no clue what the long term pay-off for everything being enmeshed into surveillance of every single data point, no matter how trivial in isolation it might be. And "I don't care about privacy, so let's not have privacy anymore, so nobody ever born will have privacy again" is not a decision anyone has the right to make, to put a point on it. We all kinda ended up here, and I know it's not so easy, but that we don't have "fixed" it doesn't mean it's not broken, and it staying broken for a long time doesn't normalize it in my books. That people don't care is what raising awareness is for, after all. And when people like Larry Ellison talk about everybody being on good behaviour because the AI will be always watching (to help everybody and make a great society, of course, because nothing could go wrong), basically, I think adtech isn't the only danger, and the effect of that would also not be "small and indirect". But it also underlines your point about what's the more direct threat to a US citizen.
• roenxi 2y ago
  And, logically - if we're worried about spying - it actually makes the most sense for average Chinese people to use US software and vice versa. The biggest threat to a person is always the police & military of their own country. For example, China killed a lot of people. They were all Chinese.
• redcobra762 2y ago
  Then you know nothing of how China operates its military or its intelligence gathering apparatus. Ask any of the parts of the world that disagree with China about their sovereignty…
  • guappa 2y ago
    I don't see tanks in taiwan… What I see is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_overseas_military_bases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_with_oversea... As I've already said, I never claimed china are the good guys. Just that they aren't the worse guys.
    • redcobra762 2y ago
      ...you realize the US is invited to be in those countries, right? And why would you see enemy tanks on an island? What you do see are many many Chinese ships and planes, constantly violating Taiwanese air and sea boundaries.
      • guappa 2y ago
        "invited" :D
        • redcobra762 2y ago
          Numerous times in the past three years the US has been asked to leave a country and it complies.
      • HuangYuSan 2y ago
        Some of them exist against the will of the host country's government, for example in Cuba and Iraq, and Iraq's government is even democratically elected (albeit with issues)
• roca 2y ago
  That makes you an outlier. Despite everything, millions of people are still desperate to get into the USA. China, not so much.
  • guappa 2y ago
    They wouldn't be desperate to get into USA if you stopped messing up their countries.
• knowitnone 2y ago
  good for you. don't ever visit the US because they are watching you closely