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I would really respect the hell out of the nation of China if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.

• onethought 1y ago
  Imperialism? Expand.
  • z2 1y ago
    The most charitable interpretation I can think of, if OP didn't misuse the word, would be, the generic "China bad" narrative being applied to things like equating the Belt and Road (loans, infrastructure projects) to centuries of old-fashioned exploitation of Africa. After all, it takes one to know one.
    • AniseAbyss 1y ago
      To be fair China challenging white people rule is kinda bad if you are white. I suppose us Westerners can now kinda feel how the Ming must have felt in the 19th century?
    • lwansbrough 1y ago
      It’s not that hard to find examples. Chinese incursions in the south China sea and the development of artificial islands to project power and control over the region. Their plans for Taiwan. The annexation of Tibet. Xinjiang ethnic cleansing. Erosion of democratic freedoms in Hong Kong SAR. And yes the entire Belt and Road initiative which is basically loan sharking.
      • z2 1y ago
        No. That list shows coercive or authoritarian behavior, not classical imperialism. Imperialism means establishing colonies or directly ruling foreign territories for economic extraction. China today doesn’t occupy or govern other sovereign states. The South China Sea, Hong Kong, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan are all disputes within--except Taiwan + the South China Sea--undisputed national boundaries.[1] Belt and Road loans, while allegedly predatory, are contractual and do not create colonial rule. So it’s perhaps aggressive nationalism and coercive influence, but not imperialism. 1. Yes, looking way back, the occupying Qing dynasty established said boundaries through quite a lot of imperialism about a century before the US got busy manifesting its destiny.*
        • ivell 1y ago
          Tibet was a self governing entity until Chinese invasion. Though China would disagree. Tibet's leaders are still in exile and one of the key issues of China with India. If the argument is that Tibet was not a country, then the same applies to Taiwan. Taiwan is not internationally recognized as a country, except for a few nations.
          • z2 1y ago
            Autonomy is not sovereignty. Tibet wasn’t “invaded” like a foreign country, it had been de facto autonomous after the chaotic Qing collapse, but no one recognized it as sovereign. If I were to guess at China's narrative, the PLA’s 1950 entry is probably seen as a reconsolidation of territory long claimed by China, not new imperial conquest. And Taiwan’s status only survived because US intervention froze the Chinese civil war’s outcome, not because it was ever outside China’s historical frame. Again, indeed, Qing imperialist actions 300 years ago led to the current map, and you might see me as pedantic here but calling China (or modern US/Japan/Britain for that matter) imperialist might feel satisfying, but analytically it dampens the real and harmful empire-building sense of the term used in history.
            • ivell 1y ago
              I think one issue is when do we start drawing the line that an autonomous entity is recognized as a sovereign country. Do we start with the UN? Because before nation states formed, it was a bit ambiguous. British empire's colonies were not a formally recognized countries in the modern sense. But we do agree that British were imperialistic.
        • andrewflnr 1y ago
          You can use whatever word you want for naked ambition to conquer people who don't want to be part of your country. I'm still not going to respect it.
          • deleted 1y ago
            [deleted]
  • andrewflnr 1y ago
    They're plainly trying to expand their territory in Taiwan and the South China Sea. Building invasion barges that can only be used for invading Taiwan, harassing Phillipine ships. It's not subtle.
• jama211 1y ago
  And oppression of Tibet and the Uyghur people and other human rights violations…
  • onethought 1y ago
    A mean not to go too deep into whataboutism… but at least they only persecute their own Muslims rather than picking random countries on a map and persecuting them.
    • free652 1y ago
      Ohhh so they aren't like selling weapon to Russia? Right. Keep going.
      • picture 1y ago
        I see your point but, they're really not selling much more than golf carts and drones. If they go all-out with selling their actual military hardware (which they have a large stockpile and production capacity of), it would be get much more difficult for Ukraine to keep up the balance without increasing support from the west. It's really quite interesting to see China being labelled as imperialist mean while the western powers have been colonizing and meddling in all kinds of affairs for generations... (see Operation Northwoods as one example)
        • jopsen 1y ago
          Everybody makes mistakes. The US is able to mention its past mistakes. China still can't talk about students it murdered over 30 years ago. Yet, recent American presidents have no problem admitting that Afghanistan and Iraq wars weren't the best of ideas.
          • sometimes_all 1y ago
            > The US is able to mention its past mistakes. The entire point of being able to mention past mistakes is for future generations to be able to learn from them and avoid making the same mistakes. It seems, in recent times, that while this liberty is "afforded" to US/Europe, they're not able to use it effectively, if at all. Meanwhile, even though the Chinese might not be able to talk about their mistakes publicly, it seems evident from their progress and events that they have not forgotten them, and that it is in their minds, at the very least. Edit: Not to mention, looking at how your current president is going after Canada just because of an ad, don't keep your hopes up on US citizens being able to "mention" things either.
• kaptainscarlet 1y ago
  As long as the cat catches the mice... :-)
• scoopertrooper 1y ago
  They go hand in hand. The authoritarianism of China allows it to undertake generational projects of immense scale with mass popular support through propaganda. It works well when the government is pursuing welfare maximising initiatives, but limits self-correction when the government goes off track. A small example of it going wrong, was when Mao convinced peasants to exterminate Sparrows and other ‘pests’ only to severely disrupt the ecosystem and cause a famine.
  • leodler 1y ago
    Somehow we (the United States) accomplished generational projects that are currently out of the realm of possibility such as the interstate system without risking anything like a famine. I think a lot of people in America have been overly-empowered to stand in the way of the most modest progress through NIMBYism, litigation, local government, etc. To a lot of people it increasingly feels like a form of private authoritarianism over tiny fiefdoms for absolutely no benefit to a vast majority of people.
    • Arainach 1y ago
      "Somehow" we did that back when we believed in a strong federal government working for the benefit of the people. It's no wonder that we lost the ability after decades of anti-government propaganda and regulatory capture.
      • yonaguska 1y ago
        I don't believe we are capable of a strong government that will also work for the benefit of the people today. Anti government sentiment didn't just spring up from a vacuum.
        • Arainach 1y ago
          It sprung up from capitalist propaganda and intentional sabotage of the government by conservatives. > I don't want to abolish government. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub. Grover Norquist said the quiet part out loud in 2001, but conservatives have been running that playbook since the New Deal.
• FpUser 1y ago
  >"if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism" Oops, my hypocrisy meter just broke.
  • andrewflnr 1y ago
    You may be making assumptions about me.
• LAC-Tech 1y ago
  Really? I always thought people made a massive deal about an incredibly poor country that become... middle income, and seems to be stuck there. I'm glad they don't have self-induced famines anymore I guess, but it's not exactly japan in the 80s.
• vishnugupta 1y ago
  I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life. From what I read online the people there are free to rant and get things fixed. Their local government representative is held accountable if the people in his/her province are unhappy. Not too different from a typical democratic setup I guess? But this could be off because I don’t know anyone personally there.
  • SR2Z 1y ago
    > I’m really curious to better understand what aspects of China’s government would hurt your day to day life. For tech workers in particular, the structure of the economy would prevent high equity-based compensation. I also distinctly recall China's heavy-handed enforcement of COVID lockdowns, and the sudden about-face when discontent reached a boiling point. Then there's the censorship too - disagreeing on low-stakes local issues is one thing, but if you disagree with national policy, you cannot exactly discuss it in the open the way that we do here. I have known a few Chinese people, and they downplay this stuff. Some of them are even political refugees from the purges following Mao's death, and they downplay the level of authoritarianism in the country. As bad as the US has gotten recently, we're still not at that level. It really does seem like both nations are slowly converging on similar systems of government, but hopefully this authoritarian swing in the US can be limited.
  • eks391 1y ago
    I'm not sure where you are reading, but people are not free to rant in China. Many of my friends would lose privileges because they were foolish enough to openly speak poorly regarding certain topics, and suddenly they were banned from Wechat, which is equivalent to being banned from the internet, and from using money in noncash form. My sister was visiting and was dumb enough to get herself banned from way more services and she was scared she wouldn't be able to get back home. In a very few places, they check your social score to ensure that you aren't low-life enough to be barred from there too. I only spoke freely after checking an area for no cameras, so I always had all of my privileges, but me and a Chinese friend, after coming to the USA (I am not Chinese, only went there for school), hope we never end up back in China. Regarding day to day life in the USA, I am unaffected by China.
• marricks 1y ago
  I don't think any super power looks fantastic, and we definitely should not idolize China. But also, we should let that be an excuse for western powers. We have corporations forcing most of the decisions in our country for extremely short term gains. In the US we have... decrypt public transit, horrible healthcare, halting progress on renewable energies, we're probably going to make less than our parents while billionaires make more. Like it sucks, and if anyone tells you well at least you don't live in China you should roll your eyes, why does where we live have to suck. Oh, and we even have awful imperialism too.
• jmyeet 1y ago
  Have you not been paying attention to what's going on this country? We're building concentration camps. We have the Gestapo rounding up brown people. We have people being deported to supermax prisons in countries they have no connection to for protesting America's material support for genocide on college campuses. We have a media that is increasingly owned by lackeys of this administration (just look into CBS and Bari Weis as the latest example). Every aspect of our government is for sale from pardons to merger approvals and ending SEC investigations. There is functionally no law and order where we may start simply ignoring inconvenient parts of the Constitution like the 22nd Amendment. We have the military in our streets to incite violence. We have the Navy blowing up random small boats off Venezuela, arguably to incite a hot war with Venezuela. We have people who are rapidly unable to afford a place to live, food or both (and that's a bout to get a whole lot worse when SNAP gets suspended in November as the administration refuses to use the $6 billion set aside to fund it). We have a Speaker who won't swear in a duly elected House representative because she'll be the 218th vote on a discharge petition that will force a vote on release of the Epstein files, which the president will be forced to veto and he doesn't want to be put in that position. I think about all these things when people bring up so-called "authoritanism" in China. Do you not see how dire the situation is not only in the US but basically all of the developed world? France, Germany and the UK are poised to have actual Nazis win their next elections due to these economic crises that governments absolutely refuse to address. And imperialism? What imperialism? Pretty much every conflict on Earth currently can be traced back to the US, either because a US ally is a proxy doing war crimes or simply because the US turns a blind eye because one or both sides are buying US arms to commit those same war crimes. Just this month the Nobel committee handed the Peace Prize to an opposition leader in Venezuela who has promised to make Venezuela more Israel-friendly and to privatize all the resource extraction to Western companies. "Peace". We are in 1930s Germany. Worrying about China seems crazy to me.
  • endorphine 1y ago
    Don't know why you're downvoted, this seems a pretty accurate take to me. It seems most of us in the West are mostly incapable of self-criticism and have been fed so much propaganda that we forgot how to see through all the bull**.
  • 1y ago
• somenameforme 1y ago
  Not to be coy, but what do you mean by that? The reason I ask is because I think many of us use these terms, but without ever thinking about exactly which behaviors we're critiquing, or how they relate to what we truly value. For instance both the Roman and Greek Empires deserve immense respect, yet they were both often imperial empires ruled by dictators. The same is no less true of many societies that played key roles during The Renaissance, and patrons of the talents of the era. I hold immense respect for China, because I think they're achieving great things. I also think there is a high probability that they will be the first society to start creating permanent off-planet colonizations, which is what will probably signal the birth of the next era of humanity, so that in the future a name like Wang Yie might lie right alongside Neil Armstrong. On the other hand I certainly don't think the US should emulate them. It's important for the world to be multipolar, not only in alliances, but also in ideology, perspective, and behavior. What will happen to China once they inevitably find themselves with a leader who is not socially motivated, or who is incompetent? In such a centralized system outright collapse is not out of the question. Or perhaps they'll be just fine? Who knows? By maintaining a wide diversity of systems across the world, I think we maximize our chances of collective success and minimize our chances of collective failure.
  • andrewflnr 1y ago
    Indeed, I think Rome, Greece and other conquering powers get more respect than they deserve. There's no actual reason so many people have to die for these countries' national ambitions. Feel free to generalize to the US, etc.
    • foxglacier 1y ago
      Didn't Rome save a lot of lives by pax romana? Perhaps it was actually better in terms of loss of life to be conquered by Rome than have endless wars among yourselves. Applies to the US too.
      • curbedsidewalk 1y ago
        The conquest of Gaul was essentially genocide. Ceaser killed one third of the population, enslaved another, and left the rest to live under Roman rule. My suspicion is Gauls would have been better off having petty wars among themselves than this.
• ImHereToVote 1y ago
  China isn't imperialist.
• carabiner 1y ago
  How much is "freedom" worth to you? Do you think your average homeless person in San Francisco would be worse off with free healthcare, housing, and no right to vote?
• csomar 1y ago
  We can argue and discuss the authoritarianism of China (and state control). But imperialism? Really?
• blitzar 1y ago
  I would really respect the hell out of the nation of America if it wasn't for the authoritarianism and imperialism.
  • Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
    The fact that america can go to authoritarism this quickly and through democratic legal procedures itself is scary and I don't think that I can trust this in the same sense from now on. Trust is brittle. I looked even more into the facade of america, and honestly, i am confused by both parties to a certain extent which are both controlled by billionaires etc. The president I respect the most is teddy roosevelt, I have heard good things about kennedy too but I want to read so much more about the absolute chad known as teddy roosevelt. I think that there is hope for america but that's only if people actually try to understand what's happening, which is what I am hoping, its a shame bernie sanders couldn't have been a president but I am hoping that a new wave of american politics could arise to tackle corruption/politcal lobbying/bribery.
  • andrewflnr 1y ago
    Yeah, same honestly. Though I still don't think America is as bad yet. We did try to build actual nations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we just suck at it. Trump is unlikely to actually pick fights with Denmark or Canada. And our internal freedoms aren't gone yet. We can still criticize the president without immediately going to jail... Give it a year or two.
• Jackpillar 1y ago
  Imperialism? Please do divulge