For all the criticism that the USA is receiving recently, I am sure the world would be a worse place if China was the most influential country in the world (which they are trying become) instead of the USA.
The problem is in their government, and their capability and method of controlling the social resources; and more often than not, the government is quite aggressive toward those who disagree with them.
Not everyone and not all the time but over a sufficiently large time frame it does.
This doesn't mean that Chinese are inherently oppressive it just means that the current cultural construct does heavily lean that way.
There is a reason why you cannot transform a dictatorship into a democracy overnight without heavy and and continous influence. A democracy lives not because of a piece of paper but because the cultural construct of the people supports it. And while it is a chicken and the egg problem at some point that argument becomes irrelevant.
For China to change it will have to change its cultural constructs that allow it to sustain itself as it does today.
But I feel that given the current style of the Chinese government, it does not seem that there is much space for its people to develop any democratic or Enlightenment culture -- and from a perspective of statistics, a true and just and honest democratic society is more stable, both internally and externally, than an autocratic one -- and more likely to benefit a wider range of people.
Yet this is not the fault of any average Chinese...It is just that, at several critical moments in its history, some overly self-centered and overly biased leaders caused tremendous damages -- with all its ruinous and poisonous ramifications -- to the entire society. Had it been more democratic then, such damages would be unlikely to have ever happened...But the assumption of that necessity leads to the chicken or the egg dilemma...
Or perhaps the history -- and its consequential reality -- is quite fortuitous in nature...
P.S. Voting on Hacker News does not change minds, if you want to convince people to agree with you instead of me, you will need to reply.
You could argue that what's going on in China is bad for Chinese people, but China's influence outside its border is much less significant.
This is going off tangent, but I would just like to point out that until now, China has not been deploying troops around the world and over-throwing foreign governments.
Can you name a sovereign state recognized globally that is being threatened by China militarily?
Yes there is historical resentment, but people in our generation are rational, peace-seeking and pragmatic.
Case closed?
The only reason why China hasn't rolled tanks into Taiwan is because of logistical or political inconvenience, otherwise China could treat Taiwan just the same as Tibet.
Bit disingenuous to imply that’s solely because of policy, not reality and vice versa.
I guess we can only wait and see for ourselves.
http://www.npr.org/2015/03/02/390245038/ben-franklins-famous...