You like posting political views on the internet right? Imagine China is the sole superpower of the world that defeated the democracies of the world. You would be ranked, censored, monitored, caught, jailed, tortured, and killed.
I have literally never seen this.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan
(Edit: I didn't notice the word superficial at first, it may have been inserted later as a correction.)
Also I'm an American and I don't appreciate your pseudo-racist condescension.
Not sure where race is coming into it for you. American is not a race. Chinese is more a culture, than a race, if you look at the diversity of China outside of just Han. ??? Maybe we should just leave that one alone, it may have been a misunderstanding.
I come from an English spring country but have spent extensive time in various other countries where I have family. Thanks for being a total dick whilst knowing nothing about me.
That being irrelevant though I suggest you re-read the post I was replying to. And then the honourable thing to do would be apologise to me.
I was responding to this part. I apologize that my comment was poorly worded and I'll admit slightly obnoxious.
Still I am surprised that you never noticed, during your visits to China, the degree to which they wish China would be the one that takes over US as the superpower of the world. When I have been there it has never been hidden, but then I tend to get down into the culture rather than remaining at the expat bars. Again I'm not saying YOU stay at expat bars... like I wasn't saying YOU are American... but just responding to what you actually wrote about what someone else actually wrote.
I’ve made exactly zero comment on what I’ve observed anywhere but HN. Please for the love of god stop assuming what I’ve seen/haven’t seen unless I say it.
That said, yes I’ve noticed people in China are favourable to a world with Chinese hegemony as a superpower. That’s not surprising is it? I’ve noticed in America there is a favourable sentiment in general to the status quo - American superpower hegemony.
Thank you for your apology and I do accept it. It is difficult sometimes on the internet and in real life to make sure you’re responding to what the person said/means and not what you imagine them to mean. We can all try to better understand others rather than talk at them.
Peaceful, not necessarily fair or free.
This statement ignores the mass murder it takes to become the number one power
If merely winning the most wars and murdering the most people automatically made one a superpower, then the United States would not have become a superpower, because they did not win the most wars, nor did they murder the most people, at the end of World War 2, when they gained superpower status.
You're trying so hard to be cynical here that you're abandoning rationality. I'm no fan of American military hegemony, or superpowers in general, but you make the US sound like a Mongol Khanate which is just absurd. The world is more complex than "whomever stands on the biggest pile of heads wins."
The US suffered less casualties than all the other major powers (USSR, China, Germany, Poland, Japan, France, Italy, UK) in WW2 and their infrastructure was not destroyed. So kill/death ratio and net destruction are quite indicative of the outcome.
Which country would you guess has committed the most large scale invasions and longest lasting wars since world war 2?
>you make the US sound like a Mongol Khanate which is just absurd
That is indeed an absurd strawman. Did the Mongols not achieve their super power status because of how successful they were at mass murder?
You're moving the goalposts now. Your earlier comment claimed the method for becoming a superpower was to "participate in the most wars and murder the most people." The number of casualties or infrastructure damage relative to the rest of the world shouldn't matter, as that implies a degree of complexity in the nature of superpowers that your prior rationale doesn't allow for.
>Which country would you guess has committed the most large scale invasions and longest lasting wars since world war 2?
You obviously want me to say the US, and you're hedging your bets with the weasel terms "large scale" and "longest lasting" and I really don't care enough about this to go look it up, so fine... the US. But since the US was already a superpower after World War 2, that's not really germane to the US's rise to superpower status.
>Did the Mongols not achieve their super power status because of how successful they were at mass murder?
Maybe, but the point is that the US didn't achieve superpower status through success at mass murder, and that they're not like the Mongols.
Please re-read what I actually said. You've blatantly misquoted me. A keyword which you conveniently ignored is wins.
>You're hedging your bets with the weasel terms "large scale" and "longest lasting"
Is scalability not a prerequisite to becoming a global scale superpower?
>the point is that the US didn't achieve superpower status through success at mass murder
Are you honestly implying the US' success at mass murder is unrelated to their becoming a superpower?
I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition.
Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives people to focus solely on what the US is perceived to have done wrong while ignoring the tremendous amount of good the US has done and continues to do for the global international order. Therefore people develop a very skewed and biased understanding of the world.
Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen in the period of global peace and stability we've seen since the US has been the superpower.
> tremendous amount of good the US has done
Has any effect on:
> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.
If I cure a 1000 people and kill 1, in still an evil killer. It's not like some kind of game system where karma is a single number. You can help some people and be abusive to others, and those will never balance out unless there's a strict cause-effect relation between them.
How so? I don't think so. AFAICS - and I lived in the US for a decade and would do so again, I have no beef with the country, just saying what I think I see/know - the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.
It's hard to prove or disprove your 2nd paragraph claim since we cannot have the experiment. I think that while you can certainly (as always) find plenty of examples in support the opposing side won't have any difficulties either. Overall the statement is way too fuzzy and broad to be either attackable or supportable.
> Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen
Sounds like a vote for a global dictatorship to me.
That’s not true at all, at least not in historical context. The US is the most powerful country in the world never to build an actual empire. It’s conquests are limited to part of Mexico, and some pacific islands. It’s predecessor, Great Britain, colonized India, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and turned China into a vassal state. The would-be challenger Germany occupied France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, etc.
The US is interventionist—it intervenes in the political affairs of other countries to perpetuate the status quo. That’s very different from being expansionist or Empire-seeking. Take Iraq for example. The US toppled the government. But did it colonize the country? Annex the oil fields? Turn the oil over to domestic oil companies like Exxon? No. (Most of the development rights went to BP, a British company!) The US spent far more on Iraq then it got out of the country. That’s not how an Empire operates.
(This is a quirky and rough post written late at night during a break from coding, so be forewarned...)
For example Europe used to be what we'd call multipolar, but today with the EU (sadly minus Britain for now at least) it's non-polar. OK, Germany is the biggest and most powerful, France after, but they aren't hegemonic and they must abide by the rules of the wider EU.
The US-led post WWII international order has probably been the closest thing yet to a global non-polar situation, so it's sad to see the US turning way from its own creation. To me, there should be more international harmonization and rule-making, which of course can only happen at the expense of some loss of national solidarity (the cost of any treaty) but which also can confer global rights and privileges.
I'd hope to see the world develop to become more like one huge EU. Just as countries wish to join the EU, they would hopefully wish to join the World Union. To do that they'd have to meet standards, and those standards would provide beacons, giving direction and purpose to countries that still had a long distance to travel.
So it couldn't be just like the EU all of a sudden of course. For example you can't just have a global Schengen Area for total free movement, you'd crash the system and get too much backlash, but you could start with, say, freedom of movement within some areas. So, imagine all OECD countries as one free movement area. I'd be so psyched! Wouldn't you? You could live in many places, your freedom would be massively expanded. And because OECD countries have similar levels of wealth, disruption would seem unlikely. Then you could expand from there however it were possible to other countries, but a larger total area would be better at absorbing immigrants because there would be more places for individuals or groups to discover niches they could fill.
(As an aside, I find it hard to understand how people who call themselves libertarians can be against freedom of movement. Likewise, people believing in "universal human rights of man" but only if you happen to be a citizen of their country. It seems almost like, say, a Christian telling you they'd only extend forgiveness and agape love to people from their own family, circle, or region, but sadly this is also common. I'm writing this from Seoul, by which I mean to argue that today we are all neighbors. Hello, neighbors^^)
Anyway, if we want a non-polar world, things like the WTO and UN, instead of being disparaged for their flaws, should be improved and expanded. To gain greater access to the global market, or areas within it, the World Union could stipulate that human dignity be maintained (even continuously improved), that rights of individuals be protected, and even that democracy, perhaps with local characteristics, be the system of government for those who wished to join. Perhaps China could keep its bureaucratic meritocracy ideas and still join, but not without approval from the country's citizens.
Advantages of joining could include things like open markets, common issuance of bonds, common protection against catastrophes, some kind of common currency mechanism with room for monetary policy to be either joined or governed by shared rules and principles, so that things like devaluations or interest rate settings could reflect local conditions but also jive / be in harmony with global economic trends. There could be levels of membership. Partial members. Pathways toward membership.
We already have a global culture and plenty of important, even existential global problems. It seems like the time is nigh for a global harmonization, maybe a World Union, or "World Commons".
That word "nigh" is interesting because it's chunked together so often with the apocalyptic phrase, "The end is nigh," the "end" being the Christian Day of Judgement from the Book of Revelations. The Book of Revelations, which just barely made it into the Bible at the Council of Nicea, has sadly become an enemy of global cooperation in many religious Christian people's eyes. This may have in part to do with the kinds of views in the runaway best-seller Left Behind series of Apocalypse and Damnation-porn fiction (the books are an evangelical Christian orgy of shadenfreude -- just watch the damned sinners get theirs hahaha), with a metaphysical conspiracy theory about the United Nations being a source for Satan's control of the world.
I'm not religious, but it saddens me that the Christian faith, which began as something hoping to be universal and seeing us all as God's creations and each with the Holy Ghost within us, so each of us as holy and sacred, how that beautiful faith can (yet again) be twisted toward parochial and even nationalistic ends, even without many of the people responsible realizing what they are doing. Why have we come here to metaphysical conspiracy theories? Because the United States, from where so much progress has come in so many ways, but also where the Left Behind books were such hits, remains the indispensable country when it comes to global union and harmonization. China, not so much.
China is an authoritarian, control-freak one-party-superstate that jails and kills political opposition. Will the world be more “peaceful” if there’s a multipolar collection of those?
No idea if it's true or will work out that way, but it's one hypothesis I think is out there.
Sure, the downside of China's rise is that authoritarian states have more legitimacy, but it's not like the western powers did much about those states back when they were the hegemons, so I'm not sure if the argument carries much weight either.
You say "block intervention"... how does that work? That sounds like a proxy war to me... like the korean war, or vietnam, or afghanistan in the 80s. It's not peace, it's just bloodier.
The world is more peaceful today without the Soviet Unions fight for influence.
China threatens Taiwan INVASION to 'unify state' with FORCE if US Navy arrive
https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/890698/World-War-3-Chin...
Chinese Police Are Demanding Personal Information From Uighurs in France
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/02/chinese-police-are-secre...
China demands immediate halt to THAAD missile system now ‘operational’ in South Korea
http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2092259/nort...
We've banned this account for using HN for political and national battle, flamewars, and personal attacks. That's a rather striking amount of vandalism, just as it would be if you had the opposite opinions. Indeed, the people who vandalize HN this way have more in common with their extreme enemies than they do with anyone else.
Arguably the biggest problem that Western democracy faces is apathy. So I think many of us take the opportunity to ride the wave of ire that China's policies illicit and attempt to funnel it into self-reflection. The West is an unaccounted bully on the global stage, the list of atrocities it has committed is both difficult to comprehend and stomach.
This does not at all placate China. Unchecked power in any context is bad news. Both the Chinese and Western populace are complicit. We are all heading for a tragically sobering wake up call.
If the only way for the Western psyche to understand its own pathology is by projection onto others, then so be it.
Directly inciting actual physical violence, you might have an argument for.
But words and ideas must remain free to maintain any semblance of a free society.
As other commenters have said: who decides?
https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...
This applies to every country, they could all be better or worse: but some of them are currently worse than others.
If you truly believe that, would you be opposed to TSA style x-ray machines, genital pat downs, and strip searches any time you were to go to school, work, get on a bus, etc?
People fly infrequently though, and also have a very strong desire to feel safe when flying, so they are for the most part fine with TSA checkpoints. TSA checkpoints are implemented to make people feel safe.
See, it's a balance.
Ratchets only tighten.
So in other words, restricting your liberty or freedom of movement?
Even if that scan does little or nothing to actually improve your safety [1]? If I'm going to have my privacy taken away, I want something better in return for it than security theater and wasted taxes.
[1] http://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-o...
China has an absolutely appalling social justice history, including every war they've been involved in, their internal intolerance, and their record-breaking incompetence at even feeding their own people.