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Comment by thevardanian | Hacker News Reader

You're acting as if "the general anti-China slant" isn't justified. The only reason China was tolerated so far is purely due to economic reasons, otherwise what China is today as a government shouldn't have been tolerated and, in facts, begs sanctions.

China has done far more egregious transgression to be sanctioned for than Russia, but business/economic interests seem to outweigh that sort of action against China.

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We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18630131.

Clearly China has done some iffy business transgressions (dumping, industrial espionage, etc.) though they've also provided plenty of bargain-priced manufacturing (I type this on a Mac made by Foxconn...). But there isn't any indication they've tampered with elections for example, so I think it's an overstatement to say they're "far more egregious" than Russia.

> But there isn't any indication they've tampered with elections for example.

So, other than Chinagate you mean?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1996_United_States_campaign_fi...

I had forgotten about it, but your link says nothing was proven... so a bit different than more recent events[1]

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

You mean like this? Note this is not the president saying it, it's national security agencies.

https://thehill.com/policy/national-security/412292-us-warns...

And then of course you over look all the chinese spying that's been going on the last two decades -- both corporate and government sponsored.

Let's be clear, China is not a good actor. And whitewashing history to make them seem otherwise is not being honest.

I'd like to introduce you to 62,979,879 people that don't believe there was any Russian interference in the United States last election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

GP was mocking the belief of ~63M people (and GGP's parallel belief by proxy), not holding it up as evidence.

Exactly. And as many people appear to have turned on Trump online since the election, I've yet to meet someone in person that voted for him that is not a huge fan of him.

That's neither here nor there is it? The 1996 investigations led to no indictments and if anything widespread criticism of how Congressional investigations wasted time. The 2016 investigations are still ongoing with dozens of indictments, several guilty pleas, and jail-time.

There were multiple people arrested and convicted for campaign crimes relating to what prompted the 1996 investigations in fact. With some of it pointing directly back to Beijing on record. To say nothing of the unusual amounts of Chinese money flowing into Hillary's campaign when she was running against Obama [1]. The Chinese foreign money connection to the Clintons goes back a very long ways.

Then conveniently Bill Clinton goes on a blitz to get China into the WTO during his Presidency.

See (2017 article):

“The FBI uncovered evidence about the alleged plan, in part, through electronic intercepts. ... The plan, first discussed in early 1995, called for Chinese officials to channel more than $2 million into U.S. campaigns."

"This isn’t even ancient history. Last week a 17-year-old video surfaced from convicted Clinton fundraiser Johnny Chung in which he confessed to fronting for Chinese intelligence and worried about being bumped off."

https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-was-bill-clintons-russia-...

[1] http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1679979,0...

But none so far about election tampering. More anout lying about timelines, not registering as foreign agents, etc. It’s like a big version of the Martha Stewart trial —so far anyhow.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...

Absolutely - and the mass internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. But the US turns a blind eye to domestic abuses all over the world, so I don't expect much.

> tampered with elections

By that metric the US is most egregious, so is hypocritical to sanction anyone

Yea - ever live in China? If not - then you don’t know squat.

That's whataboutism.

The US being a bad actor doesn't have any bearing on the the bad acting of China, which is being discussed here.

I do not see why people are voting this down. The comment is absolutely correct.

The discussion was on the faults of China vs Russia. Not on the USA. Election tampering was listed as something that China didn't do, so it is not even on the list of things we are trying to criticize China for.

Why, then, are alleged past American misdeeds coming up? We can focus on them in a different discussion about the USA. They neither explain nor excuse the economic and currency manipulations that China has been engaged in.

> China has done far more egregious transgression to be sanctioned for than Russia

That was the initial claim.

Unless it gives China reason to believe that such behavior is acceptable if their position on the world stage is high enough.

The Chinese government are mostly smarter than that, and better long-term thinkers.

The Russian government has a lot of Putin's ego in it, they make big splashy moves that look like 'exerting power' (ukraine, georgia, US elections). Meanwhile their economy is stagnating and regressing to resource extraction.

Why would the Chinese bother stoking tensions in America when we're already so good at it ourselves? "Never interfere with your enemy when he's making a mistake".

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/08/ch...

It's easy to criticize China's handling of culturally incompatible indigenous peoples when your own are either dead or accepted their place in a depressing reservation. From China's perspective, their heavy handed tactics are the only thing preventing the region from falling into civil war.

No one in the US is forced to live in a reservation, let alone kidnapped and tortured by the government just for being indigenous.

Sarcasm is hard to detect via text, I'd try and be more explicit (add a /s).

If you are in fact being serious, Google 'indian reservations'

Maybe the key word is “forced”.

Are you saying that historically Indians where not forced onto reservations, or that now there are no pressures to keep them there?

The other operative word is "is". No one is trying to defend the history of the united states... slavery was a rather common thing at one point.

There is no threat of punishment keeping them there. They are free to live their lives anywhere in the US the same as any other US citizen. They do, unfortunately, have a higher percentage of poor people than most demographics, but being poor is quite obviously better than being kidnapped and tortured.

If you want to live as a Native American, then yes, you basically have to be on a reservation, and we forced them there to begin with. We'd do so again if they were deemed a large enough national security risk. Our current moral high ground is built on the history of hundreds of years of dirty work. In a hundred years, when Uyghur culture is wiped out, China too, will start claiming their own moral high ground.

If you are comparing not being able to live in their ancestors traditional manner to being tortured, you are trying to compare "live a normal north american life" to "being tortured". I hope it's clear that "forcing" people to do the former by otherwise having them move to land set aside, is a far way away from kidnapping people and torturing them.

No one is trying to defend the history of the united states (there was this whole slavery thing after all), just the current united states. A past wrong does not justify a current one.

That's not my point. You can't judge China's actions towards a situation that you don't face. It doesn't help that the US completely failed in their treatment of Native Americans. It's comfortable to believe that modern day America is more enlightened, but do you really think that's the case? Hundreds of thousands of people were killed during the war in Iraq, in the name of "national security." Technically, we didn't force anyone to do anything after Sadaam was captured, but we basically set up two sides to kill each other and feign suprise when they did. Imagine how we would react to an actual internal threat of national security.

Maybe you think you can do better. Let's say you had a chance to be Andrew Jackson in 1830, and you're facing an American Indian crisis in Georgia. You have two options. The first is to let history repeat itself with the Trail of Tears. The second is to let the settlers and natives duke it out. Ultimately, the settlers will win and Indians are drived out anyways, but thousands more are killed in the process. The two groups are too different to coexist peacefully, and you don't have the authority from stopping people from moving to Georgia. Which option do you choose? Either way, history would remember you as a terrible person.

"You can't judge China's actions towards a situation that you don't face"

So, if one isn't facing a certain ethical situation, they can't make judgements about the response? This seems like quite poor reasoning to me.

Besides, why can't one accept that two different actions committed by different nations are both wrong? I suspect you're assuming that the posters are from the US too, which isn't necessarily true.

To be clear, I think what China is doing in Xinjiang is terrible. My issue is that the American news outlets do everything they can to paint a picture that the Chinese are genocidal maniacs. The media would never treat the actions of a single abusive prison guard as the will the American government, but they do for China. The media never implied that the war on terror was modern day genocide, but they're doing that with China.

China is buying political influence everywhere.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/oct/11/china-legalise...

> China has done far more egregious transgression to be sanctioned for than Russia

Do you have any data to support this claim? Having just read Bill Browder's Red Notice I find that to be a questionable statement.

Browder became rich in the era of voucher privatisation, there are all sorts of reasons why he may not exactly be an unbiased witness.

The overreach on southern straits is pretty egregious.

>State Dept. official: China holding 800k Muslim minorities in internment camps

That sounds pretty terrible to me.

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/419855-state-dep...

By comparison, most of that kind of stuff in Russia died with Stalin.

Censured in the U.S., but relevant:

http://www.magnitskyact.com/

>http://www.magnitskyact.com/

This is Kremlin paid propaganda from Andrei Nekrasov, a Russian film director who retweets RT and WikiLeaks.

Since Browder's become far too high profile for Putin to murder, the level of effort by Russian trolls to discredit him has been truly remarkable.

What you're saying makes no sense. If China is doing something bad and the USA allows it because of economic reasons, then both countries are in the same boat! Now you're proposing to punish China only because the economics don't seem to favor US anymore, which, if true, in fact means that the US is the rogue one.

People are so exceptionally bad at making arguments. He wasn't saying this at all. He was, in fact, saying the opposite--that the economics shouldn't matter and that China has been deserving of the international community's ire for a long time already.

Under that logic, France and Iran, Iraq and Libya are in the same boat.

Germany and Assad must be in the same boat as well. The EU has a long history of trading with brutal regimes: is the EU now morally equivalent to the worst regimes on Earth? Germany and the UK were selling technology to the belligerents in the Iran-Iraq war, countries that used chemical weapons.

Trade with a country doesn’t imply endorsement of that country’s policies. If the US takes a stand and embargoes a country, much of the rest of the world gets mad and accuses the US of meddling, then when they don’t embargo, the US gets accused of supporting policies of a specific country.

There’s no way to win in the eyes of the world.

He's saying they've been transgressing in ways, like human rights violations (social credit and the Uyghurs in Xinjiang are a couple examples), undermining democracy outside of its own government (undermining Hong Kong's contractual right to independent democratic process, etc.), violating intellectual property, cyberespionage against US companies like Google, etc., which we would have likely already have punished if it weren't economically inconvenient to do so to this particular state, and that that's an unfortunate reason to allow foul play.

They do interfere with other countries, see the news agency they set up in London.

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