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Comment by lgleason | Hacker News Reader

This is why we need to sever economic ties with China. The more we support this the worse this type of thing will intensify, including beyond China's borders....and it won't stop at just Christianity, they have targeted Islam and, Buddhists etc. as well.

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On the contrary. I think our leaders should spend more time together. Maybe they should even vacation together.

The US severed economic ties with Cuba in the 60s and look what happened (only recently celebrating Christmas became legal, and property that belonged to the church was returned). There are countless examples like that.

The US has been doing that for the past 30 years. It's not working.

The Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward happened before that. Up until Xi Jiping, China had been on track to being a freer country.

Not entirely accurate - Tiananmen square was just under 30 years ago, and that was a particularly low point. Though I suppose one could argue that pretty much anything after that was an improvement.

What exactly happened after the U.S. severed ties with Cuba? You make it sound like we lost something.

They are still stuck in the 1960s, their economy is absolute garbage and the people are dirt poor, they lost multiple generations of opportunity.

Have you been to Cuba? It’s like going back in time 70 years.. the country itself is beautiful if they had taken a different path they could be incredibly propsorous. A small country like Cuba could get by on tourism alone and do much better than they do now.

Everyone needs to take their own path, if suppressing people’s religions and no freedom is that path the Chinese want to take then that’s their choice.

Our government and our corporations should not support that.

They make it sound like they lost something. As in, if they wouldn't have been isolated it might have turned out better for the average Cuban.

It’s not certain that it would. But participation in the global economy is one way to get a country hooked on the economic crack that is the modern financial system. Once they’re hooked, economic sanctions (sometimes just the threat of them) are much more effective in achieving desired behavior.

Perhaps the point was that if we had remained involved in Cuba, they wouldn’t be stuck in the 1960s?

My point is simple: If the US had not severed ties with Cuba and instead engaged with Fidel (as he initially tried to do with the US), chances are Cuba wouldn't have alienated itself with the Soviet Union, and Christians (and everybody else) would have been much better off.

Repression of the Church didn't happen until years after the revolution and the Soviet Union had become its main ally.

Cuba is worse off today than it was 60 years ago by the way, so in that sense, they aren't "stuck in the 60s".

What did the US lose? An ally and a potentially strong economy to trade with a few miles from US shore. Cuban music had quite some influence on the music of New Orleans, particularly jazz. Cuban musicians would regularly travel back and forth from Havana to New Orleans before the revolution (and the other way around).

> A small country like Cuba could get by on tourism alone and do much better than they do now

Ye they could have done that if America hadn't enacted travel bans.

Why will severing economic ties change it either way? Do you just mean as a matter of principle we should sanction China, or do you think it will be an effective impulse for change?

One common refrain is that trade has massive material benefits to all parties engaged in it, but when one party is engaged in immoral behavior, one has to question if one wants to strengthen them with those benefits.

Personally, I think a unilateral severing of economic ties would be extremely counterproductive. However, I think eliminating the policy compartmentalization between trade and human rights issues should be seriously considered. Basic democratic representation and de jure and de facto protection of basic human rights (or at least concrete and verifiable steps towards that goal) should be fundamental requirements for having an open trading relationship with any country. Then it's up the the human-rights abusing country to make the choice about whether it wants to trade or not.

My understanding is that many of these trading relationships were liberalized with the idea that trade would bring political liberalization and human rights with it. That idea has been shown to be false, so policy that's based on it should be reconsidered.

both. I doubt it will stop it in China directly, but if you continue to support them economically this is more likely to spread as they gain more global influence. Ideally there should be none, but if you can't have that containment is the next best thing otherwise you expose a larger population to it.

Power, and if I may diplomacy, vacuums never work in the favor of the people who created it in the first place.

The U.S. (and largely other Western) nations enjoy a hefty set of soft power and good economic relations with the majority of countries on this planet precisely because we have actively engaged with them. If you're worried about things getting worse or intensifying, then severing ties with these countries (and China specifically) is a good way to make those worries a very brutal reality.

And if that's not enough the blunt reality is that our economies are too intertwined at this point. We can only play the situation as it is, not back out of it completely unless we mean to shoot ourselves in the foot.

I used to listen to people like Ron Paul, and he would say something like... The stronger our economic ties and dependencies, the less likely we are to commit aggression against each other. I believe he supports the non-intervention policy. [0]

[0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_non-interventi...

That was also the argument for why WW1 could never happen, yet it did.

Could you explain this?

https://wwi.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Norman_Angell%27s_The_Grea...

An excerpt from a book by Norman Angell, (Nobel Peace Prize winner, lecturer, journalist and MP) in 1910 as to why wide scale war could not happen between major powers.

    [War] belongs to a stage of development out of which 
    we have passed that the commerce and industry of a 
    people no longer depend upon the expansion of its 
    political frontiers; that a nation's political and 
    economic frontiers do not now necessarily coincide; 
    that military power is socially and economically 
    futile, and can have no relation to the prosperity 
    of the people exercising it; that it is impossible 
    for one nation to seize by force the wealth or trade 
    of another -- to enrich itself by subjugating, or
    imposing its will by force on another; that in short,
    war, even when victorious, can no longer achieve those 
    aims for which people strive.

It was a fairly widespread view at that point in time.

I guess the leaders at the time forgot to read his book ;)

Does a higher degree of globalization lead to a higher degree of stability and peace? This is a classical and interesting discussion. The world before World War I was arguably highly globalized. I failed to find a comprehensive summary of the arguments and counter-arguments, but here a few links:

“The First World War in the History of Globalization”

https://www.etown.edu/offices/president/2014-11-14-WW1-Globa...

The world today looks ominously like it did before World War I

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/12/29/the-w...

Globalization = No War? Does an increasingly economically interconnected world cut the chance of war? Maybe, but it doesn’t eliminate it.

https://thediplomat.com/2011/08/globalization-no-war/

We mustn’t fall for The Great Illusion again

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/955570...

The Great Illusion

https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/15/opinion/15krugman.html

IMHO, the argument is partially true. But on the other hand, it increases the complexity of the system, and makes many otherwise unlikely "failure modes" possible.

China represents almost 1/5th of the world's population, you can't simply ignore Chinas global presence. I suggest visiting china for a few weeks, exploring each of their major cities to gain some new perspective.

Severing economic ties at whose expense? Christians in China? Poor people in the US? It’s easy to claim moral superiority if someone else has to foot the bill.

What is even more dangerous is to link religion freedom to the ongoing trade war. It makes good people who are fighting for a just cause look like pawns of the US.

You may have underestimated the value of engagement. The spread of Christianity in China could not happen without the economic ties with China in the past forty years.

> This is why we need to sever economic ties with China

Then someone else will step in. What needs to be done is clever diplomacy. A carrot and stick policy and long-term thinking.

Diplomacy clearly does not work with China. The only thing that works is direct, aggressive competition. Hopefully this does not lead to military conflict but I worry that the US and China are on an inevitable path at this point.

China has something like 4x the US population, assuming they’re equally smart and driven on average, why wouldn’t they attain 4x the gdp eventually?

I think the two primary things where the US has an advantage over China is diversity (largely driven by foreign immigration) and free information flow. This leads to greater rates of innovation. Maybe not enough to keep China’s gdp from eventually surpassing the US, but that’s largely a glamour stat. The real issue is global power and influence. As shady and domineering as US foreign policy can be at times, a world dominated by China is far more concerning.

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