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Comment by fatjokes | Hacker News Reader

The echo chamber you mention doesn't simply exist here in the comments section, it's basically a narrative that's currently being pushed by the western media. I suspect at least a small part of it is motivated by guilt over European colonialism. This lets them say "See! the Chinese are worse!"

No doubt this comment will earn me an accusation of being a Chinese gov't shill as well.

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+1, plus it threatens global Western influence. Ever since Western colonialism took off, in spite of the eventual independence of the colonies, the West has had economic and thus a lot of political dominance all around the world.

China was the richest country in the world, and through drugs and war even it fell to the British.

Now that the world is slowly returning to a state that makes more sense-- with the bigger countries with lots of human and natural resources climbing back on top, the West needs to cling on to something. The narrative that "China is worse" sounds to me like "China is worse, thus it's better for everyone if we keep the world order as it is".

I think everyone knows this won't be the case. Population alone, China has more people than the US and Europe combined-- that's not only more productive potential, but as purchasing power increases, a bigger market for companies to operate in. Factor in a much slower, but potentially similar story for India, and I think there's not much the West in general can do but accept the world can't all depend on a single bank and monetary fund ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

> This lets them say "See! the Chinese are worse!"

Seriously? Even if one believes in this Chinese colonialism thing, there's no way in hell partial economic control is worse than genocides and slavery that accompanied European colonialism in the past.

That's a bit of a tu quoque fallacy.

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

Unlike the fallacy you linked, which is comparing apples to oranges, I made a direct comparison of "colonialism" to colonialism, in response to a direct comparison of "colonialism" to colonialism. Not every comparison is whataboutism, you know.

The relevance can be clarified if we frame it like this: "My economic control in a foreign nation is okay because you're lynching negroes (or did so in the past)."

gp: Europeans feel guilty about the colonial past, so they try very hard to make the Chinese look worse.

me: How can it be worse?

Neither gp nor me mentioned anything being "okay", or blamed any party for completely irrelevant crimes (lynching or whatever). Might need to brush up on reading comprehension.

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