That's pretty bad. Yet another sign of increasing Chinese dominance. I can't imagine an autocracy like China becoming the greatest superpower will work out well for anyone.
The salient point is that people here have rose tinted glasses when it comes to the negative effects of American military actions since the Spanish–American War. For the vast majority of the world, America, China, two sides of the same coin. Just another foreign government telling them what to do and taking things from them under the veneer of helping them.
That ain't exactly helping your case.
"Just another foreign government telling them what to do and taking things from them under the veneer of helping them."
Right, but one of them is literally a totalitarian dictatorship, and the other is the United States. The US is by every measure the lesser of the two evils.
My case is amoral. Your dislike of that does not change whether or not my statement is true.
"Right, but one of them is literally a totalitarian dictatorship, and the other is the United States. The US is by every measure the lesser of the two evils."
You do realize that there other cultures view us in the exact same fervent manner right?
Regardless, you don’t have to convince me as much as people living in those countries that the US is working in their interests. And the optics aren’t good right now.
America's dirty laundry is more visible than China's; doesn't mean it's actually dirtier.
You're entitled to remain ignorant, but that entitlement does not equal correctness or sanity.
Ah yes, the classic "America is still doing plenty of bad things today but I'll ignore that so that I can pretend we stopped doing it so that I can continue to pretend that China is the only one doing these things today" argument.
Or is it the "My argument was < the United States - a representative democracy - is equivalent to or worse than China - (again) a totalitarian dictatorship > so I'll start arguing about how our sins are in the past (even though we never made up for most of them) because that proves that we're better since we're a representative democracy" argument.
Can't tell, people make all kinds of funny logical fallacies.
Like, I agree America ain't perfect, but last I checked it ain't systematically and officially imprisoning/torturing/enslaving religious minorities, either (as just one example of the sorts of severe human rights violations China is actively committing at this very moment), nor is it actively preventing its citizens from discussing its very-checkered past (let alone present).
The "hey America does bad things so please don't mind us while we oppress those Tibetans over there" tactic is nothing new, and has been a staple of Chinese apologists for decades, and it falls apart pretty quickly once you scratch through the surface.
Even if we do want to go head-to-head on historical wrongs, the Great Leap Forward alone makes even pre-Civil-Rights-Movement America look utopian in comparison. I guess that's par for the course for these African countries looking for a role model, though: "if China can get away with starving its own people to death while its ruling class eats plentifully and gets richer, then I guess we can, too".
You are ostensibly correct that China treats its own citizens worse than America does in the present day. That is irrelevant to how other countries view the US and China. What matters is how the US and China have treated other countries. On that score, China is far better. The US has been meddling in many countries' internal affairs, launching coups, secretly backing internal groups looking to topple governments. The CIA has been very, very active since its inception. Blowback is a very real thing. The US is simply addicted to foreign military action. We accuse Russia of meddling in our elections when we do the same thing to other countries. Sure, China might decide to do the exact same things, but so far, there hasn't been any evidence that it has, at least not on the same scale. Hence, it's very clear why the places that we have fucked over would view China more positively than the US. They simply don't have the record that we do when it comes to foreign intervention.
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2014/07/15/which-countr...
My point is simple. The comment I replied to said:
> The salient point is that china as super power is negative independent of where you're sitting.
This is simply not true. There are places that either are not affected and would be neutral, or places that have already been negatively impacted by the US as a superpower and would be positively impacted by having another competing superpower. You then turned this into a game of who has better humans rights and which is the lesser of two evils (which actually is not objective and depends on the viewer) which is a gigantic straw man.
> Even if we do want to go head-to-head on historical wrongs, the Great Leap Forward alone makes even pre-Civil-Rights-Movement America look utopian in comparison.
You wildly underestimate the brutality of slavery era America. Even China doesn't torture its own citizens like how Americans systemically tortured, beat, raped, and generally treated slaves as animals.
China doesn't have citizens roving around committing lynchings and massacres of minorities. They get rounded up but they aren't killed with impunity by the civilians in the majority. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States. These murderers were often put on trial and found not guilty. That's legally sanctioned murder. The documented incidents are just those that didn't get covered up. Who knows how many other incidents like that happened during the lynching era?
After the Civil War and up until the Civil Rights era, there was a culture of shut your mouth and stay in your lane or you might just end up being killed by a mob of white people that thought you were just a little bit too uppity. Sure it wasn't everywhere, but it was in enough places.
Mass famine makes this look like utopia? On the one hand the famines may have been politically targeted. On the other hand, they didn't actually kill anyone directly compared slavery/lynching. If you wanna call that utopia, fine, you're entitled to your own opinion.
Russia has reasons to not like the US, but that doesn't mean they will like China more - that is one reason they are neutral. I could make a case that Russia would prefer the US to China - but it is just an argument, only history will tell how changing world affected Russia. Even history cannot tell us how things would be different in some alternative history.
Probably especially true if you're sitting in sub-saharan Africa.
In sub-saharan Africa, different places will have different languages that are important to economic success. For instance, if you're Senegalese, you're far better off perfecting your French than learning Chinese or English. That's just the raw, ugly, and unfortunate economic reality in which impoverished children in Senegal live. So the government has set things up so that children can get a small chance at making themselves impressive to Francophone companies. Because a slim chance, is better than no chance. Obviously those mandatory french classes come at the expense of English, but who cares? These kids need jobs.
Now in more and more parts of Africa for young people there is what is essentially a chance at a lottery ticket going around out there. An education visa to China. And the way they work, most business done with Africa will flow through you if you get one of those visas. If they perfect their English, the same is not true. The business that America does with Africa will not start flowing through you just because you speak English well. (And that's even ignoring the fact that America doesn't do business with Africa the same way China does.) So, yes, impoverished kids who are smart, ambitious, and tired of being hungry are going to work their rear ends off trying to get one of those visas. You or I would do the same. And good on them. They're out trying to make a way for themselves in life. That's to be commended.
It sounds like the Kenyans simply see what is becoming common knowledge in sub-saharan Africa. China is a ticket out of poverty for a lot of their more bright kids who may not be as privileged as people in the rest of the world. It's easy for us to say, "Hey, that Chinese is a bad thing." But what's the kid supposed to do with our idealism? Sure it can be a bad thing, so is diamond mining, but it pays, and for poor people in Africa these days, not many things do.
According to them, by next year most of their stuff will be made there.
China has made a huge investment in Africa - so they will get a piece of that action.
Feels like the US is resting on their laurels.
Why the downvotes? This comment got a few reasonable responses and is within HN guidelines. Help me understand what is so offensive about this post
His take was simple. When the US shows up offering to build a road to the oil refinery we want to build we first ask them to make human rights reforms and so forth.
The Chinese just start handing out cash until they get what they want.
This strategy will result in the wholesale ownership of several African states by China if it hasn’t already happened.
In China we effectively have a CEO in Xi Jinping, beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy. And the same forces are at play. China can punt on ethics so long as the return is good, and they have pressure to keep growing. So long as the banks are happy the game continues.
The global investment-backed economy is efficient for allocating resources for the purposes of increasing monetary value but it will always introduce a moral hazard since short term returns will usually be better when corners are cut.
I don't think Xi or the Communist Party view themselves as "beholden to the board of investors that is the global economy." Maybe they have use for those investors now, but they're working to make that temporary.
Soviets ended up controlling East Germany, but the didn't capitalize on that. US did much better with the culturally identical West Germany. This isn't exactly Socialism / Capitalism battle we have here, but if China ends up controlling most corrupt states while the West ends up with the least corrupt states the long-term outcome might be similar.
They've also sparked fears of a debt trap (https://www.npr.org/2018/10/08/641625157/a-new-chinese-funde...) and scenarios where countries default on debt so China will control major components of the infrastructure.
Montenegro is on the same boat[0]. Serbian autocratic regime seem to get along with China's regime pretty well. Bosnia became the most western visa-free country for Chinese citizens last year.
[0] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-silkroad-europe-mon...
There was an article on HN a few months ago about clothing manufacturing moving out of China back to the U.S. because fashion changes faster these days, and China's advantage in price becomes a disadvantage because of lead times.