China’s surveillance state has created at least four billionaires

That is kind of the stalemate isn't it? But I'm just wondering, what are you actually advocating here?

I don't think you're advocating for authoritarian rule generally as you mention you wouldn't want to become a Chinese citizen yourself.

I think you're advocating for people to learn Chinese history and that the CCP's decisions would make sense in that context.

I do know a bit about Chinese history and their government's decisions do make sense in historical context (as did Stalin's decisions), but they are still bad decisions made by practically evil people.

They are an authoritarian government. The people are happy living under authoritarian rule? Fine, Stockholm syndrome is a thing. That still doesn't make authoritarian rule OK in my opinion. Some may differ on that, but I actually would go so far as to say "authoritarian governments are bad" full stop. And yes it's a sliding scale in that the US is authoritarian in many ways, I'm not ok with that either. I think China's people are in an abusive relationship with their government; many of them are so abused that they've come to love their abuser, or think they do. A whole society trading their freedom for gold and rationalizing it any way they can. But do we actually disagree?

Yes I know, but that's still meaningless. Many people having an opinion is the same as one person having it.

> Chinese people with whom I speak are sick of hearing

Let them argue, or be sick of it. There's people sick of being tortured, there's murdered people literally without number because they weren't counted, who are utterly expelled from humanity and just shrugged off, while their murderers have banquets, there's mountains of work about totalitarianism, these things don't budge one inch in my mind even if all 7+ billion people on the planet were "sick of hearing about it". That just demonstrates how little they know, that they think that even begins to matter.

> when they see what western countries do around the world to both other countries and their own citizens

Yes, that means I don't say yes to more of it. More here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19187297 and here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19227920

> Pot, meet kettle.

So I can't make "assumptions" about you, but you can simply equate me with "Westerners" first, and then those in turn with the worst Westerners do or tacitly approve of? Come on. I'm the kind of guy who without any irony demands an arrest warrant for Blair and Bush, to start with. What I say doesn't make it happen, but that doesn't mean this Westerner isn't on the barricades about all sorts of stuff, for nearly 2 decades now. You don't even have the faintest idea how readily I criticize "my own", and how much of my life I dedicate to it.

So now I should make an exception for Chinese totalitarianism? No. I actually know an elderly person who was robbed by a gang of people who were traced back to China by the police, I'm already being attacked by what you think should be left to fester.

> If the totalitarian conqueror conducts himself everywhere as though he were at home, by the same token he must treat his own population as though he were a foreign conqueror.

-- Hannah Arendt

This is the reason why European and American colonialism HAS to lead to internal repression. It's also the reason why the totalitarianism in China HAS to spill out. The whole world is at at stake, and has been at stake for a long time now, people get born into that process without being aware of it, and consider free fall a nice sensation. They actually think Our Big Brother protects them from the differently colored Their Big Brother (and then we have little sub-poles within those to identify with and kill all our thought and agency with), instead of them being the walls between which all of life will get crushed, utterly and irrevocably, if we don't stop playing games. That's what I see, though it would take more time and space than we have here to unpack. China, with all its history, and all its people in it, currently or ever, is but a speck in light of all that. So is the US, Europe, anything or anyone you could mention. That's "where I'm coming from".

> simply acknowledging that different well-thought-out opinions exist

Then show the thought! That a lot of people share it or are "sick" of this or that, isn't anything. And it stands against a giant corpus.

> Look, I'm done with this topic on this thread, OK?

I understand, this can be exhausting and I kinda barged in with a chip on my shoulder late to the party. But I'm done with Twitter before I ever started with it :P So take care, don't take it personally.

My stance can be summed up as, I want to be able to look at least Sophie Scholl into the eye without blinking or blushing -- anything and anyone else, no matter how numerous, is secondary, those are mere contemporaries. We'll all be gone in 100 years, and while I don't claim any objective claim to anything, my outlook is a lot longer than 100 years, and lot wider than the super thin slice of people who happen to be currently living. And while we can't really fathom what future fates could hinge on our decisions, and it may be moot to even enter that into consideration, that still at least hangs there in the background of my mind, like some vague amorphous cloud.