A hard line stance on China’s human rights abuses, currency and trade manipulation, and intellectual property theft will be a top requirement for my support of 2020 US presidential candidates.
The U.S. doesn't really care about human rights, or its own abuse of them, (was any top official prosecuted for Iraq?), so you'd be voting for posturing.
It’s just not a valid argument. It serves only to change the topic and justify nationalism.
It's possible to hold both of these positions i.e. being against the Iraq war and not believing that the U.S. really believes in the propaganda they're putting out on it does not mean you had to like Saddam.
Feel free to keep shining the light on those abuses, we need to remember them and learn from them.
Now, what about China?
That sounds suspiciously like "changing myself is hard, so I'll try to force my neighbor to change instead".
China would certainly be a high-impact change on the global human rights situation (so would the US be), but on the other hand the probability of change seems somewhat low (especially because you are right: they are close enough to the US in strength that they can't be bullied around that easily). Moonshots are nice and certainly valid as side bets, but not as the primary strategy. Let's work on Turkey and the Saudis, they are "allies", somewhat dependent on Western support (Saudis) and money (Turkey) and nudging them into the right direction can make a huge difference. Reward them generously if they do, and you may see it spread. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
It would have the nice side-effect that we'd clean up our back yard a bit, too. Credibility does matter on these things where people will question your motives.
They did it with Afghanistan , later with Iraq.
OTOH the are silent about other places like SA or many other dictatorships in the world. Hypocrisy and blatant lies about human rights. And yes, the Chinese government is really fucked up. No one can deny that.
Analogy: Joe and Paul are gangsters with a nasty reputation. Paul is in hiding because the police department have declared him public enemy number 1, while Joe was a guest of honor at the last police benevolent society dinner. Are you not at least the tiniest bit skeptical about whether the police chief is really trying to fight crime?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia%E2%80%93United_St...
This is not fair, but politics is not primarily about fairness. It’s about reaching you goals (here: establish human rights world wide).
On one hand, they have dealt with Joe for a long time and, while the relationship is far from perfect, they and Joe have a sort of understanding and Joe takes their opinions into account, in part with all the opinions of other stakeholders, when they're very insistent about it.
On the other hand, Paul in recent memory has committed truly unspeakable atrocities against masses of even his nominal stakeholders--and this hypothetical person may not even have the 'favor' of being one. Paul is obviously much more hostile to his stakeholders (Great Leap Forward, June 4/Tiananmen, Xinjiang concentration camps, Falun Gong genocide, ubiquitous hyper surveillance, etc. etc.). Paul has recently become much more rich and powerful, and has started asserting that power in ways that would totally violate the understanding between our person and Joe. At the same time, Paul has been asserting his power in other person-gangster relationships, dictating terms and helping those gangsters better oppress their own stakeholders.
Are you even the tiniest bit skeptical about whether our person's interests best lie in a maximally adversarial relationship with Paul vs. with Joe? Our person may very much want a better relationship with Joe. If they see Paul as a bigger threat, though, then it makes perfect sense to focus on confronting Paul.
It's not a valid argument for the Chinese to justify their practices, you are right in that.
It is a valid argument for critics that are (collectively) guilty of similar abuses, however. In this case: why make China's abuses the issue of your vote instead of your government's abuses? The US government has limited power over the Chinese (and so your vote has even less), but it has full power over itself. Pledging your vote to somebody that will not create new wars sounds more reasonable to me than pledging your vote to someone that promises to be "tough on China". The horrors in Libya that the Obama administration is responsible for are arguably worse than China's human rights abuses in their Gulag system.
First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye and all that.
It is absolutely vital that we do improve what we can and start with ourselves but we should not get carried away with that idea to a ridiculous degree. Someone who has committed crimes can and should still speak out if someone is committing something absolutely abhorrent in plain view instead of remaining silent.
Note that I'm not suggesting ignorance and passivity. I prefer this route: 1) get your house in order before you try to fix the world 2) start with small, achievable improvements 3) be just in your judgement.
> Someone who has committed crimes can and should still speak out if someone is committing something absolutely abhorrent in plain view instead of remaining silent.
Absolutely. Yet he may have to answer why his own abhorrent acts should be ignored, especially when they aren't from the distant past and he hasn't shown to be a changed man. The lion telling the tiger he should go vegetarian for moral reasons ...
That's true, though I have a feeling the "guests" at the US black sites would've preferred to be transferred to Chinese Gulags. Were Libya, Iraq or Syria drunk driving accidents? I suppose we might disagree here.
Everybody always claims they do the terrible things they commit to make the world a better place tomorrow. Who you support in their doings and who you call a villain is up to you. I suppose if HN was created in China and majority Chinese, most here would argue differently.
Not saying the US shouldn't address and improve their own record of human rights abuses, and indeed address those that are currently ongoing (such as the detention of immigrants without a trial), but claiming that they have no business criticizing the ongoing, orders of magnitude larger Chinese human rights abuses is going to make the world a worse place.
My problem with the way you paint Libya, Syria and Iraq (there was some overreach, but by and large, they were working with the locals) is that this shifts responsibility away from those that attacked. They removed the state and the stable equilibrium of powers and installed ... nothing. As expected, the territories degenerated into a tribalistic civil war with all kinds of horrible things (which, and how many, of these groups were created/led/funded by the CIA, we'll likely know at some point in the future). ISIS/ISIL are a direct consequence of this policy, and so are slave markets in Libya. Certainly these weren't declared goals, but I don't believe the top officials to be stupid, they were well aware of what happens when you remove the dictator of a country that is only held together by his iron first - especially when they did it over and over, allegedly expecting different results.
> Not saying the US shouldn't address and improve their own record of human rights abuses, and indeed address those that are currently ongoing (such as the detention of immigrants without a trial), but claiming that they have no business criticizing the ongoing, orders of magnitude larger Chinese human rights abuses is going to make the world a worse place.
But this wasn't stated anywhere, was it? The OP said that focusing on China would be a major factor in his voting decision. He was asked whether he'd ignore US abuses. As I tried to clumsily state elsewhere: it's much easier to change your own behavior than that of others, so if it's "I want less abuse in the world" that you want, start with your own and make "end the abuse" the top priority in your decision who to elect into the office of the president and commander in chief of the most powerful offensive military in the world. No Iraq, Libya, Syria and a million or two wouldn't be dead, with many millions more displaced and on the run. My feeling is that China, with all the terrible things they do, still has to stretch a lot to come close to that.
Tangibly, sure, but not really. Iran followed the nuclear agreement, the U.S. violated it and has been openly escalating ever since. This does not mean Iran is an angel, but it does mean the U.S. is the aggressor here.
As an European, China, Iran etc. do not hold the moral high ground in world affairs in my opinion, but that's kind of expected, few think they do. What seems to be the case is that somehow the U.S. thinks it still holds that ground, where I find it not to be true not only internationally, but increasingly domestically too.
And because U.S. citizens have the most power over their own government, I think holding it to account should be of the highest priority when voting.
The KSA needs to face severe repercussions too, but repression, censorship, and extralegal assassinations are all in a day's work for the PRC.
Is this actually proven?
> It holds hundreds of thousands of minorities in concentration camps in Xinjiang.
KSA outright levels cities with minorities in them, so am not sure how they're better.
> repression, censorship, and extralegal assassinations are all in a day's work for the PRC
As far as I know, China does not repress women anywhere near the level that KSA does, nor does it require 'guardians', nor does it perform public beheading, prosecute people for 'witchcraft etc. so while am not claiming China is great, I am fairly certain it's less repressive than the KSA overall.
The PRC could easily dismiss this by providing transparency into its organ donor procurement system, but it takes a hard line on limiting all information about it.
Numerous eyewitness accounts also testify to the forced organ donation, though I find first person accounts less compelling than actual statistics and observing how the government actually behaves.
Cite on the KSA leveling cities? Or is this just a weird way to reference the (terrible) war in Yemen?
> Is this actually proven?
Sadly yes.
At least it is proven behind all reasonable doubt that they are killing prisoners for organs (proven by the simple fact that there seemed to be an endless supply of matching organs with next to no waiting).
There's also eye witness testimony from at least one doctor as well as recordings where transplantation clinics go far in describing how they use the finest organs from people who have lived a very healthy life - and if I remember correctly - actually sometimes going as far as saying falun gong.
As scarmig I'm a little less convinced by the eyewitness testimony (hiring a few actors would be an excellent way to hurt your enemies && people might have other reasons for portraying the place they left behind as evil) but still, all taken together my guess is that is not what is happening here.
Especially considering they were running a transplant industry that was big enough to cover rich western people as well.
If you run the numbers it becomes very clear that something odd was/is(?) going on, and it is something that - for what I know - might easily compete with a number of genocides for a place on the top 20 most evil things that have happened the last 100 years.
I don't consider getting our drone bombed out of the sky and backing down from a missile strike a 'provocation'. It's much better than our previous administration's idea, which is to give them money to go away and hope they don't use it on nuclear weapons against us.
"The U.S. doesn't really care about human rights, or its own abuse of them"
Sure it does. There are stories every month about people in our military getting prosecuted for abuses. I don't think I've heard one story about this happening in China or Saudi Arabia.
"so you'd be voting for posturing"
It's not all or nothing. Nothing the US is doing even compares to the horrors of China. It's good to have a candidate against this.
I seriously doubt this will ever happen. Trump is the only president that would even broach the idea of punishing China. If a Democrat gets into office in 2020, it will be business as usual and the problems will be kicked down the road, like they have been with Iran.
There are many potential human rights issues, abroad and at home at stake, so the question why the topic of China takes priority is a valid one.
Except I didn't claim that anywhere. All I claim is that any U.S. stance such as the OP would like to see is likely not principled, so actually voting on this issue is not a good idea, in my opinion anyway.