As someone with family all across Asia and the West I really hope the US and China can resolve their disputes soon. This is really not a nice position for us to be in.
[1] https://www.heritage.org/report/the-collapse-clintons-china-...
[0]: (2015) https://www.uscc.gov/sites/default/files/Research/Directed%2...
* being a party member not quite what you’d expect. Requires being in the top 10% of your HS class plus learning a bit of propaganda, and agreeing to harsher punishment for committing crimes. The ones I spoke to were successful business people, and willing to criticize the party.
If you're wondering how people in China justify the government's treatment of the Uighers, the answer isn't that they have different moral instincts than you. They justify it to themselves in the exact same way you justify America's incarceration rate to yourself. (If you're thinking that it's different, because what they're doing just feels dystopian and evil, while we're just doing the best we can, obviously realize that this is pure tribal bias. Others might have the reverse associations.)
Of course, what I am doing is textbook whataboutism. But that is the correct response to a claim that some foreign country is uniquely evil.
What you're comparing is a regional regression of a particular demographic or culture. Imagine locking down 1.4 million people of Seattle metropolitan region because they worship no god and enjoy particular rituals, sending them all to re-education camps and then building HUGE projects to house them - all sponsored by the Federal government with strict orders from Washington, and the entire operation carried out by military and special police forces, setting up checkpoints in Seattle. Oh and I forgot that the threat is simply to sell your organs if you squeak and then kill you.
> What you're comparing is a regional regression of a particular demographic or culture. Imagine locking down 1.4 million people of Seattle metropolitan region because they worship no god and enjoy particular rituals
You're not really engaging with the example -- you substituted it for another. I'm sure if you proposed locking up 1.4 million people from Shanghai for no good reason, the average Chinese citizen would react in horror, while they would dismiss what is actually happening exactly as you did, as a "regional regression of a particular demographic".
Lastly, two wrongs don't make right.
While the US has been able to heavily shift off of Saudi oil more recently, now the Chinese are picking up that supply and are becoming increasingly dependent on the Saudis. That's a remarkable position of power & influence across multiple decades, to have superpowers vested in your stability and well-being (the well-being of the House of Saud specifically).
Very few countries have ever had the sort of oil-derived slush fund (which enabled the Wahhabism push) that the Saudis have had since the early 1970s. However, for the Saudis those days are ending, as their population has skyrocketed and their oil output has not kept up (and can't), so they're under persistent budget crunch and their domestic population is increasingly growing restless as stagnation (more realistically they're seeing rapidly declining average standards of living) and unemployment become serious problems. Saudi Arabia's population has doubled since 1990, while their private industry has gone nowhere and their oil output has been near the ceiling. All you have to do is run that population growth forward another 20-30 years and it's obvious what's about to happen. The loose funding capabilities of the Saudis will decline markedly in the coming decades.
Of course it's not nothing. Imagine we do things some might consider a bit dubious. Perhaps accepting the running of a deficit in the trillions of dollars, or injecting trillions of dollars into the economy and calling the resultant price inflation growth. The natural consequences of these sort of actions are things such as inflation and a weakened dollar on the international scene.
But now here's the interesting thing. Imagine we do create inflation or weaken the dollar and so there is a surplus of USD in circulation and things start to increase in price. And now imagine a country wants to go buy oil from Saudi Arabia ( though now a days, it's not just Saudi Arabia but the majority of oil producing nations ). The first thing they need to do is accumulate the USD. And since they're getting less oil for the same USD (due to said inflation and/or a weakened USD) they need to take even more USD out of circulation than usual. They then go buy their oil. Saudi Arabia then ends up using that USD to secretly buy US treasuries. That money is now back in the hands of the government and out of circulation and, like magic, the inflation and/or weakening of the dollar starts to revert.
---
This was an extremely clever strategy. This is why things like China and/or Russia increasingly becoming buddy buddy with Saudi Arabia is such a big deal. It's also why Saudi Arabia can get away with practically, if not literally, anything (so long as they keep on the petrodollar agreement). But the petrodollar also ended up creating a bit of a funny relationship. We thought we were using Saudi Arabia, but ultimately we ended up dependent on them as our economic behavior took them for a given. So we now have the nation with the largest military force in world and the largest economy in the world behaving in an oddly deferent way to one little nation in the Mideast.
So I do fully agree with you - the next 20-30 years are going to be incredibly interesting. But not just for Saudi Arabia. The interplay between oil, economic power, and all of these other major issues (let alone huge wildcards like space) mean we're in for one terrifically unpredictable and interesting future.
[1] - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2016-05-30/the-untol...
[2] - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/oct/27/saudi-arabia...
By sheer coincidence I’m sure, just before Iraq got invaded, Saddam was planning to start pricing oil in EUR.
despite such words on the web, most americans and chinese folks don't hate each other, and we'd get along fine if circumstances put us in close proximity. don't lose your faith in humanity because you can't feel the other person at their keyboard.
Consider discussion on HN.
TPP is said to have been about "free trade". I've seen little mention of hegemony, or of corporate capture of US policy. None of TPP's ISDS enabling companies to sue governments for profits lost to health regulations, even as the public health disaster of junk food is extended throughout the Americas. Nor of requiring China to change its industrial policy, to optimize for industries shaped like US pharma.
This on a site focused on an industry with a different shape, that has long recognized itself as ill served by patent policies optimized for pharma.
When the current round of trade negotiations was breaking down, there was some discussion in business press, that pharma was perhaps pushing too hard, and would be wiser to get a less aggressive deal signed now, and push further later, rather than risking all. But on HN, you'd not even hear they were a player.
You'll see no mention here of the Unequal Treaties, nor analogies to the Opium Wars.
China must change it's laws to be more like ours, as is only proper. Even those laws, like copyright term extension, which we feel were against the public interest, and pushed through by corruption. It's the principle of the thing...?
Sure, HN's competence is largely localized to tech. It's been observed that its discussion of other fields, like medicine, can get quite bad. International trade policy is not a core competency.
But I feel like I'm watching a page out of history. Yet another war frenzy, and the choice to set aside institutional and societal intellectual integrity and competence. Perhaps someday, the NYTimes will yet again apologize, and FOX won't... and neither will undo harm and lost opportunities, raise dead and wreckage.
But HN does have a core competency of tech.
So what would it take, to create a discussion medium which might do better?
In which topics like this could fruitfully be worked through? Regardless of ignorance and emotion. And of well-funded expert disruption. Where pro-life and pro-choice communities could coexist, incentivized to remain, and productively engage? /r/The_Donald and Sanders. #TSLA and bulls.
What would it take to create a sane public dialog in the United States?
It still may that all of this is for show and part of the trade negotiations, go figure. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-09/china-ope...
(Trying to read between the lines here)