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> And if we don't force China to change, China will erode the rest of the world's modern values

There's another option: Treat them like North Korea. No trade in, no trade out, let them be whatever they want as long as it doesn't hurt anyone outside China.

It's the least profitable option, of course, but much easier to pull off than overthrowing a government armed with nuclear weapons, and un-brainwashing over a billion people.

It's interesting that Chinese used to believe that the West is more fair and just and are respected, evident in the fact that foreigners receive higher regards and even the police would prioritize such cases.

In recent time, there has been more voices in China where notion regarding the West being "brainwashed" by the western media starts the emerge, which had never happened before.

I think it's interesting to note this as it's easy to be one-sided when you are hearing only the narrative and values from a certain belief system. As such without discussing the actual merit of each individual belief, care should be taken perhaps to at least recognize the implicit meaning behind any claims of "brainwash" to ones other than your own.

Agree. But the tricky part is that it requires us to overcome our greed.

And we also have to abandon 1.3 billion people in the process. For example, people in North Korea are starving[0]. It's just we don't pay much attention to it. Is this evil necessary?

[0] https://news.un.org/en/story/2019/05/1037831

> And we also have to abandon 1.3 billion people in the process. For example, people in North Korea are starving[0]. It's just we don't pay much attention to it. Is this evil necessary?

Can we save them all? We've given North Korea free grain shipments before to help their population, the government just resold it for cash. And we can't topple a government that's willing to use nuclear weapons just to stay in power.

At some point you just have to wait for a better chance. The Soviet bloc was just as unjust and abusive, but before Gorbachev, there was simply no chance of getting rid of it without a hundred million dead in the process. We can only hope that North Korea (or China, hypothetically) appoint benign reformers at some point.

Every time people point this out, it gets accused of sinophobia.

I'd say most Chinese cast their lot a good while ago and they decided to trade some personal freedom for economic prosperity, basically giving the CCP carte blanche to do anything (in)humanly possible to preserve the status quo. Reversing that trend is not impossible but it's extremely difficult by now: there's simply not enough dissent and anything that does pop up gets quickly dealt with. It's why Hong Kong is so important.

> "That's why powerful external force is necessary for China to change." Until rich people understand that China money stinks, nothing is going to change.

> This incident is a perfect example showing why embracing China and hoping they would be more open to modern values like freedom of speech, democracy, etc., is a total illusion.

It doesn't really. The current issue count is 1354. Since many people seem to be adding multiple issues and some of them are in support of the author, that means maybe a few hundred Notepad++ users were riled up enough to comment. That's unlikely to be a significant chunk of the whole userbase in China. That most messages protesting the naming of the release are in Chinese only tells you that most people supporting the Chinese government are Chinese, not that most Chinese support the government.