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Comment by shadowgovt | Hacker News Reader

This feels like tautological reasoning.

Brittle empires fall.

The Chinese empire has a history (including mutations to its government) spanning thousands of years.

> the last Chinese dynasty — the Qing dynasty — fell in 1911–1912, it marked the end of the nation's incredibly long imperial history.

It marked the end of that government, but the nation of China is still very much an empire, by definition of its ambition and cultural reach exceeding its borders. In the same sense that the US and UK are empires.

Of course, if you use a custom definition for everything and cherry pick informations, everything is possible.

But no, it wasn't just the end of the government, it also meant losing almost 30% of its territory.

https://imgur.com/r/mapporn/Cdi6KOL

> In the same sense that the US and UK are empires.

UK was an empire, and it's already fallen, it is now on the brink of losing even the Kingdom and becoming an Island hosting borders and customs.

U.S. is not really an empire, never was. It is more the mandator of many bad things that happened in the last 70 years, that turned many countries into U.S. colonies through "exporting democracy" which actually translated too many times as "planting dictatorships befriended with U.S.A.". But it was good for U.S. and only U.S.

That's why Cliqz has reasons to exist, U.S. is an unreliable ally, even more now and Europe needs to

> building the foundation for a sovereign digital future of Europe

> develop digital key technologies as a European alternative to the market dominating US platforms.

> If We Don’t Act Now, We Will Become a Digital Colony

I'm going by the Wikipedia definition, to wit: "An imperial political structure can be established and maintained in two ways: (i) as a territorial empire of direct conquest and control with force or (ii) as a coercive, hegemonic empire of indirect conquest and control with power." The US and China are the latter. The UK's power has slipped, but it's still in this category with extraterritorial colonies. A specific emperor is structurally optional.

But the Chinese Empire has already fallen and changed radically, U.S.S.R. is not the same thing as the Russian Empire, even though they shared most of the same territory.

The point was that every empire falls sooner or later and that it happened to China as well.

And yet it fell.

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