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Comment by muleroid | Hacker News Reader

Historically the US trade relationship with China was based on a principal that doing so would encourage the adoption of democracy there. Seeing as how that hasn't happened, this kind of rhetoric could just be an attempt to course correct (maybe overly so).

I'm sure the upcoming elections also play a part in this. The article briefly mentions that as well.

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Encouraging the adoption of democracy is never a true goal to any geopolitical decision. It's only used to deflect criticism from naysayers. The US has used the same justification to bomb nations and install fascist dictators. "You oppose going to war with Iraq? So you hate democracy then?"

In China's case, "spreading democracy" just meant "remove from Soviet sphere." We broadly used the same term at the same time to open trade with China and fight the Vietnam War.

the sino-soviet split happened long before we started off shoring to china

I didn't mention off shoring? Not sure what your point is.

Exporting our broken form of governing, which is rife with corruption, mismanagement, unresponsive to the majority of the population, and defaults to redirecting money from the poorest to the richest, is the goal of western monopoly capital.

Basically "Our broken system allowed capital to rob 400 million people, let's utilize it in robbing 1.4 billion Chinese people next..."

Any idea that the American and European elite are pushing this for "benevolent purposes" flies in the face of a few centuries of well documented western history.

I'd invite you to look at https://ourworldindata.org/, and in particular the effects of capitalist and democratic reforms on the health, wealth and happiness of nations.

Every claim you make here has no basis in fact. And is mostly just symptomatic of a partisan political disagreement in a western democracy.

For sure, it's much easier to sell any decision if you package it in terms of values and ideals that your population is willing to embrace. It's as true for the US as it is any other country in the world.

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