It was tolerated in the hope that over time China would open up. But that did not happen. When facts change, time to change your strategy.
I find it rather strange that so many people throw around the "tolerate in order for China for open up" rhetoric, as if companies invest in China for ideological reasons. Ironically, by forcing those western companies to not do business with China, you are infringing on those companies' freedom to choose for themselves, and violating liberal values.
Furthermore, as someone who came from China, that "China did not open up" is completely false. In the past 30 years, China opened up immensely. In the 70s, Chinese could not choose what to wear, could not choose to travel abroad, people could randomly be caught on suspicion of colluding with "the enemy". All of that has changed. Even the latter: the practice of being "reported by your neighbor for suspicious activities" no longer happens, the Cultural Revolution madness is over. Heck, even "not allowed to criticize the government" is no longer true: there are official channels for publishing constructive criticism (emphasis on constructive), and government officials post official replies in the public, and the criticism is listened to without getting you into trouble (the caveat being that you are not allowed to instigate mass protests, or call for overthrow of the government). Sure, it's not equivalent to western democracies, but it did change for the better even if there's still room for improvement. But for some reason, many western people completely ignore this fact and buy into the rhetoric that "China did not open up". It's not even a small fact, it's a huge boulder staring in your face, and people don't see it.
The might have some notion of "big bad central state", and China was and remains that.
In any event, some rhetoric to grease the wheels politically absolutely was in order.
Now, did he really believe that? Was he just selling the American people a bad deal? The end result anyway is that this is precisely the argument that was made, and thousands believed it.
Iran tried that in the 50s. Latin America tried that in the 70s.
Got overthrown by CIA every time.
Clearly that's not what it means.
Certainly. And the CCP hinders that. But the point of my above comment is to illustrate that it's an open question whether China would be 'allowed' to be open and democratic.
I don't believe the West is actually concerned about CCP's human rights violations. They're simply concerned about China's rise as an economic and military power, we would not support the Saudi regime if human rights was a concern.
One of the major reasons the CCP got a foothold in China was because there was a sense that for over a century China was subservient to Western powers.
The CCP was fine as far as the west was concerned as long as it was primarily a dumb factory for us. But now they have ambitions to go beyond that.
I think that's the crux of the animosity towards China today, not human rights violations, as gross as they are.
I could imagine China being somewhat of an EU and democratic and as long as they buy enough western products, be left alone. But if they actually wanted a truly independent foreign policy for example, that would not fly. See the Iran Deal for how dependent EU foreign policy is on the U.S. one.
P.S. That does not mean the CCP is good. It's not. But pretending that western leaders actually care about its human rights abuses is silly.
To give you an example: in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse.
The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries. This isn’t because they condone abuses in these countries, but because a long history of failed colonialism and wars has rendered the West extremely hesitant to get involved in any sort of ‘just’ war that isn’t provoked by the state in question (see Iraq and Kuwait for example.)
The contemporary populist rise of American hostility to China is also linked directly to offshoring jobs from the Rust Belt, so again, there are clearly groups of people who have issues with China that aren’t merely “crush the rising competitor.”
In any case I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
Now Americans are selling weapons to the dictator to continue the genocide because human rights are selctive
It should be pretty clear from the context that I am talking about western governments, not people.
Also, as an European, it doesn't look to me like we have much in terms of independent foreign policy.
> The idea that by supporting one repressive state you forfeit your ability to critique other repressive states is also absurd.
One? Please. We support plenty of other dictators all across the world. Or is Egypt's Sisi not a dictator? What about the UAE, Qatar etc.?
What about human rights violations by democratic countries? We don't seem to care much about illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank.
> in retrospect, keeping Saddam in power and not invading Iraq is considered a fairly reasonable opinion; i.e. even though we got rid of a dictator, the consequences were arguably worse
The assumption that the goal at the start was to get rid of a dictator because he was one is fairly well established to not be true. Basically a bunch of neocons who were bitter we didn't dispose Saddam in the FGW wanted to settle scores.
> The reality is that the West tends to not get involved politically if the state in question is insular enough to not affect other countries.
Really, what about the likes of Venezuela/Nicaragua?
> I don’t disagree that the West has sunk democratic movements which were against its interests, but that to say all such attempts will be shut down is overly-simplistic.
I hope you're right.
His comment is in no way whataboutist or trite. It is providing counterexamples to the claim that the goal of US policy is to get countries to "open up", by citing countries that did start opening up until the US stepped in to prevent that from happening.
But regardless of if we do that, we still still engage in retaliatory trade actions against china.
He wants to be a hero that fights for people's rights unless there's money involved.