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Comment by onelovetwo | Hacker News Reader

So the argument is china was once invaded by foreign gunships (not american) so they should be allowed to ban american companies (Google, Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Whatsapp, Netflix & hundreds more) but allowed to operate any company they want in the U.S?

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Perhaps OP wasn't making a normative statement but rather speculating on how the past could materially affect the present?

Yeah, that seems like a very weak argument.

It might be helpful to understand why China does what it does. It doesn't really excuse it though.

China does what it does because it wants as much control as possible over its populace.

That's a different argument to the one you are inferring. Both arguments could benefit from more context.

Boxer Rebellion

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boxer_Rebellion

Eight-Nation Alliance

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-Nation_Alliance

And what context does those articles add, other than what's already presented?

China fought a land war against a coalition of invaders who attempted to subvert its economic, political and religious sovereignty.

China lost, was forced to cede Hong Kong to the British for 99 years, and paid 668,661,220 taels of silver from 1901 to 1939, equivalent in 2010 to $US 61 billion on a purchasing power parity basis.

A large portion of the reparations paid to the United States was diverted to pay for the education of Chinese students in U.S. universities under the Boxer Indemnity Scholarship Program. To prepare the students chosen for this program an institute was established to teach the English language and to serve as a preparatory school. When the first of these students returned to China they undertook the teaching of subsequent students; from this institute was born Tsinghua University.

Fascinating but doesn't seem relevant to the topic at hand.

The China of that history has been displaced by an undemocratic revolutionary regime that conquered the Chinese people.

Are you sure you have your timeline straight, srtjstsj? When were the Chinese people "conquered"?

Tsinghua University is a world leader in AI and software technology.

Chinese engineers and entrepreneurs are competing in world markets with innovative products and services, not gunships. 100 million American users of TikTok appreciate this.

Have you considered the possibility that China is not trying to take over the world, but rather to be a part of it?

https://uwaterloo.ca/tsinghua-uwaterloo-joint-research-centr...

The CCP conquered the Chinese people.

Yes, the previously free Chinese people under.... The Qing Dynasty and the Kuomintang?

You know, it is possible to conquer a people who are already not free under a different regime.

Taiwan seemed to sort things out eventually.

In 1842, Hong Kong was considered by both the Chinese and British to be uninhabited, there were only a few thousand inhabitants when the island was seceded. [0]

I know symbolically this is of great importance to the Chinese, but at the time it was an easy thing for the Emperor to give up given he was on the losing end of a war.

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Kong_Island#British_colon...

It might be helpful to make the argument explicitly rather than just link to historical events when people have reached to attempting to infer it.

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