The problem with war is that if your side doesn't develop its armies, the other side will. Today, that other side is China. For all the faults of the United States, of which there are many, i'd prefer it any day over the Chinese politburo.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol
But even if you are being sincere, and usually nobody using china as a boogeyman are, we aren't using our military to defend ourselves from a nonexistent chinese invasion. We used our military to kill iraqis, syrians, libyans, vietnamese, etc.
If chinese did 1/100th of what we did, hypocrites would be crying they were the most evil nation on earth.
We have nukes to deal with china. We don't have armies to deal with china. They've got 1.4 billion people.
Pretty much all our wars have been offensive wars of conquest/genocide/domination. But yeah, it's china that's the bad guy.
Can you think of the last defensive war we've fought? Even ww2 wasn't really a defensive war as we already attacked japan with sanctions.
Edit:
> China is not yet strong enough to do that outright with the west like it does within Asia and its maritime claims.
Within Asia? Are you saying it's china that has troops in korea, japan, etc? It isn't china that colonized philippines, indonesia, india, etc. Lets be honest here, asia isn't in need of liberation from china, it's in need of liberation from the west. Just think about it.
> With the west, it has taken on a different approach: infiltrate all levels of political, educational, and corporate institutions.
Is that why everyone has a good opinion of china? China has infiltrated everything, that's why we started a trade war with china? If anything, I could understand if you said israel or saudi arabia has infiltrated all levels. But certainly not china or russia.
When it comes to china, all I see is projection. Everything we are accusing china of doing, we are guilty of. We are the ones who invaded and brutalized asia ( including china, india, etc ). We are ones that invaded and occupied. And as best as I can tell, it's us who are meddling in chinese affairs and telling them what they should do or not do.
Edit1:
> I can't name another empire or superpower in human history that has shown more restraint.
Is this a joke? We wiped out an entire continent full of people. Dozens of native nations were exterminated. We dropped nukes on civilians. That's restraint? And we've been involved in wars in every corner of the earth. What amazing restraint.
For those hypocrites downvoting me, try replacing US with china for every historical act. 9/11 happens and china invades afghanistan and iraq murdering hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. I bet every hypocrite downvoting would call them monsters.
I am Chinese-American, so if China were to displace the US as world hegemon and put Han people at the top of society, that would personally benefit me. However, I do not want that, as I support racial equality.
Even if we suppose that America and China are morally equivalent (which I strongly disagree with), just out of the self-interest of yourself and your family, why would you prefer China over America?
Was a incalculably powerful US that toppled democratically elected regimes in Latin America/Iran/etc. a morally acceptable one? No but that's what it is and all you other fucks had to learn English to get some of our money. Now the shoe is on the other foot and we are the fucks who will need to learn Chinese. Serves us right but I still ain't happy about it.
(In case this is on your mind: As for college discrimination against Asians in America, although many people conflate this issue with affirmative action, it is actually separate. One must make the distinction between pro-minority affirmative action and Asian penalization relative to the white majority. Asian-American penalization relative to white Americans is morally comparable to the historical Jewish quota, and the justification that affirmative action corrects for historical injustices absolutely does not justify anti-Asian discrimination. Nevertheless, I am also against pro-minority affirmative action because it is illiberal, but it is orthogonal to Asian-American rights.)
A lot of the discussion of China revolves around treatment of minorities. I would also like to draw attention to oppression of the Han majority. One example is that the Chinese government blocks websites, even for trivial or oversensitive reasons. (China recently blocked https://scratch.mit.edu, the children's website where I was introduced to programming...) Another example is that the Chinese government performed forced abortions to enforce the one-child policy. Now in America, there is a complicated political debate over the morality of abortion that involves issues of fetus rights, personhood, and choice. However, it seems to me that whether you are pro-life or pro-choice, the one-child policy, which involves abortions that are not up to choice, is profoundly immoral.
I believe that all human beings are endowed with certain unalienable rights, including the right to freedom to voice opinions without government censorship and the right to partake in democracy (whether that be a direct democracy, a republic, or another form of democracy). Everyone in the world inherently possesses these rights, regardless of whether their government recognizes them. I wish for the government of China to recognize these rights, because human rights are Chinese rights.
We "opened up" china by war. Opium wars? Boxer rebellion? I'm not chinese and I seem to know your history more than you. Why is that? And china opened up their economy as a result of threat of nuclear war by the soviets and the west.
> in the hopes that China would also grant more freedoms to its people.
This is just propaganda. Since when did we care about freedom for chinese people? Did we invade hong kong while the british ruled it to give freedom to them? Heck, for most of the 20th century, chinese people like you were banned from even coming to the US. The only nationality to specifically be banned for immigration to the US was your people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
> Now, China is also trying to expand its territory.
You mean take back its territory right? What non-chinese territory is china expanding to?
> I fear that Chinese hegemonic status will have negative consequences for other Asian peoples.
More propaganda.
> I hope that one day, people in China may enjoy their right to a liberal democracy.
More standard propaganda.
> people in China may enjoy their right to a liberal democracy.
The founders hated the idea of liberal democracy. It's why the US is not a liberal democracy but a constitutional republic. You seem to be very keen on what the US was founded for. It wasn't for equality and it certainly wasn't for liberal democracy.
It's hard to take you seriously when you claim to be chinese and you spout anti-chinese propaganda. Not just in this comment but your other comments - "false moral equivalence", "US was founded on the idea of all men are created equal", etc. It would be like an iraqi claiming that the US invaded iraq to bring freedom. You sound exactly like gordon chang except I don't think he's aspiring to be a hacker. And for an aspiring hacker you sure seem down on your state propaganda.
It's possible to have this conversation without framing it as some sort of binary choice between xi jinping's happy social currency reeducation camp club, and white america's causally racist military industrial imperialism. Imo you can't love your country without always seeking to improve it.
Our founding fathers were certainly hypocrites and flawed men, but that doesn't invalidate the truth of their words.
No it wasn't. The US was founded on the idea that a king across the ocean can't tell us we can't expand beyond the appalachian mountains.
https://www.britannica.com/event/Proclamation-of-1763
The revolutionary war started because we wanted to take more land from the natives and the king forbade that because he wanted good trade relations with the native peoples. That's it. Everything else is just propaganda.
> I am Chinese-American, so if China were to displace the US as world hegemon and put Han people at the top of society, that would personally benefit me.
China will never be world hegemon due to geographical, racial, historical, etc issues. China vs the US, Europe, Russia, Australia, Canada, etc isn't even a fair contest. Not to mention western aligned nations like india, japan, etc wouldn't allow china to be a hegemon. Also, how would it benefit you if the chinese government view you as a traitor?
> However, I do not want that, as I support racial equality.
If you equate hegemony with racial supremacy, why would you support US hegemony? How about "no hegemony"?
Don't you think the world would be better if the US didn't have to maintain a world empire? The world wouldn't have to worry about invasions and we can finally start investing in american infrastructure. When I see the amount of infrastructure china has built the last few decades ( heck just the last 10 years alone ), I have to say I'm a bit envious. Instead of sinking trillions in foreign wars, imagine all those trillions were invested in new railways, new airports, nuclear energy, green energy, reviving inner cities, etc.
The Chinese government is putting ethnic minorities in camps. The American government did that too, in WWII... The difference is, it's a point of national shame.
Either America is not ashamed of the atrocities it has committed, or it is so dense it cannot understand it is repeating them.
That's a false equivalence. While I do not endorse the treatment of illegal immigrants and asylum seekers at the US border, it's quite different from what the PRC currently doing, which is forced imprisonment and indoctrination of its own citizens.
> And performing forced hysterectomies on them.
That was a small-scale case of medical malpractice by a single doctor, not large scale government-level policy: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/29/us/ice-hysterectomies-sur...
I bet you'd feel a little different if you were born in Iraq or Afghanistan or Syria for that matter. Conflicts the US triggered have cost close to a million human lives since 2003. And honestly, a lot more can be said of the "Benevolent" superpower of yours.
Wasn't the Syria conflict actually triggered by the Assad regime's behavior?
https://www.history.com/news/syria-civil-war-assad-rebels:
> However, in March of that year, 15 Syrian schoolchildren were arrested and tortured for writing graffiti that was inspired by the Arab Spring. One of the boys was killed.
> The arrests sparked outrage and demonstrations throughout Syria. Citizens demanded the release of the remaining children, along with greater freedoms for all people in the country.
> But the government, headed by President Bashar al-Assad, responded by killing and arresting hundreds of protestors. Shock and anger began to spread throughout Syria, and many demanded that Assad resign. When he refused, war broke out between his supporters and his opponents.
What US policies, exactly?
TIL ISIS was founded in 1999: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_State_of_Iraq_and_the_...:
> ISIL was founded by the Jordanian jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi under the name Jama'at al-Tawhid wal-Jihad in 1999 and gained global prominence in early 2014 when it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities in its Western Iraq offensive,[103] followed by its capture of Mosul[104] and the Sinjar massacre.
Apparently its founding purpose was actually to overthrow the Jordanian government for being insufficiently Islamic:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jama%27at_al-Tawhid_wal-Jihad#...:
> Al-Zarqawi started JTJ with the intention of overthrowing the 'apostate' Kingdom of Jordan,[1] which he considered to be un-Islamic. After toppling Jordan's monarchy, presumably he would turn to the rest of the Levant.[1]
> For these purposes he developed numerous contacts and affiliates in several countries. His network may have been involved in the late 1999 plot to bomb the Millennium celebrations in the United States and Jordan.[12]
The Japanese Concentration Camps are not a point of national shame. Instead, they are a point of American pride.
Case in point: One of Trump’s goons, Carl Higbie, referred to the Japanese Concentration Camps as “precedent”. [1]
If this word came from some random racist prick, then nobody would bother paying him any attention. But instead, it came from one of Trump’s closest associates.
This should make you sick to your stomach.
[1] https://time.com/4574680/muslim-registry-japanese-internment...
> Case in point: One of Trump’s goons, Carl Higbie, referred to the Japanese Concentration Camps as “precedent”. [1]
It's quite incorrect to generalize from a widely-condemned statement made by "one of Trump's goons" [1] to America, generally.
[1] Carl Higbie appears to be a goon, quite literally.
No. They are putting separatists/terrorists funded by the west in "camps". They aren't putting minorities in camps.
> The American government did that too, in WWII...
No. Our government exterminated our minorities. It's how a nation of 13 states became 50. Of course we became a nation of 13 states by genocide as well.
The idea of benevolence is laughable. Not only did we nuke japan, burn german cities to the ground, use biological weapons in korea, etc ( and these are our vassal, or allies ). Look at how we benevolently nuked japan. As I said, for everything we've "benevolently" done in history, switch that to china.
Invasion doesn't need to be with armies. China is not yet strong enough to do that outright with the west like it does within Asia and its maritime claims. With the west, it has taken on a different approach: infiltrate all levels of political, educational, and corporate institutions.
That's been done between nations all the time.
USA seems to be the biggest offender in this category.
Yes, they expanded along their periphery, which is how they got to their size today.
But even when they had boats, they visited as far away as Africa, and traded with them, instead of enslaving them.
However, in contrast, let’s list all the countries that have enslaved foreign lands.
Britain, France, Spain, Portugal, Germany, United States, Netherlands, Australia. Yes, you guessed it. All these are European countries that have brought an untold number of deaths and destruction to the lands that they visited.
But of course, you are free to turn a blind eye to all their injustices that they have done in the past.
I like how you inserted "distant" in there as if it matters.
Even in just recent history, China has:
- Invaded Vietnam, purely for political reasons as they were stymieing China's aspirations in SE Asia, Cambodia in particular
- They provided military support to North Vietnam as a way to increase their sphere of influence and offset the USSR in SE Asia
- They are currently expropriating land and sea for economic purposes that although justified in their own public statements, I'm not sure even they believe
He/she likely needed to include that as a way to ignore the Tibetan elephant in the room.
China also established a pretty extensive tributary system in the past, requiring a variety of local states to pay tribute every few years. This is really venturing far from my knowledge of history, but I believe this system would have included much of modern central Asia (the -stans), and all of East and Southeast Asia, through much of the Indonesian islands.
Then the Manchurians invaded China, and they also succeeded, back in the 1600s.
The key distinction here, is that the Mongolians and the Manchurians invaded China, and succeeded, only at their own peril, where they essentially subsumed themselves and their culture into the mainstream Chinese culture.
Honest question for those in the know: at what point in history did non-adjacent invasions become feasible and beneficial? I'd imagine if a country ever had a large army and a desire for more land, they would choose neighbors just because of how much simpler it'd be to fight and rule after conquering.