The US is imperfect and perhaps worse than (post-colonial) Europe in many respects, but does anyone seriously think that a Chinese global hegemony would be better? I understand that this is controversial and I'm not trying to agitate, but I am curious about who holds this position and why?
> does anyone seriously think that a Chinese global hegemony would be better
False equivalency; no one is arguing that. However, a multi-polar world is appealing. The US is certainly not always a good actor here either: the US has 50+ years of foreign interventions to point to that span the globe, particularly the middle east, latin america, and southeast asia. Less extreme: its ability to unilaterally cause pain for even allies (EU, Canada) through trade tariffs wasn't exactly welcomed.
It would be in Europe (and other regions') interest to be able to defend their own interests on equal footing with the US. Currently, they cannot do that (military and economic dependence). Having China offers leverage. I.e., the US will be incentivized to behave better if other countries can say "well if you push us too far, we'll work with China."
This is just my armchair analysis. I'm not invested enough to back this up with citations or anything so if that's what you're looking for feel free to ignore and argue with someone else who cares more.
Afaik, tripolar tends to be the most stable, with a default-neutral third party, who may choose to side with either other major.
Bipolar comes in second.
A multi-polar world is one where a bunch of nation-states have a realistic shot at becoming the new global hegemon. The likely situation is something like what occurred in the 19th and early 20th century where all of the major powers were locked into a blisteringly expensive military and arms race. And when you have a military that stands on an equal footing with others, the temptation is there to use it to advance national interests and, as the old quote goes, "of course you realize this means war!"; the list of wars that occurred in the 19th century is surprisingly long. Absolutely nothing about that scenario is appealing.
Really? Can someone clarify what my earlier quoted passage was referencing then? I wasn't trying to straw-man the OP.
> However, a multi-polar world is appealing. The US is certainly not always a good actor here either: the US has 50+ years of foreign interventions to point to that span the globe, particularly the middle east, latin america, and southeast asia.
The Cold War (and most/all of those foreign-interventions that you object to) were products of a multi-polar world. I don't know that this is a good thing. I understand and empathize with the "competition is good" impulse, but I don't think it bears out in history.
> It would be in Europe (and other regions') interest to be able to defend their own interests on equal footing with the US. Currently, they cannot do that (military and economic dependence). Having China offers leverage. I.e., the US will be incentivized to behave better if other countries can say "well if you push us too far, we'll work with China."
I understand and empathize with this as well, as noted above.
IIUC, OP's quote just means that a lot of existing books do try to make that argument, i.e., that the only outcome of the US losing its position is for China to take it, as opposed to a multi-polar world (and thus, it would be in the reader's best interest to support US hegemony).
I mean, as you point out, it's not always all that great for those within the US's pole, either. But to me, China and Russia seem to be more aggressive in asserting themselves in dominance over others.
Tell that to Latin America (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...) and the Middle East.
China uses economic leverage. Russia uses subterfuge. America uses those with an extra helping of bombs.
During the cold war the US and Russia made a mess of many many countries. It doesn't seem likely to be cleaned up any time soon. That's what a multi-polar world is like.
The only reason Europe has been able to fund their various subsidies, welfare programs, and safety nets, is because they've slashed their defense budgets by joining NATO and outsourcing defense to the US.
> This is just my armchair analysis. I'm not invested enough to back this up with citations or anything so if that's what you're looking for feel free to ignore and argue with someone else who cares more.
Then why post?
... Seriously? Because it's the Internet and I have a few minutes to kill here and there.
Obviously false. From Tibet to the recent massive South China Sea annexation and Taiwan, all of it is hyper expansionist. It doesn't matter if they lie and claim otherwise, it's plainly a lie. They're seeking territorial expansion.
Nobody in their right mind believes the waters off the coast of south Vietnam belongs to China, except China. That's not about territorial unity, it's about hegemony in Asia and expanding their territory through military force. They're in conquering mode.
The territy they took when they conquered Tibet is twice the size of France. The South China Sea territory they're attempting to take now - which does not belong to them - is at least the size of Tibet or larger.
That's conquering on a scale not seen since immediately after WW2 with the Soviet Union's land grab in Eastern Europe.
Now, is the limitation of my perspective that they can rationalize anything with this? Or that the unanimous People's Congress can update the constitution if any other roadblock is in their way? Sure. I just don't see that predilection.
There are plenty of disputed land borders around the edges of China. But I just don't see things beyond that and the South China Sea.
I was surprised to see the treatment of their state of Inner Mongolia, and to me this is a separate form of discrimination in favor of Han Chinese (or something more nuanced). My line in the sand - for the expansionist opinion - would be taking pieces of Mongolia. Or way into states of India and bordering nations. Or way past Xinjiang.
Well, sort of. They're almost always from very wealthy families with very particular educational, social, and occupational histories, on both sides. We get to choose from within the group that makes it to through the candidate vetting processes controlled by the parties.
> China's military and social power is wielded by a very small group of elites in the CCP, which makes it hard to trust.
Again, it's pretty similar. The rich and their children have time and money to build the connections that can get them into positions of institutional power.
> The nature of US policy has been shaped over the centuries in the open, whereas China's policies and doctrines are sometimes changed overnight.
Policy changes in China get voted on too. They might seem like an orchestrated rubber stamp to us -- and they might actually be!
But similarly in the US, executive orders, agency decisions, and supreme court orders can happen swiftly and have similarly profound impacts on the people and the system. See for example Citizen's United, or the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine by the FCC. Did any normal people vote for those things? They kind of just... happened, and their impacts are huge.
I'm not trying to say I would rather live in China or under its system, rather that our perceptions of the differences between the systems are influenced heavily by our context and our naturally western-oriented media diet, and they may in reality be smaller than we feel.
To put it very cynically, our system currently works by allowing average people to feel like we have control over it, while China's doesn't use that tool so much. In truth, average people don't have any real control over either system under normal circumstances.
I don't see how... Yes, the US has a classist bias and certainly some mild corruption. That still seems a world apart from a single party system that routinely flouts its own constitution.
Also, executive orders and legislation are bound by the constitution in theory and practice. While they may result in abrupt changes from time-to-time, they are limited in scope. That seems materially different to me than a single party system that can pass, overturn, or utterly ignore whatever legislation it likes overnight.
In China it's the Politburo rather than a Supreme Court but the leader must also engage with politics and get buy-in for changes.
And at every step along that journey, it was proclaimed as the best possible way of doing things, ordained by god, etc etc. Not just politics, we actually have the ideal system here.
Yet we imprison Americans at a much higher rate than Chinese imprison their own. And that's before I even get into how we treat foreigners.
So how much are all those great rhetorical adjectives worth when the rubber hits the road?
This is easily verifiable if you talk to anyone from China. Too many kids, you get sterilized, them's the rules (unless you're rich/connected, of course). So why do our media always report cases involving minorities out of context, creating unfortunate assumptions? Who benefits from that?
You'd think the free press would surface the most accurate story, right? Just like the awesome judiciary shouldn't lead to world-leading incarceration rates. This set of gaps is what I'm talking about, not China's sins or virtues.
Citation needed.
> This is easily verifiable if you talk to anyone from China.
Is it conceivable that China is not entirely honest with its citizens about its various atrocities? If this seems far-fetched, perhaps we could examine the CCP's track record of disinformation, misinformation, and censorship campaigns against its own populace.
> Mass Birth-Prevention Strategy. China has simultaneously pursued a dual systematic strategy of forcibly sterilizing Uyghur women of childbearing age and interning Uyghur men of child-bearing years, preventing the regenerative capacity of the group and evincing an intent to biologically destroy the group as such. According to Government statistics and directives, including to “carry out family planning sterilization,” “lower fertility levels,” and ”leave no blind spots,” China is carrying out a well-documented, State-funded birth-prevention campaign targeting women of childbearing age in Uyghur-concentrated areas with mass forced sterilization, abortions, and IUD placements. China explicitly admits the purpose of these campaigns is to ensure that Uyghur women are “no longer baby-making machines.”
- https://newlinesinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/Chinas-Brea...
Perhaps "the free press" who are largely citing reports by experts such as the one above, are in fact more accurate than Chinese state propaganda?
> Just like the awesome judiciary shouldn't lead to world-leading incarceration rates.
You're deflecting again.
And as for the "New Lines Institute".. whew, I sure am glad we have experts rather than security state propaganda. We are so fortunate over here.
Come now, you're being willfully obtuse. Clearly I was asking for a citation about your claim that it's not ethnically motivated beyond "ask any Chinese citizen".
> I sure am glad we have experts rather than security state propaganda.
Well, you don't trust the media, and you don't trust independent researchers, but you totally trust the Chinese government, so I don't know how we're going to make progress. Seems like we should just agree to disagree.
(More “propaganda” from my HN feed: a journalist fleeing China for covering State treatment of Uighurs: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-56586655)
Here's a cite that goes into detail on the specific claims you've probably read about sterilization practices (partway through): https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/18/us-media-reports-chinese-...
TL:DR; -- Historically, minorities were allowed to have way more kids on paper and the limits were rarely enforced in fact. Since ~2018 there's equality, via raising Han Chinese limits and applying even enforcement, so it's a change and there's some upset about it, but it's the removal of favoritism rather than the imposition of discriminatory measures. It got to even.
..
As far as who I trust. DC natsec think tanks are absolutely at the bottom of that list on ANY topic, they are guaranteed to be entangled with the military-industrial complex. I trust our actual military more than I do those think tanks. (And the one you chose turns out to be funded by... gulenists??? I did not expect that, frickin wild -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fairfax_University_of_America)
On THIS topic -- the hard evidence points towards internment and mandatory patriot camp, which are bad, but no genocide, slavery or any of those other crazy accusations thrown about. This is.. not great but also exactly what the Chinese government says they're doing. They put out press releases saying, "yeah, it's mandatory job training and harmony camp". Western media are the ones throwing unsubstantiated claims around.
..
Here's one from your BBC guy, John Sudworth: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/nz0g306v8c/china-tainted-co...
They ACTUALLY INCLUDE a Chinese newspaper page that they're selectively and deceptively quoting from. As an image, though, so you can't copy/paste it into Google Translate. The source that THAT THEY ARE USING is a story about a state-run "gig economy for cotton picking" program where people with small farms can work on bigger farms during their downtime, one guy is super stoked that he made 5k RMB ($800) in a month (quite a lot for the third world). They pull ominous-sounding quotes about 'organization' out of this story out of context while implying forced labor, right in front of your face, just banking on you not being able to read Chinese. If you read carefully, there's never even a hard accusation, let alone any evidence. Just lots of innuendo.
So who should I trust? I don't know if or why Sudworth was run out of town, but his track record shows a lot of bias and disregard for the truth. Maybe some zealous local party members made him feel unwelcome, maybe he was pressured by higher-placed people in the party, or maybe he's just making a play for an easy headline. I don't know.
A single party system sounds very scary, because how can you vote them out? But... that's just not how China's system works. I'm not an expert on China at all, and I don't mean to claim to be. I'm just an internet dweeb, but I'd still like to try to explain what I mean:
Within a party like China's, there isn't just bland homogenous unity. There are factions, with histories and ideological alignments and family connections, aspirations, and so on. Xi Jinping's ascendance was part of a long political game that came along with specific groups, ideas, and policies to the forefront of Chinese political power for a period, and it was supported by the prevailing milieu within the party, and could not have happened without them.
Over time, that milieu changes, and so do the party's goals, priorities, and actions. That happens as the course of external events and affairs, internal politics, economics, public sentiment, fortunes, etc. all unfold to shape it. Jinping has acted to maintain his power and continue his own work and vision, which appears to still be supported by the political powers that surround him. Changing their Constitution (to allow further terms) is a legal action, and they followed a process to do so. It would have required significant political capital to see that process through. It was hardly flouted, even if we balk at the result.
Fundamentally, what is done by the Chinese government is always simply work to preserve and extend: China's sovereign power, the well-being of its people, and the wealth of its ruling class. This is basically true of all nation states.
In America, it is difficult to change the Constitution. Maybe more difficult than in China; constitutions have different levels of significance in different places. But there is similarly a process for it that has been executed many times.
If someone really needs to, they can try to accrue and expend the required political capital to get an amendment done. There's been talk that the Koch brothers and some associated folks have been working on that for years[1]. In the meantime, Presidents, at the behest of whomever they are politically beholden to, work hard to get Judges in place to interpret laws however they may need, and those interpretations vary wildly.
Meanwhile, the two parties in America change as their cultural milieu forged by similarly shifting economic, political, etc. forces unfolds. They consistently line their own and their friends' pockets, start wars, create secret courts, surveil people, and so on.
So how different is having Just Two Parties who take turns depending on a very big vote, but that think in and act in many fundamentally similar ways... from Just One Party with an ever-changing internal makeup, whose leadership takes turns depending on a smaller vote? Ultimately, the American government still and always works to extend America's sovereign power, the well-being of its people, and the wealth of its ruling class.
To repeat myself a little from another post, I'm personally much happier living in a Western-style democracy than a Chinese-style system, where we at least maintain the illusion of real popular control. But the changes we can really effect as individuals, and the power we really have, in either system, are quite limited. While different tools are employed, the aims, the justifications, and the results are broadly similar in the end.
Perhaps you think the United States differs fundamentally in that it can't or won't use violence or underhanded political tactics against its own citizens, to keep the dissidents it really fears down? Read about Sandra Bland, Fred Hampton, or Martin Luther King. There are many, many examples here -- the mask of just benevolence slips off pretty easily.
What I'm ultimately saying is that, if the United States government needed to, it could and likely would use the same tactics the Chinese government does. It already does from time to time in limited contexts.
We, the people, get to choose as long as it's between Harvard and Yale, and if we got really dangerous and started to forcefully demand, say... anything really different? The string of unfortunate coincidences would come out first, and if we somehow kept our momentum up past that, well, then the gloves would come off for a while, until we quieted down.
We feel good about our worldview precisely because we are able to imagine that those gloves cannot come off, or that they wouldn't ever unless it was really justified, and then we'd be on the right side of it, right? But in reality they don't serve 'justice'. They serve the extension of America's sovereign power, the "well-being" of its people, and the wealth of its ruling class.
All that to say, I still feel like it is pretty similar.
1 - https://www.salon.com/2018/08/10/the-biggest-threat-to-our-d... (I just gogoled 'koch constitutional amendment' here, there may be better sources)
(edit: I corrected Fred Hampton's name from my typo'd Thompson.)
I think we do. Voting for Donald Trump or Joe Biden was entirely in the average person's control, and the outcome is that Joe Biden won. Simple.
Take, for example, the President. Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan - none of them came from wealthy families. If the most powerful man in the country is chosen entirely by the people, I'd say average people do have control over the system.
>The nature of US policy has been shaped over the centuries in the open, //
That really doesn't seem to be true. Do you teach in schools about all the democracies that those in power have chosen to meddle with? Is it in election manifestos? Like "if elected we will depose the democratically elected leaders of country X in order to impose a dictator who is covertly in our employ".
>China's policies and doctrines are sometimes changed overnight //
Exactly like presidential edicts? How much of the population voted to leave the Paris Agreement on climate change, for example?
I'm not saying China ain't bad, their leadership clearly aren't great either.
Lost in translation. "Single party system" is a fancy way of saying "totalitarian dictatorship." "Two party system with mild corruption" is a fancy way of saying "modern plutocracy."
I agree that modern plutocracy is better than totalitarian dictatorship. It's not great but it could be worse.
This thread is great, OP asks for less reductionist good vs evil viewpoints and gets 20 replies saying 'no its actually that'.
Are you trying to say that all 100 million of them have meaningful influence on CCP policy? Like some sort of great big Athenian democracy?
There are lots of facets and levels of politics -- being a CCP member kind of necessitates being engaged in some way, probably at the local level for the vast majority of them.
Very little, that's why we refer to the actions of the American government rather than the actions American people.
You say as if it makes China better, but I see strong parallels with Nazi Germany's Lebensraum, or Imperial Japan's "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere". Nationalist sentiments can paint a surprising amount of aggression as "defending what's naturally ours."
They are not directly militarily expansionist but are very economically influential by bankrolling the new silk road and lots of developments in Africa.
> The American perspective is that everyone is secretly trying to expand
A huge & growing society seeks resources - which requires expansion; it would be more surprising if they did not given their capabilities and size.
I don’t think the evidence supports that - they’re literally creating new islands to gain more territorial water, for instance. They contest their borders with India and Japan regularly. Their international economic and development policies serve to expand their global influence.
China as a nation and as a group of people have rarely (if ever) been aggressive outside their own borders. Any time where China exerted force or pressure outside its own country is justified as being purely defensive in nature. Internally, this is seen as largely being a cultural difference between Chinese philosophy/practice and the rest of the world.
In contemporary times, this practice of non-aggression translates to China's global policy. "One belt, one road" -- one of the primary globalization initiatives of China -- is built around Chinese support of critical national and trade infrastructure of developing countries. The idea is to build up trade partners and diplomatic allies through cooperation and capital infusions. Examples include building international trade ports, providing billions in medical aid, donating technology infrastructure, building millions of km of roadways, and investing in local enterprises. Fundamentally, China is focusing on countries left by the wayside by Western regimes (Africa, parts of Southeast Asia, South America, parts of the Middle East) but China is a good partner to many European countries. This is a dramatic departure from European colonialism and American exceptionalism where military might and economic threats were the standard negotiating tactics.
This, the Chinese allege, is fundamentally why a Chinese global hegemony is better than previous historical attempts. The Chinese do not significantly interfere with other nation's business unless it is as an ally of support or unless it's a defensive reaction to outside aggression. This allows other nations and peoples of the world to live their own lives while taking advantage of the market efficiencies, technology, and capital resources that China can provide.
The idea that “we acted outside our borders in defense”, is a line as old as empire itself (and in no way unique). One need only look at the changing borders of China over time to see that their interests extend exactly as far as the geography and external kinetic force allow it to.
Another line of thinking they’ll teach you in China is that the people of Tibet were enslaved by a ruling class, and their annexation was actually a liberation for the good of the local population. Maybe they’re right, and maybe five people in Tibet agreed before they started shoving families of Han Chinese into the region en masse, but justification of expansionist policies is a different discussion than whether their policies are or are not expansionist.
As to the OP's unasked question as to if the world would prefer living under Chinese supremacy vs American supremacy I think the difference is where in the world one currently lives. Generally speaking, I assume that North Americans, Brits, and small parts of Asia (Japan, Taiwan, Philippines) likely prefer American hegemony. OTOH, pretty much everywhere else in the world likely prefers a Chinese hegemony.
You can have two or more somewhat balanced powers jockeying for supremacy by way of cold or real wars, but this seems strictly worse for nearly everyone than a single imperfect, democratic superpower. I don't think there's a world in which nations don't compete for influence, at least not in the next century.
> USA seems only to be fighting China, so it can replace/keep itself in place as bully of the World meddling and causing untold harm for very perverse ends.
I don't see how anyone can look on 20th century history and conclude that a US hegemony is as bad as it gets.
> We need actual democracy, if we can make it work, proportional representation seems a bare minimum to work towards if we want to seek greater global cooperation (which we must to combat global climate change).
I don't see a global democracy coming to fruition in the next 100 years. It's an interesting idea, however.
A USA hegemony under Sanders would be very interesting, under Trump's ilk ...
USA's power relies on threat of violence, can we really not do better than 'the best murderers win'?
I'm guessing you're from USA; when you say the best thing for everyone is a USA hegemony?
I welcome Chinese non judgemental policy especially internal matter.