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Comment by Santosh83 | Hacker News Reader

Honestly is it any less "baked in" than the pre-eminent Western powers? Can't the US govt achieve similar levels of censorship by serving NSLs and shutting a piece of information down? They perhaps may not need do it as rigorously as China because the real power lies in private mega-corps. As long as they survive, any old President will do, as long as he's not a loose canon like the last one.

I still can't think of a single world nation that puts real power in the hands of the people. There are always power structures and their protection even from the very people they ostensibly serve. I wonder in what way is China more evil than the major Western nations?

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Yes, there is a difference. I've been in a place where there explain you that the west is just like us, but it is total BS. There is a difference in independent courts, difference in freedom of expression and freedom of protest, there is a difference in a decision being taken by the society and by a small elite that exercise total control over the system. False equivalence is one of the most poisonous arguments that people deploy in order to deflect responsibility.

> Honestly is it any less "baked in" than the pre-eminent Western powers?

Because it's _less_ "baked-in". Germany just recognized their part in a genocide, China has yet to acknowledge the Tiananmen massacre.

Acknowledgement is lip service, especially decades after the fact. If they provide significant compensation, then yes. There is hope for better days for China too, but not by portraying them as unmitigated evil. I can't think of any significant nation that has caved to orchestrated, vested moral outrage and said "sorry you guys... we'll hold elections next years and play by your rules henceforth", especially when the very countries asking for this unrepentant about their own past transgressions costing millions of lives (atomic bombs, Iraq invasion etc.)

Germany will provide around 1.1 billion EUR but they will do it by sponsoring social projects over the next 30 years.

Social project run by western NGOs I guess? What is 1.1 billion when the west steals like 2~3 trillion each year since ww2 from the global south.

You can smooth over a lot of mismanagement or save a lot of costs this way. It also seems the dividend from the colonial days is not enough anymore to keep the West going given their infrastructure seem to crumble every year.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2021.1...

> I can't think of any significant nation that has caved to orchestrated, vested moral outrage and said "sorry you guys... we'll hold elections next years and play by your rules henceforth",

Governments regularly cave in due to protests in democratic countries. It happened in the Netherlands a few months ago, for example.

Moreover, it's fundamentally important the fact that protests exist.

Comparing any western democracy to a dictatorship is the worst form of whataboutism.

How did they not "acknowledge" it? They did and they do. "They" call it "1989 incident" and despite the Western believe Chinese people are aware of that incident. And yet, most people I have spoken to in my countless trips to China follow the words of Deng Xiaoping that it was worth to sacrifice 3000 lifes for 30 years of stability.

Edit: by the way, it annoys me that I got trolled into posting something totally unrelated within a tech article. Why are all Chinese-related articles turning into exactyly the same direction in the past 3 years? I am tired of that.

> it was worth to sacrifice 3000 lifes for 30 years of stability.

No one knows what China would be like now had the CCP acceeded to the students' demands and liberalised.

Taiwan ended their long period of martial law around the same time too, and for a nation with so much stacked against it, you can hardly say they're doing badly.

You have no idea what you are talking about. No idea.

I have lived in China. Freedom of press and Rule of Law(they don't exist in China) are amazing inventions.

You just don't have an idea how lucky and spoiled you are. I recommend you volunteer helping refugees just to get a glimpse of how the world works outside the West bubble.

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