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Comment by publicola1990 | Hacker News Reader

publicola1990

But is China really threating the US directly in anyway through military confrontation? Taiwan, China sea matters are localised to the close neighborhood of China.

Does the US desire peaceful coexistence with China or not? Reading some of the hawkish, cold war style jingoism coming out of US media makes one wonder?

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China is a state that seems to be more or less incompatible with liberal democracies and has a lot of power.

That is the main struggle

The US supports all kinds of non-democratic groups when it benefits them, though. Most likely the reason is just that they don't want to lose any power to China.

How is China incompatible with liberal democracies? internally of course, the authoritarian politics are incompatible.

But in international relations, they’ve traded been trading with liberal democracies for decades. So what’s the incompatibility?

An increasing desire and capability to export their illiberal practices abroad. For example, using their weight to prevent the Dalai Lama from speaking at foreign universities. It’s naive to think that an even more powerful China wouldn’t continue to suppress free speech abroad as much as it does at home.

How is what China does to the Dalai Lama any worse than what the US does to Julian Assange? Isn't it equally naive to assume that an even more powerful USA wouldn't continue to summarily execute people abroad as much as it already does?

I think you have a decent comparison, but debate about what the CIA did in the US is widely reported in the US while. There is no free press in China. Pressure to stop China will only come externally, whereas pressure to stop US can come from within and external.

Also China is continuing to carry out a genocide that is unparalleled in this century.

Lets be real, America has allowed the use of capitalism to enslave entire generations of people and they are clueless to the fact about it. In fact many praise it and go deeper into debt so they can rock the newest iPhone 13, only 36 months of payments spread out. I can handle that!

In the US a Genocide has been underway for decades. The cost of healthcare will break people. A trip to the doctor can easily wipe out life savings, what little there is for most people. Considering more than half the US population lives paycheck to paycheck to nearly paycheck to paycheck lifestyles, its easy to see how Most Americans are nothing more than slaves that go to work and back home in a endless cycle. That is not freedom. And sure they can quit, and live out in the streets if they wanted. Its a shit life.

Americans are so caught up in thinking the government is the bad guy here. No the real bad guy is the companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Exxon, Verizon, ATT, Capital one, Chase, any CC company, plus the many Pharma companies. The list can go on and on.

With no protection for allowing people to get into 10-20k+ worth of CC debt at 22-28% APR, People will always be slaves.

Honestly its easy to see the USA as a Cancer. I dont blame China for wanting to break away from the ideals of the western world. Now they have made a lot of bad choices. But at the same time the USA is largely responsible for keeping the middle east a 3rd world society.

Americans enjoy living in a bubble, They love to think they are free. They are not free!

I'm an American, and I'm just as much of a slave to the system as the rest of you. The system is so rigged that any true free speech is easily spun around. Just look at all the crazy trump supporters, Slaves not only to unchecked capitalism but to also propaganda labeled as factful free speech.

You are delusional to suggest the legitimate problems with American capitalism are anything close to genocide.

Nothing justifies it when the US does evil. The important difference is that as a society, in the US we have remarkable capacity for self-criticism and the power to loudly rebuke our government. We're far from perfect, but we can at least acknowledge the atrocities committed in our names, and hopefully account for them and try not to commit them again. The same is not true in Chinese society. Currently, it is only external pressure that keeps them in check. There won't be internal resistance to the Chinese governments expansionist behavior, because it simply would not be tolerated. The PRC will even use its power to silence criticism from abroad, much less tolerate it at home.

Again, we're not perfect, but we hear about almost every drone strike that harms civilians, or the abuses our prisoners of war face in Guantanamo bay. Does anyone in China rebuke the government for stealing land from neighboring countries[1] and building on it?

[1]: https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/05/07/china-bhutan-border-vil...

> How is what China does to the Dalai Lama any worse than what the US does to Julian Assange?

Among other things, we're allowed to discuss what the US has done with Julian Assange on this here US-based website without much fear of a dawn raid by the FBI over it.

Communists don't have a great reputation for peace.

I wonder why the bad things the US does internationally never get blamed on capitalism, yet when people write or vent about China it's always about these darn Communists. Are these after-effects of the red scare?

China is an authoritarian dictatorship with their own flavour of communism I guess. Blaming everything they do on commmunism as a whole is very uninformed.

I believe this has to do with any system where the government has too much control. Communism appears to me like a system that promotes the government’s freedoms over an individual.

Have there ever been peaceful communists who ran a country?

Add that to the tankies I've met personally and their beliefs, and yeah, communism sucks.

How many times has Cuba invaded the U.S.?

Being too busy repressing their own people to invade anyone is hardly an achievement indicative of peace.

Have there ever been peaceful capitalists who ran a country?

Don't get me wrong, I can't really stand uber-authoritarian Communism. But I don't see how communist/marxist theory is bad as a whole. Would certainly help erase a lot of issues we have on our earth. Unfortunately, people at the top always start to misuse their power to stay there. But that's also the case in capitalist America, so then again, why is communism such a problem for many americans?

This probably explains the well-known confrontational postion of the US vis-à-vis Saudia Arabia and Bahrain and so on.

> Taiwan, China sea matters are localised to the close neighborhood of China.

Or the close neighborhood of the Philippines, a major US ally with a mutual defense pact. Or Taiwan, a major US ally and trading partner. Or Vietnam, a growing trading partner. There are ongoing disputes between and among those groups.

A huge amount of shipping goes through the South China Sea, including most oil for S. Korea, Japan and the US West Coast. Meanwhile, goods bound for Europe and the Suez from those places also go through there. Something like 10% of the worlds shipping. Letting China just call "dibs" on international waters and set up a chokehold would be weird to allow.

I don't think anyone is urging war with China. But stopping their advance in it's tracks.

Meanwhile, China has been aggressively expanding its influence worldwide, in South America, Africa and Afghanistan.

> Meanwhile, China has been aggressively expanding its influence worldwide, in South America, Africa and Afghanistan.

In contrast to the U.S.? When other countries did this in the past and present, it was ok, but not for China? The U.S. can invade and occupy countries on the other side of the world, but it's aggressive for China to occupy an unoccupied island off its own coast?

I'm not thrilled with China's behavior, but the U.S. needs to stand down until they can act from the high moral ground. They have a lot of work to do to rebuild a working compass. Until then, nobody can trust their navigation.

> The U.S. can invade and occupy countries on the other side of the world, but it's aggressive for China to occupy an unoccupied island off its own coast?

Invading countries with a diplomatic alliance like NATO behind you is as close to "okay" as you can get. A small country got beat up, but there was no risk of WWIII. And there was an attempt to install a democracy in place of a dictatorship and get out.

China claiming the territory owned by their neighbors is about slowly stealing land (and sea) and making them part of China. It's completely different.

But really, the US's moral high ground is a distraction. This thread is about whether China is taking actions that could be a threat to the United States.

> China claiming the territory owned by their neighbors is about slowly stealing land (and sea) and making them part of China. It's completely different.

Tell that to Puerto Rico or Guam.

Yes, the United States did that in the past. It did it by fighting a war with Spain. That's why I would also agree with someone who said the US was a threat to Spain 120 years ago.

Or did you miss:

>> But really, the US's moral high ground is a distraction. This thread is about whether China is taking actions that could be a threat to the United States.

> This thread is about whether China is taking actions that could be a threat to the United States.

This thread is about the U.S. producing a war plane. Somehow China is threatening the U.S. just by knowing about a weapon produced by the U.S.? China is the threat?

Whatever, if not thread, the posts you are responding to were about that. There are many posts that deal with the plane. This is focusing on China/US relations, as an offshoot conversation.

> Taiwan, China sea matters are localised to the close neighborhood of China

We don't have a defense treaty with Taiwan so it's not like we'd have to intervene to the degree we would if Egypt decided they wanted to have a go at Israel or something, but we've had a standing agreement since the 1970s to arm them as the situation dictates, so we're not entirely detached from it.

No but any credible claim that the US has to defending interests in SEA / East Asia would evaporate once that happened. China understands this. If Taiwan goes, then that's it for the US's Asia strategy.

> Reading some of the hawkish, cold war style jingoism coming out of US media makes one wonder?

Yes, and the same can be said from Chinese state media...

Anyone who cares about democracy in their own part of the world should be paying attention to what happens in China. Unlike the 20th century fascist and communist dictatorships (including Chinese communism of that era), China today is neither self-destructive nor economically unsound.

The "close neighborhood of China" would significantly grow and envelope unwilling countries if unscrutinized.

(Not who you responded to)

Jingoism is definitely present and infuriatingly becoming more financially viable for media companies pitching towards those parts of the populous, but it is important to recognize that that is the minority. Anecdotally, most people in my area, a college town in a republican state, are apathetic by means of being unaffected and uninformed. Even the chinese and korean people I've spoken with pretty frequently don't seem to particularly care or be informed. It is kind of weird, because it freaks me out and I follow it very closely; worrying about ww3.

Opposition to Xi Jinping in the executive branch is widespread, that is also definitely true. I think our hawks and their wolf warriors have created a feedback loop.

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