A small price to pay for a country that isn't confused about its place in the world, where one half of the population wants to kill the other half, and so on. Pick your poison, I suppose.
Edit: your account has, unfortunately, clearly been using HN primarily for ideological/political/nationalistic battle and has a long history of breaking the site guidelines. I've therefore banned it. We have to ban accounts that abuse HN this way, because they destroy the possibility of the community surviving for everyone else. (And no, this isn't because of your views.)
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future.
I think Xi is quite clear on his view of China's place in the world: hegemon in their region but no desire to be global police like America.
> I think Xi is quite clear on his view of China's place in the world
Yes, Xi may have a view. Again, the problem for the regime, and presumably the reason for Xi's crackdowns, is that China, as in the population, is less clear on its view of Xi's place in China.
For a Western person, with the implicit cultural and historical ethos, and the actual modern history, it's natural to apply aggressive stance to a rising power.
For a Chinese who had the same kind of knowledge from the Chinese heritage, it's laughable to expand. China in the Han dynasty, already figured out that expansion just results into stretch of power and evetual breakdown, which is natural for any complex system. So that's what happened after Wu Di the second great emperor after Shi Huang, he realized his military expansion in the end does not achieve it's strategic goal, I.e., extinguish the roaming noamd tribes from the earth. He even wrote a self criticizing official doc to confess. And changed the policy to use economic and royal marriage to manage the nomad tribes.
You can equate the cultural and economic management as expansion, just like what US did in 20 century. But that's inevitable anyway. I.e., culturally and economically advanced nations are mimicked by others even if they are not doing anything...
In 19 & 20 century, things changed. Those strategic areas have to be under China's control for national security, which was under siege from Russia (the most expansionism nation on earth).
Like USSR inherited Russia's imperial territory, and India inherited great Britain's, CCP conveniently inherited Qing empire's as well (indirectly through KMT, the nine dashed line was a KMT invention...).
As far as china's ambitions go, anything can change but they have a long, long history of non-interventionism. It's hard to justify ideologically when they teach every schoolkid about the century of humiliation and the evils of colonialism.
We ban accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological/nationalistic battle because they destroy this community for the thing it is supposed to be for: respectful, curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. Therefore I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. As you know, they're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
The shape of global politics is interesting to me. Your call.
The problem is that that's not enough. Accounts that use HN primarily (exclusively?) for political/ideological/nationalistic arguments are breaking the site guidelines. This site is supposed to be for curious conversation on intellectually gratifying topics, and an account that only uses HN for arguing about $hot-divisive-topic (be it China or any other) is clearly going against that spirit.
I'm sympathetic to the fact that flame wars about China are too common here, and hey, banning the non-american point of view might end them, circlejerks can only go so far on their own. So maybe you're right, but I wouldn't be super satisfied with that solution.
> That's just not an accurate summary of my posting history.
I looked through your most recent 60 comments and counted 9 that weren't on flamewar topics, and that was being generous, because several of the latter were about Bitcoin and religion. It's true that a few were about software - but on the other side, quite a few of the other 51 were blatantly breaking the site guidelines. On balance, your account has clearly been using HN primarily for ideological/political/nationalistic battle. As you know, we ban such accounts. I spend a lot of time replying to people who feel that we don't apply these rules evenhandedly (from all ideological/political/national sides, btw), so I think it's pretty important to actually do so.
[1] I put this list together yesterday for a user who emailed because they were worrying about Chinese spies on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. I think it makes the situation pretty clear, if anyone has the stamina to slog through it.
You can have a country that's not confused about it's place in the world and without one half of the population wanting to kill the other half and still have freedom of expression and democracy.
I agree.
I doubt however that a tyrannical dictatorship is necessary to achieve that. There are plenty of examples where people have agreed on a common narrative without an oppressive regime.