If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
How is China more of a threat to other countries' sovereignty than America?
Second, I wasn't responding to just the one comment but to an obvious (and very bad) pattern in the comments by that account. Note "you've been doing it a lot, unfortunately". The reason we'd ban an account is because they posted one comment like the GP, but because they're making a habit of breaking the site guidelines.
I hope it goes without saying that these moderation calls involve no relative assessment of threats to national sovereignty.
The problem is there’s way more countries in the world than China and America.
Oh not at all. The rest of the free world including unaligned folks are quite concerned about China and the CCP.
Things can get much, much worse for democracies as China rises militarily. Relative to China, the US (and several other democratic nations) have a free press, access to unfiltered information, constitutionally protected right to dissent, independent judiciaries etc. Those are important checks to have.
China could conduct large scale genocide and yet there would be absolutely no domestic pressure on the government. The worry is that as it grows stronger, international pressure wouldn't matter much either.
Indeed, generally, domestic opinion is not the most relevant predictor of what a country will do abroad, it's quite minor as most people have little information about foreign policy and are pretty easy to coax into whatever opinion you want, free press or not (see the WMDs, the lead up to the Vietnam War, etc..)
So this is not actually a relevant concern.
Actually, there is a countervailing factor, which is that China will never become a hegemon, they will always be somewhat counterbalanced by the US. So in reality one would expect less bullying for non-aligned nations.
Generally, the US is seen as a bigger threat to democracy and world peace than China, internationally:
https://www.npr.org/2021/05/05/993754397/poll-much-of-the-wo...
https://www.salon.com/2014/01/09/the_top_4_threats_to_global... (from 2013, I assume it got somewhat worse since Trump)
Public opinion (and draft, and casualties) did influence US actions quite a bit in the Vietnam era.
But that's not so relevant, because at its peak the cold war was a complex moral situation in which the path didn't matter as much as the goals. In the 70s, the NATO and Soviets were fielding 40,000 nukes and marking the world into two camps. But it'd be a folly to paint them both with the same brush - a world in which the Soviets dominated would be quite unpleasant to live in.
https://www.pastemagazine.com/politics/whataboutism/theres-n...
Killing Hope: Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II, William Blum
https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/13/130AEF153...