But it's way, way worse than that. At the most surface level there's Julian Assange, he's not even from the country that he'll be disappeared in. But deeper than his case are the cases that he actually highlighted, US war crimes. The US with formal support from Europe has had a decades long foreign policy of violently destroying communism (see the history of South America and South East Asia). Communism has its fair share of evil, but like it or not, it is a fundamentally valid criticism of the West's capitalism. 10s of millions of innocent well-meaning communist supporters have been killed whether directly or through Western support, by the West.

China is not good, but it's just not comparable in scale to the West's evils. Indeed I believe it shows a profound, albeit typical, ignorance of history to think that China is a comparable threat to the world.

I think something to bear in mind with the topic of comparing the West and China is that they aren't actually 2 independent entities that have now come of age, each imposing its unique stamp on the world. What China is today is fundamentally defined by European colonialism. Chinese culture is actually thousands of years older than European culture, and for the majority of human history was the most advanced, richest and successful, at least certainly in comparison to Europe pre and post the Romans. Now recall what Europe did to Native American, African and Australian cultures, which cover almost half the planet. China has something called The Century of Humiliation[1]. Those colonial forces that banished the Cherokee, the Inca, the Mbundu, the aborigines, to the pages of history, eventually arrived in China, and I think quite understandably China fought tooth and nail to avoid the same fate.

So when I criticise those in the West that criticise China, I'm not just trying to equalise the argument to include criticism of all governments. China is not just another evil empire. Modern China is specifically what happens when you have the desire, and more importantly means, to defend yourself against the forces of Western colonialism. China famously burnt its colonial fleet in the 15th Century[2], they are actually not a naturally colonial culture. A metaphor could be something like: when you punch so many people so hard, that most of them die, it's impossible for them to criticise your behaviour, because they're, well dead. So when one of them, after seeing all the dead people, and then getting punched themselves, manages to survive, and even starts to return punches in order to survive, those "fists" of criticism are an extremely understandable survival instinct.

Pointing the finger at China's "punches" is profoundly ironic, because not only have we thrown more punches, and caused more destruction, but we incited those punches.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Century_of_humiliation

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages#Causes_o...