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Comment by tombh | Hacker News Reader

You are so out of your league here. Whilst you state facts, it is comical to imply that China can hold a candle to the West's atrocities. 18 different border disputes, 18!?? I mean how can you seriously think that's a big number? Just take the American continent itself. Honestly, think about it for a second, what if North America was inhabited by Mandarin-speakers from northern China and South America was inhabited by Cantonese-speakers from southern China? Of course with the occasional "Euro-towns" scattered around selling pizzas. It sounds like a dystopia doesn't it, so why was it ok for Europe to do that? Don't you see how blinded by propaganda you are?

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You've broken the site guidelines egregiously here.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are. Not only does it take the community further into hell—just what we don't want, and good for nobody—but you actually discredit your own point of view when you post like this. If you happen to be advocating for the truth, or some aspect of it, that means discrediting the truth as well. This hurts everybody.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

I know how difficult and frustrating it is to be advocating a minority/contrarian view whilst feeling surrounded by endless wrongness on the internet, but at least on HN, if you're going to wade into such swamps, you need to build capacity to do so thoughtfully, neutrally, without swipes, and so on. That's not easy, but we all need to work on it.

Railing and fulminating against wrongness (e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661759) actually feeds the wrongness you're seeking to counter. You're gifting it with new feelings of validation and righteousness when you do that. This is not in your interest, and it's damaging to the community (such as it is) here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Thank you for your thoughtful, even-handed and constructive reproval. You clearly took the time to read and digest my comments. I feel embarrassed for doubting my capacity for patience. I will strive to not let your good intentions and efforts go to waste.

Don’t you see that an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind? Hey you know what, at least we can both criticize the West’s atrocities and not fear being disappeared by an authoritarian government.

In what way did George Floyd not disappear? Blackness isn't even an outspoken geopolitical position, yet significantly more African Americans have disappeared, whether literally, or effectively in prisons, than Chinese dissidents. I don't want to suggest your white and middle-class, but the world really is only politically safe for what is actually a global minority, namely the white middle class.

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.

You seem to be attacking Western governments assuming we want to defend them?

Our identity it's not tied to our governments, unlike you, we criticize them ALL the time. They do horrible things, but because a Western government has done horrible things doesn't mean China gets to do it too.

We are not attacking you as a Chinese citizen, we are attacking the governments who do wrong.

This comment chain is specifically about China's government's atrocities. If every time we criticized one government, we had to include all of them in the same post, that would be insane trying to list every single thing.

It seems you may think I'm Chinese? I'm actually 100% British.

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...

I’m unsure how you can justify the present based on what happened in the past. It just sounds like you’re making excuses for justification.

China has a long history colonialism, just like pretty much any other empire in history. So unsure how you can claim they don’t have colonial nature.

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