Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

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It has nothing to do with xenophobia.

The Chinese government doesn't play fair, and the West has been letting them get away with it for decades. They take full advantage of open markets available in the rest of the world, but close their markets to outsiders; at best, outsiders can get a piece of the action, but only through the oversight and partial ownership of a local company. The idea that China is still a "developing nation" and should have special status and privileges is a joke.

While I won't claim that Western nations don't have issues with censorship and freedom of speech, the Chinese government punishes foreign corporations (economically) that say anything critical of China or its government. The Chinese government exports its propaganda and censorship policies through informal economic sanctions.

I'm not particularly interested in allowing an authoritarian government that pushes pervasive propaganda and censorship to become the next world hegemon. (I'll freely admit that the US is no saint in that role, but I think it should be obvious and defensible why I'd prefer the US in that position rather than China.)

Note that this is all about the Chinese government. I have no problems with Chinese people; by and large, those I've met on my few trips to China (granted, my last trip was over 10 years ago) and those I've met who travel to and live in the US have been good, friendly, intelligent people. It's perfectly reasonable to be against the constant, widespread actions of a foreign government without being branded a xenophobe.

> The Chinese government doesn't play fair

No government or organisation does, and I wouldn’t fault any state for doing it’s best to edge it’s bets.

The expression is "hedge its bets" and that doesn't make sense in this context.

Oh, my bad. And while it does make sense, it indeed doesn’t mean what I intended to write.

So "stack the odds in its favour” then?

The parent comment isn't saying anti-China actions and suspicions by the government are xenophobic. It's instead saying more or less the opposite: that the delay in these kinds of actions is possibly down to policymakers seeing China as lesser and not worth concern.

That also sounds like the opposite of xenophobia.

And the US befriended China for important strategic reasons starting with Nixon. If they underestimated anything it was the ability of an authoritarian regime to retain power through such a period of economic growth. Middle classes tend to want western products and media. But the economic growth itself was a deliberate goal of US policy.

I was going to add some about at least several decades of US/Western approach being from a playbook of having the market kind of lead to liberalization on its own, and the Chinese government's ability to reap the rewards while maintaining control, but I didn't want to bloat the comment.

As for xenophobia being the opposite, I imagine the comment being referenced (now several levels above) was using -phobia in the common modern sense of including bias or prejudice and not literally fear.

If you go through my comment history, you'll see that I am critical of the CCP for many of the reasons you've listed.

However, my argument is that the West, in general, underestimated China because of beliefs of cultural, economic, political, intellectual, ethnic, moral, etc superiority. Those beliefs were ultimately weaknesses.

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