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Comment by psunavy03 | Hacker News Reader

Why yes, let's let a totalitarian state become a superpower and start dictating the international order. I'm sure Xi Jinping will prove to be just as cuddly as Winnie the Pooh; nothing to worry about here.

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I bet you're from the USA, so this may be hard for you to understand given your context, but as someone from LATAM, let me tell you: China can try really hard to be evil - they will have a LOT of work to be worse than the US.

That's mainly because the USA's flaws have been covered in far more detail, and has also played a bigger role in Latin America. Once those countries start to deal with China more you may find your observations were biased.

How many democratically-elected democracies has China overthrown through bloody dictatorships?

CCP's dictatorship bloodily conquered China, population 1.4B, 20% of the entire planet's people.

USA has also rescued hundreds of millions of people (including China!) from bloody conquerers, as in WW II.

You're arguing with folks who just want to be angry, not listen to facts or sage observations.

(it's not like the US is innocent; we have made a huge number of terrible mistakes attempting to maintain the Pax Americana. I fully acknowledge while being fairly sure that China could and would do far, far worse than the US)

This speculation that China could do far worse is totally unfounded given that they've had plenty of time to push buttons militarily that the US and the Soviet Union had already pushed with much less military power.

What democratic government did they overthrew? Because the ROC was no more democratic than the CCP... and Taiwan didn't have real election till the 1990.

China is allied with Russia right now to overthrow Ukraine

You're right, but that's not the point. Being afraid that another state will become the leading superpower and "dictate the international order" when your oligarchical country has been doing the same thing for the past 70~ years, and not in a "cuddly as Mickey Mouse" way, is HILARIOUS. The doublethink is off the charts! hahahaha.

America has been truly 'oligarchal' for approximately the past one month, whereas China has been a totalitarian state for the better part of a century.

Why not compare the Allies with the Axis next? The US was segregated, right, so... hey, same difference! /s

The US has a pretty extensive 100+ year history of imperialism, destabilization and violence in LATM [1], which is where they are from.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...

Everyone knows that.

A surprising number of people don't seem to know the first thing about China. Hey, it might not help that China doesn't allow a fifth of the world to learn the history of China.

But let's talk again in four years. The way things are going in America, I may agree with you guys by then :(

If this kind of take is what I missed by never installing TikTok, I don't regret it.

Also, China did try it only a few decades ago. Murder, starvation, horrific torture, reeducation camps, brainwashed children denouncing their parents... impressively evil. Not that Tiananmen Square or Uyghur ethnic cleansing or kidnappings of expat dissidents are so much better.

It's extremely telling that you're bringing up the atrocities of the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap Forward and being downvoted as if the US had ever done anything to that scale.

For sure this country has its own flawed history with slavery and treatment of Native Americans, but China is absolutely on its own level with Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Should we become a totalitarian state in order to compete with another? That feels like McCarthyism/Cold War/ “authoritarianism is fine as long as it isn’t communism” vibes.

I can see why one would think that; China is very successful in the world market (or, getting there) despite it not having a free market as such (although it has freed up a lot); despite, or is it because, it being a totalitarian state it is quickly catching up to the US, being the 2nd economy of the world; they still have like $10 trillion to go, but charts like https://www.statista.com/statistics/1070632/gross-domestic-p... predict China will overtake the US by 2030 at the current rate.

And there's nothing the US can do. Cutting government spending and starting trade wars with neighbours is not going to stop it. Building up a totalitarian state with deep government influence into businesses is not going to work and will be actively resisted, since Big Government is so against the principles of the current regime's voters - and China has been working on this for decades now. Free market won't work either, as it's already very free in the US itself - but the aggression of US companies in their sales practices, tax dodging, and privacy violations have caused their foreign customers like Europe to raise the defenses.

TL;DR, while I can see how totalitarianism can in theory create a strong economy, it isn't going to fly / work in the US.

Some people can't handle the idea that China has more people and are roughly as resource rich as the US, so if they work hard like we do they will naturally have the bigger economy.

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