Hacker News Reader

Comment by throwaw12 | Hacker News Reader

> China is imperialist as any other country.

Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people. Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%

Or lets look at China itself, before the opium wars and British colonization, it accounted for ~30% of the world GDP, by 1970s it dropped to 4-5%, now climbing back to 20%.

Indonesia would be another example.

You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage", because you probably live in the West and feel nice about your day to day life and regular things like education feels granted, and not seeing the enormous impact of the West's evil actions to the lives of billions of people around the world in the last 200 years. (US hasn't even stopped yet, see Cuba, Middle Eastern countries)

View on HN

> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.

Ridiculous statement. China is doing it today — uighurs are actively erased bit by bit.

> Look at India, before British colonization they accounted for almost 25% GDP of the world (~1700s), now it is around 3-4%

This statement is rooted in “zero sum” logic, and based on the assumption that without colonization India should have stayed with its 25% or more share. Hypotheticals are hypotheticals, and nothing more.

> You keep defending the West,

I’m not defending anyone. I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good” horse and completely oblivious to so many things that China does, which are objectively worse.

> I find it ridiculous that you are so high on “the west is bad, China good”

Can you read what I have written? if not, let me copy what I wrote earlier here:

> I am fine with lesser of 2 evils

> But it obviously has its own problems (e.g. how competitive is the life in China for kids and so on), I am not saying China is perfect

I am not saying China is good, I am saying it is lesser of 2 evils with much less negative impact to the lives of human beings around the world, in my opinion.

I am not sure we are arguing here on the merit of the argument itself. You are fine with China’s genocide TODAY because China is the “lesser of two evils”?

I do not understand this. It sounds like a cultist/religious position.

Ugh, not this Uyghur political propaganda again. Can't you just go and check it out with your own eyes?

> Sure, but not the way West conducted it, by going and killing generations of people.

But they did. Look at Xinjiang, Tibet, and the history of Manchuria, among others. They did it to themselves as well, like most backwards dictatorship. And "the West” does not really do genocide anymore, either. This is more a consequence of it being a terrible strategy than Chinese benevolence (or anyone’s, really). At some point we realised that direct administration is a burden and that it’s much more cost effective to bribe nominally independent governments without having to deal directly with local populations. China does this a lot, just like evil western imperialist countries. Empires look different in the 21st century than in the 19th, that’s all. And where would you put Russia in a neat west-rest of the world dichotomy?

> You keep defending the West, even though its actions were much worse than "industrial espionage"

“The West” is not a monolith. It’s made of several countries, some of them better than others, and each one of them with its good and bad sides. It is not useful to work with generalisations like that. It obscures any information or lesson we could get and leads to wrong conclusions. It’s also counter-productive because for all its evil, there is nothing “the West” did that is unique. Except in scale, but then it’s more a quirk of history than something being intrinsically evil in “western” people.

> And "the West” does not really do genocide anymore, either

Don't want to get into the definition of genocide, but sure, you can think of whatever you want, but facts are different (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides):

    * Gaza genocide (supported and enabled by West)
    * Bosnian genocide
    * Holocaust

Not classified as genocide but almost similar or even larger impact:

    * Vietnam war
    * Afghanistan
    * Iraq
    * Libya
    * endless sanctions and blockade against Cuban people

> “The West” is not a monolith. It’s made of several countries

some wars on the list were joint operations between US, Britain and NATO, for others you can read this 20 page wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com