Don't forget the part where they all have access to running water and penicillin now. They're responsible for the greatest humanitarian success story in world history over the last 40 years.
Overlay that with how the US spent our cold war dividend over the same period..
Every big country has got some skeletons attached to it, especially including the US.
If you're primed to see the foreign country as monstrous and evil, you'll see it that way, whatever the balance of the facts for people who live there may be.
For example, social credit. Do you know what it is? Do you know specifically what's being proposed and implemented right now? Or are you going off of some breathless reporting?
(super briefly, there's no consumer credit system in China. Currently there are 2 corporate credit systems evolving in response to need (alipay, wepay), and something like 15 different government-sponsored pilot programs testing different ideas in different provinces, because having consumer credit scores is in fact important for finance. This gets reported as some Big Brother Social Credit Program With A Big Dystopian Plan by western media).
Eh. I commented that "Chinese people are people too" the other day and got pretty heavily downvoted.
Are those downvoters expressing a reasoned belief that Chinese people aren't people? Or are they just reduced to a set of tribal motor reflexes with up and down arrows?
I'm actually kinda hoping it's the 2nd one rather than the first.
Without LBJ, we wouldn't have had the Space Program, the various civil rights bills of the 60s, or Medicare. He also escalated Vietnam from a minor conflict to a major disaster.
Most impactful President since FDR, easily, yet he doesn't get half the press of Reagan or Nixon.
"Rule of law" doesn't mean picking and choosing whom it applies to. Saddam was our best buddy when he was using mustard gas in Khuzestan against the right people.
International politics is rule by power rather than rule of law. The person you're replying to got it right.
It's also complex over there, where Americans don't speak the language or understand anything about the culture or history. Our lack of understanding does not make them 1-dimensional movie villains in reality.
There's a pretty significant online mob who really want to split HK off of China. I'd call 'kneecap' reasonably apt.
As far as hegemony.. I'm sorry you don't believe that :) Why is specifically China the Big Bad Guy if it's not about hegemony? Why aren't we focused on cleaning our own house first if it's about justice and freedom?
Like, if this isn't about power, we could at least stop actively supporting the horrible regimes that are useful to us? That seems like a pretty easy thing to do. Why hasn't it happened?
Overlay that with how the US spent our cold war dividend over the same period..