They would. Listen closely to how you and your friends tell stories next time. Race and gender are almost always used to describe people. "My landlord, who's a black guy, <STORY DETAIL THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH BEING BLACK OR BEING A MAN>"
So from a sample size of one, you thoroughly concluded that this was because of democracy vs dictatorship. Just to offset that for you, India is a democracy with pollution even worse than China (although conveniently not often discussed in western media).
The conclusion you came to that China is trying to curb pollution "mostly" because of foreigners visiting during the Beijing Olympics, again do you honestly believe that?
You don't think the CCP, even being one of those "communist dictatorships", cares at all about lowered life expectancy across its population? Why did the CCP lift most of its people out of severe poverty over the last 20 years? What evil agenda was it trying to achieve then?
Just a few
- world class manufacturing techniques
- world class drone technology
- world class civil engineering (high speed rail, bridges)
- world class super computers
Haha don't reach for Orwellian buzzwords so quickly =P. A lot of successful Chinese tech companies don't succeed just because competitors were banned. Even when Google was in China, Baidu catered specifically to local needs whereas Google just paratrooper dropped their product in. Baidu was more successful. As for Wechat, given how Facebook messenger has been shamelessly copying Wechat features for years, I highly doubt Wechat was at danger of losing marketshare to Facebook.
Now you know how Chinese people feel when they read any articles written by white men about China, or when they go eat at one of those asian fusion abominations :)
One could've argued that making seafaring voyages in the 1600s requires putting your differences aside. But instead we had a bunch of barbarians going around extinguishing and enslaving the world =P
until we run out of resources, develop a plan to terraform the planet, which is incompatible with the original biosphere, and wholesale destroy all life on that planet.
If it ever got to us vs them, we haven't evolved past choosing us first.
The addendum is that Liu believed it would be very difficult for, if not impossible, for a civilization to hold together across a long enough distance. This was shown when the original interception ships floated far enough and started attacking each other, throwing out pre-emptive strikes when communications broke down and resources were needed.