211–220 of 311 posts
Broken English, and most of the few comments you have in your profile are pro-China. Hmmmm.....
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>I don't care much about what the Chinese do within their borders. The far more aggravating thing is that we tolerate China, choose to do business with Chinese companies and buy Chinese products. >Now that's fucked up, because we are trading our values, for which people freaking died to win, for short term convenience, also sending the message that it's OK as a country to violate basic human rights, as long as you're…
To be fair the issue is a lot more nuanced than that. For example, because of that trade we live in a quite peaceful period. This income in China has been used to bring hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty and into a middle class - where people have some luxury money and aren't engaged only in sustenance farming. I think this is an extremely valuable and positive thing, would you really want to stop…
The problem is that when autocratic state have new wealth (via taxing the people you are talking about) they almost always invade their neighbors or at least try to annex some land or settle an old dispute via force. Saddam with Kuwait, Russia with Ukraine, and China with the Spratly islands are obvious examples. It doesn't matter that some Chinese bureaucrat can afford an iPhone if it means we get world instability, war, and unneeded aggression in exchange. The West is probably looking at another shooting war with either of these countries sooner or later due to their unilateral aggression against our allies. Is a precious, precious iPhone worth that to you?
It seems like we lifted them out of poverty too quickly. They didn't develop democratic institutions, legitimate multiparty politics, a fair judiciary, human rights, international cooperation, etc. This is like handing a 15 year old a brand new Ferrari and acting surprised when he manages to crash it and kill someone.
Broken English, and most of the few comments you have in your profile are pro-China. Hmmmm.....
Um, not a native English speaker here. Though as long as I can articulate my thoughts to have a meaningful discussion, I don't think that's being an issue. I would rather you focus on the topic and contribute your thoughts or counter-arguments, than focusing on trivia or throw off 5 cents party stuff to close this fruitful conversation.
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I don't know that Snowden is a good example: he had to flee his country in a hurry. There is a great deal of uncertainty about whether he would have a fair trial in the US, a country where many are calling him a traitor.
That's seletz's point. It's easy for people to embrace the rhetoric that China is a bound society and the West is made of free societies. In reality, the shape of the bindings is different. A free society wouldn't have forced a man to flee because he knew he wouldn't find justice after revealing an uncomfortable political truth to the public that is oppressed by it. America's methods are different, but being a superp…
I thought he was claiming in the US it was possible to be a dissident without censorship or repression. My mistake!
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Um, not a native English speaker here. Though as long as I can articulate my thoughts to have a meaningful discussion, I don't think that's being an issue. I would rather you focus on the topic and contribute your thoughts or counter-arguments, than focusing on trivia or throw off 5 cents party stuff to close this fruitful conversation.
You can definitely articulate your thoughts enough to have a meaningful discussion, your written English is indistinguishable from college graduate level native written English. I am seriously curious what small hint convinced jonstokes your English was not native, because it was too small for me to catch I guess.
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>Hundreds of millions of Chinese peasants got out of poverty and started enjoy more freedom in education, living, migration and social upwardness. On that fact alone, China should be praised instead of being scolded on. In the west you'll find it common to think that Chinese Communism caused the famines and decades of failure and it was their integration of Western Capitalism and reduction of communism that led to th…
Appreciated for your comments. Though statistically that is not very convincing: the ingredients of capitalism, i.e., market economy and democracy would lead to prosperity. We have more than two hundreds of countries on this globe, the most advanced ones are still the powers from the colonization era. In my humble opinion, those factors seem to be more of correlation than causation.
Considering that the most advanced economy in the world did not even exist at the onset of the colonization era (and did not catapult to its status until the past century), I think you're over-reaching!
>Though statistically that is not very convincing: the ingredients of capitalism, i.e., market economy and democracy would lead to prosperity
Really?
Can you name a single modern large scale society at all that experiences prosperity without market economy? I did not say 'democracy' -- this is an economic discussion of how capitalism, and not communism, creates prosperity. I struggle to find a non-market-economy communist system that creates mass prosperity.
We Americans sometimes look back to Boris Yeltsin's infamous trip to America in the late 1980's: http://blog.chron.com/thetexican/2014/04/when-boris-yeltsin-...
It wasn't correlation to Mr Yeltsin, whose faith in communism was destroyed by walking through an American grocery store: it was causation. “I think we have committed a crime against our people by making their standard of living so incomparably lower than that of the American" and I'm willing to bet there are those in China who agreed prior to the liberalization of the economy and the introduction of market capitalism.
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To be fair the issue is a lot more nuanced than that. For example, because of that trade we live in a quite peaceful period. This income in China has been used to bring hundreds of millions of people out of absolute poverty and into a middle class - where people have some luxury money and aren't engaged only in sustenance farming. I think this is an extremely valuable and positive thing, would you really want to stop…
> where people have some luxury money The problem is that when autocratic state have new wealth (via taxing the people you are talking about) they almost always invade their neighbors or at least try to annex some land or settle an old dispute via force. Saddam with Kuwait, Russia with Ukraine, and China with the Spratly islands are obvious examples. It doesn't matter that some Chinese bureaucrat can afford an iPhone…
And the alternative where we try to economically suppress them works so much better? It's not like the cold war didn't lead to it's own share of nail-biting episodes where we worried there would be full nuclear war.
> It seems like we lifted them out of poverty too quickly.
It's not that we lifted them out of poverty, it's that we took advantage of the favorable market forces present to our mutual benefit. If we didn't someone else would have, unless we tried to get widespread support for an embargo.
> This is like handing a 15 year old a brand new Ferrari and acting surprised when he manages to crash it and kill someone.
Or, you know, it could just be a nation of smart people and statesmen doing what they think is best for their country, based on their beliefs (which could include slow reform).
In any case, I'm sure your likening of China to an irresponsible child is useful, warranted, and even if widely believed, wouldn't in any way help to cause those shooting wars you are talking about. /s
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> where people have some luxury money The problem is that when autocratic state have new wealth (via taxing the people you are talking about) they almost always invade their neighbors or at least try to annex some land or settle an old dispute via force. Saddam with Kuwait, Russia with Ukraine, and China with the Spratly islands are obvious examples. It doesn't matter that some Chinese bureaucrat can afford an iPhone…
> The West is probably looking at another shooting war with either of these countries sooner or later due to their unilateral aggression against our allies. And the alternative where we try to economically suppress them works so much better? It's not like the cold war didn't lead to it's own share of nail-biting episodes where we worried there would be full nuclear war. > It seems like we lifted them out of poverty t…
Yes, an offhand comment on HN is going to start a war.
There's a historic basis to my comment that autocratic systems with sudden influxes of cash become violent/agressive/annexing. The reality here is that's exactly what happened in Ukraine and in the Spartly's. I don't think you can just smart-ass dismiss that and whatever future conflicts we're in for. There's certainly a relationship here. Empowering autocrats has never worked well.
As far as the Cold War goes, isolation led to the downfall of the USSR and communism, in general, which was a horrific system. Those tactics certainly worked and freed millions out of tyranny. No nuclear war, no WWIII, etc. At worst a handful of proxy conflicts that had a death toll that matched perhaps one or two good sized WWII battles. Meanwhile, communism led to the deaths of almost 100m people via internal violence and mismanagement.
Sadly, HN has a "anyone but the US" bias to it and comments like your reflect a fairly biased and uncritical "China can do no wrong" attitude.
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The moment we stop talking to people we want to change, then we lose all hope of doing so.
Why would you want them to change? And change to become what? To become more like you? To me Western civilisation has this recurring feature to want other people to be like them. It was the case with proselytism, colonialism, etc. I understand a will to change a threatening country, or to get rid of a really evil tyran like Pol Pot. But a country having a different level of censorship of the media is not, to me, a ca…
The bit about China "embrassing" (I assume you mean embracing) the "useful" parts of Western culture is neither relevant to this discussion, nor particularly constructive; it comes off sounding defensive more than anything else.
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No, the problem isn't when only certain media sources are allowed - honestly, the problem is when any media sources are allowed at all. Frankly, I think Amercians are as deceived by propaganda as the Chinese. Did we somehow forget in this thread that in western press, one can rarely find an article that isn't full of bullshit? Even if the reasons differ (western media do this for profit), the end result is the same.
There certainly is propaganda masquerading as news in America (and other Western nations), and it's absolutely true that some people are deceived by this. However, there is also a wide variety of media, and it's certainly possible to find articles that are well-developed and not "full of bullshit". (I imagine there are also ways of getting information beyond the curated "official news" in China; not living there, I'm…
By "wide variety" you mean those 6 corporations/oligarchies, many of which have been owned by the same families for decades, even centuries (i.e. Hearst)? The "variety" is just targeted marketing. For example, the communications chief at Time Warner (CNN's parent) and the CEO at News Corp (Fox News' parent) are "close confidants" who worked together for 11+ years, even though CNN is often considered "left" while Fox is "right".
http://www.businessinsider.com/these-6-corporations-control-...