FYI, this conversation is very productive and contributes to the greater conversation in a positive way. Thank you for bringing in a unique viewpoint. I hope we all can work better towards the future.
> I think so because I have witnessed first hand about how insulting the Chinese is still acceptable [0] even in the PC culture (ppl still ask me if I eat dogs), how biased the mainstream media are, and how the democratic system here is full of flaws.
I have seen this as well, HATE it, and I've had to chew people out on it before. But it's something bigger than just one person trying to be mindful, I think.
There is the normal amount of it that is in jest, as with any other group of people, but for some reason, treating Asia like the butt of your jokes almost NEVER seems to be taken with any sort of seriousness at all. For example, a normal, sane westerner wouldn't go out saying 'Black people eat nothing but watermelon,' without complete irony, but for a much longer time, it was completely reasonable to make similar jokes, even more vulgar jokes towards people from Asia. Only recently have people started thinking 'Oh, maybe this is a bad idea, too.'
The media... Yeah. The media is dreadful. But it's a growing sentiment in the west that the media is useless and does extraordinarily more harm than good (being a shame since it's so ingrained in everything)
> Look, the HN crowd are still down-voting my post that complains about you mentioning Japan and I still can't think of why
Just for a western perspective, there may be a few reasons this is happening
* People in the west LOVE Japan. Obviously we'll look at the entire country with rose tinted goggles, and anything they've done to the west we've done back to them tenfold. So as a rule, Japan tends to get a MUCH bigger free pass on just about everything. Doubly so because their culture is so prevalent in the west. My initial thought, without actually reading into what you were saying was: "Japan is terrible. China is better." Obviously that's not what you said at all, but it's STILL my first gut reaction (the next thought was instinctively 'maybe some nuance was lost between languages?' Which is also a very unhelpful sentiment, but it remains my initial reactions)
* There's been a LOT of anti-Asia, especially Chinese, sentiment lately. I'm not exactly sure what's going on, if there's some sort of propaganda push or people are literally just echoing the political climate, but especially on Hacker News, it has been almost unusable due to how toxic it is lately. Again, I try to see beyond what I'm seeing/hearing, but even for me it's hard to not get swept up at times. So ANYTHING pro Chinese is bound to be at least met with skepticism at best.
* People unfortunately, and incorrectly treat the 'flag' button as a 'dislike/I don't like this' button. I think Reddit unfortunately normalized this as a trend.
> we believe that the West is hostile towards Asia and will do everything to prevent any country in that area from growing up and challenge them
I may not be as well researched into this as someone who's actually on the receiving end, and I am on the younger side, but from the perspective I know, Russia, China, and the US were always on equal footing and were constantly trying to do similar things like this to each other. I would be interested in hearing more about this from a different viewpoint, however.