351–360 of 456 posts
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I think the point here is, what are you going to do about it? This is unfortunately how humanity operates. It disgusts me but history shows that it is nigh inevitable.
I don't have the answers that I would wish, but refusing to give up on humanity is a good place to start. History is prologue, not destiny.
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This why I say pair criticism of China with penance. For example, give up Puerto Rico and Hawaii but recognize Taiwan at the same time. China may not officially give a shit, but Europe and many former colonies should.
Puerto Rico does not want to be "given up". It wants, and deserves, statehood. A so-called "independent" Puerto Rico would be nothing more than an impoverished client of the United States.
> Taiwan deserves provincehood so it isn't a impoverished client of the PRC.
Now, Taiwan is quite rich, but still, optics matter. Better to give Puerto Rico tons of reparations if you are worried about it being impoverished and dependent.
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Unlike how it is now?
It might have been clearer for "be" to be "remain".
My proposal is "bleeding heart realpolitik", and bound to thus illicit confusion in the US.
I'm currently reading Anne Applebaum's Gulag: A History and the origins are the following: * Initially they had a huge amount of prisoners and shortage of workers in key regions. Naturally they had them work in remote areas. * The real motivation is economic - the central planners simply loved the flexibility of slave labor - they could start pet projects quickly. They wanted to complete vanity projects that made no…
>will eventually run out of cheap rural labor Premier Li KeQiang revealed this year over 600m Chinese still live on 1000RMB a month. China will _never_ run out of cheap labour. The reality is, even at the height of Chinese export economy 10 years ago, manufacturing "only" employed ~400M workers. China has more cheap work force than _global_ demand. These poverty alleviation / sinicization programs are just that. They…
Also, in textile manufacturing for example you can see that firms are already moving away from China to places like Bangladesh.. unless they are using Uyghur labor.
Regarding the rural population - Chinese agriculture is extremely inefficient and still needs huge amount of labour - the reason is that the large agricultural enterprises are in effect limited to family businesses by law. If they actually reform agriculture China will have no issues feeding itself cheaply, but it probably will not as it will be a huge social disruption.
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I don’t think the US alone has any appetite for a land war in China, nor does the rest of the world. They have such a huge population, it would be very, very hard to win a war like that. If they were to confront China directly, I would guess the US and the west are much more likely to take a containment approach like they did with the USSR.
Yea war is a terrible idea. Even if we “won” it would come at great cost. The best strategy is to contain them and wait for the inevitable communist collapse. Also, breaking the great firewall would do wonders in encouraging Chinese citizens to stand up for themselves. Hopefully Elon doesn’t kowtow to the CCP with Starlink.
Not too sure. There are obvious fake negative news about China and racism comments from Fox News/YouTube. For Chinese people, it’ll be quite a mixed feeling to see toxic content on China, e.g. Wuhan virus, China must pay, etc. I’d say those content might come first to hurt their feelings.
As a native Chinese, it’s still emotionally tough for me to browse China related topic even on HN which is a much more principled forum. Let alone other media
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You don't have to have any appetite for a land war to say you gotta free your concentration camps within 18 months or we have to come invade. It's a million people.
Problem is, the concentration camps are just as real as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.
https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...
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Citation? The US has a record of wanting to be hegemon and specifically wanting to export our ideology. China, not so much outside of their borders and immediate sea lanes. Are you just assuming they want to do so because that's what we do?
It's all lies. I used to believe this line of thought about China. "We aren't expansionist like the US, we just want to do things our way inside of the country". It's not true. China as a unified country has never been as large as it is today. They are actively taking over parts of Nepal, they have taken pieces of land from India, they invaded and took over Tibet, the are nearing genocidal strategies to eradicate any…
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There are some bases that cause a lot of friction however. Behaving like they can do what they like is not in the US’s best interest. The latest rape saga in the Philippines comes to mind and the damage done by the 1990s rape of a child in Okinawa and it’s aftermath have damaged the US image. Also behaving like they are above the law, there was the appalling behaviour of the US military when a family member of a serv…
Crimes that number in the dozens of people and is disliked / prosecuted by the USA is a candle compared to the sun of China's concentration camps.
The US military also didn’t punish for crimes against civilians on Okinawa much of the time and if it did, the punishment was relatively minor. This isn’t how assault, rape and murder are treated in the US.
The whole Tibet situation is such a horrible one. From our Western perspective it feels so wrong that they're essentially trying to extinguish an entire culture and 'fitting' it into China. But we also can't say anything because China makes all our stuff. Plus, China isn't going to be impressed when the old Imperial continent with 140 ex-colonies and the current imperial top-dog with 800 foreign military bases are go…
What China is doing is progressive system of genocide. They borrowed USSR's system of multiple nationalities, identified different ethnicities, and now are trying to wipe out the Uighurs by merging them into Han. It is only a matter of time till they start doing this with whole bunch of other groups. The Uighurs are seen as threats because of their resistance to adopting majority Chinese culture and because of their 1600 year old desire for self-rule.
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Keyword: world Could be safe internally, but that is utterly irrelevant to its neighbors, and the geopolitical order of a world in which the nazis weren’t crushed, the winning empires weren’t dismantled, and the US isn’t the guarantor of global trade and European security in order to combat the Soviets.
If Nazi Germany wasn't stopped we would be living in Man in the high castle world where japanese empire rule over asia, Italy over afrika and germany over all the rest with split of americas. It is potentially peaceful and safe world. Just not nice.
If you’re interested in geopolitics reading outside of Philip K. Dick, an accessible but satiating piece I always recommend is World Order: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20821140
It’s written by a highly respected war criminal (how many fields can say that!)
