> Is that what happened? That feels like a massive stretch considering who the US backed in the Chinese civil war.
China, the US, Germany and Japan were all fighting against cultural genocidal Marxism which had global domination ambitions. It's a matter of historical record. There were dictators on both sides, but not all dictators are created equal. Both Germany and the US were helping provide supplies. The problem is that Japan and Germany got so fanatical and expansionist themselves that they became the bigger threat.
We are lucky that there are incredibly incompetent people in charge of Russia and China, but if Japan and Germany had sufficiently expanded into Russia and China to gain the resources they needed, that would be too much geographic power to allow their respective ideologies to have.
My point in this thread is essentially that the CCP has never ended its war in support of communism and while the era of the tank has largely ended, we now have EVs rolling straight through the middle of cities unopposed. Arguably every bit as useful as rolling a tank down to the capitol.
> And you see that ideology as a threat to US Global Imperialism, and you have internalised US Global Imperialism as part of your personality, I get it.
People knew what life was like inside Soviet Russia. It wasn't free, life sucked. Nobody wanted that to happen to their country. If Marxists gained control of enough global resources and continued to build giant militaries to expand with then they posed a legitimate risk of erasing freedom worldwide.
The US has never been about imperialism in the way you think of the British Empire, the Russian Empire or the Chinese Empire. You're only applying a naive filter by suggesting land empires aren't real empires, only ocean empires are real empires. All of the other empires have been actually imperial, with kings, emperors and so on. It's not really accurate to call the US a religious empire even, but it was a country formed anew with deep understanding of the problematic cycles the world has faced for thousands of years.
There are scenarios where we have critical interests like Panama, Hawaii, Guam, Cuba, Puerto Rico, Greenland, etc, but it's not like we're in these places enslaving their populations and preventing them from knowing the truth. If we were a true British or Russian style empire with endless ambition, the US could have wrecked Germany and Japan, then gone on to finish China and take over Russia, capture all of the middle east, steamroll south america and so on. If we are an aggressive empire, then we have been extremely judicious relative to the amount of projection power we have.
After World War 2, we invested in the rest of the world to help it recover. Why do that when we could've just steamrolled a weak and battered world? Because that's not how we think.
The only reason we're using more of our leverage lately, is because we're countering the things Russia and China are already doing and we're not being ignorant about the threats that are being posed.
> The difference between this and something like the US All Writs Act, or Australias Access and Assistance bill is super negligible. Just the overt trappings of single party politics really differentiate it. The US, and its allies are equally capable at compelling corporate action. I know its scary when the red guys do it, but if you want me to care about this, you would need the US and friends to not be leading the charge.
The US does not require companies to hire political and intelligence minders. It would be like the US requiring a company to align with Republican politics, even if their company wasn't politically minded. We see this kind of wild stuff in radical Islam, where the religious law must be enforced, so religion and state are one. In China, it's more than nuance around a one party state, it is that the politics and the state are one, because Marxists believe that all social action is political action and so social action must sufficiently adhere to Marxist principles. It's just not realistic to enforce this at the lowest levels, so some version of CCP interests are imposed at the company level.
You can point to various laws, but it depends on the spirit of the law and how those laws are actually being implemented in practice. Next to Iran, China leads the charge globally in sociopathy around this particular issue, I'm sorry to say. So, no, you can't normalize it like China is just doing it, because the US is doing it. We're absolutely not doing it the way you are imagining.
The closest thing is when there is military-civil public/private fusion, which is for defense purposes in specific critical areas, but it's not about political compliance as much as it's about national security.
The CCP thinks the survival of the CCP itself is national security. In the US, if you got enough support you can make a new political party.
We do have scenarios where organizations that get a lot of public funding can be required to change some of their policies which can be close to political enforcement, but it is optional for organizations to receive public funding. They have to decide if they're committed to whatever their political thing is enough that they like it more than the money. It makes sense that if public funding is going towards anything that is considered political, it needs to be evaluated whether the state should be doing that since it risks a self-reinforcing cycle that can politically weaponize the state against itself into some kind of one party system.
I've never said the US is perfect, but it's very cheap to point at some random thing in the US that looks vaguely duck-like and say look, you taught us about ducks! It's especially weak when you're trying to defend the goodness of your country and think of the US as bad, but then you use the US as an example for why you're doing something? What China does is much closer to the political radicalism of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union than the US.
> I could literally sit down, go through every single piece of Chinese history for the last 20 years and recontextualise it for a US audience. The problem is largely that you dont believe in their legal system. And fair cop, just like the national security courts in the USA theres literally no oversight. So when they disappear someone in the government, and claim they were a traitor, you say that's bad. Fair enough. But thats just noise to me. Because I dont trust the US legal system either. The purges are sold internally as fighting dissent and corruption. If the US government took precisely the same action with precisely the same justification you would be clapping like a seal, and trying to convince others using your "dangerous free thinker" powers.
Of course when you've been immersed in the kool-aid of any given system you get used to it and start to rationalize things like "well, the world didn't end after this and it happens a lot, so I guess it's ok". Being desensitized to it is a risk.
The difference is that our justice system succeeds far more than it fails. Journalism can get a little warped, but when one journalistic outlet goes crazy and becomes useless there are others you can look to instead. In China, so many political things are considered national security that you don't have the right to even be accurately informed about political things occurring. Essentially, this is like if Democrats started jailing Republicans for basic vanilla conservatism, but then also jailed any journalists that reports on it in a way that was not aligned with the Democrat party line.
Look at what Venezuela, Cuba, Iran and Russia do with their political opponents. China is that with a little more sparkle at a much larger scale with extreme censorship. When you are raised in a system like that, your ability to even know what is true is degraded significantly since it has been curated in advance to be more favorable to the CCP.