Comment by threethirtytwo

Your description of China as authoritarian and repressive is largely accurate, but the conclusion you draw from it is far too binary and ignores major parts of reality on both sides.

China’s system has produced outcomes the US cannot come close to matching. In a few decades it lifted hundreds of millions of people out of extreme poverty. It built nationwide high speed rail, dense urban transit, modern housing, and large scale infrastructure at a speed the US has not achieved since the mid 20th century. Many Chinese cities are cleaner, more connected, and more functional than American ones. Long term planning, industrial policy, and state coordination have delivered tangible improvements in daily life for a huge share of the population. Those are not propaganda achievements. They are measurable.

China’s downsides are also real. Political dissent is not protected. Surveillance is pervasive. Ethnic repression, especially in Xinjiang, is severe. There is no internal mechanism to safely challenge the regime when it abuses power. Prosperity is conditional on alignment. When the state decides someone or some group is a problem, there is no lawful way to resist.

Now look honestly at the US. The US has political freedoms China does not. Speech, courts, elections, civil society, and the ability to oppose the state without being erased are real advantages. That matters enormously. But the US also has a long record of extreme violence and moral failure. It slaughtered millions abroad in wars like Vietnam and Iraq, often based on lies. It overthrew governments, backed death squads, enforced sanctions that killed civilians, and built a mass incarceration system that destroyed entire communities. At home, it tolerates deep inequality, decaying infrastructure, and political paralysis. It cannot build basic transit or housing at scale, and millions live worse materially than citizens of far poorer countries.

So if the standard is “this regime has blood on its hands,” then the US fails that test as well. If the standard is “this regime produces good outcomes for its people,” China clearly succeeds in ways the US does not. If the standard is “this regime allows its citizens to challenge power and correct abuse,” the US is better.

That is the real comparison. Different systems optimize for different things and fail in different ways. One is not a moral fairy tale and the other is not a cartoon villain.

That’s why “buying anything from China is supporting evil” is not a serious ethical framework. Global trade does not map cleanly onto endorsement, and the same logic would implicate participation in much of the modern world, including the US led order that produced enormous suffering of its own. A coherent position is to argue for strategic decoupling or limits on state coupled firms. A black and white call for regime destruction or moral purity ignores both China’s real achievements and the US’s very real crimes.

Once you include the full ledger, the issue is not good versus evil. It’s tradeoffs between flawed systems, not a simple moral referendum.