Comment by cthalupa

I can see the argument for Hong Kong. I don't agree, really, but I can understand it. Under the strictest of definitions, perhaps it isn't.

But Taiwan is very obviously a totally separate country no matter what fictions anyone employs. If you are trying to talk about the thin veneer of everyone going "Uh huh, sure, China, yep Taiwan is totally part of you, wink wink, nudge nudge" as somehow making China not imperialist when Taiwan basically lives under the perpetual threat of a Chinese military invasion and having their own democratic form of government overthrown and replaced with the CCP, then... I don't really know what to say.

I suppose we could argue about imperialism being more of an economic thing - in which case this all still holds up - China's investments in Africa are effectively the same playbook the US has run out in developing nations for years. The US learned it from prior imperialist nations but belts and roads is nearly a carbon copy of what the US has done in other places.

But let's look at what the original poster was actually talking about - saying that China is safe because they don't have a military industrial complex because they're not imperialist. The proper word to use, if we want to get down to the semantics of it all, would be expansionist - but it's still not true. China has the 2nd largest military industrial complex in the world, and the gap is shrinking every day between them and the US. And if you were to look at wartime capacity, where China's dual-use shipyards could be swapped to naval production instead of commercial, a huge portion of that gap disappears immediately.