Comment by vlovich123
1 month ago
> They’ve never interfered in my politics or started any wars
But they have. I dont know what specific country you are referring to but China has interfered with US elections as well as Canada, Taiwan, and Australia in addition to many many others.
They’ve annexed Tibet (1950), fought India (1962) and Vietnam (1979) among others and more recently in 2020 a deadly skirmish with India. They’ve generally shifted their focus to cyber military actions but you’d have to be pretty naive they won’t start to exercise military control over Taiwan when/if they get a chance.
Now compare that to what the USA did in the same time frame. Pay special attention to people killed (either directly, or indirectly) outside of their own borders. Who should you be worried about?
Two evils just means there are two evils. We don't have to value one more than the other.
Wrongs don't negate each other.
If you have the choice between AI models created by one evil or the other, it does feel relevant which you consider to be the lesser evil
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> We don't have to value one more than the other.
Yes we do. We should evaluate threats and choose our allies carefully.
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Correct, but people are not wrong in being more concerned about the evil biting than the one keeping it chill.
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Nobody said they negate each other. The comment being discussed is fearmongering about China and is very relaxed about the USA. All we're saying is you should be either afraid of both or relaxed about both. China is not worse than the US.
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Sadly, we live in a decidedly imperfect world. I don't think there is a single completely good person on the planet, let alone a country.
It is perfectly fine to say that a person who killed one person is bad but not as bad as the one who killed thousands.
I eagerly await for the USA citizens to downvote this in about 5 hours.
> Who should you be worried about?
For Americans the answer is obvious since they are biased in this.
For everybody else, your question is valid.
Dont pretend americans dont need to be afraid of american government. look at the state of the place. A lot of them arent exactly thrilled with their current environment, job market, education, prisonsystem, gun laws, food industry, healthcare etc. etc.
the question is valid for anyone who cares for more than their own ass
I'm an American, but I do not think the American government being strong helps me or my fellow Americans. The less America can project its cultural and military power on the rest of the world, the better.
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Considering who has been their president for 2 terms, and most likely a third one, I really wonder.
All my life I heard American boasting their constitutions but now it's as worthy of my toilet papers.
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The American government has caused the death of a lot more Americans than China has.
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For a concrete example, consider e.g. Operation Condor which displaced my own family
> Operation Condor (Spanish: Operación Cóndor; Portuguese: Operação Condor) was a campaign of political repression by the right-wing dictatorships of the Southern Cone of South America, involving intelligence operations, coups, and assassinations of left-wing sympathizers in South America. Operation Condor formally existed from 1975 to 1983. Condor was formally created in November 1975, when Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's spy chief, Manuel Contreras, invited 50 intelligence officers from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay to the Army War Academy in Santiago, Chile. The operation was backed by the United States, which financed the covert operations. France is alleged to have collaborated but has denied involvement. The operation ended with the fall of the Argentine junta in 1983.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor
Both of them.
Whataboutism isn’t a useful game. The claim was that they don’t interfere with politics of external countries. They do.
The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now. Believing it’ll stay there is naive.
Playing the moral superiority game is uninteresting in either direction. Games of power inherently are devoid of morality.
Ok, let's follow your rules then. If we remove morality, we are left with what? Pure numbers? If you want to be technically correct China foreign interventions are > 0, indeed. But the scale of US actions is, I would dare to say, at least one magnitude bigger. An empire should be judged for how they treat their own citizens, their allies and their enemies. And if we do that, maybe China and the US are not so different.
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I'd like you to familiarise yourself with a legal and societal principle we use in civil law countries:
> de minimis non curat praetor
Which basically means judges are not interested in minor disputes. When you add the USA to the mix, China's actions pale in comparison to the point of being negligible, no point in discussing them given the scale of USA's warmongering, overseas and local crimes. "They never interfered in [...]" is an exaggeration which shows the lack of importance of China's crimes when compared to the USA's, that's all.
The "whataboutism" here isn't a deflection strategy, it shows the hypocrisy and correctly minimises the scale of China's actions in comparison to the hypocrites'.
Whataboutism is a very useful game to reveal whether people are being honest or not.
If someone is vocally complaining about country A doing some oppressive activity, while ignoring country B doing 100x the same activity, the comparison does not forgive or excuse country A, or make them right or admirable.
But it does allow us to conclude that the person complaining is biased. Either they don't care about the oppressive activity and want to attack country A for some other reason. Or they have a particular fondness for country B and will never accept that it does wrong. Or some variation on these.
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>The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now.
Come on, are you seriously equating hacking to literally bombing and killing people? That's just arguing in very bad faith.
Calling hacking "warfare" is just intellectually dishonest, if not downright disgusting toward the actual victims of American wars.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
how is this not a non sequitur in your head. genuine question.
Whataboutism is juvenile.
This is not whataboutism.
“China is evil.”
—- “But look at the United States! What about that?”
Is this not just whataboutism? It never adds much to the discussion.
It would be whataboutism if it was a random Joe saying "China is evil" not literally a company that 1) is in the US 2) has a strong influence in the government and legislations affecting them and their competition.
In this case it's just pointing out the propaganda and the contradiction.
The Indian wars were border skirmishes at most. Literally 2,000 soldiers dead on both sides combined by official count. Very few civilian casualties.
The 2020 skirmish was way smaller with single digit casualties. Again, almost no civilian casualties because it's a largely empty region in the first place
You really can't compare this to the kind of wars America has started. Casualties - both civilian and military - stood in the hundreds of thousands
And then we haven't included Bibi-enabling, allowing a genocide to take place and then suggesting it is a real estate opportunity.
I mean most of Chinese "wars" have been border issues. Most of these border issues themselves stem from badly drawn borders post colonial withdrawal. These are understandable, if not justifiable - countries tug at each other to figure out where their territories start/end. A hostile neighbor at your borders is a legitimate national threat
America's wars have been in countries so far away that they could've never posed any threat whatsoever to America as a nation.
Really not the same thing
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If you're making a case of this vs what the US has interfered with, it simply does not stack up. Of course it's naive to think they won't start interfering like the US once they gain the leverage, but to a neutral party it likely doesn't matter which of these two ends up as the superpower on the global stage.
One, as bad as it is, has its biggest critics live and speak out freely. The other silences, imprisons or kills them.
With the butchering of the Correspondent's Dinner last week, it doesn't seem like things will be the way they were.
Something which Trump wants to change. Trump has already done a lot of silence critical media and he wants to do more.
Tibet was part of China since the Quing dynasty in the 17th century, it briefly declared independence during the chaos of the Chinese civil wars, but it was never recognised.
Vietnam is usually recognised as a low point in Chinese history.
There's been an ongoing border dispute between China and India for over 100 years, thanks to some questionable line drawing by the British.
Also, referring to the parent comment, of these only the border skirmish with India was within my lifetime.
in contrast this is USA's main job is to Interfere in any country it can in favor of its own goals. not related to what the people of that state really want.
north Americans must stay silent about interfering in other states internal issues.
No new wars in 47 years is a pretty good run vs other major powers.
Lets ask xinjang?
Repression of their own citizens is another subject. It is of course highly problematic and should be condemned as much as possible, but in the same way that if the US decided to repress mormons violently, it remains internal affairs and not an imperialistic threat to the countries around them.
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Let's ask black people, minorities and foreigns with the wrong skin color in the US?
What about women too ? Especially in red states.
I imagine they are better off and more developed than any of the Muslim regions the US has bombed the ever living crap of continuously over the past 50 years...
So I don't support the re-education camps that happened in Xinjiang. Exactly what happened here is still a bit of an unknown because unfortunately there's a ton of misinformation. Whatever did happen, you can go see yourself. It's not a closed region. There are a ton of Youtube videos of people going.
But I hate this talking point for one primary reason: almost nobody who brings it up actually cares about the Uyghurs. It's just a talkijng point.
How do I know this? Because of Palestine. If Benjamin Netanyahu turned around tomorrow and treated Palestinians as Uyghurs were and are treated and developed the region like China does today then he would win the Nobel Peace Prize and Palestinians would be unquestionably better off. It wouldn't be sufficient mind you.
Israel's crimes in Palestine are America's crimes because Israel could not exist without the economic and military support of the US, political cover in the UN and international community and the political will of Us domestically. It would collapse tomorrow if the US withdraw support.
So I don't want to hear a thing from China hawks and skeptics about Xinjiang unless they're louder what Israel is doing to the region.
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Its called a cold war.
What people don't know is that China's "war" against Vietnam in 1979 was actually a pledge of allegiance to the United States, a way of demonstrating its stance.
This event was followed by the longest honeymoon period in Sino-US relations, which eventually lead to China's rise.
"But Tibet!!!" has to be the most intellectually lazy pro-American imperialism argument, particularly when you consider the US history of regime change [1]. Heck, this unwinnable war we're fighting in Iran has a direct through line to not one but two such incidents, specifically the coup in 1953 and US involvement in the Islamic Revolution in 1979 (ie making sure the fundamentalists won instead of the communists). And weirdly a significant number of these puppets end up turning into enemies and far worse problems (eg Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden).
Tibet specifically is funny because one of the things China did was end slavery in Tibet [2]. A large percentage of the population were "serfs" but that was a generous translation because these "serfs" could be traded. You know, like property. Like slaves.
And Vietnam? They had a small border dispute. What did the US do to Vietnam? And Cambodia? And Laos?
But the funniest claim of all here is election interference. The foreign interference in US elections conversation begins and ends with Israel with an honorable mention to Russia for running some Facebook ads. Just last night we had a debate in the Democratic primary for Senate in Michigan, a race that AIPAC proxies (eg UDP) have spent upwards of $60 million. On a primary.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibet_serfdom_controversy
Did the US annex Vietnam or Iran?
There's a qualitative difference between interference and outright annexation, with borders redrawn and cultures violently assimilated.
They have colonies and generally aspire to become basically the old british empire as a longterm strategy? At least thats what they push with that "century of humiliation" comeback strategy internally..
Did anything else happen in Vietnam in the 70s?
That is nothing compared to the us
> China has interfered with US elections
Wow, that newest of Trump's distraction talking points made it surprisingly quickly to the uncontended (?) and commonly accepted facts in HN conversations.
You’re misinformed. The Biden administration in 2020 declassified that Beijing has prepared to latch influence campaigns in 2020 but backed off. December 2023 a report was released that they had changed track and engaged in influence operations during the 2022 midterms. Biden’s administration also warned about influence operations in the 2024 election cycle. The Biden DOJ unsealed multiple indictments against Chinese intelligence officers, state-backed hackers (such as APT41), and illegal Ministry of State Security agents acting inside the U.S.
You’re very misinformed if you think Trump’s latest blathering are completely wrong. I generally don’t pay attention to him so I don’t know exactly how he lied or exaggerated but I’m sure he did. It doesn’t negate the real and active influence operations China is engaged in
You’re very misinformed if you think democrats and republicans arent playing the “election influence fiddle” in exactly the same way; legitimising the elections they won, casting doubt on those they lost, all while achieving the main goal of making sure the population doesnt forget who their so called enemies are.
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Lots of assumptions about what I think. I pointed out that Trump put the topic on the agenda a few days ago and now it comes up in HN comments. No more, no less. Whether it has merit is a different question. Point is that the reach of him setting topics goes far which is hard to deny.
I'm surprised to see that this hasn't received enough downvotes to be grayed out. It seems those who can downvote on HN mostly believe this BS
> China has interfered with US elections
Wow. I bet we'll soon be reading on HN that Biden stole the elections back in 2020.
No one who believed it definitely was has changed their mind, they've just at most gotten quiet about it.
No one who believed it definitely was not has changed their mind, they've just at most gotten quiet about it.
No one who believed it could have been but that the claim has not been proven have changed our minds, we've just decided that there's no way to know what actually happened.
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Same as killing Palestinian and Yemeni kids if some westerner need a transplant, I guess ?
You think the USA does that?
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At this point with how volatile US is I'd rather have China control Taiwan than US.
And this comment isn't about putting any good light on China. Lately US acts like they want to compensate for Russia fucking up less things around the world