You might as well say the current government in the US is the "Same government that mowed down innocent college students at Kent State".

It's actually not the same government. Some parts of it are significantly better, some parts of it are significantly worse. Either way, it does the discussion a disservice to call it the same.

In effect the argument is being made that without any of the above successive governments have been complicit during or after the fact.

Unfortunately, they will only recognise and apologise after that generation is long gone, that is the reality of politics.

Yang Shangkun must have had one heck of an influence if he was able to dictate who would be president of the country 15 years after his death... Of course Yang was forced out of the party in 1993 (the last time he had any influence), but don't let history and facts get in your way.

Also China is still the censoring, authoritarian regime it was before. Look at their citizen scores, monitoring, threatening South Korea, Taiwan, us, Australia, etc

To your point, I'd say all 3 parties (D, R and CCP) have had slow and continuous ideological drift. All 3 are unrecognizable compared to 1989.

The views of the same party on a narrow subject in the same country are more similar to each other than can be captured by analogy to the full spectrum of ideology of a western first world democracy.

From my limited view, there's actually been a lot of movement on freedom in expression in China, and Xi has been pushing the pendulum back towards the less free side. Which is bad. It's silly to paint all of that as a single overarching 'china'.

The main problem in this thread is people engaging in whataboutism and obscurantism to signal sophistication, because they look at "is massacring civilians bad" and mistakenly think it's a trick question, and set about looking for oversimplifications to correct which they think are secretly attached to the question.

Just like aaron-lebo points out above, a dichotomy between hellish labor camps and flawed western democracies was never posed, yet somehow got corrected. Similarly, I don't think anybody in this thread ever suggested that the problems with the regime were the collective responsibility of every Chinese citizen from Shanghai to Kashgar. Yet those are the kinds of arguments offered in defense of Tiananmen in the name of signalling sophistication.

There aren't billions of politically involved Chinese but there ARE millions of party members, with their own agendas and political battles rolling all the way up. It's not 5 people in a smoky room, and it's definitely not the same 5 people as 30 years ago.

Still lots of morally reprehensible stuff that cannot be excused, and its a pity they rely on rewriting history and suppressing subversive thought to preserve the government’s legitimacy, but to assume that China is some kind of giant hellish labor camp, and that our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy are the only true answers to the world’s problems, is short sighted, blindly dogmatic and ignorant of the way the world works these days.

That dichotomy was never made. The answer isn't today's ineffective democracies, but it is much closer to those than it is to governments which kill their own citizens to maintain power.

It always reads like whataboutism to say "but what about their mistakes"? In the 1930s there were plenty of cheerleaders for the USSR who made just as much progress at great human cost. You're aware of the sins of the West because a free press broadcasts them. What is it that the Chinese government won't let the world know about?

And yet, t is always at the forefront of the subtext of any discussion of China- the communist regime that's so unlike our Western democracies because it's communist and we're democratic.

As to governments killing their own citizens- the US, the leader of the free world, is one of the few nations besides China that still regularly uses the death penalty. And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts).

It's impossible to make a comment about the politics of China, without implicitly comparing them to the politics of the West; and vice-versa.

The death penalty is administered within a legal framework that is designed (nominally at least) to be transparent and afford due process. The implementation is sometimes flawed to the point of absurdity, but the American people largely know this and are free to criticize and debate it without fear of punishment by the state simply for disagreeing. (EDIT: And, more to the point, Americans are increasingly using the power of their vote to abolish the death penalty.)

I hope you can see how the Chinese government's claim to the right to slaughter and imprison its citizens at will and in secret or the crime of expressing dissent is, um... different?

> "And they consider it perfectly legal to assassinate their own citizens without anything like a trial (as in remotely, with drones, when said citizens are involved in terrorist acts)."

Who's this "they" you speak of? Obama's extra-judicial killing af Anwar Al-Alawki, for example, is one of the great stains on his presidency in the eyes of a large portion of the voting public, and it was hotly contested within the government too. And again, Americans are free to criticize these actions without fear of government reprisal. I remember calling Obama's action cowardly and illegal here on HN a few years back, and the thought of being killed or imprisoned for this never occurred to me. Exactly how does this situation compare to that of China?

I'm sure China's system has some high-minded "nominal" goals too. Why should we give the US a pass for its practical outcomes while holding China to a higher standard?

Remember, for all that talk about how horrible China is, the US imprisons many times more people per-capita.

(I tend to agree with you that Chinese practical outcomes are worse in various intangible ways, but I'm not willing to write off US prison populations like that, it's a blemish and a stain and it's such a massive problem that people are unable to address it on any sort of a political level. Which is basically the same problem as in China, just with a different set of social strictures. In both cases it comes down to a basic sense of "shou ga nai" - nothing can be done.)

In contrast, as an American, I can lend out my copy of "The New Jim Crow" and rant and rave in public about how unjust the American justice system truly is, and never once fear punishment by my government. It's never once entered my mind.

As for Tiananmen, one needs to see the context. China had recently endured the cultural revolution and the leaders had a good understanding of the potential disasters of a revolution. In that context, if they believed that the ends justify the means and that millions would die if a new revolution happened, the leaders could rationalize their decisions.

I'm not saying it's not horrific. It is. But, it's the kind of decision that needs to be understood in it's historical context.

As for the actual mowing of bodies and the bulldozer's making a pie. I'm not sure if it's real or not. It does seem like the kind of rumors that circulate because they are particularly gruesome. What would be the point for the Chinese government to do that? I may be mistaken but, in my mind, the Chinese government at that time was nothing if not practical and pragmatic (in a horrifying way for sure), there would be no justifiable reasons for being this gruesome.

> lots of morally reprehensible stuff that cannot be excused.

Which is it?

I'm curious. What makes you think the Party's actions were anything but a selfish attempt to maintain control over society, like any other authoritarian government?

> our frankly ineffective and destructive forms of Western democracy

What do you mean by this, and what alternative do you propose?

As for alternatives, I have no good alternatives, but what I can say is that while people from the USA decry authoritarian rule as being 100% evil, it’s hard to ignore how efficiently it has been working in the Chinese case. In a developing country being inefficient at developing has real human consequences, prolonging disease, hunger, malnutrition, undereducation, and lack of opportunity for incredibly large numbers of people. So I don’t believe that opting for a maximally representative but likely significantly less efficient form of government is necessarily a good choice for all countries, which seems to be the subtext of many people who draw a hard line on the Chinese government’s misdeeds, and proceed to label it as uniformly detestable, without considering the potential human cost of its alternatives. As for whether installing a democratic government at that point in China’s history would have been successful or even possible at that time would have been a huge uncertainty, even with what we know today.

I hope I don't sound like a China apologist: the Chinese government has done a terrible crime, and it's a shame that not enough Chinese people are demanding justice, and sooner or later they will have to look back and recognize what happened, hopefully sooner rather than later.

However, packaging that as "the threat of China" is a self-serving narrative that will harm people. I guess you mean well, but in the end that justifies America interfering with other small countries and supporting their dictators, because, hey, otherwise China will be doing the same and at least "our guys" won't be as bad as "their guys". (Just don't look too closely at what our guys are doing.)

More personally, as a South Korean, America having such an opinion basically means my country is forced to "choose side", hurting our economy and destabilizing military balance in East Asia. The only benefactors are military complexes of China and the US.

China could make the the whole problem go away by withdrawing their support of Kim.

And remember that if it weren't for us, the entire peninsula would be "North Korea." Including your own home.

You're welcome.

What the heck are you talking about? South Korea has already chosen a side. Your country runs military exercises jointly with the USA and Japan.

Americans spilled blood and gave their lives to defend South Korea after North Korea (backed by China and Soviet Russia) invaded on 6/25/1950. The US sent hundreds of thousands of troops to defend South Korea, and currently has 30k troops stationed in South Korea. Our two countries have agreed that the USA would take military command if war were to break out.

There are extreme human rights abuses and health deficiencies on the north side of the 38th Parallel, but the south side has grown to be economically powerful and extremely prosperous despite being a fairly poor country at the outset of the war. Your country and mine maintain a free trade agreement, and have traded 100 billion dollars worth of goods this year.

I personally bought a Samsung phone and a Samsung TV, so I'm about $3k of that.

Don't forget who your friends are!

See, this is what I mean when I say I object to such reasoning. People are so bold, they're always willing to sacrifice other people's lives to defend freedom.

South Korea's forces had lost 70,000 men in five days before the USA came to your aid in 1950. In the fighting that ensued, 37,000 Americans perished to defend your country. Please consider that.

Alliances are double-edged swords. I'm curious, what would be your perspective if the U.S. decided that South Korea was no longer worth defending and pulled it's troops back to Guam and Okinawa?

You mean, what if the US decided that keeping an air force base within 1000 km of Beijing isn't worth the cost?

Well, it that case, it sucks, because our national defense budget will likely have to increase a lot. But an independent country cannot outsource its defense to others forever, so South Korea should have contingency plans for such a case, or at least I hope so.

As you said, alliance goes both ways. The military ties to the US did help us tremendously in the past. But the US is not stationing thousands of soldiers out of goodwill: they're doing it because South Korea is located at a really convenient position in America's game of global dominance. I think it's mutually beneficial (for now), but if America decides it isn't, well then that's it.

Hint: maybe we keep military bases in SK to defend South Korean, because over the past 67 years of our alliance, South Korea has become a fantastic trade partner and we want to ensure that such a mutually beneficial relationship continues far into the future.

But you can't sell prospect of a nuclear war against China, because people have iPhones made in China, so they know it's absurd: why would China want a nuclear war? A threat has to be believable to sell to people. So we talk about North Korea. Nobody in the US has bought anything from North Korea: they are a dark, evil, and mysterious people, and it's easy to believe they can be also suicidal.

(Yes, the North Korean regime is evil: they're so evil that they make China look like boy scouts. But they aren't suicidal.)

There are other reasons why going to war against China wouldn't be that advisable.

http://www.businessinsider.com/navy-chinese-microchips-weapo...

https://www.wired.com/2011/11/counterfeit-missile-defense/

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/fake-parts-in-hercules-aircr...

People are tempted to bury it in a larger narrative of global complexity, thinking that treating it like a trick question is evidence of sophistication. But what if it's not a trick question?

I'm curious how China currently views Sun Yat-sen's "Three Principles of the People"[0], one of which is Democracy. Does his philosophy attract any attention today?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Principles_of_the_People

/s

There is no need to abandon old principles when you can just use doublethink to make them mean whatever you want them to mean.

If taxation by a non-representative government isn't as much common sense as abolitionism, it's only because of a huge amount of propaganda. It is not even much fundamentally different from slavery.

Yes it is.

What is that large difference? Authoritarian states deal with their people basically as if they were their property. They dispose of their lives at will, they dictate what they think and what they work on, they take their labor at will.

They may not be traded on degrading markets, but that just make people valueless from the point of view of a dictatorship. And I do actually expect people are being mutilated by the Chinese government all the time, we just probably don't hear about it. Again, that what this kind of government normally does.

- China puts a freeze on burning coal, leaving millions of families shivering in the cold http://shanghaiist.com/2017/12/05/coal-ban.php

- China Blowing Major Bubbles In 2017 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenrapoza/2016/12/19/china-bubb...

- In locked-down Xinjiang, China is tracking kitchen knives with QR codes https://www.fastcompany.com/40510238/in-xinjiang-china-some-...

- Big data meets Big Brother as China moves to rate its citizens http://www.wired.co.uk/article/chinese-government-social-cre...

- China threatens U.S. Congress for crossing its ‘red line’ on Taiwan https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/josh-rogin/wp/2017/10/12...

- Joe Hockey’s stark warning to Australia over Chinese interference http://www.theaustralian.com.au/national-affairs/joe-hockeys...

- Chinese diplomat in U.S. threatens Taiwan with military attack https://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3316709

Love your arguments like this. How about the ban allows everyone to breath fresh air during winter instead of byproducts of coal burning? Omg, few families is going to be shivers. Many more will thank its government for that step. You are welcome to visit Beijing to experience constant smog yourself. I highly doubt you want your children to live in such environment.

Democracies are not immune to that, of course, but the effects are exacerbated when nobody dares to point out obvious flaws like that to avoid embarrassing the leadership.

They're certainly a threat in Hong Kong, where they have a degree of control and influence, but how and where else?

While they lay claim to Taiwan, what harm do you think they are going to cause to South Korea and why would they even think of something as insane as enabling North Korea to strike Tokyo or Los Angeles (or anywhere else) with nuclear weapons?

Although I think China needs to credit much of its success to western ideas, but it doesn't accept all of them, it takes what it needs and rejects the rest. If this holds, then other developing countries may start adopt the China model (though I don't think it would necessarily work for them), instead of the West's solution, which might signal a global scale retreat on a lot of things, like democracy/free speech/more censorship...you name it.

When a man with brains is on the top, big things do happen.

Now there is Xi, a semiliterate * who spent his youth as a pig rearer. Not a bright talent he is.

There are increasingly significant trade agreements and loans with Latin America. They are striking deals across Africa for oil and minerals, and have a permanent naval installation in Djibouti, and seem comfortable supporting antidemocratic regimes on the continent.

In the last week lightly veiled comments have been made in parliament over where National Party funding came from, with the implication being that China was behind it. It’s early in the piece but there is plenty enough here to drag this out for ages.

Chinese here. I could say, if our government proves capitalism can be very well integrated and become more productive in an authoritarianism society, then that is a really bad news for democracy.

On the other hand though, after watching many Fox News clips on Youtube, I don't think you guys are doing very well on democracy, especially the people in the US.

Democracy is much harder to maintain than authoritarianism. It's very easy to get hijacked, especially the world is full of liars now days.

I'm not saying you should abort democracy, instead, you guys should be grateful for what you have, and be careful don't lose it, because if you did, you probably won't get another one for free.

Fox News is populist media; populist media is a "feature" in practically every country. On the other hand, populist media on the "other side" exists without too much conflict here so far. There's also more sober sources of information too, for those that feel that both are pretty junky. Honestly, the fact that polar opposite populist mouthpieces can both exist is probably a better indicator of democracy than the fact that a single populist media outlet exists. If one had to ding our democracy at the moment, it's that high level government officials in the US are trying to discredit media sources more than in previous times. It's not censorship by any means yet, but it is something to watch (and, if one was a US citizen, seriously push back on).

China will be interesting to watch too. Although they've come a long way, they are still a middle income country by PPP. I can't think of any high income country of late (other than petro-dictatorships) that hasn't embraced some form of more democratic, more open model. Xi Jinping is going in the opposite direction.

The interesting question is whether his current concentration of power will satisfy, and truly keep the stability they seek, of all of the 1.4 billion people in China... especially at a time when China's middle class is rising. I also wonder whether the current control tightening of information, and a reluctance (so far) to ease off the heavy handiness of government involvement in business, will harm innovation in China in the long run. We'll see -- not being Chinese, I obviously don't know enough to wonder anything other than some vague "armchair thoughts".

Yale put Mao Zedong into power. Every US ambassador to China after that has been a member of Skull and Bones.

You are correct that maintaining power in a Democracy is more difficult. That is why the secret society wants to make China the model for a new world government. The US must be destroyed for this to happen.

And I don't think it's actually an effective (or humane) was to try to solve problems like this to begin with.

Why's it worse in this case?

Drop the condescension here.

I doubt this number. And let's not forget that they let them protesting for some time. An highly unusual event in China. Problems occurred when protests did not stop.

"threatens democracy and freedom worldwide." China is not totally undemocratic and I doubt that democracy is necessarily the best solution at all times and for all states.

"This psychopath will eventually cause harm to a few countries (Taiwan, South Korea)"

South Korea?

On the other hand I am sure the people in Syria, Libya and Iraq were happy about the US bombings. Remember "highway of death" in Iraq?

"when said and done, maybe enable North Korea to strike a few nuclear missiles into Los Angeles or Tokyo, who knows."

North Korea is a buffer sate for both, China and Russia. China has NO interest in a war in North Korea.

By the way, North Korea. The Soviet Union fought an existential war against Germany and lost 10% of their population. This war DEFINED the Soviet Union. In Europe the second world war was basically a Soviet-German war (9 out of 10 German soldiers that died, died on the Eastern Frontier).

This being said, this is NOTHING compared to the war that North Korea fought: https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2017/12/11/state-fear...

Yes, North Koreans are paranoid. They may have reasons to be.

You can't directly implant process X from culture A to culture B. The checks and balances and social norms between different cultures are different. You can implant an industrial process, if you educate a workforce, i.e. transform culture B to A onsite. Changing the culture of an entire civilization is considerably more difficult.

That's not to say I don't like democracy or markets. But a country does not become a western democracy by having an election an privatizing everything.

Labeling china as bad guys trivializes several aspects of differences between cultures. I'm not sure there are any good guys in global politics, so I'm not sure how the labels good or bad should be applied.

Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan have a similar culture yet became liberal democracies.

That 10,000 number is contested, you do the truth a disservice by assuming it to be true. We hold ourselves to higher standards here. Other sources assert the figure was in the hundreds, still a lot but two orders of magnitude different.

The US destroyed literally every single town. A State Department official in charge of Far Eastern affairs during the Korean War, would admit that the United States bombed “every brick that was standing on top of another, everything that moved.” American pilots, he noted, “were just bombing the heck out of North Korea.” For a point of comparison, the Nazis exterminated 20 percent of Poland’s pre-World War II population and the Khmer Rouge killed ~21% of Cambodia's population during Pol Pots reign of terror.

Western media fails to ever mention this grievance when trying to give a reason for the state of NK's behavior, instead painting a picture of a zany regime that operates without rhyme or reason. For them, it is still the 1950s … and the conflict with South Korea and the United States is still going on. People in the North feel backed into a corner and threatened and have not forgotten the devastation.

That's just one example. I could substitute in the US's use of Agent Orange in Vietnam and Cambodia (who we were not at war with), the 1953 coup in Iran that deposed a democratically elected leader, the 1973 coup in Chile that put Pinochet in power, or the shooting down Iran Air Flight 655.

To be clear, I'm not excusing China's behavior at all. I think it's sad that Americans forget the atrocities it committed. I don't think there can be a peaceful way forward if we are on a high horse, believing that we possess some moral superiority. Although we are correct to criticize the Burmese treatment of their minority Rohingya, the US is still a country that had race riots in the 21st century and a violent Neo Nazi rally in 2017.

P.S.

The US is the unchallenged global leader at hiding messaging behind marketing, propaganda, consumerism and strong arming other countries, and we are ruled by a powerful group of multi-national corporations.

"The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, and our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of…. It is they who pull the wires that control the public mind."

-Edward Bernays (often considered the father of PR), from his seminal work, Propaganda.

Bernays’ publicity campaigns were the stuff of legend. To overcome “sales resistance” to cigarette smoking among women, Bernays staged a demonstration at the 1929 Easter parade, having fashionable young women flaunt their “torches of freedom.”

He promoted Lucky Strikes by convincing women that the forest green hue of the cigarette pack was among the most fashionable of colors. The success of this effort was manifested in innumerable window displays and fashion shows. And yes, he was aware of some of the early studies linking smoking to cancer.

To say that the wholesale slaughter of protesters was necessary to deliver market reform is simply absurd.

A civil war is very different than a massacre of innocent protesters.

all the progress China's made today is because the communist government took their foot off of the necks of the common citizens, and let the citizens work tears and sweats.

Stop using what-ifs to justify monstrocities.

EDIT: to be clear, nobody is saying what they did is moral. But what I am saying is that the results of such an uprising was not guaranteed to be peaceful, orderly, nor lead to better outcomes; and furthermore you can make the argument that the success of modern Chinese governance has been one of the greatest triumphs of poverty alleviation and human development in all of human history. So to claim with such conviction that that branch of history would be the better option smacks of ignorance to me.

Cases in point: the "Arab Spring" (culminating in the Syrian Easter, if I may be so bold); regime change in Libya; regime change in Afghanistan; regime chnge in Iraq; and so on.

This wonderfully altruistic feeling we have, that we want others to enjoy democracy like we do, is always exploited to invade countries "in need of democratic reform". So often, indeed, that I at least wonder if that's the whole point to cultivate this feeling in the hearts and minds of our people.

It's not nearly as cut and dried as you'd make it. How many Chinese deaths would be justified for such a transition, in your opinion?

The truth about who really controls China is obscured.

Just a century ago, China was a backwater nation that got conquered by Great Britain. Within 60-80 years, they got nukes and became a super-power. Within 30 years, every nation sold out to China by giving them all the manufacturing technology. Bill Clinton sold them nuclear secrets. Israel regularly funnels intelligence and technological secrets to China.

What do you think is going on? Does anyone think the Brits who worked very hard to rule the world 200 years ago and had an advanced intelligence network just gave up and walked away? I don't.