They may have made missteps along the way, but if Flint, Michigan or Puerto Rico were in China, they'd both be fixed by now... Though hypotheticals are unhelpful, I know.
> suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country
Bashing Foxconn (a Taiwanese company) is often done in the same vein as China-bashing. Even before the suicide nets, the suicide rates were lower than the population at large. It's just that when you have a large enough population working at the same company, any number seems like a lot. Even without accounting for the suicide clustering effect, the rate was lower than similar-age populations at universities. After the nets went up, the suicide rate became almost negligible, similar to the prevention methods installed at the Golden Gate bridge.
> Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power.
Until someone fear-mongers you into a plausible enemy. And then you're screwed. Prepare for another century of bloodletting? (Shudders.)
> How does China measure up to that? > ignore any progress in human rights
A lot of the progress simply doesn't get reported in the West because it's not China-bashing enough to get eyeballs. There is this popular perception that freedom of assembly doesn't exist or that all protests get cracked down on. In recent memory, there was a strike of factory workers in Beijing and Shanghai, and it resulted in better working conditions and a higher minimum wage. There's lots of progress, but we just don't hear about it here. You should have seen the state of human rights during my grandparents' time when the KMT (the political party that self-exiled to Taiwan and was the official China internationally for a generation) was in charge.
I'm glad we live in modern times and not those times.
Well anything with "disruption" in the name certainly will be assumed to follow business practices similar to Uber - they (and AirBnB) poisoned the well pretty much with their blatant disregard for any kind of law. For the other part, I fully agree with you - and hell there should be way more discussions on drone strikes.
> China is recovering from generations of being colonized, being doped-up-by-drug-cartels-with-a-navy, acts of genocide by a colonizing neighbor, forced to cough up money (like Haiti did) due to losing wars, violent revolution, and is only in my lifetime lifting almost 1.3B out of extreme poverty. My own grandfather was sold into indentured servitude to support his parents' opium habit. I have a grandmother who ran away from home because her (single) mom could only afford education for one of her two children, so she prioritized the boy. I am glad that China is no longer like that, that it's a legit modern (or getting there) nation, and no amount of spin on how that's 'bad' for the West for China to 'catch up' can change that.
I agree that China has done massive leaps in economic terms - but not so on the human-rights part... and that's where much of the progress that has been made actually comes from: debts in terms of ecology disasters and debts in human rights (as shown e.g. by the suicide sprees routinely making headlines. Suicide prevention nets, I haven't ever heard about something like that in any other country).
> China has a historical tendency to under-invest in the military and over-invest in consumer production / quality-of-life infrastructure. This is literally the opposite of the colonizing powers.
Because today you don't need a massive army to be a formidable power. China has learned there from the Soviet Union which was dragged into bankruptcy by trying to keep up with the US in military terms... today all you need is economic power. China (and to a certain extent the Arabian countries) have total leverage over the West, given the dependence of Western civilizations on cheap oil and China as a production house.
> Relevant question: which countries, during their Industrial Revolution, had universal suffrage? What were their international politics like during their Industrial Revolution?
None for #1, and "warmongering" is a bit of an understatement for #2.
> How does China measure up to that?
On this part: very well indeed. What angers me is that the Chinese leadership does not have a tiny dent of respect for human rights (e.g. Tibet, but especially their desire to be a state in total control over their citizenry). Today's China simply has different focus on where they want to ignore any progress in human rights.