We (the U.S) tolerate their disrespect for human rights because we also do not respect human rights, as demonstrated by our relationship with Saudi Arabia, our many horrible wars, etc. We also do not respect national sovereignty, as demonstrated by our covert wars in South America, our firebombing of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, and our occupation of the Middle East.
We do business with them because they are like us. Or at least, like our business people. They want to grow their power as our businesses do. Not all business people are like this, but we allow the influential businesses to support these actions and we as a people do not stop it.
I'm sorry but this statement is just absolutely and completely ridiculous. I don't know if you've either never been to The United States, or you've never left The United States, but the difference between the respect that we have for human rights, and the respect that much of the rest of the world has, is stark.
The U.S. is indeed by most metrics one of the freest societies on the planet in terms of the state repression imposed on the average citizen, certainly far better than China in this regard. At the same time, in foreign policy it behaves exactly the same way any other nation state does - pursuing its perceived interests without consideration for anything else other than objective constraints to its power. Since the U.S. is by far the most powerful nation state in the world, its list of foreign atrocities far exceeds that of anyone else since WW2. However, that's not any different from any other major power in world history and there's absolutely no reason to think China (or anyone else) would behave any better or worse given similar ability to pursue its interests unchecked.
The US has the biggest prison population in the world by a big margin, 655 per 100k people (El Salvador is in second place with 604/100k and China is at 118/100k). I'd call that state repression.
In other measures it does better, like the so-called democracy index, where it ranks #21 (flawed democracy), which is better than China at #139 (authoritarian). In the reporters without borders press freedom index it's at #45, with China at #176 (almost dead last, out of 180).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_incarcera...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index
I would argue that state repression is not only about direct interaction with police and other agents of the government, and that economic inequality and poverty is less direct, but just as real, relevant and serious form of oppression. If you buy into that premise, then the recent UN report is pretty damning.
http://undocs.org/A/HRC/38/33/ADD.1
Some quotes:
"About 40 million live in poverty, 18.5 million in extreme poverty, and 5.3 million live in Third World conditions of absolute poverty."
" Its citizens live shorter and sicker lives compared to those living in all other rich democracies, eradicable tropical diseases are increasingly prevalent, and it has the world’s highest incarceration rate, one of the lowest levels of voter registrations in among OECD countries and the highest obesity levels in the developed world."
"For almost five decades the overall policy response has been neglectful at best, but the policies pursued over the past year seem deliberately designed to remove basic protections from the poorest, punish those who are not in employment and make even basic health care into a privilege to be earned rather than a right of citizenship."
I'd say that compared to China it really is better, in most regards, but "by most metrics one of the freest societies on the planet" is a stretch, to say the least.
I would also note that even including all of the damning things you list, the U.S. on average falls behind most rich democracies in the world, but is still far ahead of most other states, except in the incarceration rate [1]. Rich democracies are an outlier.
[1] I'm not sure that's quite true any more if you count in all the Chinese internment camps and other non-disclosed facilities - the U.S. never had secret prisons at scale, other states do.
I think you're wrong about the incarceration rate though, by a lot. China has an official prison pop. of about 1.5 million, to have a rate close to what the US does it'd need to have 7.5 million [1] people in the internment camps, which AFAICT is way higher than anyone estimates (I couldn't really find any good estimates, but for scale the total population of Uyghurs in China is 11 - 15 million)
[1]
(def us-pop 325719178)
(def us-prison 2121600)
(def china-pop 1403500365)
(def china-prison 1649804)
(defn rate [prison population] (float (* 100000 (/ prison population))))
(rate us-prison us-pop) ;=> ~651
(rate china-prison china-pop) ;=> ~117
(rate (+ china-prison 7.5e6) china-pop) ;=> ~651
Note, however, that none of those speculations is in any way meant to excuse the incarceration rate of the U.S., which is an exceptionally outrageous state of affairs. It also goes to show that using incarceration as a tool of social engineering is by no means the sole province of totalitarian systems of governance.
Your speculations about China sound about right to me, but as a European looking in from the outside, any time someone talks about how much freer Americans are it scares the shit out of me. The US might be the domestically freest of the global superpowers, but that doesn't mean it's any good, it just means the bar is set _really_ low.
Individual Americans may respect human rights. Just like individual Chinese do as well. But when you challenge them as a nation, well, then the needs of the stong outweigh the needs of the weak.
And how many Kurds were killed by Saddam Hussein? How many Shias? I think the Iraq war was a terrible mistake but that doesn't mean that supporting it means you don't care about Iraqis.
We elected a government and enabled a system that led to this. How can we judge China as worse? More importantly why do these judgements fundamentally even matter?
The real question Americans should ask themselves is : what is our vision for the future? How can we regain our glory?
Anything else assumes authority without investment. A strategy that is destined for failure.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in...
Please go justify that and then say USA cares about sovereignty of nations!
So you took a poll, "do you give a rats @ss that 1 Million Iraqis were killed by USA" and most people didn't care? Let's tone it down, USA did not go there to kill a million people, it happened because of the war, and Saddam might have killed 2 mil if he was alive for Arab Spring. Not saying that Iraq war was justified but there's a huge difference.
Yes, even with the strawman wording you put forth, I suspect that > 50% would come down on the "don't care" side.
If you worded it in a way that was designed to tease out revealed preferences, like: "Have you considered the plight of Iraqis in the last year?" you would get even more dramatic results.
The war had bipartisan support and the leader that started it was re-elected in the ultimate poll, so I'd say the majority are fine with it.
If they had issues bigger than killing hundreds of thousands of people then...
And I'm saying this as an Australian, we weren't much better.
The United States has serious and growing problems around its global support for human rights. The domestic policies it exhibits mirror that; there are clearly long-term problems that are deeply worrying.
But support for human rights is not a binary state. The United States has the rule of law, freedom of speech and religion, a functioning judicial system, and an army of human rights specialists who operate freely. It supports many of these initiatives in other countries, both as a society and a government. The fact that the country does many awful things does not mean that other countries should have a free pass to implement arbitrary policies free of criticism.
No country in the world has a perfect record of protecting human rights, but that should not prevent them calling for change elsewhere. I hope deeply that the US fixes its problems soon, but that does not stop me from being aware that organ harvesting and political assassinations are also bad.
The US has some sordid history, but not organ harvesting last week sordid.
The immigration separations are timely, but have some due process with an intention reuniting families (ie, the design is not to separate families more than necessary) and also better than being murdered.
I'll bite, although I have a feeling I'm about to be screamed at for being an ignorant bigot for lacking this specific piece of knowledge: what on earth this comment referring to? The claim is that the present-day US is selling children in auctions who were taken from their parents by force? What?
USA has one of the highest incarceration rates due to the stupid war on drugs. It has enabled drug gangs - no less scary than ISIS yet ignored by our media and populace - to take over large swaths of central America. And so on.
All we care about is blocking refugees from getting in.
HOWEVER!!!! That is external.
Internally, the USA has some of the most respect for human rights and freedoms of any country.
This would never happen on any significant scale in the USA:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_harvesting_from_Falun_...
Up to the 20th century, the west had a surefire meta-strategy for dealing with world-conquering former empires like China. You bring them into modern industrial economics while exporting western culture. The massive changes would destabilize the old regime and turn it into another trading partner.
In 2018, media and economics have changed to the point where everything's now mediated by computers and networks. Things have changed so much, all we can be sure of is that meta-strategy no longer works in quite the same way.
These atrocities are being committed by a regime that has all but said that it intends to conquer the rest of the planet and export these atrocities as the standard operating procedure for the entire planet
You can say this for just about everyone on the world stage. Spain, France, Britain, and the US have all taken their turns as the lead player on that stage, and the quoted sentence could be applied to them all, just with different levels of severity for the atrocities. The long arc of history is really just about asymptotically reducing the level of atrocities to zero. The question of Chinese ascendancy is just a matter of when and how large the local spike in atrocity might be.
(EDIT: To clarify, the local spike in atrocity for Britain and the US were smaller than what came before, and the affect of their hegemony has been net positive.)
True, but you could argue that these countries had excuses. At the time of the worst crimes (colonialism, slavery, etc) there were no examples of benign, free trading partners, abiding by international law - all this had to be designed, philosophized, created - and the modern western countries did all this because they saw how bad those atrocities were. I'm not saying all western countries are benevolent or don't commit atrocities now, but certainly most try to uphold international laws and human rights and their populations have a very big democratic voice that is constantly fighting towards these ends, despite what political leaders and power elites want.
Compare that to China, which is not even attempting to abide by any of these standards - despite the fact that these laws, ideas, and rules have been around and well established in the entire rest of the world for at least the past 50 years.
At some point, you'd think the west would wake up, China is super nationalistic, powerful and has no regard for human rights.
Voters value bread and circuses above ethics or human rights of faraway people. In a democratic country, if a politician would implement impactful policies aimed to improve human rights elsewhere at the cost of local economic harm and inflation hitting their workers, then that politician would get voted out of office and these policies reversed - so they don't do that.
If some politician genuinely desire to help human rights elsewhere, then they'd still not implement such overt policies (since they'd get reversed and help no one) but implement subtle diplomatic pressure.
The same logic, by the way, explains the current situation with climate change.
It is not ethics however that is driving a wedge between the United States and China. It is China's efforts to solidify its power over the Asian Pacific seas (in)conveniently named the China Sea and their trade routes, their One Road foreign policy efforts, and China's efforts to remain outside of the international order while also participating in it (e.g. IP theft, etc).
They would if they could. Most other nations are nowhere near the level of sophistication of China on 'making stuff'. It's not just cheap labour, it's a myriad of other things related to it that China specializes in.
China is not trying to take over the world, they just want to be the 'superpower' in their sphere, and to be the centre of their Universe.
Which is fine in some ways, problematic in others.
The list is long.
You need tons of people with tons of little bits of specialization, tons of factories run by experienced people, tons of workers for those factories willing to put up with rubbish, you need all the support: capitol, financial systems, export sophistication etc..
Surely, any group of people well enough organized could build maybe one such city of a few million people in ten years, but that's small.
In the meantime, in India, they can't get the electricity grid to work. Factories? No way.
Which is why we see a lot of software outsourcing in India, factories in China.
For assembling Nike shoes or something, other parts of Asia might already start to make sense. But for real manufacturing of most things ... it's China for the foreseeable future.
Also...SK was for a long time a authoritarian American client state and being a neighbor of China and Japan was in no position to "dominate it's neighbours" even if it wanted to
A) Option that marginally (and in some cases significantly) increases personal convenience while incrementally undermining the long-term probability of western moral aspirations maturing to their full promise and forming the basis of a more human-centric global future.
or
B) Option that rejects the temptation of new gadgetry / marginal personal convenience improvements but that withholds some small amount of fuel from the growing moral conflagration. This option is increasingly associated with social circle friction.
This is perfectly exemplified, on a much less serious level than human organ harvesting and trade policy, by the Chrome vs. FireFox situation, or by the choice to use FaceBook.
There needs to be a realization that the current version of extreme economic policies governing large multi-national corporations like Google, FaceBook, Exxon, etc., are diametrically opposed to western moral aspirations w.r.t human rights, and are in fact fueling the demise of said aspirations. These corporations are not "American" or "Chinese" or "Other Nationality" in any way that matters for actual human beings, but exist as increasingly-autonomous global entities that are radically reshaping the geopolitical landscape and diverting increasing amounts of power to actors that have an open disdain for the human condition. People who oppose the current trends of inequality growth, corruption normalization, environmental exploitation, human rights abuses, and other deleterious effects of extreme capitalism don't seem to have an option other than to reject the consumerist culture / mindset that it's all built upon.
* It's hindsight to say China' embrace of authoritarianism, nationalism, and expansionism was inevitable. Even around ten years ago it was a much different place, with much more freedom of expression (you could find fascinating discussions of democracy by leading figures on Weibo, for example) [0] and a slow process of liberalization. And if it was an error of foresight at the time to assume that the then-current trend of liberalization would continue, it's an equal error to assume the trend of today will continue. By far the best outcome for the people of China, the region, and the world is for China to liberalize; a global contest would be very damaging and expensive; a war could destroy several civilizations, including the U.S. While it would be foolish to ignore current trends, it has proven equally foolish to accept them as an inevitable future and to let the bad guys dictate your values and the future.
* The people of China are not the government of China; it's difficult to oppose the latter without hurting the former. The people deserve freedom, human rights, food, shelter, and prosperity and the things that go with it. China's economic growth arguably has lifted more people from perilous levels of poverty than any event in human history, and they still have a ways to go. If the West didn't trade with China, that never would have happened.
* Of course, the West has profited immensely from China joining the global economy.
[0] China Digital Times (CDT) used to carry many of them, possibly still available in their history/archives. https://chinadigitaltimes.net/
And ten years before that, it was using deadly military force to subdue similar democratic thoughts in Tiananmen Square.
(Also, Tienanmen Square was in 1989.)
The fear of China is a reflection of white colonist mentality. When viewing the world they see it in terms of what they would do, not as what other cultures realistically would do.
I think the threat angle is questionable, even if China perfects altering human genetics to create a superior breed of humans, the theory of mutually assured destruction + our arsenal of intercontinental ballistic missiles with nuclear payloads + the concept of a deadman's switch is still pretty solid insurance against anything they can do on a macro level along with any other major world power like Russia.
Any war/history buffs out there care to chime in and change or reinforce my opinion on the topic with some concrete facts and data?
Altering human genetics might lead to a creation of radiation-resistant human. If such mutation gets to a significant percentage of country population, such country might actually welcome an unfolding MAD scenario. (Subject to radiation-resistant food and energy supplies etc)
I think it is ultimately possible - elephants have large bodies but less cancer, cockroaches posses high resistance to radiation, etc. Would this be called "human" is another question...
It's possible to oppose organ harvesting in China and actions by the US. But you have to do them independently (i.e. not whining about the US in a post about China) and specifically (i.e. "organ harvesting, here's the cite" vs. your rather generic complaint above).
I feel a lot of people have this perception of China as a Technologically powerful North Korea... Nothing can be further from the truth.
China is like an asian tiger... Japan, Singapore or Taiwan.. or maybe not exactly an asian tiger, but somewhere in-between North Korea and an Asian Tiger but leaning much more closer to an Asian Tiger than it does its' historical regime based roots.
You guys need to visit China to get a more realistic perspective. I recommend Shenzhen.
A dystopia doesn't have to be as all-permeating and starkly obvious as the one depicted in 1984 to be a dystopia.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/may/07/edward-snowden...
He is literally not allowed to denounce the government for breaking their own laws.
I agree with what Snowden did, and respect him for having the courage to do so, but I'm not sure if you're trying to demonise the US government or legitimise the Chinese one by claiming the prosecuting someone for publishing classified documents is equivalent to prosecuting someone for disagreeing with the ruling party.
China is pretty obviously building their empire. They, as a government, appear to have almost no regard whatsoever for human life. They, as a government, appear to have absolutely no regard whatsoever for national sovereignty. They, as a government, appear to have absolutely no regard for the environment.
It just seems completely inevitable to me that China eventually wants to conquer the world. Why is the west enriching them, and by proxy funding their research into war machines when it seems obvious that these things will eventually be used against us?
These acts are atrocities, no doubt. But these atrocities aren't being committed by some dictator in some small, isolated country. These atrocities are being committed by a regime that has all but said that it intends to conquer the rest of the planet and export these atrocities as the standard operating procedure for the entire planet, and which very probably WILL DO THIS if something doesn't occur to change the course.
People are upset about the "trade war" we are currently in, or about to be in, or were in, or whatever the pundit of the hour says. I can't say I agree that restricting trade with China, and encouraging the infrastructure being built there to be built in the US, or at the very least in a country that respects human rights instead, is a bad thing.