On the other hand, the US isn't currently occupying, detaining, and requiring patriotic reeducation for an ethnic minority within its borders.
I feel like an "It's already happening, and this is what you get" appraisal cuts less favorably towards China than the US.
Let's just ignore that the US is still running torture black-sites to this day and droning people all over the planet often based on nothing more than metadata and questionable ML algorithms [0] because that's what "the US spying on the world" is mostly about: State-sponsored assassinations and abductions.
That's why the US doesn't exactly occupy a moral high-ground on these issues, the only reason many US Americans think they are is that they've bought into the "only protecting you from the next 9/11" narrative, which is exactly the same narrative the Chinese government is peddling to its own citizens to justify its own measures: "Fighting terrorists, keeping the country save".
A cynic could now try to measure the bad vs the worse, but the reality remains that both are committing crimes against humanity on a regular basis and both justify them in exactly the same ways.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/02/the-n...
The drone numbers are even less useful because two different US administrations [0] [1] went through the effort of redefining "enemy combatant" to pretty up the "collateral damage" by drones. That's why Pakistan alone actually tallies up to over 3.400 drone victims [2].
You then compare that with 1989 Tiananmen Square and Tibet, so it is only fair to also factor in 2003 Iraq because just like China hasn't admitted any wrongdoing in Tiananmen Square, the US has yet to admit that going into Iraq was wrong.
Which counts just as much regardless of the US "not annexing Iraq", it still was an illegal war of aggression wreaking havoc on a sovereign country, killing hundreds of thousands of people, displacing millions as refugees, with the US government employing tactics like torture and abducting family members to fight an insurgency [3], destabilizing the region to this day.
And that's only Iraq, which hasn't been the only "US terrorism interventions" we've had in these past 2 decades but only one out of many.
The fact that so many people are unaware/in denial about a lot of this, only shows how effective the US government has been in hiding and legitimizing its own crimes against humanity.
And even when international bodies, like the ICC, try to investigate: The US shuts it down by sabotaging [4] any efforts at investigation and flat out threatening involved countries with sanctions [5].
So if we really want to be "realists", we have to be real about all of it, and not just cherry-pick estimated numbers to tally them up against each other.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enemy_combatant#Change_of_mean...
[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...
[2] http://drones.pitchinteractive.com/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq_prison_abuse_scandals
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/mar/15/mike-pompeo-...
And if you want to include Iraq, then we should include Korea.
My point being, the last time the US murdered that many of its own citizens was April 6, 1865.
> My point being, the last time the US murdered that many of its own citizens was April 6, 1865.
I don't see how that's a point for anything, crimes against humanity are not defined by the citizenship of the victims.
It's also an extremely dishonest take: If my own government is oppressing me, I at least can have the hope of starting a "revolution" and overthrow said government to improve the situation.
When it's a foreign government doing it, and not even my countries own military was able to stop them, what are my options to change anything? Not many, maybe start an insurgency, but anything that would "take the fight" to the actual enemy, an external enemy, would be considered "international terrorism".
No they don't give a shit about that. The US cares about other nations spying on their businesses and commercial interests and losing dominance of leading network technology to a foreign country which would then be the leader of said technology and the US would fall further and further behind and completely lose dominance like Europe lost dominance to the US due to WWII.
The networking business would never recover from that. Huawei has shown China can lead in something, the US wants to kill that idea and wants China to assume the position of Japan which leads in none of the tech despite having a sizable way to do that in the 80s.
The best way to deal with it is to mirror what Google did with Android by forking it and setting up a group of 20,000 engineers to work on that fork and making that community driven and open source available to any company that wants to develop on the platform... so due to the privacy concerns that competing technology destroys Google's dominance on mobile... maybe even makes a dent against Apple's privacy play. While they do that they should also drop the Great Chinese Firewall. Fork Chrome. And adopt Capitalist democracy.