...while at the same time US law seem to magically apply everywhere in the world. Extradition to the US is very common. Not to mention https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition

> while at the same time US law seem to magically apply everywhere in the world.

Like how non-USA financial institutions have to care about whether their clients could be considered USA citizens, just because USA law says so.

Or like USA export control laws apply to devices which were not manufactured in the USA, just because the device includes an USA-manufactured screw or something like that.

Pardoning was the wrong move, but are you honestly putting that upon the same level as over a million placed in concentration camps? The US is not perfect, but what, because of that they can't have legitimate points on human rights on what the CCP is doing?

Not that the point isn't legitimate, but it carries less weight because China can just say "we're following the US example".

https://www.businessinsider.com/leaked-chinese-papers-on-mus... : "Xi pushed the party to use the "organs of dictatorship" to move millions of the minority group, Uighur Muslims, into the camps in western China and cited the United States' war on terror following 9/11 for an example of how to limit civil liberties. "

> it carries less weight because China can just say "we're following the US example".

I agree that post 9/11 US foreign policy making has been disastrous and utterly corrosive to America's ability to hold the moral high ground. But surely we can differentiate here. Putting millions of Uhyger men into camps and forcing their wives to share beds with Han men is on a whole another level[1].

[1]: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/muslim-china-u...

The US's disastrous and inhumane foreign policy started long before 2001 (though 9/11 did make it worse). The Vietnam War (where the US routinely engaged in chemical warfare -- a war crime) immediately springs to mind but there are many other examples.

One might note the act you reference in your link has no real precedent in US history and is an anomaly by someone who has no concept of how the military works and issues orders to the military via twitter.

>the idea that US positioning against China is aimed at genuinely improving human rights and not just using them as rhetorical cover.

You must be saying this in jest, or you have been brainwashed. Without even touching on the interment camps, which are definitely worse than the US prison system; here is demonstrable evidence that the US cares more about global human rights than the Chinese.[1]

[1]https://www.hrw.org/report/2011/11/04/youll-be-fired-if-you-...

How many people get killed at the hands of the police in encounters in the US, versus the same in China. My guess is that at least on a per capita basis, the figure would be more in the US.

Also I do not subscribe to the view that Democracy is somehow morally superior to other forms of government. Anyone who has read Plutarch, can understand that figures like Pericles can manipulate the minds of the masses and rule as an authoritarian under the guise of being a democrat. The same playbook is being used for thousands of years with the same effect. See Erdogan in Turkey, I don't see him ever outsted from power democratically, aleast not in a long time.

Same reason products with the better advertisment sells better than the better product.

That link doesn't actually mention the US at all? It points to a single example involving Zambia and China, which is definitely bad. There are an awfully long list of those around the world.

That's what I mean - if you go looking for incidents where the Chinese are involved and build up a prosecution argument against them, that's a very different approach to trying to systematically and without favour deal with all human rights abuses of all scale by all parties. Which is a huge job.

I'm saying that China consistently does a worse job of handling human rights than the United States. The post WWII global economic order has been mostly on the US; recently China has started to push out into Africa, plundering their fishing stocks and practicing neo-colonialism. I'm looking for places where China is pushing into an existing economic order and noticing how humans rights standards generally go backwards.

> recently China has started to push out into Africa, plundering their fishing stocks and practicing neo-colonialism

Do you have any idea about the history of the United States in Africa? The overthrow and murder of the first elected President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the installation of an American-friendly dictator. Support for the coup that overthrew the first elected President of Ghana and replaced him with a military government. Opposition to Angolan independence from the Portuguese empire. Support for the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

And you're comparing this to what? Chinese companies overfishing in African coastal waters? You're really lacking a sense of perspective here.

The United States invaded Iraq and killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis on a thin pretext. It toppled the government of Libya, leading to years of turmoil and the return of literal slavery. It supported Sunni extremists in Syria that helped tear that country apart. It ran a global kidnapping and torture operation for years. It conducts drone assassinations around the world. When I hear Americans talking about the US standing for human rights around the world, I wonder where they've been living these past few decades.

The intervention in Libya was due to a security council resolution proposed by the UK and France. It was run as a joint NATO effort.

> It was run as a joint NATO effort.

All that says is that other “democratic” “human rights advocating” countries are also to blame.

I'm not saying that France out the UK have clean hands either, but there was critical US involvement. NATO went far beyond the UN mandate to protect civilians, however, becoming the de facto rebel air force.

NATO tried several times to assassinate Gaddafi, killing his family members instead. For example, one airstrike in Tripoli killed a son and three grandchildren of his.[1] Of course, they did eventually bomb his caravan, leaving him to be brutally murdered on the side of the road. None of this was authorized by the UN. Western special forces were also not authorized to operate in Libya, but they did anyways.

Anyways, years after this wonderful exercise in protecting civilians, the country is still in a state of civil war, torn between different warlords. People forget that as bad as Gaddafi was, Libya used to have the highest living standard in Africa. Now, it's a nightmare.

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-libya/libyas-gaddafi-surv...

Look, I'm didn't say that the US is a beacon of morality, what I'm saying is that China is significantly less moral than the US, and I gave a direct apples to apples example. Pointing out that the US participated in the Iraq war is not really on topic at all, because the US is the sole flag-bearer of free trade on the high seas in our global economic system--no one else has the navy to do it and nobody else has to maintain that machine. The US hasn't kidnapped and tortured any consulate employees recently, which China just did.

https://www.hongkongfp.com/2019/11/21/uk-govt-summons-china-...

Saying the US "participated in the Iraq war" is putting it rather euphemistically. The US government lied and engineered the Iraq War, which was an illegal war of aggression. It led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. ISIS probably would never have come into existence without the Iraq war.

> The US hasn't kidnapped and tortured any consulate employees recently, which China just did.

Perhaps not (though it does have a recent history of kidnapping and torturing people on a global scale), but the US is busy blasting away pine nut farmers in Afghanistan.[1]

1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-afghanistan-attack-drones...