For things like this there isn't a "the U.S." there's groups of people, interest groups, political economy, political will, etc. If China were rapidly liberalizing and didn't have stains on their reputation like the HK protest lockdowns, minority subjugation, and horrible prison conditions it would be a lot harder to push any of these changes through. As it stands, democrats and republicans are both turning hawkish on China and the business interests that used to dominate have started to turn sour too.

When I say "the U.S.", I mean the current admin and associated groups.

It is fairly evident that the U.S. is worried about China putting it in a position where it's not as easy/effective to go around the world, exploit foreign natural resources under false pretenses and sanction "non-compliant" nations to the brink.

It has absolutely 0 to do with human rights and all to do with economic power.

As for Chinese domestic human rights, the thing is doing coups etc. as was done so many times in i.e. the Middle East and Latin America won't lead to a better outcome because a coup is a forceful, violent and sudden, unnatural event that requires forces usually as bad if not worse than the current regime to pull off and denies the chance for long-term institutions to develop that adopt naturally by increasing human rights, however slowly.

It's the same problem with introducing modern economic theory, manufacturing, technology to a nation that did not had that trickle in at least somewhat continually over a period of time. It's a shock to the system in a way that rarely leads to better long-term outcomes.

> As for Chinese domestic human rights, the thing is doing coups etc. as was done so many times in i.e. the Middle East and Latin America won't lead to a better outcome because a coup is a forceful, violent and sudden, unnatural event

There is a political theory that any transition from a repressive to an open society involves going through a risky zone of instability:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_J_Curve_(book)

Now if you consider that this involves a country of 1.5B people, and take into account past experience with radical political changes (e.g. the Cultural Revolution), it seems that even for the most enlightened political leadership, both domestic and foreign, there may not be any easy answers how to proceed.

But is it really? Were the people complaining about the war in Yemen or the atrocities of Saudi Arabia or the horrors of the Iraq War able to meaningfully change anything?

Or is it the case that the only time that human rights actually enact change is when there is an underlying material interest, making them little more than a veneer?

Well yeah, of course. Pretty much every US city is buried in homeless populations because human decency is off the table if there isn't a profit motive behind it.

You can look at the glass is half full view of this, though - thanks to selfish interests an evil regime is being cut off from market access to spy on people around the world. Its of mutual benefit to the capitalists that saw this happen and the people whom China would have invaded the privacy of.

Of course that begs the question what Oppo, Xiaomi, etc are still doing in US markets... just because they are using international SoCs doesn't mean their assembly in China is trustworthy. But if you start asking those questions you start wondering about all the phones assembled in China by external companies like Apple or all the chips added to Samsung phones sourced from China, etc.

The question for me is twofold.

First, will isolating China from the US and it's client states actually do anything to make the CCP act in a way that will respect human rights more? I think it is pretty clear that won't be the case.

Second of all, is the entity that stands to benefit actually going to be better for human rights? In this case it pretty much is a zero-sum game. This is a bit more debatable, but I don't think that if the US won this Cold War against China the situation for human rights in the world will become any better.

Because of that, I can't get behind it, at all.

The answers to both questions is no. Trying to isolate China will only make the lives of Chinese people worse and extinguish any hope of democracy in the medium term. But the US is terribly afraid of losing its grip on power, so it has to be.

Second, the country that is now invading the privacy everywhere in the world (anyone forgot Snowden?) and raging wars without end in sight is the country pretending to be for democracy. This only tells me that the only greatness we still have in the West is the ability to spread propaganda. Somehow, people can be easily convinced that all this is for the greater good.

> I don't think that if the US won this Cold War against China the situation for human rights in the world will become any better.

That's true, but you need to contrast it with the other outcome - if China wins, human rights everywhere are very likely to become much worse.

That itself is a really good reason to support the US / West.

We are already in pretty bad shape. I particularly don't think this new "Cold War" will have any winer, ever, other than the ones making money from it. Good luck supporting these crimes.

There’s a value in quantity. Show me mass genocide happening in any of those other human rights violation hotspots.

Great countries were built on the backs of subjugated minorities and horrible prison conditions. By great countries I mean the US.

> If China were rapidly liberalizing

By any measurements one can imagine, this was true since 1970s: China were rapidly liberalizing.

In 1970s Chinese cannot choose what they wear each day. That's how authoritarian it was.

Except US gov responses to cripple Huawei predates the liberalization narrative. China is the largest purchaser of western semi products, private industry in this sector absolutely wants to continue sales. Hence US was forced to implement entity list, twice, to starve Huawei of components. Prior, US has been unilaterally crippling Chinese semi efforts via CFIUS and other instruments before HK/XJ, since MadeInChina2025 was announced. Human rights is just a convenient smoke screen. These moves are particularly desperate since it demonstrates that US is willing to coerce private industries for it's foreign policy goals, an accusation levied at CCP, which CCP hasn't actually done.

Exactly. The human rights narrative is the clearest smokescreen ever used. The US was working just fine with China until 5 years ago, when they decided to enter the same markets (technology). China may not be the freest country in the world but it is way better than it was 20 years ago. Moreover, I don't remember the US trying to put ANY sanctions on Saudi Arabia for all its recent history of human rights violations.

Can you name a nation that does not care about their own interests? US or not, replace it with France or Brazil or India.

It’s not just US, - Japan, EU, SK, APEC, India, Australia, NZ, everyone is piling up on the CCP’s regime that it has built up by abusing its own citizens, iron grip over the society, surveillance and extreme form of asymmetry in trade.

Look up: http://www.ipac.global

So bashing on US is convenient and easy but you’re turning away from the actual geo political climate against China, clouding your own judgement perhaps with prejudice but I won’t go that far.

Oh, come on. You're pretending that the U.S. is not the world's sole superpower right now and that all the countries you just named aren't U.S. partners with hardly independent foreign policies. Or are you telling me that Saudi Arabia has better human rights than China? Because it's certainly not being pilled on anywhere as much by any of them.

That's completely hypocritical. The US was just fine with the exploitation of workers in China while it made economical sense. Now that the US is losing its grip on power, they want to create this nonsensical narrative.

Actually, you're right. American executives sold off their souls to cheaper prices, moved factories out of US and exploited cheap labor. It is still going on at a monumental scale - Apple for example.

So, it is capitalism at its worst. The government failed to keep American interests and now they're back peddling.

Furthermore, literally every developed country is at the helm of Chinese goods. Every nation in the world.

There is a giant Huawei office as soon as you get out of the Zurich airport housing probably 5000 people.

The Japanese sold off their local businesses and shut down factories, moved them to China for cheaper labor.

What IPAC is doing is to bring right government officials together to back peddle and put brakes on it because capitalism will bankrupt their host nations and enrich China.

US to care about human rights is not necessarily a precursor condition for this set of events to be eventually better for human rights.

Exactly. I think Noam Chomsky said something along these lines: I cannot think of a case where a nation intervened in or influenced another country in a purely disinterested humanitarian fashion.

That doesn't mean national interests cannot coincide with good outcomes, though.

Kosovo? The US didn't seem to have much in the way of interests there.

Kosovo was a part of Serbia, a Russian-backed client state. You would never see the US advocate for the people's right for self-determination for Palestine or Scotland.

Yes. But I don't think that giving more power to the US Empire will be better for human rights long term. The US and it's client states also kill millions of people for profit.

Do.. you have a citation for that?

Iraq War, Afghanistan, Syria, Libya, 90% civilian death rate from drone strikes? Yemen and supporting the Saudis who are much worse than anything you think of in terms of the CCP? Coups in Iran, Latin America, elsewhere? For profit prisons denying people basic rights and what's basically slave labor, police killing unarmed citizens, horrific COVID response that's guaranteed to have led to preventable deaths?

US prison system, law enforcement system. BLM movement. We do systematically repress them to lower classes, and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system), and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty).

> US prison system

https://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=6766

> law enforcement system. BLM movement

(I assume you mean what BLM is protesting and not that BLM is killing people)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/investigations/polic...

> We do systematically repress them to lower classes

If you are systematically repressing people, please stop. I'm not, so I'm not sure where this "we" is coming from.

> and also kill them directly (through a violent law enforcement system)

You are more likely to die by car accident, heart attack, suicide or coronavirus than cop. That doesn't mean we shouldn't improve the system.

> and indirectly (deaths of despair, deaths from crime as a result of systematic poverty).

I encourage you to fight poverty and the best way to do it is through donating to meaningful charities. That doesn't seem unique to the US though.

Have we already forgotten the Iraq War? Syria? Lybia? Vietnam? All of these wars based on lies that covered for profits and killed millions?

Exactly. US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights. But the defeat of Nazi German and Imperialist Japan had huge, favorable results for human rights.

>US entry into WWII was mainly for reasons that had little to do with human rights.

Reasons? There were no reasons, the US entered WWII when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor!

And then Germany declared war on the US.

Back then the politics were a lot less polarized and you had sane domestic policy under FDR, these are different times. That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.

> Back then the politics were a lot less polarized

I count 4 political assassinations in the years around WWII[^1]

[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinated_American_...

> had sane domestic policy under FDR,

Is this the same FDR that tried to pack the US Supreme Court and interned over 100,000 Americans of Japanese decent in camps?

> That was when U.S. understood that you can only attain so much by brute force.

WWII was pretty much brute force all the way. Around the clock bombings of enemy cities and civilians. Firebombing Tokyo, nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that was from the US side. The Soviet side had such things as massive artillery barages of cities, no step back rule where people with machine guns shot their own soldiers for not advancing fast enough.

You're confusing foreign policy and domestic policy.

FDR was horrific on foreign policy and had his problems at home, but he understood with the Great Depression at least that some serious economic steps had to be taken in favor of your average worker for the system "as is" to survive.

Right now, the U.S. is "number #1" at handling COVID 19 the absolute worst and still calling Medicare for All a crazy idea, even in the middle of a pandemic, while apparently Biden, a proven right-leaning centrist as somehow being a socialist.

Crazy watching this unfold.

Less polarized? Huey Long got shot for FDR to get in, and actual socialism was a thing in the United States. Assassination attempts were regularly made against union busters.

What I meant was that there was a better sense of what left or right actually means on an international scale.

Nowdays centre-right presidents like Barack Obama or Biden get called socialist, somebody on the international centre left like Sanders is apparently a communist and Chomsky is an out of his mind, left of Mao crazy person. Pink haired college kids are apparently a serious threat and there's a "culture war" or something.

It seems fairly abnormal, especially considering Medicare for All is apparently still crazy, even in the middle of a deadly pandemic the U.S. is currently doing terrible at.

I don't think polarized is necessarily the right word for it, it just seems like American politics has jeered strongly to the right, dragging the people who dislike it into liberalism to seem reasonable.

There are gradients to everything. Where in the US we have a free press to document human rights violations and people can voice their opinion, China has none. The problem with statements like yours is that it completely trivializes the major violations of one country and the progress that has been made in improving human rights of the other.

Not sure why you’re being downvoted. What you said is factually correct.

Like 3000+ anti Trump stories on NYTimes. Try that in China?

That's fair, on the other hand, is China semiregularly bombing hospitals in the Middle East? You can cherry-pick certain facts to suit you either way.

As for "free press", the U.S. has the appearance of free press that is shockingly uniform on issues of war for example, controlled by very few entities in total.

Hard to tell without a free press

Hard to tell with a free press, since people just find the news they want to hear anyways.

I guess our situation with getting news from Facebook is voluntary censorship. Maybe that’s better than forced censorship?

What if the controller of news is benevolent?

I think the situation is that the Chinese government is mostly benevolent to its own citizens, which is why it has fairly good political support domestically. They are however not benevolent to the US interests, which is why we want to stop them. One benefit of a free press is that we’d be able to introduce our own propaganda into the country to push agendas that benefit ourselves.

So silencing the original Covid-19 whistleblower allowing the virus to devastate Wuhan and propagate to the rest of the world is better than free press? How is that benevolent?

Our free press didn't do much to help prevent the spread of the virus here either... It looks like it's also going to turn out much worse.

Huh? Have you looked at American press? The history is filled with literally thousands of articles condemning the government in every aspect of its operations.

Including the NPR which comes out with stuff like this: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/31/690363402/how-the-cia-overthr...

American press is brutal, you like it or not. If US is bombing hospitals in the middle east, there are news papers writing about it. Btw, would like to get the source on this from you while you google your away into another example of American freedom of press.

Incredible how American image on the world has tarnished and people go in with a swoop of imaginations, away from hard truth and facts.

I am not even American.

Yeah, I have seen that exact American press.

The NPR story is about a coup that happened in the 50s, so not much you can do about ti today. They're not saying "don't escalate with Iran today, we did a lot to wrong them too". They didn't say don't go to Iraq or Vietnam pre-invasion.

Even in China you can say that Mao did this and this wrong, because guess what? He's dead and that's no longer relevant.

A good press opposes things when there's something that could still be done about it.

As for their criticisms of Trump, it's more about decorum and his lack of polish/civility rather than some hard-core policy disagreements from what I've seen.

It's a different country :) And it has different level tolerance in the freedom.

Try making any speech about a race in the US despite it's correct? US has no such freedom or tolerance right?

True that there are lots anti-Trump material out on the internet, but that's the US culture. The media is a tool for winning an election. One cannot force the other world to adopt the same system US has, right?

What is your argument? The point is that in one country you get the truth and in the other you don't. It doesn't take a genius to understand which is better.

> One cannot force the other world to adopt the same system US has, right?

Yes, you're right, China should stop forcing Tibet, Uyghurs, and Hong Kong to adopt their system.

> What is your argument? The point is that in one country you get the truth

Like that Iraq had WMDs?

China should stop forcing Tibet, Uyghurs, and Hong Kong to adopt their system

> wrong, they are not countries. And China didn’t force them to adapt to Chinese Cultural. Their cultural inheritance is widely seen in the region.

In the grand scheme of things, whether they are "countries" is not the issue right? They are places that had their own distinct cultures and way of life and China invaded and forced their way of life upon them. By the way, Tibet was an independent state prior to forced occupation.

> And China didn’t force them to adapt to Chinese Cultural

This is factually incorrect. There is definitive evidence of destroying cultural and religious artifacts of these groups, desecrating their ancestral graves, banning speaking of their native tongue, among other things. In order to have a fair discussion on this, the facts must be straight. These are all things that have plenty of photo, video, documented, and testimonial evidence via primary sources. Unfortunately, you would never see this evidence presented through Chinese media or textbooks. In fact, you would see the opposite as China propaganda portrays these people as having wanted to be a part of China.

*CCP