Yes, there is a difference. I've been in a place where there explain you that the west is just like us, but it is total BS. There is a difference in independent courts, difference in freedom of expression and freedom of protest, there is a difference in a decision being taken by the society and by a small elite that exercise total control over the system. False equivalence is one of the most poisonous arguments that people deploy in order to deflect responsibility.

> Honestly is it any less "baked in" than the pre-eminent Western powers?

Because it's _less_ "baked-in". Germany just recognized their part in a genocide, China has yet to acknowledge the Tiananmen massacre.

Acknowledgement is lip service, especially decades after the fact. If they provide significant compensation, then yes. There is hope for better days for China too, but not by portraying them as unmitigated evil. I can't think of any significant nation that has caved to orchestrated, vested moral outrage and said "sorry you guys... we'll hold elections next years and play by your rules henceforth", especially when the very countries asking for this unrepentant about their own past transgressions costing millions of lives (atomic bombs, Iraq invasion etc.)

Germany will provide around 1.1 billion EUR but they will do it by sponsoring social projects over the next 30 years.

Social project run by western NGOs I guess? What is 1.1 billion when the west steals like 2~3 trillion each year since ww2 from the global south.

You can smooth over a lot of mismanagement or save a lot of costs this way. It also seems the dividend from the colonial days is not enough anymore to keep the West going given their infrastructure seem to crumble every year.

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13563467.2021.1...

> I can't think of any significant nation that has caved to orchestrated, vested moral outrage and said "sorry you guys... we'll hold elections next years and play by your rules henceforth",

Governments regularly cave in due to protests in democratic countries. It happened in the Netherlands a few months ago, for example.

Moreover, it's fundamentally important the fact that protests exist.

Comparing any western democracy to a dictatorship is the worst form of whataboutism.

> Or perhaps not acknowledging that under the umbrella of democracy the same things happen, is whataboutism.

No. That may be denial, but “whataboutism” is a variant (or, really, just a different name for) the tu quoque fallacy that deflects criticism by accusing the critic of hypocritically ignoring the same action they criticize when committed by a friendly party (or committing it themselves).

A critic denying that a friendly party engages in the act they are criticizing isn’t “whataboutism”. It may or may not be hypcocrisy, denialism, or something else, but its not whataboutism.

OTOH, accusing a critic of whataboutism (and invoking a nonstandard – indeed inverted – definition of “whataboutism” to do it) when they point out whataboutism as a deflection technique, so as to deflect the criticism contained in the original accusation of whataboutism is advanced-level whataboutism.

> the tu quoque fallacy that deflects criticism by accusing the critic of hypocritically ignoring the same action they criticize

I'm not justifying what happens in China, I'm saying that the US democracy spent 65 million dollars of 1948-1970s money to control the politics of a sovereign allied and financed far right terrorist groups that killed hundreds of innocent people and still refuse as of today to release the documents about it.

Sometimes some democracies are simply not better than regimes.

They can be equally bad, you knew if it happened to your country.

So maybe is denial, but maybe whataboutism is the idea that "we did some things, but look at us, we are a democracy, we did it because obviously it was necessary to preserve it, because the others are the real bad ones".

How did they not "acknowledge" it? They did and they do. "They" call it "1989 incident" and despite the Western believe Chinese people are aware of that incident. And yet, most people I have spoken to in my countless trips to China follow the words of Deng Xiaoping that it was worth to sacrifice 3000 lifes for 30 years of stability.

Edit: by the way, it annoys me that I got trolled into posting something totally unrelated within a tech article. Why are all Chinese-related articles turning into exactyly the same direction in the past 3 years? I am tired of that.

> it was worth to sacrifice 3000 lifes for 30 years of stability.

No one knows what China would be like now had the CCP acceeded to the students' demands and liberalised.

Taiwan ended their long period of martial law around the same time too, and for a nation with so much stacked against it, you can hardly say they're doing badly.

You have no idea what you are talking about. No idea.

I have lived in China. Freedom of press and Rule of Law(they don't exist in China) are amazing inventions.

You just don't have an idea how lucky and spoiled you are. I recommend you volunteer helping refugees just to get a glimpse of how the world works outside the West bubble.