An unrelated quiz: which country bombed most (by the number of countries) this century?

Since you're willing to engage in such an argument, you should count by the number of civilian casualties and violations of human rights instead, in which China and Russia would be holding the top spots by a wide margin.

Can you show some data to back that up? Post 9/11 US wars have displaced more than 38 million people and directly caused more than 900,000 deaths. China and Russia both have terrible records when it comes to human rights, but where are you getting the numbers that they have caused more deaths?

Great Leap Forward, Korean War(NK had support from China to kick it off), Chinese civil war. I see no reason to limit to post 9/11, but if you wish, then Covid is completely China's fault for lax preventative measures and killed more than 900,000.

By your logic, Congo should be topping that list for introducing HIV to the world and causing more than 40 million deaths. That sounds ridiculous to me, but hey whatever floats your boat.

>you should count by the number of civilian casualties and violations of human rights instead

US is 100x combined China and Russia for both civilian casualties and violation of human rights.

Dont forget US even sanctioned the UN Human Rights https://www.npr.org/2018/06/19/621435225/u-s-announces-its-w...

https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/b/un-human-rights-co...

I seriously think HN comments get brigaded by Chinese infowarriors, so often and reliably. There's a tone that's pretty consistent with the official party line: hold up a strawman of "free markets" and "rules-based order" as necessarily absolutist, and then attack the US for being hypocrites when not absolutist. Paint China as a victim, who like Rome, is attempting to conquer their neighbors in self-defense.

The US and the (relatively small) global democratic order (of which Japan and Taiwan are a part), is deeply flawed in many ways, but thus far it seems a better system than what China is selling, which is outright and unveiled autocracy and totalitarianism. Complicit in everything wrong with North Korea. It's easy to envy the efficiency of totalitarian regimes like XJ's but none of us would trade citizenship with someone living in it.

China as a geographic area was dominated by superpowers for eons, but they were relatively isolated from half the planet for most of it, separated by mountains, deserts, and oceans as they are. Their history is replete with a changing nature of what "China" was, e.g. the Kara-Khanids were not the Han, though they were an empire. It's a bit intellectually lazy or a function of over-generalization to think of China as being a continuous empire, but it's quite useful rhetorically. Chinese culture is longer-lived than any system of government it's had.

I think it's also a logical fallacy to assume that the status of being an empire is indelible. England was nothing for eons until it became arguably the greatest planet-scale empire for a relatively short time, and then it wasn't anymore. "China" has never been a planet-scale empire. Nobody is expecting the Persians to ever be a shadow of what that empire once was. I'm not sure China has a "rightful-place" more than anyone else. To presume it does also assumes that China will not balkanize over time, and that it survives intact despite its own belligerent and weaselly policies on the global stage.

Or maybe many of us across the world see things differently.

We have good reason to fear and distrust the US far more, since we’re from countries that were targets of coups, sanctions, bombings or invasions.

Probably both, probably in line with the Pareto Principle.