What are you even talking about. China is regularly rated lower than Vietnam on human rights rankings and Vietnam is trending towards improvement. China is trending towards regression.

https://www.rfa.org/english/news/vietnam/vietnams-human-righ...

I thought this article did a quite good job at what is meant when people talk about the fight for democracy: https://responsiblestatecraft.org/2023/03/31/what-biden-mean...

Our morals in international politics are always just applied selectively, and there are few examples of where our best interest and moral considerations clash - because morality is immediately ignored or downplayed when interest is involved.

Lived in China and Vietnam. There is no comparison. I don't care if Vietnam allows their citizens to use Facebook.

When did you live in China? China today is a different country to pre-Xi or even early-Xi China.

Also China doesn’t let you go where the real human rights abuses are in Xinjiang.

Please go into more detail, as there's a dearth of comparative information.

RFA? Come on.

>Based on Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, it was established by the US International Broadcasting Act of 1994 with the stated aim of "promoting democratic values and human rights", and countering the narrative of the Chinese Communist Party, as well as providing media reports about the North Korean government.[12] It is funded and supervised by the U.S. Agency for Global Media[13] (formerly Broadcasting Board of Governors), an independent agency of the United States government.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_Free_Asia

To be fair, the theory that economic development leads to political liberalization isn't entirely fiction. Taiwan and South Korea both used to be de facto dictatorships.

Meanwhile, Russia's vastly more economically developed[1] than it was in the 90s, yet it went fully down the authoritarian slide over the past three decades.

Also, it may be worth dropping by much of the Middle East to get another reality check on this question.

The only thing economic development seems to consistently result in is a higher demand for imports.

[1] Well, the nice parts of it are much wealthier than they used to be. The provincial towns are dying, and all the productive industries have been pushed out by oil and services.

Authoritarian slide is when those global south nations don't elect our puppets....

This. And it's beyond sad that the majority of HN users blindly follows this more than obvious propaganda war.

> I've been trying to preach this on HN for months

Please don't preach on hackernews. Instead try and communicate what you know and why you know it.