You just need to stomach slavery, violent repression of political dissidents, live organ harvesting and a handful of other unpleasantries.

I'm not an apologist for Chinese repression, but America still has or once had slavery, child labor, torture (Abu Ghraib), patent medicine and unsafe food, racist policies that prevent wealth accumulation (redlining), mass pollution, racism and mistrust of non-white-skinned people, a terrible healthcare system for most, and still debates over the utility of vaccines, has a poor K-12 education outcome, refuses to severely punish notorious white-collar criminals and make their victims whole, immunizes its law enforcement from prosecution when it violates others' civil rights, and vests the President with absolute immunity or a presumption of immunity in exercising its powers. And those are just the embarrassments and atrocities I can think of right now.

We still have a lot to answer for.

If it's already changed don't you think it's answered for? What level of performative apologetics will make it better in your estimation?

I don't want performative apologetics; I want the still-existing problems to be remediated. I also want my fellow Americans not to deny our history and present reality. Recognition and apology are not identical.

You seem to be not distinguishing things that have happened hundreds of years ago with things that are present, exaggerating the scale of things that are still present, and not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes.

I made clear that some of these were past (and they reverberate still today), and some are present: "America still has or once had"

> exaggerating the scale of things that are still present

What am I exaggerating, exactly?

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

https://mappingpoliceviolence.org

https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality...

https://www.npr.org/2026/03/14/nx-s1-5734051/measles-outbrea...

> not acknowledging that those things are widely recognized and even taught in American history classes

In some states, yes. In others, the content is being censored (another embarrassment for America, which once censored the teaching of evolution!). See, e.g.:

https://pen.org/educational-censorship/index-of-educational-...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_school_curricula...

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/a-look-at-whats-behind-the...

The For Profit Penal System (tm) and the resulting recidivism rates associated therewith, while not technically slavery, isn't exactly not slavery either. Anyway was there something specific you're trying to defend here or is this merely an exercise in performative nitpicking?

Yeah, people here are insane to believe the CCP is some kind of technocratic benevolent autocracy.

The same can be said without irony about the current administration in the US so there is that. Anyway it's perfectly reasonable to point out the ways in which the CCP is outperforming western governments. If that bothers you then I'd say you may want to contact your representatives.

It helps that they spend billions to manipulate public perception on forums like this one

There's an invisible tradeoff here. The US has an extremely expansive view of free speech, so you get a very noisy picture of its politics, half of which is Infowars-level insane lies. This is a large cause of its problems. China absolutely does not have free media, and if it did it wouldn't publish primarily in English, so its negatives are very hard to see. Even for Chinese speakers.