Where did I say they were blameless? There are varying degrees of bad behavior, and while the US Government has a whole host of actions they can be validly criticized for, they're not even in the same ball park as the PRC.
As I said, we really need to consider how so many Westerners have become so blind to that fact that this weak whataboutism can we depended on when any mention of China is made.
The fact that we’re able to talk openly about the unaccountability of the NSA, CIA, FISA courts and Gitmo is a form of accountability that does not exist in China.
I do not condone the actions of all of the US institutions and believe many are largely unaccountable, but there is still far more accountability in our least accountable institutions than any in China. Culture within institutions, the populace at large from which institutions hire from, and the history of institutions is a very important but subtle factor that westerners take for granted and is not identical between countries.
The fact that we even call US actions war crimes is another form of accountability China lacks. China forcibly annexed Tibet. China has concentration camps in inner Mongolia. China massacred it’s own people during the Mao era and is run by the same party today. China releases dams upstream of cities and drowns its own people. China committed war crimes in its support of North Korea during the Korean War, and Vietnam in the Vietnam War. China turned hundreds of its college students into mincemeat in Tiananmen square.
These are not on the radar of most people in China the same way Gitmo and Iraq and Vietnam are in the US because the CCP has a level of unaccountability westerners do not understand. Their stranglehold on media and public perception is extreme, and they have been exerting influence on western social media like reddit, youtube, and facebook, as well as google search. They do so through virtually all corporations that want access to Chinese labor and the Chinese market.
The ramifications of this are severe. The lockdown policies that have destroyed a lot of the global economy were pushed on the world by pressure from China (and our own fear and incompetence), despite existing pandemic plans in western nations that were far more sane, more humane, and less destructive.
They were able to get us to discard our own pandemic plans from our own institutions because of the influence they have been gaining. China exerted influence over the WHO recommendations, and was very aggressive/in PR panic mode when the virus first escaped. Our own internal division is largely our own doing, but they were extremely aggressive in the early phases of the pandemic online and greatly exacerbated western problems precisely because they knew what talking points to copy and paste for maximum division and lack of consensus.
Giving them your data and more ability to influence you and people that fit your demographics online is incredibly naive and foolish, no matter how much you may dislike your own government or how valid that dislike may be.
A lot of good that accountability did Kim Dotcom, or the brown-skinned people being blown up by drones, or the hundred thousand civilians killed in Iraq after America brought about regime change. Over the past century America has interfered far more in other countries' affairs than China ever has. A cynical way of putting it: China's government oppresses its own people, America's government oppresses everybody but its own people. As someone neither American nor Chinese I feel China's far less likely to come along and bother me when I'm minding my own business than America is.
Right but there’s a difference between “X is bad because China is the one doing X” and “X is bad for reasons A, B, C that would also apply if it were not China doing X”
China goaded itself on. It's really a "boiling a frog" situation if you look at it historically. China's abuses of human rights, intellectual property, dissident repression, history whitewashing, etc. have slowly ramped up over the course of decades. Then Xi came to power, declared himself de facto dictator for life, turned the Nationalism dial to 11, and refused to take US demands for trade fairness seriously.
Yes, the current presidency is partly to blame, but don't pretend that it's the only, or even primary cause of the current narrative.
Nothing that the US or any other country has done justifies China’s actions. This isn’t a contest to see who’s worse. Your entire argument here is tangential to the fact that China’s actions have been ridiculously abusive.
Has my own country done some despicable things? Yes. Is it still doing despicable things? Yes. That doesn’t mean I have no right to point out abuse elsewhere. Abuse is abuse; to the victim, it makes very little difference whether it’s one government or another. If abusive actions come to my attention, the absolute least I can do is condemn them.
It’s almost like more than one country can do horrible things. Who’d have thought? It doesn’t make the situation in China any better to point out that other countries have also done bad things.
reply