They’d have to literally be genocidal Nazis to be any worse. And they’re definitely not that.
Lip service is all it is. The US has never had any problem with just straight-up murdering democratic leaders, or leaders they don’t like who are threatening to win democratically, when it feels like it.
That and twenty cents can get you a cup of coffee at MickeyD’s. You should just have stopped at “lip service.”
Not very often, no. Certainly not in Africa.
So, we should distrust them because they’re not two-faced back-stabbing hypocrites, now?
“Hegemon” is a perfectly cromulent word that best describes the US approach to superpowerdom.
Given a choice between the two, it has to be America. We’re far from perfect, but China is as bad or worse in many of the ways we’re flawed. Certainly as a leader in the world, the human rights issues are huge. And while someone upthread mentioned that the US is only 250 years old and is instable, aren’t we the oldest existent Republican Democracy? I’d say that makes us remarkably stable, certainly compared to China’s relatively young current government. Many aspects of their culture date back thousands of years, whereas ours is much more of a hodge-podge of the various long-lived European cultures. I’m not sure how much effect in either direction our cultures woudl really mean as a super power.
All of that said though, I think the age of super powers is ending. I don’t see the US so much in decline as that we got a huge head start because of the world wars and revolutions and such, and we could only ride that so long. Now the rest of the world is catching up. The more and more tied the world economy is, the less individual countries can really exert power without shooting themselves in the foot in the process. America can still push around lesser developed countries at great personal expense, but major conflict between the US and any other reasonably powerful nation, like China, and everyone loses.
Mao is credited with being responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of Chinese people. Tens of millions more deaths than Hitler.
So, do you mean the Chinese committing genocide against their own people , or the current genocide against minorities in Tibet and other areas ???
As for Mao, would you like me to drag up the Native Americans or Southern slavery? Because it’s about as relevant.
Please. Illegal forced labour is hardly just a Chinese problem - I can drag out a number of cites on similar situations in the United States, or India or wherever.
One of the big differences there, of course, is that publishing those anti-slavery pieces in China will get your ass vanished.
It is, simply put, ludicrously partisan to declare that the United States and the PRC are on similar ground in regards to human rights and the exercise of power. It is possible to point to episodes in American history that are shameful and horrid. The difference being that in the PRC they are happening today.
Yes, the USA had open slavery. But sufficient of US citizens found that abhorrent that the political pressure built up until we went to war with ourselves to eliminate it. 600,000 dead and an entire region laid waste to the point where it took more than 100 years to really recover.
And yes, what happened to Native Americans amounts to genocide. Unlike other episodes of such, however, we acknowledge our role in both of academic and mass culture. Whereas upthread there’s a mention that 70% of the chinese people think of Mao as ‘OK’.
Really, take the blinders off. It’s fine. It’s OK if you hate the US. I, for one, (and likely my co-citizens as well) am cool with that. But don’t let that blind you to the fact that the PRC is an enormous challenge to the world in terms of how to deal with them.
And they are happening today with America too, outside its own borders. Again; from the standpoint of how it would do as a superpower, what matters is the foreign affairs of a nation; not its internal behavior. And when it comes to foreign affairs America loots and warmongers and conquers and slaughters and tortures. Someone blindfolded and beaten to death by an American soldier has no reason to care about America’s domestic policies; he’d far prefer a Chinese who didn’t kill him.
Great post, but you did misquote me.
What I said is that many Chinese people have told me that Mao was “70% good”
I guess meaning 30%% bad. But that his being only “70% good” is somehow ok because many of them have told me that Mao is their hero.
The problem with talking with people in China is that many of them are ignorant of their own history. I was in China during the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, and the majority of younger people that I talked with knew absolutely nothing about what had happened, and of course there was nothing in the Chinese media about it.
The internet in China is heavily censored, and even if you wanted to know the truth it may be difficult to find the truth about China’s history from within China.
The China of today still does not have freedom of speech, or even freedom of travel and living. Chinese in the wealthier provinces, having the “right” ID are more free to travel within China. But, Chinese people in the poorer provinces are still restricted in where they can travel and work.
People in the poorer provinces may be able to find work in Beijing, for example, but they cannot enroll their children in the schools and may even find it difficult to find medical care. All due to their having been born in the poorer parts of China.
The Chinese ID is known as the Hukou:
“The impact of the hukou system upon migrant laborers became onerous in the 1980s after hundreds of millions were ejected from state corporations and cooperatives.[5] Since the 1980s, an estimated 200 million Chinese live outside their officially registered areas and under far less eligibility to education and government services, living therefore in a condition similar in many ways to that of illegal immigrants.[7] The millions of peasants who have left their land remain trapped at the margins of the urban society. They are often blamed for rising crime and unemployment and under pressure from their citizens, the city governments have imposed discriminatory rules.[4] For example, the children of “Nong Min Gong - 农民工” (farmer workers) are not allowed to enroll in the city schools, and even now must live with their grandparents or other relatives in order to attend school in their hometowns. They are commonly referred to as the home-staying children. There are around 130 million such home-staying children, living without their parents, as reported by Chinese researchers.”
Which, of course, is why the PRC let the slavemongers go..
Oh, wait, no, they straight-up executed some of them.
And massive human rights abuses aren’t happening in the States today? You have an entire minority underclass of your very own that gets disproportionately imprisoned (and executed), for instance. Never mind the active war on your own women’s and minorities’ rights, currently being waged by one of your two sole parties in power.
All of which has Jack to do with how the US or China acts as a superpower. Which was the OP’s question. To which I say “Iraq War. Torture. Guantanamo.” And that’s just the last decade.
And?
Mao is no longer in charge in China, either, you may have noticed.
And I’m sure a large number of Americans think the same of Andrew Jackson.
You start with your beam first, mate, then I’ll get round to my splinter.
Past evidence and even current rhetoric suggests that is not the case.
And so is the USA.
Up to now, only the USA has ever actively worked to made my life worse. When the Chinese government intelligence agencies actively side with my racist oppressors and work against my best interests, as the USA’s has done, I’ll start to worry about them.
What Mao did happened during my lifetime, so it is fairly recent history.
You are the one that first mentioned the Nazis, but what Mao did was more recent and killed tens of millions more people,
Not too many Germans today praise Hitler, but you will find millions, maybe even a billion, of Chinese today that will tell you that Mao is their hero.
There are lots of people still alive from Hitler’s time, too. So what? Mao dies in 1976. China was a different country then.
Read the context I said that in - I was talking about the present Chinese, not the past.
And has squat to do with the current PRC regime’s actions.
Curiously, a small minority of Americans do - just visit Stormfront…
Again, so what? Even if they really mean it rather than say it out of fear or a rote response, what does that have to do with China’s actions as a potential superpower? Are they insisting that Africans engage in a Cultural Revolution (the way some Americans insist on exporting their retarded political and sexual hangups to Africa?) No, they are not.
Well, since it comes down to “The USA is a devil, and China is a devil, which one do you want ruling the world?” I’m still gonna go with USA. I think it’s fairly well-understood that, should any country end up as a super power (let’s not forget USSR!) that there will be abuses perpetrated by said nation (let’s not forget Britain, France & Spain all did their share of horror when they were taking over the world). The sole exception to this is Canada. Canada would be a firm but gentle ruler.
MrDibble, where are you that you have “racist oppressors?”
And you’ll find millions of Americans who look up at our slaveowning genocidal Founding Fathers as near-deified heroes. “Our Founding Fathers intended X” is still considered a valid argument too, so it isn’t like they don’t affect anything anymore.
I don’t reckon it is more complex than that. Unless you’re suggesting China would be kinder and gentler in it’s hegemony than the US has been. You don’t strike me as being so unreasonable as to push that point, however. So, we go back to the OP: You’re going to take it in the ass, do you prefer Thug #1 or Thug #2? Thug #1 has rogered his whole neighborhood but has given out some candy, too; and while Thug #2 has never left the house, he’s totally done his entire extended family, has a 12-inch member wraped in a sandpaper condom, and frequently oogles the neighbors.
Nobody’s really asking if the USA has been a force for good overall. That would be a long discussion by itself. USA has a brief but intense history of good and bad. Sort of a yin/yang power, if you will. What good has come from China in the last 250 years?
neither, we’re in a global world today where everything is integrated… the age of superpowers is slowly becoming a thing of the past, the US is in the traditional sense, because of larger economy and military capabilities that rival those of … uhh, yeah i can’t even begin to tell u how nuts the us military is, it’s ridiculous… but i mean it’s becoming so irrelevant, basically if u got enough nukes to blow up the world (several countries do) then ur the #1 superpower, sure we could blow up the world 10,000 times whereas china could 8 times, does it make any difference? china’s economy depends on the US, the US economy depends on china, the world’s economy depends on both… both depend on parts of the world economy, i’d say if anyone is a superpower it’s south korea because of their incredible educational system, but that’s just how i’d judge a superpower…defintely not sentiment taken seriously by many other ppl
Yes, I am. The modern Chinese, unlike the USA, have so far shown absolutely no interest in exporting their own ideology to their foreign clients. They literally are all business. That can be seen in some ways as bad, as they’re not exerting any positive influence on their client states. But it’s completely balanced by the fact that they’re not slaughtering tens of thousands of us brown foreigners or attaching moral conditions to foreign aid, either. They just takes our stuff and pays us our money and shuts the fuck up - that’s what we should want from a hegemon, if we have to have one (we don’t, but the OP offered this false dichotomy only)