Yeah, I was going to say, have you (plural) heard of the Opium Wars? The wealth of the West didn’t come from nowhere.
‘Other than’ the 10’s of millions they killed, deliberately, of their own people? Other than that? Yeah, I guess they are the same. Some folks do seem to have trouble with scale. The British, as bad as they could be during empire were never in the same league as Mao, Stalin or Hitler. The SPANISH, as bad as THEY were, weren’t in the same league as those guys.
Not saying the British were saints or didn’t do bad shit, but come…you have to have some perspective.
Have you heard of Tibet? Know how many people died in that? Know how many people are STILL dying there? How about the Great Leap Forward? Ever heard of the Holocaust? What about Stalin’s purges, the Gulag system, hell, how about just the building of the Moscow tunnel system? Again…you guys need some perspective. The Opium Wars, while not a shinning example of the British Empire, weren’t even as costly in lives as relatively recent wars like Korea…certainly they don’t rise to the level of WWII or WWI. Yet, what Stalin, Mao and Hitler did DO rise to that level.
So, it matters less when it’s “others”, I take it? Less moral outrage when it’s not closer to home?
Oh, really? Are you under the mistaken impression the Empire didn’t do deaths by the millions?
Oh, they didn’t gas them? Big whoop.
I do have perspective - the kind that comes from not being wilfully ignorant of the “scale” of the British Empire’s death toll. “Bad shit”…right. Just some bad eggs, no doubt.
Tu quoque? Really?
And, of course, sometime it iscloser to home and “their own people”.
Why no…you completely misread that. I’m saying your ‘other’ in what I quoted was kind of a big deal. You know…‘other’ than that big ass hole in the Titanic, it was unsinkable. ‘Other’ than the hole in your husband, how was the play, Mrs. Lincoln?
Your own cite says that ‘wartime colonial policies created and then exacerbated the crisis. A minority view holds that the famine arose from natural causes.[D]’. Was it horrific? Sure. Is it on par with the other things I mentioned? No. Not because this was in India and those were in China, Russia or German (no fucking idea why this is important to you…still scratching my head with your first line), but because of why and how those things happened. In the case of China, Russia and Germany, it was deliberate…in the case you cited here, it was due to other factors, such as the fact that there was a war going on with the British Empire fighting for it’s life, and also split. You also had sort of a perfect storm of events that caused it. Yes, you ALSO had incompetence and probably some malice wrt the British as well. But it’s not in the same league.
Perhaps the distinction lost on you is that they didn’t do it deliberately, or for over a decade. Obviously there is a huge disconnect here. You really feel that what you cited here is the equivalent of rounding up an entire population and starving them, THEN gassing or shooting them after torture and rape? Or do you seriously not know enough about the holocaust to know it wasn’t just ‘gas them’ and be done?? I won’t even get into how ignorant what you said here sound wrt China’s Great Leap Forward or Stalin’s rein of terror.
Naw, you don’t, and the willful ignorance here is pretty apparent. Also, this thread isn’t about this. If you want to debate this subject, feel free to start your own thread. I think you are going to be a bit surprised at how stupid you’ll sound trying to put the British Empire on par with the CCP, Stalin and Hitler, but who knows, maybe you’ll learn something. Doubtful, but possible I suppose.
I thought my “Two wrongs don’t make a right” could move us past this pissing contest, but I guess not. If this is what OP wants the thread to be about, so be it.
[ul][li]It is estimated that the totally stupid and/or hypocritical War in Iraq cost a Million lives. Yes, that’s Million with an M.[/li][li]During World War II, in which Germany, Japan, and the Soviets all demonstrated great wickedness, the United States deliberately targeted civilians and killed well over a Million in firebombings. Again, note the M.[/li][li]In the Filipino–American War of 1899-1913 — a War that is usually omitted from lists of America’s wars — American imperialism cost civilian lives sometimes estimated as high as a Million. There’s that M again. True, the veterans of that war are long-dead. OTOH Chairman Mao is long dead and Secretary Xi is a different person IIRC.[/li][li] Et cetera.[/li][/ul]
I happen to want the U.S. to be a strong force for good in the world, and worry that China will become a force for evil. But please let’s stop the jingoistic double-standard and the pretence that geopolitical actions aren’t colored in shades of gray.
Yeah, to remain focused on the OP: How is it less a secret invasion than another country pursuing its own interests in its own way? They’ve certainly got the right to do so through economic competition. The US has, during the post-war era, chosen to do so militarily. I think that’s largely been foolish, but fine.
We say that modern countries should compete economically and not militarily. We can’t, then, be upset when another country does so. It’s not like we couldn’t do the same thing in the developing world. We’ve simply elected to allow ourselves to be distracted. If the Chinese are changing the game it’s because they know they can’t compete militarily and have shifted to where they can.
If we don’t catch up we’ll lose. And we’ll deserve to lose. It’ll be no one’s fault but our own.
The trouble is, they don’t compete in the same way. They use state assets to infiltrate and reverse engineer our products. They don’t abide by the WTO policies they specifically signed up for. They use their laws to coerce companies who want to do business in their country to basically cut their own throats. And this is just on the trade front. On the political front, they are infiltrating our political system, buying our media companies and subverting them to the CCPs will, attempting to change the narrative and stifle speech on several key things they want suppressed, etc. Then there is their policies in the South and East China Seas region. Their debt trap loans.
It’s a ‘secret invasion’ because they are deliberately trying to subvert our entire system, on multiple levels, and using our own system against us…and it’s ‘secret’ because, frankly, folks don’t seem to know or care about it, basically shrugging their shoulders and saying ‘the US does the same stuff and is evil too’ thingy. I get that to most in this thread it seems like this is just China doing the same thing we have, but it really isn’t. It’s not jingoistic flag waving, what the CCP does is fundamentally different in several ways to what and how the US has or is operating…or really the entire West. And their ends are much, much darker and will have a bigger impact, assuming they actually succeed, than folks seem to realize. There is another thread in GD that is about Freedom and how that’s just a word for getting away with stuff, but what’s chilling is that the OP could have been written by someone in the CCP, as this is exactly what their attitude is.
Like I said, this wasn’t really supposed to be a debate (certainly not about the hijack stuff), but if you guys watched the video and can just shrug and say it’s all the same or equivalent then we definitely see things differently. Anyway, thought it would be educational to post the link and hopefully make some folks think about this stuff a bit.
I wasn’t quoting you, I was referring to your emphasis of “their own people” like that made some kind of difference.
No, it was completely deliberate. Maybe you’re unaware of Churchill’s opinions on PoC…I believe one quote was something like “Relief will do nothing, for Indians breed like rabbits”
I’m aware that *you *seem to think it makes a difference. I don’t.
Well, I’m glad you can be that introspective…
*You *brought it up…
At least I can tell the difference between post and poster, mate.
I think the British Empire was worse than any of them. It lasted *way *longer, it killed more people overall, and it did *way *more damage to way more cultures and people, on a much wider - global - scale.
Moderator Note
Feel free to take the hijack to a new thread if either of you (or anyone else) would care to, but for this thread, let’s focus back on the OP, please.
Fair enough - all I have to say here about the OP is that it feels like déjà vu all over again. I have a private pool going for when the words “cunning” and “incrutable” will pop up…
X, I see where you’re coming from. I do.
But what exactly are they doing wrong? Are they breaking some sort of rule about international relations? There are no real rules. If they’re using those tactics to outcompete then it’s incumbent on us to develop our responses.
You can say they’re using debt traps, sure. Though enforcing debt traps on sovereign nations is hard as hell unless you’re willing to use gunboat diplomacy. And I don’t really think the Chinese have that sort of capability.
As I said, it’s a different tactic that we have - in my opinion irrationally - been used to using. In a time when we have had the most robust economy in the world we’ve chosen to spend it on our military rather than buying friends. The last time we truly thought our foreign policy through was FDR’s ‘Good Neighbor Policy’ with Latin America wherein we stopped treating central and south American countries like servants and began treating them like partners. It was an extension of e pluribus unum. Something you think we’d know about but we seem to have forgotten.
I’ve travelled through Africa, the Middle East and all over Latin America in my day. In many of those places the USA is perceived as a nation of murderers, of angry killers of children who can’t be counted on to go off half-cocked and act irrationally. If we could grow into the role of treating smaller nations as partners again and provide them opportunities to work with us instead of servicing us we’d be in a much better position to offer an alternative to the develop loans the Chinese are attempting to make throughout the developing world.
Because the leaders and peoples of the developing world are blind. They’re just as smart and sophisticated as the average American. They know what sort of a bargain they’re making and they thinking the juice is worth the squeezing. Want them to work with us instead? We should make them a better offer instead of telling them their being foolish. They’d welcome the opportunity to partner with the Colossus of the North. We just have to get rid of this inherent belief that others should do what we say because we have a bigger army.
The edit function is your friend.
Well, but see, there are actually rules…even if they are more the pirate rules variety. 
Seriously, though, China is a signatory to the WTO, and they are violating a laundry list of ‘rules’. They aren’t outcompeting the US or the West so much as they use our own rules, and greed of course as a poster up thread noted, against us. In addition, there are plenty of other ‘rules’ they are violating that don’t have anything to do with trade.
Sure, debt traps are a thing that aren’t part of this rules violation…just kind of a slimy practice that, admittedly, isn’t’ unique to China, though it is fairly unique in recent history. Still, I don’t really fault China for that particular thing, I just bring it up as another thing China is doing as a point of interest. What is a bit worrying is the amount of debt China is incurring, especially the fact that no one really knows how much that is, or what their actual GDP numbers are, or a host of other things. it could be a huge house of cards that the CCP is betting on, and basically China, much as the US, is kind of instrumental to the world economy…and the few checks and balances on the US or most western nations don’t exist wrt China. It’s the wild, wild west and no one, and I include the CCP or Chinese economists really know where they stand, because they lie and fudge the data at every level.
But what is also a thing is their expansion into the South China Sea region. Based on past threads, most 'dopers seem to roll their eyes or handwave that away, but it’s actually a big deal. China is, by fiat, taking that region over, slowly but surely (or maybe Surly). And into that region something like 30% of the entire worlds trade passes (to the tune of over $3 billion annually). Plus there are all those resources, such as fish, that the Chinese have been not only exploiting themselves but preventing the other area claimants (who actually have better claims to the region) from going into. Sure, the US goes in at will with our Freedom of Navigation exercises, but most of the other regional powers don’t.
Absolutely. The US has fucked ourselves in many of those parts of the world, as generally we either support thugs or we attach strings, often human rights strings, on loans and grants and such. But I think the perception that China is going there to help is changing. China, obviously, doesn’t care what your human rights are…they will loan you (or, at least say they will loan you) all the money you want. Generally, they love dictators and bullies and thugs, and will give them money. But…they have already called in some of those debts, and it’s going to cost many nations in the regions you are talking about stuff that many generations will be paying for. Wait and see what happens in Venezuela, or what’s happened in places like Djibouti, Kenya or even Greece…hell, Italy is now on the gravy train, and it’s possible they might fall into a debt trap themselves, though I see this as unlikely. But that’s a G7 country with their hand out.
Like I said in the Venezuela thread, I doubt many of the countries in the regions will work with us any more than they are already (in Venezuela’s case, not at all). I think what will occur to many down the line is that, while the US/UK/Europe/West was/is bad, China is much, much worse. And we aren’t exclusively talking about the 3rd world coming to this realization, IMHO. I think what has been happening in Australia and New Zealand wrt Chinese meddling in their political system, and what China has been doing wrt the EU, especially in Eastern Europe and Greece and now Italy is starting to do that waking.
Gah…NM. You almost made me hijack my own thread. Again!
How would it be a hijack when it directly addresses the OP?
Your backhanded attempt to paint me as a racist addresses the OP? That’s…an interesting take. Even leaving that aside, you seriously don’t seem to even understand what I’m talking about. You’d have been better off using the Red Scare wiki, since I’m mainly talking about the CCP (in fact, we could leave ‘mainly’ out of it), but then it wouldn’t have played into covert attempt at painting me a racist thing you were going for, demonstrating that you actually don’t even know what the discussion IS. You seem to think it’s about race and old conceptions of the Oriental or some such horseshit, and have decided to handwave the whole thing away because I’m a racist…or something. Fairly clear in the context of your other hijacks (your weird fixation on my quotation of your use of ‘other’, for instance) of this thread, really…and looking back, perhaps in other discussions I’ve seen you in, now that I think of it.
Thanks for your input in the thread. It was…unusual. As always. I think we are done here.
All the language around why what makes what China is doing any different from what America and Europe have done in the past is the language of Yellow Peril rhetoric - the “devious Chinaman” stereotype drips from such phrases as “secret war”, “slimy practice”, “infiltrate”, “subvert”, “dark ends”- you don’t actually ***refute ***that it’s still “old conceptions of the Oriental or some such horseshit” because you know you can’t…the language use speaks for itself. That’s what I’m addressing, and some of that was in the OP, yes. If you think pointing out you’re using the rhetoric of racists is me calling you a racist, that’s on you, though. I’m saying you’re echoing a racist trope, you can do with that information as you like.
And you don’t actually make a case for *why *it’s different from what others have done and continue to do, you just *assert *it is. As if us foreigners don’t have enough experience with how the Western powers have always done exactly the same thing. Only, it’s the “World Bank” and the “IMF” doing the nation-scale payday loan thing, and it’s the CIA doing the infiltrating. It wasn’t the CCP that landed Nelson Mandela in prison, so sign me up for Mandarin lessons.