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Comment by landryraccoon | Hacker News Reader

Historically, China has not interfered in the affairs of distant nations. If you are judging by history, the West has interfered with China much more, thus far, than visa versa. I would go so far as to say that China has never yet tried to destabilize the West or impose it's values on the West. Can the West make the same claim about China?

As it is written, as you judge, so shall you be judged. If your standard is that countries should not abuse their power to destabilize other countries, then historically doesn't China actually hold the high ground?

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China has never been able to interfere in 'distant' nations.

The Europeans were the first to truly develop navies capable of projecting force at such great distances, beginning in the Renaissance period, and everyone else has been playing catch-up.

By your logic, the Romans or Greeks or ancient Egyptians were a peace-loving peoples because they didn't bother China much either.

But if you look at what was possible, based on the technological capabilities at the time, China has never been as peaceful as they constantly claim. Just ask any of their neighbors, many of whom have explicitly created defense pacts with the US and the West because of historical fear of an aggressive China.

Note I'm not trying to say the West deserves any trust. But based on China's history and its current behavior as it does become more capable, combined with the constant Chinese PR about their 'peaceful rise', I'm not willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Actually Chinese had much more capable maritime technology than europe in the 1500's but their emperor said he did not approve of such silly business as voyages of discovery so they just stopped doing that. To China's rulers, trade and profit were facets of internal politics, and not an end in themselves.

"as the Confucian bureaucracy under the next emperor reversed the policy of open exploration and by 1500, it became a capital offence to build a seagoing junk with more than two masts."[0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_exploration

I am certainly aware of the 'Treasure Voyages' and China's abilities up through the Ming dynasty. China was indeed able to travel, trade, and exploit foreign nations at limited distance, but never on a scale as the Europeans from the 16th century onward.

This is also documented: https://www.amazon.com/Civilization-West-Rest-Niall-Ferguson....

You're just talking about different time periods.

But when talking about "ability" to influence distant nations, having a bigger and better ship than Columbus at the time kind of means they had the ability. [0]

They just didn't care about finding another route to India for spices or mining some distant silver mountain. They already had those.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zheng_He

They "didn't care to" because the Ming dynasty rulers felt that China was culturally, technologically, and economically superior to all other nations, and thought cutting China off was the best way to preserve that. Obviously, that turned out to be a total failure of a policy as China was rapidly surpassed by the West over the next several centuries and is still catching up today

I'm not sure how that provides any guidance on how a CCP-led China would handle foreign policy in a completely different era though. This whole discussion seems sort of pointless to me.

>>> Ming dynasty rulers felt that China was culturally, technologically, and economically superior to all other nations

They most likely were at that time.

>>> Obviously, that turned out to be a total failure of a policy as China was rapidly surpassed by the West over the next several centuries and is still catching up today

You don't know that. Maybe expanding beyond your means for no good economic reason would have been a bad idea?

And the reason they're catching up today has little to do with that decision. The industrial revolution or the enlightenment didn't happen because Columbus discovered America.

>>> This whole discussion seems sort of pointless to me

Agreed.

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

> then historically doesn't China actually hold the high ground?

No, it doesn't. Just look around what they did to their neighbors. The weasel word "distant" doesn't change a thing: China has bullied other nations for a long time and there is little reason to believe that they won't do it again.

Distance is no weasel word. China historically interfering with Korea or Vietnam is natural as it's neighbors and problems of one side of the border leaks on the other side, and cultural and economical influences are strong. But France or US interfering with Vietnam or Korea make much less sense. The real deep difference in the long span is that Chinese never sailed en masse to the other side of the planet to "propose" (with a gun in the hand) a foreign religion and a different way of life to people which never asked for anything.

Would you think it was fair if China were to treat the West the same way the West treated China, if the balance of power was reversed?

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