I'm not sure what your contention is. Do you not believe the Chinese government to be corrupt, authoritarian, and/or oppressive?
I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that free societies should not economically support oppressive ones.
I'm pretty comfortable with the idea that free societies should not economically support oppressive ones.
That is a great idea. Except it's not really what's at play here. If it were, then the US would ban all imports from China, and not just ones where it feels it needs to maintain a strategic advantage. It would also stop supporting Saudis.
I believe what GP is trying to communicate is that US struggle against Chinese government for maintaining top superpower status, thinly veiled as concern for human rights, is unnecessarily hurting Chinese people.
We imprison more of our own people than them and we wage war all over the world, but people don't see it in their daily life so it's just background noise.
Maybe the basis should be cooperation and understanding rather than demonization and fear.
I believe it's way too harmful to simply categorize government into "free" vs "bad/corrupt/authoritarian/oppressive". There're a large number of other factors to consider. I agree Chinese government has tons of problems, just like US government has tons of problems of its own, just different.
At the bottom line, Chinese government is making tons of efforts to improve the economy of the country and improve the life of all the citizens. "According to the World Bank, more than 500 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty as China's poverty rate fell from 88 percent in 1981 to 6.5 percent in 2012, as measured by the percentage of people living on the equivalent of US$1.90 or less per day in 2011 purchasing price parity terms."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poverty_in_China
> Do you not believe the Chinese government to be corrupt, authoritarian, and/or oppressive?
I agree there're corruption in Chinese government. Anti-corruption is a one of the main focus of Chinese government in the past few years. Moreover, corruption has nothing to do with 'freedom' vs 'non-freedom'. There are way too many heavily corrupted democratic government in the world.
Is it authoritarian? Yes there is only one party in power - the CPC. The party has close to 100 million members throughout the country, which is close to 1/10 of the entire population. You can't possibly consider a party like that to be a single entity. There's also semi-democratic process: People elect representatives and they form National People's Congress - highest organ of state power in China.
Is it oppressive? Well, media censorship is a thing, and if you had to go on the street and protest the government in the same way you'd protest Trump, the government might invite you to "have a talk". But people still talk shit about the government all the time in private and on social media. The comments are likely to get deleted / banned. That sucks, but it is not something that could hugely impact the quality of life of regular citizens. You can still hear lots of dissident voices on the internet, and the government would often respond to that in positive ways.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/06/world/asia/china-detentio...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ewelinaochab/2018/10/16/organ-h...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/13/world/asia/liu-xiaobo-dea...
https://sg.news.yahoo.com/beijing-encroachment-hong-kong-fre...
If you believe China lifting people out of poverty excuses a laundry-list of human rights abuses we'll have to agree to disagree.
I've also expressed my opinion about some other issues like Xinjiang in another thread if you're interested:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18439175
I'm not saying there aren't tons of problems with Chinese government. But from the point of view of a Chinese citizen, the human right issues are mostly excuses that western media use to attack Chinese government; a lots of those are false claims; and even for the parts that'd be truth, it impacts very few amount of people and it's generally not a big concern for vast majority of people living in China no matter Han or not (Not saying violating human right is fine but the issue has much lower priority for most people)
To avoid continuing a flamewar we can just agree to disagree. Yes, Uighurs, Tibetians, and Falun Gong practitioners are minorities. The fact that they are minorities does not affect how I feel about the way they are treated.