Comment by hguant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hguant | Hacker News Reader

I found this article incredibly naive and idealistic. The divide between China and America isn't a mere disagreement about trade 'disparities' and how IP is handled. The Chinese Communist Party is running an authoritarian, draconic police state that has spent its time quashing human rights, and threatening and bullying democratic nations, all while cynically exploiting its own citizens for increasingly centralized wealth. No amount of cross border trade can alter the fact that China has positioned itself as an enemy of democracy when it stands in the face of hegemonic Chinese power, both abroad and at home.

This is a country where the government forced ~10,000 women to be sterilized or see their families imprisoned in 2010, where a report came out not 2 months ago documenting how prisoners of conscience are harvested for organ transplants (the organs in question being sold; it is, after all, _state_ capitalism), a country that joined Russia in preventing the UN from sanctioning Syria after one of the worst chemical weapons attacks...I think since the Iran/Iraq war. This is the country that is stripping its citizens of their rights based on an algorithm that takes into account everything they say on the internet.

Every country commits human rights violations of some sort or another. No group is perfect. That being said, the breadth, scale, and malicious intent behind China's human rights violations beggars belief. These are not the actions of a nation that wants the best for the international community. These are not the actions of a nation that wants to integrate with the international community, except to loot it while enjoying the protections and rights created by that self same community of nations. Huawei is not dividing China from the world; China has done that for itself.

Of course it's about trade. This isn't about an argument between you and China, it's about US foreign policy toward China, vs Chinese foreign policy towards the US. The US has never cared about human rights violations as a high priority. Look at any year of US foreign policy history for the past century at least, look at who the allies are, look at who gets invaded.

When discussing US foreign policy, human rights is a fig leaf, not an actual cause of policy.

Exactly this, looking at which regimes the US has supported historically you start to realize that the US gives zero shits about democracies or human rights, they care only about their interests and will prop any dictatorship against the democratically elected leader friendly to the USSR.

Lest you think I’m being unfair to the US only, China does it too. It invaded Vietnam (another communist country) in the 70s and developed an alliance with the United States after the sino soviet split, so that it could hedge against a growing USSR and Vietnam.

In general countries are very flexible on principles, and follow their interests. Realpolitik.

> The Chinese Communist Party is running an authoritarian, draconic police state

Agree. But don't you think it is weird that this did not register during the time when moving production to China was at it's height? How come the whole west were willing to look the other way at most if not all human rights violations in China for most part of the last 3 decades, only to now raise concern?

I believe an honest assessment of those questions reveals without shadow of a doubt that humans rights violations in far off countries only become a concern for the west when it is useful for geopolitical or simple profit reasons.

It has been that way since the opium wars and longer, and we fall for it every single time.

There's a lot of history there. China had been liberalizing their society and there was some thinking - wishful thinking, perhaps - that accepting China into the international community via the WTO and offering them Most Favored Nation trading status would encourage continued liberalization.

The thinking is obviously imperfect in hindsight, but I think that Bush and Obama both feared the complications and political fallout of trying to correct course.

>But don't you think it is weird that this did not register during the time when moving production to China was at it's height?

There have always been skeptics and strong opposition to China, and full disclosure I personally have long thought it was very foolish to sacrifice both our societal ideals and the Free Market on the alter of Free Trade (which as it's been used over the last few decades has been directly opposed to both). However at the same time I think it's unreasonable not to acknowledge that there were a lot of very smart people who were China doves out of a hypothesis that economic development would actually be the best way to peacefully and productively make China liberalize and become a strong, equal and valuable partner in the international order. It was believed that economic development would result in a growing middle class and in turn a demand for more political freedom, that enormous authoritarianism would ultimately be unsustainable, and that the moral thing to do was to not be too hard on these billion+ people most of whom were highly impoverished. And China also put on a good act, toeing various lines or making the right noises or even occasional actions, combined with carrots and sticks towards companies, while they built up.

It has now become clear however that, at least in the short term, the idea that economic development would inevitably lead to political liberalization too has not worked out. Nor has a growing panopticon proved unsustainable so far. It may be that these were simply never linked concepts, or it might alternately be that technological and societal development has rendered the modern situation fundamentally different to how the West developed and shifted the power balance such that that window of history is firmly closed.

At any rate however, while there were certainly a lot of people motivated purely by greed I think you are still overly uncharitable towards a lot of genuinely good people who had good intentions. Remember, this was coming directly off of the Cold War, a time of genuinely justified end-of-the-world terror and polarization and confrontational approaches. Even if it was naive, I can understand why some people, both exhausted by the CW and excited by an imagined future where liberal democratic societies spread throughout the world, thought building economic ties and giving China a lot of slack was an alternative approach that could work.

But at this point consensus is no, regrettably it has not worked out. That a lot of anguished doves are now changing tack rather then stubbornly refusing to adapt is admirable, not bad, and will add some needed moderation and variety to new strategies rather then letting the pendulum go all the way in the other direction.

> It was believed that economic development would result in a growing middle class and in turn a demand for more political freedom, that enormous authoritarianism would ultimately be unsustainable, and that the moral thing to do was to not be too hard on these billion+ people most of whom were highly impoverished.

Maybe, just maybe, these people were a little too confident because the USSR had just collapsed.

> It was believed that economic development would result in a growing middle class and in turn a demand for more political freedom, that ... authoritarianism would ultimately be unsustainable

For the record, this is pretty much what happened historically e.g. in South Korea, and in Taiwan (which is culturally part of China). However, it did take a higher degree of development than we see in the mainland today, for there to be a real 'demand' for these sorts of changes.

>How come the whole west were willing to look the other way at most if not all human rights violations in China for most part of the last 3 decades, only to now raise concern?

This could be the subject of an interesting thesis paper in political psychology.

I think a couple factors were at play. First, when China was opening up the first time, the expectation was that democracy would follow shortly - within a decade. I think there was a real belief across a broad swathe of the political class in 1970's America that capitalism was a force for good, that foundations of civic society free markets created would inevitably flourish into democracy.

Additionally, I think you're wrong in saying that the whole west has been looking the other way when it comes to human rights violations in China. The Human Rights Watch has been going on about this for years, there were sanctions and massive protests against China after the Tiananmen Square massacre, and the Free Tibet movement has been going on since the...60's? There's been broad awareness of how much of a bad actor China is, and continuous

>I believe an honest assessment of those questions reveals without shadow of a doubt that humans rights violations in far off countries only become a concern for the west when it is useful for geopolitical or simple profit reasons.

I think this belies the scale of the threat to the West the Soviet Union represented. Ultimately you're correct; it's undeniable that the US in particular made policy choices with regards to China that put geopolitics first and human rights second, but the USSR represented a literal existential threat to democratic Europe. There's no moral and right choice here - opening relations with China keeps daylight between the CCP and the and the USSR, but legitimizes a regime that just murdered it's own middle class.

At some level you need those confluences of moral, economic, and geopolitical motives to make changes. The moral imperative against the Chinese Communist Party has always been there, China has replaced the USSR as a threat and now that the economic incentives are being hit, we're seeing the geopolitical realm hinge more on the moral side. I don't think this is just or good - I think it's just how it is.

You could say the same thing with human rights violations about Saudi Arabia. 2018, Saudi Arabia finally allowed women to drive cars. Heck even China allows women to drive cars.

US is still pretty buddy-buddy with Saudi Arabia despite the Saudis' Middle Eastern regional hegemony in the GCC Gulf Area and the fact that US calling for LGBTQ rights and women rights in Saudi Arabia is almost unheard of (https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/05/opinions/un-death-penalty-res...), so there is more than a moral "protect world human rights" stance here at play when observing US policy, its more realpolitik.

Also there is no like necessary-evil situation here, the other alternative is to enable the Middle Eastern states to embrace democracy and to get rid of hereditary dictatorships.

While I very much agree with most of your points I think you have to be careful not to assume malicious intent. Very likely most of the decision makers on the other side are very much thinking they are making the best decisions for their country/party/region/faction/[insert frame of reference]. Once you vilify your enemy you won't be able to understand them or empathise with them.

I'm disappointed to see that you're being downvoted. People like to play "what about" games comparing the US and China's human rights record, but we're talking about a country that indisputably runs literal prison camps for an ethnic/religious minority:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/13/666287509/ex-detainee-describ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/50_Cent_Party

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