Edit: Grammar
It's a rather remarkable difference at this point.
The US economy was 16 times larger than China at the end of 1989. Japan was nine times larger. China was only about 45% larger than South Korea back then.
China's military spending today is equal to at least a third the size of its economy in 1989 inflation adjusted.
There's a reason why there are no major protests occurring in the Middle East re Xinjiang. One would expect an enormous outpouring of anger and protest, boycott, mass demonstrations and burnings of the Chinese flag and Xi's effigy 24/7. They know it won't make any difference and it'll just anger China; they have almost zero influence to affect China's behavior. Most of the world feels that way.
Take Pakistan. It gets billions in military and economic aid from the west and does a lot of trade with the US and Europe, but protests against the west are common. I really don't get what it is about China that, in the eyes of the Muslim man in the street, gives it a free pass to mass intern and re-educate muslims into not being muslims.
That's not true. The US is susceptible to humiliation and reputation erosion when it comes to human rights. China, largely, is not. The Muslim prisoners - Abu Ghraib - being tortured wearing black bags, the infamous photos that were leaked (and sparked large protests across the Middle East), was an embarrassing scandal for years in the US and globally. It rather painfully tarnished the US when it comes to having authority to speak on human rights. And that's just one of several prominent examples from the past 20 years.
Obama promised to close Guantanamo specifically because of that type of reputation damage. Guantanamo is an issue about 1,000 times smaller in terms of impact, than what's going on in Xinjiang and yet it was a huge human rights scandal for the US that persists in tarnish to this day. It's routinely mentioned even now and the US gets lambasted for it. These things are a big credibility destroyer for a liberal democracy.
Go watch footage, or read polling/surveys, of what Western Europeans said and thought about the US from ~1948 to ~1991. Then compare it to today. That's the reputation hit the US has taken, the moral ground it has ceded. It has a tangible negative impact on the ability of the US to operate as a superpower, when your allies question your moral standing.
The US went to war, in Europe's backyard, to stop a genocide of Muslims with the Kosovo War. The positive reputation gain that you acquire from doing something like that, is largely wiped out when you do something like torture Muslims in those infamous photos at Abu Ghraib.
China does not operate on any reputation basis when it comes to human rights. They do not depend on US-style allies, of which they have almost none. They almost entirely disregard such reputation concerns. Quite the opposite, they defend their authoritarian approach with direct threats to anyone that opposes how their government does things.
The sort of image the US wanted to project wasn't just for their allies but also for internal consumption. Remember that back then there was a PR war between capitalism and communism, as there was a real fear within the US of communism taking over. This fear was laid to rest when the Soviet Union fell apart and conservative interests won power within the US. As a result US authorities felt free to take the velvet glove off their iron fist.
The brazen exercise of raw power without apology has accelerated under Bush Jr and now Trump. Gitmo was an embarrassment to Obama who vowed to close it, but Trump has signed an executive order to keep it open and has vowed to use more torture.
Where are the consequences?
The West has had decades of support for Israel (whose existence has been detested by most of the ME since pre-inception) and the decades-long struggle for ME countries to obtain ownership of their oil resources while white guys were in the country getting rich off it created has created a powerful and lasting image embedded into the culture (not least aided by lots of opportunistic ME politicians drumming up anti-West sentiment for decades in the same manner Western ones drum up anti-immigrant sentiment).
China is too new, even if they're actually a more appropriate target for wrongs committed in 2018-2019.
1. https://www.thequint.com/news/world/pakistan-pm-imran-khan-o...
I am sure they will go in, but I’m also sure they have more sophisticated crowd control methods available to them.
The self-censorship on the part of the Western heads of state thus far has been a testament of the PRC's clout unto itself.
It certainly looks bad. But let us not forget how the US treats our own "Tank Man", Chelsea Manning.
1. Local police was sent, it either did nothing or deserted
2. Troops from BJ itself were sent in, largely the same happened
3. Liaoning military region troops were called, they fared just a bit better than BJ troops, made few attack attempts, but nevertheless withdrew
4. Finally, as Beijing was getting more and more desperate, Shaanxi military region troops - "the primitives," were called and given a total cart blance. They made a blood bath
Also, even they weren't particularly loyal: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insubordination_in_the_PLA_dur...
What then?
It has always been the case that the powerful squash uprisings by getting half the poor to kill the other half this has been the case regardless of the country for thousands of years, to think otherwise is naive.
> combined with all the cameras running
They killed protestors in Tiananmen square precisely because it was in front of cameras so the world would know the lengths they would goto in order to maintain power. China has never faced any negative consequences for the massacre because every one got the message.