By that standard surely Korea can complain endlessly about China and Yuan Shikai lording it over their kingdom in the 1880s, and the Czechs can cry over their subjugation for centuries by Austria-Hungary, etc. etc.
In 1949 Mao Zedong famously declared "China has stood up." Apparently though he meant, "We're such a weak people that we cry to mommy everytime others demand reciprocity."
160 years in the past?
The Chinese reparations, totalling $US 61 billion is today's dollar equivalents, were only completed in 1940. Then China sided with the Allies in WWII. 15 million Chinese lost their lives in that war.
But I wouldn't characterise Chinese trade policy as victimhood. Chinese entrepreneurs don't rely on any such arguments. They just make products that western consumers want to buy.
That was under the Kuomintang regime, who fled to Taiwan in 1949
This is like saying that the Poles didn't deserve reparations from Germany for WWII because the pre-war republic wasn't restored and instead there was a new regime. The country and people exist independently of the governing system.
This doesn't really make sense. The Second Sino-Japanese war predates the European theater by 2 years. It'd be more accurate to say the US sided with China to help them fight a mutual enemy.
These other national examples are nation vs nation, where an outside oppressor came & then went. Missing from your anti-empathy sentiments is recognition that these peoples never were given their own sovereignty & resources to rebuild themselves. The most injurious piece may have ended but they remain bound up in the impacts all the the same.
I vaguely say “other people” because this notion is what entices racial sentiments. It’s no different than changing the adjective for a different skin tone, and saying they too deserve their “own self rule”
This implies “blacks” don’t have self rule as it stands today, which I disagree with. In 2020, there exists no legislature that disfavors someone based on their skin color or ethnic background. We do however have the inverse, policies that give advantages to those who have specific skin color.
This predilection for a specific kind of racism, a one-way street attitude, is what fuels our current divide. I need not say more.
In one case, the oppressors left & sovereignty was restored.
In the other case, the law decided it had to change to try to bring itself into alignment with some basic human rights & regards.
I do think the people living under now-more-just law still struggle, still face discrimination, and are victim to a system that was imposed on them & a system which does not favor them. I don't think it's unreasonable to identify this gap, and this "one way street" attitude seems, to me, restorative & to be what equity & justice demands. And at times, it feels like it's still not enough, that some people- some persistent negative forces- remain fixed & focused on exclusion & discrimination & their biases, in a way that makes me think perhaps these victim-folk do deserve entirely higher levels of freedom from these oppressive forces that they still face, beyond merely our ongoing & too-controversial attempts at rebalacing.
While it's true that the Sino-British Joint Declaration placed some temporary restrictions on China's policies regarding that region, this is an agreement between sovereign nations, thus reaffirming China's sovereignty.
I suppose that, in a sense, all international treaties are a loss of some degree of sovereignty, but in that sense nearly every country in the world has lost sovereignty in that time.
Yeah, it's absurd. It's like if somebody would appeal to the memory of the Battle of the Alamo.