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Comment by fakedang | Hacker News Reader

Most of the Middle East, Africa (up until their debts had to be collected), Indian nationalists (up until the incursions in Kashmir), Singapore, Duterte. Heck, Europe just signed a trade deal with China with full knowledge of the Uighur camps and the HK protests, while on the other side extolling vacuously about democratic ideals in Sub-Saharan or war ridden failed states.

If people counter me and reiterate stating that the EU deal is going to miraculously discipline China somewhat, boy do I have a bridge to sell to you. Maybe some gutter oil to go along with it too.

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Do you believe antagonising China even more will make things better? Should the EU stop all deals with the biggest exporting economy of the world, home of one in 5 human beings, because it disagrees with its policies?

I will answer that: no it shouldn't. You can have a certain level of engagement even when you strongly disagree with another country. Showing aggressive behaviour, specially taking into account the history of agression and colonisation by the West as recently as 50 years ago, will not do anything at all to make life better to the victims of Chinese prosecution. By engaging with the Chinese, the EU may at least have some leverage to politely request that the Chinese , as sovereign people, start displaying a little more respect to other cultures within their own borders.

That is essentially the thesis of American foreign policy in Asia since the 1980s. The results have been mixed; yes, they have a huge, prosperous middle class now, yet the government remains about as authoritarian as it ever was.

Now, with technology, in fact things are getting worse. Everyone is required to have a cell phone, everyone is spied upon, a "social score" is maintained and if your score dips below a certain threshold, you may not travel etc.

If the EU thinks that making more trade deals with China is going to temper any of these, they're naive indeed.

Over in the land of the free. Are the police not trawling through Facebook imagery and chat messages to arrest the “insurrectionists”? Is the spying ok when it’s sponsored by Facebook?

Oh, is today Whataboutism day?

The racism/double standard (which is what it is) hurled at china for things that everyone is doing, but it's some how bad in china, then excusing pointing this out as "whataboutism" is pretty disgusting.

Well, I don't disagree with you. We're becoming more like China every day. Social scoring, speech codes, nonpersons, government-inspired mob violence.

I can't help but feel this isn't related to political idealism... There is some kind of "well we can... so why not?" and implementing it, and the second/third order effects of doing it are sometimes hard to envision. Like "lets build a chat system (and store it all in a centralised location)" doesn't feel as nefarious as like a Manhattan Project, but ramifications are quite dramatic.

> Do you believe antagonising China even more will make things better? Should the EU stop all deals with the biggest exporting economy of the world, home of one in 5 human beings, because it disagrees with its policies?

Yes. Sanctions can be very effective in curbing China's outsize influence worldwide and cut their economy by half. Just embargo them as long as they persecute Uighurs and HKers.

Unfortunately that can't be done, since American and European companies were too stupid to give away their schematics and let the Chinese copy them outright, while also simultaneously reducing their indigenous production capabilities in important sectors such as rare earths mining and refining, solar manufacturing and extraction technologies.

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