[niccccccccc]

There's alot of international people posting on hacker news, and alot of them have anti-US bias. They wish China would be the one that takes over US as the superpower of the world. for those people I have a comment

You like posting political views on the internet right? Imagine China is the sole superpower of the world that defeated the democracies of the world. You would be ranked, censored, monitored, caught, jailed, tortured, and killed.

[jackvalentine]

> They wish China would be the one that takes over US as the superpower of the world.

I have literally never seen this.

[natch]

You should travel to China and see it for yourself. Americans are so incredibly naive. I’m not saying you’re American but you definitely should get out more.

[ItsMe000001]

He is not talking about China but about people on HN who allegedly want this. I don't see how traveling to China helps, you need to travel to this website that you are already on to prove or disprove the claim :-)

[TomMarius]

Meeting the naive expats there is a very eye opening experience.

[natch]

Well yes, that too.

[jackvalentine]

I have been to China three times, for a total of about a year spent there thank you very much.

I come from an English spring country but have spent extensive time in various other countries where I have family. Thanks for being a total dick whilst knowing nothing about me.

That being irrelevant though I suggest you re-read the post I was replying to. And then the honourable thing to do would be apologise to me.

[natch]

>I have literally never seen this.

I was responding to this part. I apologize that my comment was poorly worded and I'll admit slightly obnoxious.

Still I am surprised that you never noticed, during your visits to China, the degree to which they wish China would be the one that takes over US as the superpower of the world. When I have been there it has never been hidden, but then I tend to get down into the culture rather than remaining at the expat bars. Again I'm not saying YOU stay at expat bars... like I wasn't saying YOU are American... but just responding to what you actually wrote about what someone else actually wrote.

[jackvalentine]

> Still I am surprised that you never noticed, during your visits to China... (snip)

I’ve made exactly zero comment on what I’ve observed anywhere but HN. Please for the love of god stop assuming what I’ve seen/haven’t seen unless I say it.

That said, yes I’ve noticed people in China are favourable to a world with Chinese hegemony as a superpower. That’s not surprising is it? I’ve noticed in America there is a favourable sentiment in general to the status quo - American superpower hegemony.

Thank you for your apology and I do accept it. It is difficult sometimes on the internet and in real life to make sure you’re responding to what the person said/means and not what you imagine them to mean. We can all try to better understand others rather than talk at them.

[natch]

Point (well, points) taken. Thanks for the clarification, which I admit I should have been able to read from your original parent's wording.

[_ptgt]

I have been to China and it did not allay my fears about a CCP-centric world one bit.

Also I'm an American and I don't appreciate your pseudo-racist condescension.

[natch]

I definitely didn't mean it in the sense of allaying fears. I meant if anything it should heighten fears, for those who have more than a surface experience.

Not sure where race is coming into it for you. American is not a race. Chinese is more a culture, than a race, if you look at the diversity of China outside of just Han. ??? Maybe we should just leave that one alone, it may have been a misunderstanding.

[chapium]

Same. Seems like trolling.

[meri_dian]

I see China envy online a lot, especially given our recent political disfunction as people look at the superficial stability of China and want that for their own societies.

[whatshisface]

China is emphatically not stable. The PRC was started in 1949. The US civil war ended in 1865. Revolution is a living memory for some in China and that does a great deal to help the population think that suppression at all costs is reasonable. While the US was having its civil war, China was suffering through the tail end of [1]. Historically (in the modern era), China may best be seen as a very violent place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hong_Xiuquan

(Edit: I didn't notice the word superficial at first, it may have been inserted later as a correction.)

[dnoeuirc4334nt]

They said "superficial stability". The point is that it looks nice and stable if you don't look too closely.

[sh4z]

I do think a lot of people wish US was not the superpower of the world, but I don't think many people wish China to take over. But they probably will.

[rohit2412]

Don't have anything against USA, but a world with a single superpower is prone to bullying and abuse by the said superpower. Many of us just want a peaceful world, and if that needs to be multipolar, so be it

[konschubert]

A unipolar world tends to be more peaceful than a multipolar one simply because there isn't much opportunity for conflict.

Peaceful, not necessarily fair or free.

[wu-ikkyu]

>A unipolar world tends to be more peaceful than a multipolar one simply because there isn't much opportunity for conflict.

This statement ignores the mass murder it takes to become the number one power

[iovrthoughtthis]

I guess they meant peace as the opposite of war?

[wu-ikkyu]

Right. The one who participates in and wins the most wars or murders the most people becomes the superpower.

[krapp]

>Right. The one who participates in and wins the most wars or murders the most people becomes the superpower.

If merely winning the most wars and murdering the most people automatically made one a superpower, then the United States would not have become a superpower, because they did not win the most wars, nor did they murder the most people, at the end of World War 2, when they gained superpower status.

You're trying so hard to be cynical here that you're abandoning rationality. I'm no fan of American military hegemony, or superpowers in general, but you make the US sound like a Mongol Khanate which is just absurd. The world is more complex than "whomever stands on the biggest pile of heads wins."

[ibeckermayer]

Your analysis entirely leaves out the most important factor which is: who are the “poles”?

China is an authoritarian, control-freak one-party-superstate that jails and kills political opposition. Will the world be more “peaceful” if there’s a multipolar collection of those?

[Asdfbla]

I suspect some people are guessing that a multipolar world will be less interventionist (since the great powers might block each other from interfering too much) and therefore adventures like the Iraq war are less likely to happen again. This might arguably make the world more peaceful, though it might allow civil wars to continue for longer.

No idea if it's true or will work out that way, but it's one hypothesis I think is out there.

Sure, the downside of China's rise is that authoritarian states have more legitimacy, but it's not like the western powers did much about those states back when they were the hegemons, so I'm not sure if the argument carries much weight either.

[rgbrenner]

But that's not what happened during the cold war. The US and Soviet Union both fought over allies, influenced affairs in other countries, engaged in proxy wars, etc

You say "block intervention"... how does that work? That sounds like a proxy war to me... like the korean war, or vietnam, or afghanistan in the 80s. It's not peace, it's just bloodier.

The world is more peaceful today without the Soviet Unions fight for influence.

[thiagoharry]

China is less imperialistic and appears to mess less with other country affairs. China never gave support for a dictatorship in my country. USA also jailed and persecuted the Black Panthers and had the macarthism. Their 2 political parties which are able to win elections sometimes appears to be very similar, at least about their foreign policy which impacts the world.

[dralley]

Lol. Tell that to Nepal and Taiwan.

[niccccccccc]

> China is less imperialistic and appears to mess less with other country affairs

China threatens Taiwan INVASION to 'unify state' with FORCE if US Navy arrive

https://www.express.co.uk/news/world/890698/World-War-3-Chin...

Chinese Police Are Demanding Personal Information From Uighurs in France

http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/03/02/chinese-police-are-secre...

China demands immediate halt to THAAD missile system now ‘operational’ in South Korea

http://www.scmp.com/news/asia/east-asia/article/2092259/nort...

[meri_dian]

The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

I think many people, especially in large and proud nations, don't like the idea of being a second class power to the United States. That's certainly what motivates Putin and Xi Jinping. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be the best, of course. I welcome competition.

Unfortunately though this frustration with not being the lone superpower drives people to focus solely on what the US is perceived to have done wrong while ignoring the tremendous amount of good the US has done and continues to do for the global international order. Therefore people develop a very skewed and biased understanding of the world.

Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen in the period of global peace and stability we've seen since the US has been the superpower.

[ItsMe000001]

> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

How so? I don't think so. AFAICS - and I lived in the US for a decade and would do so again, I have no beef with the country, just saying what I think I see/know - the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.

It's hard to prove or disprove your 2nd paragraph claim since we cannot have the experiment. I think that while you can certainly (as always) find plenty of examples in support the opposing side won't have any difficulties either. Overall the statement is way too fuzzy and broad to be either attackable or supportable.

> Multipolarity means warfare and carnage on a scale much greater than anything we've seen

Sounds like a vote for a global dictatorship to me.

[rayiner]

> the US has always been an expansionist and later empire-seeking country at least for significant (i.e. with enough influence) parts of the powerful.

That’s not true at all, at least not in historical context. The US is the most powerful country in the world never to build an actual empire. It’s conquests are limited to part of Mexico, and some pacific islands. It’s predecessor, Great Britain, colonized India, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas, and turned China into a vassal state. The would-be challenger Germany occupied France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, etc.

The US is interventionist—it intervenes in the political affairs of other countries to perpetuate the status quo. That’s very different from being expansionist or Empire-seeking. Take Iraq for example. The US toppled the government. But did it colonize the country? Annex the oil fields? Turn the oil over to domestic oil companies like Exxon? No. (Most of the development rights went to BP, a British company!) The US spent far more on Iraq then it got out of the country. That’s not how an Empire operates.

[lotsofpulp]

Yes, the US does seem to be keen on transferring tax dollars to private entities.

[gkya]

It's a fallacy to think of global affairs as a competition for some funny vague rank or doing good or bad, and of figures that represent power as tragedies characters that aim certain things and act in accordance with their stereotypes. It's a game of economics. Rest is rhetoric.

[viraptor]

I'm not sure why:

> tremendous amount of good the US has done

Has any effect on:

> The amount of "bullying and abuse" by the US is grossly overstated.

If I cure a 1000 people and kill 1, in still an evil killer. It's not like some kind of game system where karma is a single number. You can help some people and be abusive to others, and those will never balance out unless there's a strict cause-effect relation between them.

[malloryerik]

What about a non-polar world?

(This is a quirky and rough post written late at night during a break from coding, so be forewarned...)

For example Europe used to be what we'd call multipolar, but today with the EU (sadly minus Britain for now at least) it's non-polar. OK, Germany is the biggest and most powerful, France after, but they aren't hegemonic and they must abide by the rules of the wider EU.

The US-led post WWII international order has probably been the closest thing yet to a global non-polar situation, so it's sad to see the US turning way from its own creation. To me, there should be more international harmonization and rule-making, which of course can only happen at the expense of some loss of national solidarity (the cost of any treaty) but which also can confer global rights and privileges.

I'd hope to see the world develop to become more like one huge EU. Just as countries wish to join the EU, they would hopefully wish to join the World Union. To do that they'd have to meet standards, and those standards would provide beacons, giving direction and purpose to countries that still had a long distance to travel.

So it couldn't be just like the EU all of a sudden of course. For example you can't just have a global Schengen Area for total free movement, you'd crash the system and get too much backlash, but you could start with, say, freedom of movement within some areas. So, imagine all OECD countries as one free movement area. I'd be so psyched! Wouldn't you? You could live in many places, your freedom would be massively expanded. And because OECD countries have similar levels of wealth, disruption would seem unlikely. Then you could expand from there however it were possible to other countries, but a larger total area would be better at absorbing immigrants because there would be more places for individuals or groups to discover niches they could fill.

(As an aside, I find it hard to understand how people who call themselves libertarians can be against freedom of movement. Likewise, people believing in "universal human rights of man" but only if you happen to be a citizen of their country. It seems almost like, say, a Christian telling you they'd only extend forgiveness and agape love to people from their own family, circle, or region, but sadly this is also common. I'm writing this from Seoul, by which I mean to argue that today we are all neighbors. Hello, neighbors^^)

Anyway, if we want a non-polar world, things like the WTO and UN, instead of being disparaged for their flaws, should be improved and expanded. To gain greater access to the global market, or areas within it, the World Union could stipulate that human dignity be maintained (even continuously improved), that rights of individuals be protected, and even that democracy, perhaps with local characteristics, be the system of government for those who wished to join. Perhaps China could keep its bureaucratic meritocracy ideas and still join, but not without approval from the country's citizens.

Advantages of joining could include things like open markets, common issuance of bonds, common protection against catastrophes, some kind of common currency mechanism with room for monetary policy to be either joined or governed by shared rules and principles, so that things like devaluations or interest rate settings could reflect local conditions but also jive / be in harmony with global economic trends. There could be levels of membership. Partial members. Pathways toward membership.

We already have a global culture and plenty of important, even existential global problems. It seems like the time is nigh for a global harmonization, maybe a World Union, or "World Commons".

That word "nigh" is interesting because it's chunked together so often with the apocalyptic phrase, "The end is nigh," the "end" being the Christian Day of Judgement from the Book of Revelations. The Book of Revelations, which just barely made it into the Bible at the Council of Nicea, has sadly become an enemy of global cooperation in many religious Christian people's eyes. This may have in part to do with the kinds of views in the runaway best-seller Left Behind series of Apocalypse and Damnation-porn fiction (the books are an evangelical Christian orgy of shadenfreude -- just watch the damned sinners get theirs hahaha), with a metaphysical conspiracy theory about the United Nations being a source for Satan's control of the world.

I'm not religious, but it saddens me that the Christian faith, which began as something hoping to be universal and seeing us all as God's creations and each with the Holy Ghost within us, so each of us as holy and sacred, how that beautiful faith can (yet again) be twisted toward parochial and even nationalistic ends, even without many of the people responsible realizing what they are doing. Why have we come here to metaphysical conspiracy theories? Because the United States, from where so much progress has come in so many ways, but also where the Left Behind books were such hits, remains the indispensable country when it comes to global union and harmonization. China, not so much.

[dang]

Ugh, what a trainwreck of a flamewar. All: please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, which asks you not to feed egregious comments by replying. All you do, when you do that, is add to the damage and spread the flames.

We've banned this account for using HN for political and national battle, flamewars, and personal attacks. That's a rather striking amount of vandalism, just as it would be if you had the opposite opinions. Indeed, the people who vandalize HN this way have more in common with their extreme enemies than they do with anyone else.

[tombh]

Is it anti-US or rather just not pro-US?

Arguably the biggest problem that Western democracy faces is apathy. So I think many of us take the opportunity to ride the wave of ire that China's policies illicit and attempt to funnel it into self-reflection. The West is an unaccounted bully on the global stage, the list of atrocities it has committed is both difficult to comprehend and stomach.

This does not at all placate China. Unchecked power in any context is bad news. Both the Chinese and Western populace are complicit. We are all heading for a tragically sobering wake up call.

If the only way for the Western psyche to understand its own pathology is by projection onto others, then so be it.

[baq]

chinese 'patriots' and/or chinese psyops must be active on HN just as they're active on other online forums; that's probably what you're seeing.

[0x03]

Can you support your claims in the first paragraph?

[Froyoh]

Don't think he/she can.

[niccccccccc]

pavs literally just posted the evidence below

[throwafk81]

I’m European. I can be fined and/or incarcerated if what I say on the internet is arbitrarily deemed as “hate speech”. You don’t need to live in China to be censored.

[whatshisface]

That's bad, but you have bad and worse. For example in the US the TSA does things the police (and nobody, really,) should never be able to, and they do it without warrants: but that alone does not mean that the US is an authoritarian police state (even though it is more of one than it could be). Likewise, there's a difference between corporate influence in government and outright, socially accepted direct bribery.

This applies to every country, they could all be better or worse: but some of them are currently worse than others.

[meri_dian]

Having to be scanned to get on a plane seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have to do. I fly often and I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest.

[pluto9]

> Having to be scanned to get on a plane seems like a perfectly reasonable thing to have to do.

Even if that scan does little or nothing to actually improve your safety [1]? If I'm going to have my privacy taken away, I want something better in return for it than security theater and wasted taxes.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-o...

[wu-ikkyu]

>I'm glad the TSA exists and does what it does. I don't feel like my liberty is being taken away in the slightest.

If you truly believe that, would you be opposed to TSA style x-ray machines, genital pat downs, and strip searches any time you were to go to school, work, get on a bus, etc?

[meri_dian]

Well that would be an inconvenience because I and many others go to work and ride public transport every day. Which is why we don't see TSA checkpoints everywhere; it would be too inconvenient.

People fly infrequently though, and also have a very strong desire to feel safe when flying, so they are for the most part fine with TSA checkpoints. TSA checkpoints are implemented to make people feel safe.

See, it's a balance.

[acct1771]

TSA checkpoints have accelerated to being in subways, etc.

Ratchets only tighten.

[wu-ikkyu]

>Well that would be an inconvenience

So in other words, restricting your liberty or freedom of movement?

[manjushri]

Many chinese citizens feel the same way about the "social credit system".

[darepublic]

Do you believe the censorship in Europe is the same as in China? I guess more generally do you believe China taking over would not make things worse?

[acct1771]

China is simply further down the same exact line, for lack of better phrasing.

[jchw]

That's a pretty weak comparison to China's totalitarian system of censorship and monitoring.

[throwafk81]

The Police of London actively scan and monitor social networks looking for “hate speech” so they can pursue legal action. What’s the difference between that and what China does?

[SolaceQuantum]

The difference is that you can criticize the government and not be thrown in jail. You have a lot more autonomy in your opinions on how you are governed. You can have his conversation at all!

[anontoday0406]

> Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of [China], its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content.

https://gking.harvard.edu/publications/how-censorship-china-...

[SolaceQuantum]

Okay, so we can even have the conversation about broad social implications, compare/contrast, what we can do about it, etc. is a drastic difference.

[faitswulff]

Shouldn't hate speech should be punished?

[acct1771]

Offending someone shouldn't be illegal. Period.

Directly inciting actual physical violence, you might have an argument for.

But words and ideas must remain free to maintain any semblance of a free society.

As other commenters have said: who decides?

[i_am_nomad]

The problem with that is, who defines what “hate” is?

[chrischen]

London deemed hate wpeech punishable, China determines certain speech (that it deems bad for society as well) punishable. No difference except for a difference in perspective.

[Karunamon]

No. Not because of the usual slippery slope reasons, but because denying someone their freedom for mere words is abhorrent.

[solarkraft]

I'm European. I'm glad there's an attempt to protect vulnerable groups.

[acct1771]

"The Holocaust" isn't a vulnerable group.

[throwafk81]

I’m sure the Chinese are also glad there’s an attempt to maintain order and avoid social unrest. ;-)

[meri_dian]

It's funny, hate speech laws are unconstitutional and could not be passed in the US but such laws are commonplace in Europe. Yet people like to mock the US for saying it's the land of the free.

[madengr]

No guns for you either, Comrade.

[pavs]

Please stop spreading FUDs, given the option I think most people would prefer China over USA's policy of bombing the shit out of your country to install democracy or rather pro-American democracy.

[JoeAltmaier]

...and no consciousness of the irony in being able to post that criticism openly.

China has an absolutely appalling social justice history, including every war they've been involved in, their internal intolerance, and their record-breaking incompetence at even feeding their own people.