| I'll offer a contrasting viewpoint - I'm scared to see people propagate opinions like these though I see why people might believe these things. (In no way do I mean any disrespect to you. Power to you for being brave enough to post what may contribute to an interesting discussion.) For one, these opinions are essentially a list of judgments based on a biased set of observations. There is a difference between making an observation and making a judgement: For example, perhaps you observe that there are few replies on this thread and therefore judge that people are disinterested. Perhaps you observe China is a rising power and you judge that it is gathering power for the purpose of undermining Western countries. Perhaps you observe that Chinese people have copied a lot of Western ideas and you judge what they are doing to be selfish stealing. Perhaps you observe that China doesn't have due process, free press, etc and therefore judge that Chinese authorities are "happy" to jail people. These kinds of judgments tend to attribute intention to behaviors. Such judgments aren't falsifiable nor testable, are too narrowly focused, and they put people at risk of committing fundamental attribution errors. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error) I suspect people who post opinions like these tend to have some less-than-virtuous private psychological desire they want to fulfill. Perhaps they are projecting their own life metaphors onto abstract geopolitical entities - which I think is often silly. Even though we all know China is a country and not a person, people often personify the abstract entity of _the whole of China_ as “wanting” things or having "values" or being "happy to do anything". Perhaps they think life is supposed to be fair and so they frame the actions of countries in terms of fairness. I don’t think it is always correct to think about countries in terms of these metaphors. Sometimes I also suspect people who have these kinds of opinions to be low-key racist since they are quick to turn observations into more than they are. Perhaps they believe Chinese people are only good at copying people and not making anything original of their own. Perhaps they think Chinese people live in inferior ways and are too inferior to come up with a superior way of living. Perhaps they think it is only natural we should always be drawing negative attention to divergences between what those people do and what we do. I can sympathize with these views but I wonder what the end goal of propagating these views are - is it a war based on an obsession with something related to identity? Or are people calling for help in finding some way to peacefully coexist? Or do people just want to stroke their own ego? It is no great intellectual achievement to come up with a political narrative. Many narratives aren't falsifiable, some are psychologically driven, bias driven, and many should never be considered politically-actionable. It is one thing to be disinterested and another to be informed yet cautious about jumping to judgment. |
"Even though we all know China is a country and not a person, people often personify the abstract entity of _the whole of China_ as “wanting” things or having "values" or being "happy to do anything". In this case, and in this context, "China" as a concept can be entirely reduced to the Chinese government, and we do know exactly what their values are (entirely antithetical to everything that I listed), how they behave and what their interests are (hint: None of it is in our best interests). Hell, at this point, we could probably reduce it down to President Xi Jinping. Depending on context, "China" could also mean the corporations that represent China abroad, which are almost always state-sponsored, owned and subsidized anyway (they just hide it pretty damn well), and the end point is, again, the Chinese state.
As for the idea that a country can't "want" anything or have "values" ... that's just not true. I'm not even sure how you can say that as a fact, even though countries often behave in goal-oriented ways to get what they want - and what they want is generally entirely dependent on its government, its economy, its population, etc. A country isn't a separate concept from these things - it is these things. Do you know what we call a country's values? Culture.
You've essentially said a whole bunch of nothing while addressing none of my actual concerns. It's disingenuous and deceitful and I'm not sure why you're trying to paint my comment in such a bad light in such a way.