[knzhou]

I'm glad we agree that development and opportunity are good things.

The average per capita income in China is lower than countries like Costa Rica or Venezuela. It's less than half of what a minimum wage worker gets in the US. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people still die in China due to preventable diseases like tuberculosis and hepatitis. About half the children in the countryside are malnourished, to a degree that would not be conceivable for anybody in the US. This is the actual situation China is facing, and it's still dramatically better than many countries that were similarly poor decades ago.

In response to this, you and HN in general immediately react with fears of imminent Chinese world domination. Once again I ask you: why does the prospect of a few non-white people not starving to death make you so afraid? Why is this so alarming, so abnormal? I encourage you to spend at least a moment thinking about it.

[zozin]

You keep bringing up racism and devolving the conversation. The entire gist of your argument seems to be that universal principles don't matter so long as progress is made. That's a shortsighted and fairly moronic point of view. Taiwan, South Korea and Hong Kong were able to develop and raise millions out of poverty in concert with universal principles and democracy. China and the China model does not have a stranglehold on development. They don't own some sort of secret sauce that cannot be replicated. You don't have to trade in freedom of speech and expression and the rule of law for an HDTV and a high-rise apartment.

I would argue that a democratic China would be further along in its development than it currently is. A democratic China would have not have had its development retarded by a megalomaniacal madman whose decisions led to the deaths of dozens of millions of souls. Were those deaths justified in the pursuit of growth and development?