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by mrtnmcc 1238 days ago
China is about 10x older than the US. We're like a six year old thinking they knowing better than grandpa.
2 comments

I find this perspective pretty amusing. The United States is in fact more than 3 times older than China (i.e. the PRC). The idea that modern China is wise because its ancestors were ruled by Chinese emperors seems to me basically the same as saying the west is wise because its ancestors ruled by Roman emperors. But I guess historical myths and culture are quite powerful ideas for many people.
This is the same logic hawkish American Republicans use when they say they are defending Western Values against the Chinese. What are those values? Where do they come from? Most rural Americans from Alabama who say these things haven't been to England or Germany, and if they did, they sure wouldn't recognize "their culture". Heck, they don't even need to travel to Europe.. try NYC!
I don’t really understand your point. Are you comparing hawkish nationalist Americans to hawkish nationalist Chinese?
No, but they are not comparable because Chinese are not hawkish by any American definition.
In your view, what is "hawkish by an American definition?"

Some research on the subject: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10670564.2019.15...

Five surveys of Chinese citizens, netizens, and elites help illuminate the attitudes that the Chinese government grapples with in managing international security policy. The results suggest that Chinese attitudes are more hawkish than dovish and that younger Chinese, while perhaps not more nationalist in identity, may be more hawkish in their foreign policy beliefs than older generations.

The febrile public comments about Taiwan recently suggest they are just as hawkish
Oh I see you are comparing countries not cultures. In that case US is older.
The Europeans are not obsessed with taking down China, nor are Europeans ardent individualists as Americans are. Chinese and America have a bigger cultural gap than Europe and China in this respect.
As a Chinese-speaking European, I'm getting the impression that you're using faraway places you know little about as convenient projection surfaces for an ideal contrast with the things you dislike about America.

Dislike of America's recent history of conquest turns thousands of years of warfare on what is now Chinese territory into thousands of years of living on the same land without any invasions.

Dislike of American individualism turns Europeans into... I'm actually not sure whether you associate any specific qualities with not being ardent individualists.

Anyways, I'm quite annoyed by this, so consider yourself officially taken down.

American Individualism is a well studied value w.r.t Europeans, https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2011/11/17/the-american-w...

Of course generalizing like this about groups is a cloudy lens at best but it's the premise of OP and may predict voted policy of respective countries.

That said, it's been a number of years since I lived in Switzerland and I see things have changed measurably regarding official EU policy on Chinese trade, https://wikipedia.org/wiki/China%E2%80%93European_Union_rela...