How does a Bay Area tech site, when Bay Area tech has sooo many individuals who originally came to the USA as students but then couldn't go home due to tiananmen, have this kind of 'enlightened thought' on China, day in and day out?
I believe the point GP makes is not that China is a good place. More like that we are oblivious to all the points that make our own place pretty bad too.
On one hand, you can claim that it's a well-known propaganda technique (e.g. the soviets using "...And you are lynching negroes" as a rebuttal to anything). But on the other hand, the most satisfying way to avoid that form of propaganda would probably be to fix our own flaws rather than calling whataboutism.
I mean American's seem like about the most 'bring our flaws out into public and deal with them' society I have ever interacted with. Daterape is no longer acceptable. The entire way men treat women has changed in my lifetime. How we respond to domestic violence has completely changed (we don't just ignore it). LGBT+ rights have greatly changed. Race relations have completely changed (they may need work but they are so much better than the 80s where people rampantantly used the N word at work, in social situations).
The average American is much more aware of our issues, not China's. Our own place isn't pretty bad just because we have past history nor ongoing problems. It's a matter of 'what are we doing to change and improve', and are we willing/free to bring up problems that need changing, and does our societies structure allow change? Or does society pound down those nails that dare stick out? Every society is a flawed human constructed stumbled into not intelligently/humanely designed. The American systems is the most dynamic/flexible of all the ones I have been exposed to. There are more liberal ones, but less dynamic and flexible (no free speech laws in the UK which might cause the lack of reflection that you lament). There are more conservative ones that are again less dynamic/flexible.
Look - I agree. But at the same time, I've seen what the Bay Area puts out, and their product designers are more concerned with designing the next cigarette than improving anyone's life or ensuring domestic security. The US is currently relying on contractors that are asleep at the wheel.
Plainly speaking, China already took our iPhone manufacturing and our electric car business. They've got the chops, the supply chain and the export network to keep doing that for everything from the JSOW to the Harpoon missile. Unless the US makes a serious effort to invest in domestic R&D, our Bay Area vanguards are going to spend more time jerking off than participating in a healthy defense business.
Additionally, iPhones were never assembled in America. Enough manufacturing had been offshored to the PRC it just wasn’t even a consideration of any sort until late last decade, and the response from Apple has been to reshore some assembly elsewhere, not bring it into the States.
"over time" is right - if TSMC's roadmap isn't getting the US onto 3nm before 2026, then Apple could buy cheaper/denser silicon from fucking Samsung if they wanted. You know, the fab Apple has avoided for density issues and concerns that they aren't competitive. Taiwan still has the golden goose, and unless Apple's products stop relying on node upgrades (they won't) then we're not going to manufacture the majority of Apple chips in America. We'll be lucky if American fabs yield high enough to make memory controllers, let alone entire SOCs.
It's very easy to say that during peacetime. But you can't depend on adversaries for cheap labor, period. The US federal government, communist or not, just spent billions ensuring that those manufacturing jobs aren't forfeited by our multi-trillion multinationals. Our strict adherence to capitalism is just about pushing us to USSR-collapse levels of market abuse. Our consumers are completely braindead; our manufacturers aren't being given reason to stay by the government; even US agencies like NASA and DARPA are getting outdone by Chinese state-run agencies.
Regardless of how you feel about it, the CHIPS act is a line in the sand the US has just crossed. We are heading back to cold-war style economics, because this is an economic cold war.
This doesn't really mean much when those laws include "you're not allowed to expose crimes by government" not to mention drug laws and copyright. At the end it's not any less arbitrary than whatever excuses the chinese government uses to intern those they don't like.
There are also no laws against exposing crimes by the government. You’re just not allowed to break other laws just because you’re doing so.
People very frequently successfully expose corruption and abuse by governments in the US. It just doesn’t make significant news unless it’s a major national politician, and that happens multiple times a year.
It is known a priori that the laws are so vague that everyone is breaking several. If the government chooses to find out which one you are breaking, you go to prison. If you expose crimes by the government, you may find yourself suddenly being investigated for something unrelated.
That's just the government interring whoever it doesn't like, with extra steps. Or making a law that says "we have to like you" with extra steps.
Sure they are. E.g. hate speech, antisemitism, threat to public order, threat to the integrity of the state. You know that Russian woman with the blank paper was also a threat to the integrity of the state.
No. While there were criminals also in gulags, most of people were there only because someone didn't like them or they happened to be wrong time in wrong place. That's it.
One is a failure of social order, product of greed, evil and stupidity. The other is the largest-scale arbitrary detention of ethnic and religious minorities since World War II.
No. But does China have a horrible record on human rights and abuses? Yes. Have they been ethnically cleansing the Uyghur population for years now? Yes. Not to mention bullying and threatening all neighbors across the region. Just read about the recent worries over ZMPC cranes. The CCP will and has infiltrated private companies as a vector to spy on other countries. Maybe they haven't blown up pagers like this, but they've done other things that should make anyone skeptical of buying sensitive equipment from them.
Oh wow, a country BULLYING its neighbors. Imagine a country doing that. Luckily, the US never does something like that. Or imposes sanctions on a country half a world away, sanctions which the entire world has to adhere to unless they want to lose US trading all together.
Some of these talking points fall apart upon typing them, let alone posting.
I imagine China is just as good in pretty much every way.