The buzz around Xiaohongshu and then DeepSeek has had an unusually high volume of westerners speaking positively about China for the last couple of weeks, which of course means we’re also seeing many westerners falling all over themselves to say “Well actually China is actually quite bad actually” in response.
Western liberals who fancy themselves enlightened and critical of power tend to get very squirmy and uncomfortable in their skin when they hear people saying positive things about the PRC, and love nothing more than to tell you that China is just as evil and tyrannical as the western power alliance, if not worse.
This is objectively, measurably false. China hasn’t spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. China isn’t circling the planet with hundreds of military bases while working to destroy any nation or group anywhere in the world who disobeys it. China isn’t strangling nations around the globe with starvation sanctions for refusing to bow to its dictates. China didn’t just spend 15 months lighting the middle east on fire and backing a live-streamed genocide. China hasn’t spent the last three years endangering the world in frequently terrifying acts of nuclear brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower. Only the U.S.-centralized empire has done this.
Whenever I point this out I get empire apologists going “Well yeah, SO FAR! We haven’t seen China doing all that evil foreign policy shit YET because they’re still not powerful enough!” Which is just silly. China absolutely is powerful enough to be a whole lot more abusive and murderous abroad, and it simply isn’t. Westerners love to claim that China has secret agendas to conquer the world someday (hilariously implying that these hypothetical future abuses make China morally comparable to the U.S. empire’s current known abuses), but if you actually dig into the evidence for these claims what you’ll find every time is that all they provide evidence for is China’s openly stated goal of a multi-polar world that isn’t ruled by Washington.
Our ancestors set sail to conquer the world; their ancestors built a wall. This notion that China has an interest in ruling over a bunch of white foreigners has as much rational basis as old racist superstitions that black and brown people wanted equal rights so that they could come and steal white men’s wives and have sex with their daughters.
They’re just a better civilization than ours — not because theirs is miraculous or perfect, but because ours is just that murderous and dystopian. They simply do the normal thing while we do the freakish thing: they make the lives of their citizens better and better and avoid unnecessary wars, while western governments make the lives of their citizens worse and worse while plunging into new acts of mass military slaughter every few years.
Any criticisms you could level at China — that their domestic policy is more authoritarian than ours, that their culture is more conservative, etc — are eclipsed in moral terms by the depravity of our own western governments by orders of magnitude. And why would you even level such criticisms while living under the single most bloodthirsty and tyrannical power structure on earth? That would be like a German living under the Third Reich looking overseas and bitching about Brazil.
I find nothing more pathetic than a westerner who lives under the shadow of the U.S. empire spending their time and energy criticizing the abuses of nations who lie outside that power structure. It’s an embarrassing, bootlicking way to live. Focus on criticizing the far greater abuses of the far greater evil that you actually live under, loser.