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Protester shot in chest by live police round during Hong Kong protests

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628 points nodea2345 | 5 comments | 01 Oct 19 11:19 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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loquor ◴[01 Oct 19 16:03 UTC] No.21126953[source]▶
This might sound alarmist, but do you think China is the biggest upcoming global problem after climate change? For two reasons:

1. China has a totalitarian ruling system. They intend to realize George Orwell's 1984.

2. Present-day China essentially has no ethics. Take the US in comparison. No matter how perverse the people in power become and even if they do messed up things, the US has some founding morals and principles they do not forget. China, in comparison, systematically rooted out these values since the Great Leap Forward. The happenings at Hong Kong and Xinjiang epitomize that.

I do think China's expansionist policy bodes poorly for all of humanity.

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baddox ◴[01 Oct 19 16:34 UTC] No.21127399[source]▶
What policies does China have which are expansionist?
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bdamm ◴[01 Oct 19 16:45 UTC] No.21127555[source]▶
The belt and road initiative is fascinating, including their cultivation of Africa. The scheme where they lend poor nations money to build ports and then when the port authority fails to fulfill the repayments, they simply take over the port and basically establish a Chinese base is rather diabolical. From a business perspective it is brilliant but it does seem rather obviously predatory. I consider that expansionist. Did America do the same with Panama, did UK do the same with Gibraltar? There are some parallels.
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1. braindead_in ◴[01 Oct 19 17:03 UTC] No.21127767[source]▶
Yanis Varoufakis has an interesting take on Chinese economic imperialism. According to him, the Chinese are a benevolent imprealist, trying to achieve the same dominance but with loans rather than guns.
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2. YayamiOmate ◴[01 Oct 19 17:40 UTC] No.21128248[source]▶
It's interesting to consider it benevolent from his perspective, since he called German financial institutions malevolent when it played out very similar in Greece. Except geopolitical influence expansion was not a main goal.

Maybe he said something like "it looks like benevolent, because they use finance instead of guns" or that compared to using military force it's relatively benevolent, but after watching some of his talks, I highly doubt he'd call it a generous ethical policy.

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3. snagglegaggle ◴[01 Oct 19 18:33 UTC] No.21128967[source]▶
>According to him, the Chinese are a benevolent imprealist,

Yellow man's burden?

4. hobofan ◴[01 Oct 19 18:36 UTC] No.21129008[source]▶
Is Varoufakis someone that should generally be taken that seriously? The last time I heard about him was during the election for the European Parliament, where he was pushing DiEM25, which seemes like a rather idealistic (in the unrealistic sense) movement full of attention-hungry personalities.
5. xfs ◴[01 Oct 19 18:59 UTC] No.21129265[source]▶
Varoufakis' comment on China isn't about China per se but rather an extension of his economic criticism of financial capitalism. He views China as patient investors looking for long term returns from infrastructure projects instead of short term returns from financial speculation, and he believes the former is "far more humanistic" than the latter. He even gave an example when he was the finance minister: He renegotiated a better deal for the port with China, but the deal was blocked by the Troika. It's not a comparison between finance vs guns, as we all learned after 2008 that finance can be as destructive as guns.