Huawei 5G kit must be removed from UK by 2027

This kind of thing is going to play out a lot over the next few years. It's a tough question: how to marry globalisation with the political realities. When China was very poor, it didn't really matter, or perhaps the assumption was that China would liberalise more quickly than it has. But China, while increasingly mature economically, has not developed proper civil society, human rights, freedom of expression, democracy, and so on. Let us hope they do so as quickly as possible, not least for the sake of the Chinese people themselves. And let us work to improve our example and unity too in countries where we do have these things, however imperfectly.

Different != Improper.

They're not perfect, but over the last 30 years they lifted half a billion out of poverty and didn't wage war all over the world.

Not everything needs to be wrapped in our style of propaganda, sometimes it can be wrapped in other brands instead.

Percentagewise, China hasn't done any better than South Korea or Taiwan at lifting their populace out of poverty. So I don't see how that comes anywhere close to excusing China's human rights abuses. And while SK and Taiwan only became democracies relatively recently, their human rights abuses even before then pale in comparison to what China is currently doing to Uighurs, Tibetans, and religious minorities in general. So yes, if anything improper is putting things too lightly.

Surely this is a joke right? The white terror in Taiwan on a per capita basis was more brutal than anything in China. People were summarily executed, jailed, and robbed for even the slightest hints of anti-establishment sympathies.

From the numbers I can find from a cursory search, the upper estimates for deaths caused by the White Terror is ~32,000 (28k from the massacre that kicked it off plus 4,000 executed in camps). That's about .35% of Taiwan's then population of ~9 million.

By contrast, the Great Leap Forward alone killed 16 million, and that's at the lower end of estimates. The population of China at the end of this was ~665 million, meaning they killed 2.7% of their population just in the Great Leap Forward.

So even with the numbers most favorable to China and least favorable to Taiwan, Taiwan comes out ahead by an order of magnitude.

But you hadn't even heard of that. Or the gwangju massacre in korea. Right?

Why is that? How come some things are marketed extensively to the American public but others are never mentioned?

(Also, if the goal is to criticize maoist China, I'd go with the cultural revolution instead of the great leap forward)

I had, in fact, heard of the White Terror, and the suppression of the island's indiginous people. I had not heard of the Gwangju Massacre.

There are two reasons why they aren't mentioned as much as Mao's atrocities. One is that those countries are our allies, and as a result we are more willing to overlook their faults. And I don't think that's necessarily right, but it's part of human nature to overlook the faults and flaws of friends and allies. But the second reason is that, even ignoring those effects, Mao killed far more of his citizens (and far more per capita), making it a much more interesting and disturbing event in history. The atrocities of Taiwan and South Korea come across as "run of the mill authoritarian leaders violently cracking down on dissent" while the atrocities of Mao's China are on a whole different level.

FWIW, as far as dictators and genociders go I think Pol Pot gets the least attention relative to the scale of his atrocities since he wiped out 25% of the population, and in extremely brutal and arbitrary ways.