If you don’t know what is actually going on in China, it’s probably better not to speak as an authority on it. Good intentions don’t inherently make you any more effective at being well-informed. You can be more well-informed still, if you translate the intent to a certain amount of humility about what you know and find the right people to listen to. Right now, how you come across to me is a western chauvinist who is determined to oversimplify the world and pretend other cultures and peoples are identical to yours, while speaking from a position of implied superiority of knowledge and understanding of the world.
You might think that’s a lot to extrapolate from your post, but the tone of your post is a lot more generic of an ideological position than you might realize. It’s good that you recognize the harm capitalism causes. But that can’t be the end of it or you miss the larger picture of the world’s development and history. You have to recognize what colonialism and imperialism are, as a bare minimum, and preferably attain some understanding of how the targets of these things have developed in their efforts toward self-determination. Notably, the western empire is still an ongoing thing to contend with. If you exclude that from your understanding of nations, you will be viewing the world through a simplified lens of “good/bad nation” and missing a large portion of not only development and the whys behind it, but also information and bias, and being able to recognize, for example, that much of the “information” you will find from the western empire about China is coming from a place of empire wanting to undermine it.
Recognition of biases is pivotal to going further than condemnation of vague descriptions of reality like “greed.” Greed is real, but it is insufficient to explain the mechanisms of development of a nation, a people, much less the entire world. Choosing to consciously side with colonized people’s over colonizers is a form of bias, but this does not make it bad. There is no escaping bias. There is no ideology where you can be above the fray. The question is, do you come to recognize the biases and choose sides, or do you pretend to be above it and condemn vague descriptions of behavior that are commonly associated with immoral action. The second one might make you feel good, but it offers no materially proven solutions to the problems of the day. The first one is what history is actually operating on and will continue to operate on, whether you recognize the mechanisms or not.
If you don’t know what is actually going on in China, it’s probably better not to speak as an authority on it. Good intentions don’t inherently make you any more effective at being well-informed. You can be more well-informed still, if you translate the intent to a certain amount of humility about what you know and find the right people to listen to. Right now, how you come across to me is a western chauvinist who is determined to oversimplify the world and pretend other cultures and peoples are identical to yours, while speaking from a position of implied superiority of knowledge and understanding of the world.
You might think that’s a lot to extrapolate from your post, but the tone of your post is a lot more generic of an ideological position than you might realize. It’s good that you recognize the harm capitalism causes. But that can’t be the end of it or you miss the larger picture of the world’s development and history. You have to recognize what colonialism and imperialism are, as a bare minimum, and preferably attain some understanding of how the targets of these things have developed in their efforts toward self-determination. Notably, the western empire is still an ongoing thing to contend with. If you exclude that from your understanding of nations, you will be viewing the world through a simplified lens of “good/bad nation” and missing a large portion of not only development and the whys behind it, but also information and bias, and being able to recognize, for example, that much of the “information” you will find from the western empire about China is coming from a place of empire wanting to undermine it.
Recognition of biases is pivotal to going further than condemnation of vague descriptions of reality like “greed.” Greed is real, but it is insufficient to explain the mechanisms of development of a nation, a people, much less the entire world. Choosing to consciously side with colonized people’s over colonizers is a form of bias, but this does not make it bad. There is no escaping bias. There is no ideology where you can be above the fray. The question is, do you come to recognize the biases and choose sides, or do you pretend to be above it and condemn vague descriptions of behavior that are commonly associated with immoral action. The second one might make you feel good, but it offers no materially proven solutions to the problems of the day. The first one is what history is actually operating on and will continue to operate on, whether you recognize the mechanisms or not.