this post was submitted on 26 Dec 2023
196 points (84.0% liked)

World News

32529 readers
376 users here now

News from around the world!

Rules:

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] HughJanus@lemmy.ml -4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Really not looking for whataboutisms to justify their atrocities...

[โ€“] guitarsarereal@sh.itjust.works 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't know that I justified it, just pointed out a basic historical truth about industrialization. With a shred of historical context it's trivial to turn the conversation from "ew China evil" to "is it possible to industrialize without this shit?" which is a question anybody should have been asking from the very beginning.

At the end of the day, lambasting China for doing all the things industrializing nations have always done, without offering a concretely better, alternative path for industrialization, and simultaneously demanding they achieve a similar level of development as the West without doing anything the West did to get there, is honestly just pointless. The West imposed a competitive market system based on the preposterous violence of industrial production on the rest of the world, and are now going to be collectively hoisted by our own petards over the next few decades.

If we wanted them to industrialize without shit like ethnic homogenization/genocide/systematic exploitation of labor/everything else, we might have tried blazing a path to economic development that wasn't based on those things.