China has upset many countries in the Asia-Pacific region with its release of a new official map that lays claim to most of the South China Sea, as well as to contested parts of India and Russia, and official objections continue to mount. What is the map, and why is it upsetting people so much?

It seems significant, then, that Beijing chose to release the map on the heels of a late August meeting of the BRICS nations — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa – and just before China is to participate in top-level meetings of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations and the Group of 20 rich and developing nations.

In releasing the map now, Beijing is widely seen as signaling it has no intention of backing down on any of its claims and is making sure that its positions are fresh in the minds of other countries in the region.

  • phoenixz
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    10 months ago

    No.

    Again, no.

    These countries cannot be compared, they’re not even in the same category.

    I’m not trying to tell you that the US is awesome, it isn’t. But comparing it to China is disingenuous at best and just plain ignorant.

    Tianmen square? Uyghurs? Hongkong?

    The US indeed invaded Iraq based on lies and just for money grabs, it has a moment problem and it has a lot of bad actors in the government that van push it to do bad things.

    China is a defacto dictatorship that commits genocide as a state policy. It downright murdered thousands of innocent students because they protested. That sort of shit would never fly in the US. Prisoners are executed for their organs, one amongst other sources on that was the testimony of a Dutch doctor going there to help with a transplant.

    The US is badly flawed and recently got quite a bit worse and I worry for it. However, it’s an enormous far cry from China, don’t compare appels to torture.

    • TokenBoomer@lemmy.world
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      10 months ago

      Why do you feel the need to pick one over the other? Depending on what you value, one might be better than the other. But they can both be bad in different ways. You’re convincing yourself that they’re mutually exclusive, when it’s really a false dichotomy. They can both be bad, and we, as a civilization should seek to do better than either has to offer.

      • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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        10 months ago

        You seem to have made a choice by trying to inject America bad arguments into a discussion that had nothing to do with America. So I ask you, why are YOU okay with China’s wrongdoing instead of criticising every country that does something bad?