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Posted Feb 6, 2022, 12:38 PM UTC
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I mean yeah the Twitter post definitely isn’t correct. China invaded Vietnam in the 1970s alone. However they are right in that America is a much worse and much bigger threat to most countries.
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As if Vietnam invading Cambodia would be a justified reason for China invading Vietnam.
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They got mucky because China decided to back Pol Pot instead of Vietnam due to the Sino Soviet split and late Mao era fuckery (technically he was dead by this time but his bad foreign policy in later life lead to this war in many ways)
It was a complete failure of foreign policy and its fine to call it as such. No country is perfect and calling out their errors is important. China never should have backed Cambodia, especially over Vietnam.
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That Twitter post is actually cringe though. Every country has waged war at some point in its history and China is no different.
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They didn't go out of their way to travel by sea to genocide and enslave.
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People still don't get it. It's not about who waged wars or who invaded, it's about the US fucking pointing fingers at everyone else while they are literally dropping bombs on civilians.
The US doesn't have the moral high ground to criticize anyone about anything at anytime. Since the founding of the USA, there have been less than 20 years where they weren't somewhere around the world invading another country
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This subreddit is just a parody of itself when it comes to politics, it’s why I unsubscribed from it smh.
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It’s not usually this bad :(
This thread is so weird.
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The post exaggerates a LOT but it’s basically saying that the CCP hasn’t started any major wars since it’s been in power, and this is correct. Tibet was liberated, it joined the Korean War to defend the Koreans and itself and the “wars” with Vietnam and India were really just violent border conflicts
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It’s not just exaggerating, the tweet is just pathetically wrong — only the PRC is remotely pacifist in recent times, that’s certainly very different from the warmongering western imperialists but it’s nothing like that tweet. The lines crying about Tibet are funny with their glorification of feudalism but China as a nation is not pacifist, that’s just an attribute of the modern PRC.
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China is a threat of being a good example. What if other developing countries realized they can improve the living standards of the population without worshipping corporations? That's heresy. US can't let disbelievers success.
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Domino Theory. We've been living it for a hundred years.
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… How did all the brainworms of my beloved r/GenZedong concentrate in this one post? This sub isn’t usually like this, what even is this thread…
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I'm chinese and this thread + the original twitter post is just... ew.... blindly praising china's entire history reeks of Han nationalism (which, despite what many people in this sub proclaim frequently, is in fact a vey real movement in China. I don't know how anyone who has actually been on Chinese social media can deny this lmao??)
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Yeah, very weird thread. There’s very rarely such consistently bad takes for an entire thread.
It’s so weird because if China was so great before why would communists oppose that culture? If China peacefully expanded with so much success and prosperity who would support its overthrow, least of all the domestic population that benefits most from the supposed success of China?
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Interesting. How do you know that they are not just some vocal online incels but a real movement with large support? Usually when I see Han nationalism/great replacement/antisemitism they just get replied with “Hanryan” to mock them or some Lenin quotes.
Though yes Han chauvinism is cringe and should be rightfully suppressed.
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You're right, "movement" was probably not the right word. It's not comparable to white supremacy in the west if we're talking about direct violence caused as a result of this sentiment. I was just kinda done with how some people really think chinese ethnic minorities suffer absolutely ZERO discrimination or bullying while growing up and going to school, that all Han Chinese people are the epitome of culturally open and accepting. There definitely is a rising sentiment of anger at ethnic minorities, and incels are a big part of this, seeing as the ratio of men to women in china is absolutely insane.
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how bad is it? is it comparable to white supremacy in the western world? or worse?
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Okay, it's not comparable to white supremacy in the west if we're looking at direct violence caused as a result of it. Maybe I didn't handle my words accurately, "movement" might not be the right way to describe this. It's more that there's very obviously a rising sentiment of anger + frustration + disgust at certain benefits that Han citizens think ethnic minorities get (because it's often the case that the "benefits" they're angry about either don't actually exist and were baseless rumours spread online, or were discontinued already).
This is furthered by more and more younger generation folks from ethnic minority backgrounds becoming more present online and getting upset (rightfully, in my own personal opinion at least) at just how much misunderstanding Han folks have towards them.
I will say that there doesn't seem to be any hatred based solely on the fact that ethnic minorities are of a different ethnicity, except for still very vocal opposition to Islam "infiltrating" china.
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so it's a result of a feeling of unfairness from affirmative action rather than feelings of "supremacy" or superiority? at least this means there is potential to resolve it by ending or lessening these programs.
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China would literally just be like northern Henan if they were never aggressive lmao. The Han dynasty under a reign of a single emperor annexed what is now northern Vietnam and northern Korea, waged war against the Xiongnu (a confederation of steppe people living in what is now Mongolia and depending on who you ask might be the Huns when they were still in Asia), and even fought a war over horses in central Asia
What various Western commentators and cringey China watchers purposely get wrong is by painting the various conquests as China conquering innocent hapless victims when the entire deal is just feudal polities warring against each other, no more and no less. The emperor doesn't represent the will of the people then in the same way the bourgeoisie doesn't represent the will of the people today.
And the so-called barbarians weren't just noble savages throwing off the Chinese yoke, they were well integrated into Chinese geopolitics and in the business of conquering China as well. The Five Barbarians initially rebelled against the Western Jin dynasty upon seeing the weakness of the Western Jin dynasty, which was embroiled in multiple civil wars. But after sacking the capital of Luoyang and killing the crown prince, they didn't go, "Well, we taught our Chinese oppressors a lesson they'll never forget, I guess we'll just go back to Mongolia." They set up their own dynastic states within China, many of them headed by their own self-styled emperor with a foreign policy of eventually unifying (ie conquering) the rest of China.
The northern dynastic states were briefly unified by former Qin, a Di-led dynastic state. Former Qin then attempted to conquer the remnants of the Jin dynasty called the Eastern Jin dynasty, but lost the Battle of Fei River, which caused the northern state to fall apart into more warring states. The north would be reunited at a latter date by the Northern Wei, a Xianbei-led dynastic state. Most of the so-called barbarians already had various degrees of Sinicization in the same way the Goths and Vandals were more Romanized than most people give credit to. The Northern Wei ruling elites under Emperor Xiaowen were further Sinicized as a means of being able to more adequately rule over their Han feudal subjects. A parallel can be seen with the Norman invaders being slowly Anglicized as they lost their French possessions and had to rely on their English feudal subjects.
Western commentators almost always portray Sinicization as something imposed on others by the Chinese and not something that goes both ways. It's hard to argue against the fact that the Baiyue weren't Sinicized through the point of the sword, but the Xiongnu and Xianbei were also Sinicized despite being conquerors of northern China. Subsequent northern dynastic states would be more and more Sinicized until the Sui dynasty, originating from the north, reunified China. To see the degree of Sinicization of the non-Han population, the second and last emperor of the Sui dynasty and the founder of the subsequent Tang dynasty both had Xianbei-Han empress consorts. This is why the Xiongnu and Xianbei don't exist today. They weren't ethnically cleansed by genocidal Chinese people, which makes absolutely no historical sense by virtue of them ruling over northern China, but underwent Sinicization to the point of becoming indistinguishable from the Han.
My whole point of this super long post is that portraying China as some pacifist society or Vietnam/Korea/Mongolia as hapless victims being bullied by China is just crass Orientalism, nothing more. All of these places have rich histories, incredibly complex geopolitical interactions with one another that is a lot more complex than "Vietnam good, China bad" or "China good, Vietnam bad."
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this is a really good summary of what i've been thinking a lot over the past few years thank you :')
cultures, countries, states, empires, whatever form a political entity existed in at any time, they all fought with one another for reasons that really can just be summed down to more land/more money/more resources. Pretending that China was somehow "right" in conquering all the places it expanded into but then saying that, for example, the Mongol Empire was the epitome of evil for daring to attack China, is such a double standard and really racist???
Basically implying that "Chinese culture is better than all the surrounding cultures and other cultures should be grateful for being Sinicized"
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Fr
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Fr, sometimes this sub is the one that makes my head hurt and makes me take a break off reddit
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Same lol
This sub can be extremely based and very cringe
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Yeah, I can’t tell whether OP is pointing out how the tweet is obviously wrong or if they’re focusing on the title.
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Vietnam enters the chat.
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Chinese: So you guys agree it's 5000 years of history then, fine by me.
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Yeah
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Invades Korea to save a peaceful country from greedy crapitalits
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USA prefer Tibetans to be feudal slaves who have their life expectancy cut in half.
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no civilization has truly been peaceful, and china is no exception. at the same time, some civilizations are more warlike and destructive than others; take mongolia and england as examples, who created the largest empires in world history through very violent conquest. china doesn't even come close.
and of course, the tweet in question doesn't help and only serves to provide ammunition for the anti-china crowd.
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Even Beijing wasn’t Chinese territory from the beginning. A lot of their wars are mostly about reunification, but territorial expansion from war is also present in their history
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The tweet is dumb because China in the past 5,000 years invaded a lot of places.
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dumb tweet
moving on
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The Imjin War, it wasn't an offensive invasion
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Casually ignores agreement between Dalai Lama and Mao
Can you give me the source?
"When serfs stood up in Tibet" by Anna Louise Strong
But the Dalai Lama is just so cute /s
He's literally wholsom Ninjago the last air bender yoga monk keanu 100 🙏🙏🤪🤪🤪
Yeah he made that one album on Spotify no reason to investigate him anymore
Wait what lol
*quietly pulls rug over the human skins
I think it is funny how people take the Dalai Lama supporting Brexit and saying "Europe is for Europeans" shows Brexiters/British nationalists are wholesome epic people, and not that the Dalai Lama is not as wonderful as westerners say.
Well actually they were many times in different dynasties where Korea or at least most of the peninsula was under Chinese rule such as in the Han dynasty
Not sure about India but China has fought a ton of wars with Korea. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Korean_War
I’m certain that the original post said India in reference to the border war and subsequent border clashes that occurred between India and China(because border wars are totally invasions)
I guess but it isn’t much of an invasion
Korea use to be a satellite state of China
During the Cuban missile crisis China did invade a bit of India
India and China have had many border skirmishes.
One of the many reasons the Sui Dynasty failed (the dynasty before the Tang) was because it attempted to invade Korea and failed miserably. Also multiple points during the Han dynasty there were attempts to invade Korea.
I do not think this really counts as an invasion, but they took a few miles from India last year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020%E2%80%932022_China%E2%80%93India_skirmishes
He said in its entire history. China had a long history, they invaded Vietnam like fifty times, Tibet at least thrice and Korea is its punching bag until the 19th century when it became japan's.
I'm guessing Korea during the civil war and India in the Kashmir territorial claims. It's a matter of casting these things in the proper light: were we would say that China supported North Korea, they would say China invaded North Korea, when we say that China recovered Hong Kong from british colonialism, they say that China occupied Hong Kong, etc
Also, China did invade Korea.... when they wasn't China nor Korea yet: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qing_invasion_of_Joseon#:~:text=The%20Qing%20invasion%20of%20Joseon,relationship%20with%20the%20Ming%20dynasty.
That's the problem with trying to equivocate the facts of history in millenary cultures: the idiots think they have good gotchas when they are actually lying with their half truths. Despicable