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Much much worse: see Tibet or Hong Kong

Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan...

care to explain why all governors of Hong Kong under the british rule were white males?

Because the only period HK got a wind of freedom was after the signature of the retrocession still .... SARS.

How is Hong Kong worse than say, Puerto Rico?

As someone from India and someone who knows people from Tibet, Chinese hegemony will be much much worse.

There is no HN equivalent in China where users advocate that US hegemony will be better.


On the other hand, India is enemies with China and Tibet is a highly oppressed region. I wonder what the average Chinese in china thinks.

The average German in Nazi Germany probably didnt think the Nazis were too bad either (of course the average citizen wasn't Jewish, gay, communist or other undesirables). That the average Chinese think things are “just fine” doesn’t mean they are.

Unlike Nazis, I don't see that Chinese communists have expansionist goals to seize territory. Nazis wanted all of Europe. Do Chinese communists want all of say southeast Asia?

South China sea, Tibet, Uyghuria, Taiwan. And definitely dominance over SE Asia even though no direct conquest.

Yeah capitalist countries are the only imperialists. Every other country is a saint compared to the west.

To be clear I don't think the government of China is as bad as the Nazis were. I'm just saying "the average Chinese in China thinks it's fine" doesn't mean it's fine.

  *Shuts off Internet access to Chinese labs (womp womp, no blatant distillation of US models)*

And what’s wrong with distillation? In its own right, and especially considering how those models were trained in the first place - in what world is it right that US firms are free to use copyrighted / otherwise non-public works however they like, while others are ostensibly in some moral wrong for just using the product (completely normally) and then using the outputs in a way that threatens US firms.

Who said blatant distillation was wrong?

It just shows that Chinese “labs” are dependent on the US.

Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.


> Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.

Distillation itself does not, but it does enable research by allowing more teams to play around with models that follow the frontier, as opposed to completely independent training including scaffolding up w/ synthetic data.


They can simply host the models somewhere like Singapore and then sell the service from there. I mean, my Xiaomi account gets routed through Singapore.

> because they're so much better cars than our domestic brands

Is that objectively true? True after factoring in harms they do to human rights and the environment?

Nope.

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/may/12/c...

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2024/10/human-rights-...

Remember, even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for). https://thenextweb.com/news/byd-rejects-hungary-environmenta...


> Is that objectively true?

objectively true. And there's zero need to factor in things like "human rights" or "environmental protection", because these are costs that have been externalized and the consumer don't pay for it (in their lifetime anyway). That's what objectively means.

Chinese cars are unavailable in the US because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete. Japan was in the exact same position before, but because of ally status, japanese car companies (with their gov't as the proxy) managed to negotiate and have a "voluntary import restriction" in place to protect US manufacturers. This artificial restriction created a higher price for consumers than it ordinarily would have been.

The japanese car manufacturers were also able to setup shop in the US, and instead of exporting, they manufacturered directly on US soil. They're allowed to do this sole because they're an ally, and i don't expect this same to be allowed for chinese companies.


> because US manufacturers are 100% unable to compete.

In the June just passed Tesla Model Y is the best selling EV in China.


Made in Shanghai Gigafactory. Some may even argue Tesla would have died without the manufacture capacity in China

And where is that model Y manufactured? Surely you're not suggesting that it's imported from the US.

If you consider Tesla in China to be Chinese, then BYD in EU would be Hungarian in the parent comment. Japanese brands also manufactures in Mexico, so Mazda is suddenly Mexican now? I've never seen anyone claiming such stuff, except when it comes to anything China.

Model Y remains American just like iPhone, regardless of where they are made. Nobody refers to iPhone as Chinese or Indian.


Are you saying USA is somehow a good example for environmental issues and human rights? Read the news in the past years?

Did you read the links I attached?

Are you saying China is better in human rights?

Read the news in the past few years?


>Are you saying China is better in human rights

Sadly, that's debatable these days.

But what are you trying to argue here? "America doesn't abuse it's workers as much so it's more ethical to buy american EVs that don't exist!"? We're objectively behind because so many EV lines were paused/cancelled last year

>Read the news in the past few years?

Yeah, I recommend doing that. We're going to have encyclopedia's dedicated to what's happening in the US in these last few years(and coming next few years).


>after factoring in harms they do to human rights and the environment

America c. 2025 and beyond has no leg to stand on in terms of espousing care of human rights and environment.

>even EU despite claiming to be morally superior to the US, heavily tariffs BYD (much more than the tariffs that the globe mocks Trump for).

You are technically correct... because Trump did not actually Tariff BYD directly. The 100% EV tariffs was a Biden era move, made to give American manufacturers time to develop their own EV solutions for the domestic market. Separate from whatever global tariffs Trump announced.

And then trump ended EV credits, and ultimately pushed the road down to American manufacturers giving up on their EV initiatives.


Isn't the median income per capita higher in the US. European companies are likewise free to pay tariffs or not do business.

EU does much more to protect its market compared to US.

EU was never a developing country like China. Most countries in EU benefited from centuries of exploitation of Asia, Africa and the Americas. They don't need protectionism.

It is immoral and ugly.


Not really. Go ask someone in Tibet/HongKong/Taiwan/Japan/India if China isn't breaking rules and bullying them. If China had US's powers/economy, it would be a much bigger bully.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...


What China does with places they think are rebellious provinces is one thing. What the US did to Hawaii, Panama and half a dozen other countries when the local population tried to unyolk themselves from brutal US corporate robbery is another. The Chinese are hard driving businesspeople for the most part, the US is a gangster state.


No country in the world is full free market economy. It is always a spectrum.

We are discussing Chinese models. Now look at how much foreign competition the Chinese government prevents in their domestic market in other industries.


Chinese companies compete ruthlessly between themselves though. That's how they get this good. Full competition with preventing exploitation by foreign countries seems to be working great for them. American and European protectionism of local rent-seekers can't really compete with that.

I replied to a comment with a structured informal proof on HN.

A well established user here was adamant that I used AI because apparently humans never ever wrote proofs.

This was a while ago. Any well crafted human output is now being dismissively cast as AI if the reader is challenged by the output intellectually/politically.


It's the irl version of being accused of hacking in Counterstrike.

Yeah but because there is tons of it, and not all the accusations are on the same grounds (and level of competence)

I’ve been accused of being a bot myself. I’ve started leaving some incorrect autocorrects in, hopping it would stave off people for whom it seems making accusations of being a bot is soothing or a coping mechanism when they’re confronted with information that does not fit into their world view or perception of self.

Wasn’t it the US that caught European companies in the emissions scandal

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volkswagen_emissions_scandal


Ok, what's your point?

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