Irredentist pro-war language, Tim Cook? I am so done with Apple. They knew what they did when they chose the words; they certainly spent thousands of hours deliberating them.
This is Lebensraum with Chinese Characteristics.
> "The term is often used to avoid invoking sensitivities over the political status of Taiwan.[16] Contrastingly, it has been used in reference to Chinese irredentism in nationalist contexts, such as the notion that China should reclaim its "lost territories" to create a Greater China.[17][18]"
With respect, this topic is of immense interest and significance to a large number of us on HN. The many engaged and enthusiastic responses attest to that.
Is it off-topic to talk about the adversarial role of tech companies in a potential war, one that would be devastating to many of us? About the entanglements of their supply chains? Have I truly, in your judgement, derailed this thread away from curious discussion? Because, this subthread looks to me comparatively thoughtful (if mildly heated), while the more narrowly-construed topic of discussion is a polyester fashion accessory.
To paraphrase Anakin Skywalker: "from my point of view, it's the iPhone Pocket that's generic and uncurious".
It's obviously off topic and obviously nationalistic flamebait. Those are the high-order bits here. Adding provocations like "lebensraum" makes it even more of an obvious call.
> Have I truly, in your judgement, derailed this thread away from curious discussion?
For sure. A subthread like this usually has a lot of activation energy because the (off) topic is sensational and divisive, but that's not the same thing as curious conversation. Supplanting less sensational/divisive topics with more sensational/divisive ones is the essence of the "generic tangent", which HN's guidelines ask users to avoid for good reason.
If the OP isn't so interesting, the solution is to find other threads that are interesting, not turn this one into a flamewar (or potential flamewar) about something else.
It's a large step up from "it's used for job postings in (or closely working with) mainland China", to "it's featured in Apple product announcements targeting a global audience of millions".
Has it been used in an Apple product announcement before? My search is imperfect, but I actually can't find an example (on their /newsroom subdomain).
As recently as two months ago, with the Airphone announcement, they weren't doing this:
2020 - "First, I want to recognize Apple’s family in Greater China. Though the rate of infections has dramatically declined, we know COVID-19’s effects are still being strongly felt. I want to express my deep gratitude to our team in China for their determination and spirit. As of today, all of our stores in Greater China have reopened."
2024 - "Today, Apple has 57 stores in Greater China, with thousands of team members delivering exceptional service and creating magical experiences for customers."
It's not a "loose geographical region". It's usually denotes precisely the PRC (People's Republic of China, including mainland China and the special administrative regions of Hong Kong and Macao) together with the ROC (Republic of China, usually known as Taiwan).
> Just like how they removed all the gay dating apps in China yesterday (by request of the government of course).
Those apps have always been illegal in China. Of course, one could say Apple should not operate in China (and this is perhaps true), but they cannot both operate there and break the law.
Apple could choose to give the users of their devices freedom to run whatever operating systems and programs they choose. Then they could truthfully say that there is no way for them to control what people do with their devices once they leave the Apple store. If you put yourself in control of such things because it is profitable, you ought to take responsibility for the consequences.
It's not really about outsmarting them. Authoritarian systems of control rely on centralization. If you create an ecosystem where end users have lots of agency, of course most of them will go the path of least resistance, but the few who are willing to put in the effort to resist still can. Google and Apple tightening their grip over their respective mobile ecosystems is a very potent lever for authoritarian governments to pull.
They don’t rely on them. They successfully use them. In the Soviet Union every one horse village with unpaved roads had a commissar. No internet, no telegraph, no newspaper, no electricity but they held control just the same. Central control makes it convenient for them, but it isn’t the difference between them existing and not existing.
In a way. Basically yes any totalitarian regime will want to create a system where the people in charge have total control over everyone and everything. But my point is that Stalin was able to exert control over all parts of the Soviet Union without the internet, Facebook, WhatsApp, backdoored E2E messaging systems, email and email spying, parallel construction, etc.
The comment I was replying to is not wrong exactly but the better way to phrase that is that any unrelated but centralized system can and probably will be co-opted by a totalitarian regime and in the long run only helps the oppressor and not the oppressed.
Surely there’s a difference between hardware being a locked down appliance and… well, a more generic computation device.
I think the argument is that Apple or even any company that makes Android phones could choose to have an open bootloader (and maybe some driver stuff) and normally that wouldn’t really offend any government, while also giving the users more freedoms.
Otherwise, what’s next, PCs that only run Windows and only allow Edge as the browser and force the telemetry on?
Chinese people lives are getting better and they largely are on the same page. Meanwhile the US has DEI in the govt while the govt says DEI is bad. Minority authoritarian rule in the US with the Senate.
The US is a brutal dictatorship all the time.
China thankfully has a govt that is on the same page as the people.
Country with social credit, LLMs that have a seizure at "Tiananment square", Winnie the Pooh and Taiwan, Great firewall, cultural genocide of Uyghurs is a country where "lives are getting better" while US is a brutal dictatorship, my fucking sides.
Is that so? I have not surveyed the Chinese, but will not be surprised if the approval was higher than you'd imagine. If anything, the core ideas of communism have clear demand in the west and people are voting for them when they are shown with a lipstick on top.
> I have not surveyed the Chinese but will not be surprised if the approval was higher than you'd imagine. If anything, the core ideas have clear demand in the west and people are voting for them when they are shown with a lipstick on top.
Ask other dictatorships while you're at it. Systems so great one wonders why stupid democracies haven't adopted the model still.
You're weasling your way out of the core point. I'm in no way advocating for such ideas. Quite the opposite. I'm just saying unless you have data about this you shouldn't rely on your instincts. There are many nuances around this and economic prosperity can mask huge other issues.
> Ask other dictatorships while you're at it.
In fact, I have observed immigrants from certain failed states that you refer to as "dictatorships." In many cases they say they hate their government yet they vote for mostly the same policies when they are given the chance to do so in the West, so again, even surveying them directly with a lazy question "do you like the government in country X" won't get you to the spirit of the answer.
To wit, you also just fell for the common fallacy of assuming dictatorship is the opposite of democracy. They are much more alike than you'd think. Democracy isn't liberty.
Would they? Unlikely, given iPhone creates a lot of jobs there. But if iPhone becomes the de facto devices for Chinese citizens to access illegal content then the chance is none-zero.
(And of course they can make Linux illegal too. It's just harder to enforce than making iPhone illegal.)
Can you give me the source of where brazil made linux illegal? I am sorry but I tried to search and the only references I could find were of brazil banning twitter/X for some reason.
I am genuinely curious how someone can decide linux to be illegal. How would the ban even work out?
Brazil has what is known as the Felca law, which requires providers of app stores and "terminal operating systems" to do age verification and to provide secure auditable APIs that meet government standards for doing the same. Presumably, specific distros like Red Hat can go through a government approval process in order to be legal to distribute in Brazil, but without such certification and without providing such system-level APIs, a random distro like Debian will be illegal to distribute in Brazil.
It's delusional to think the default OS would be replaced by anyone more than a few percent of niche users.
It's your desire to have open OS just say so. Doesn't really tie into avoiding oppression by communism. The Chinese need to solve that problem at its root.
People on HN thinking Apple should get into some kind of dick waving contest with an authoritarian government that rules over 1/6th of the global population and that supplies the labor to build their products and the materials in those products by implementing your guy’s pet issues is the height of fucking delusion.
At least try to pretend like you guys are thinking about situations in the real world.
The iPhone is a Chinese product. China ultimately controls whether or not the iPhone exists. No place else on earth can manufacture 20,000 iPhones an hour, 24/7/365.
Making two hundred million devices of the iPhone’s complexity and quality is not a trivial matter, and takes tens of thousands of skilled (and experienced) workers. Almost all of those people are Chinese, in China, subject to Chinese law. Apple cannot meaningfully fight Chinese law.
“sit comfortably” is a big stretch here. I imagine it must upset him as much or perhaps more than it does you and I. We, after all, can speak publicly about how upsetting it is. He cannot.
> must upset him as much or perhaps more than it does you and I. We, after all, can speak publicly about how upsetting it is. He cannot.
Yes, he will just have to comfort himself by crying into his pillow made of solid gold bars on his California King-size bed made of a solid block of hundred dollar bills. Poor Tim Apple — the real victim here.
In seriousness, even if he feels (and is right!) that there was nothing Apple could do better, nothing stops him from resigning, and then publicly stating that he didn’t want to be a part of a company that had to collaborate with a brutal and inhumane government. He just would rather acquire more billions for some reason.
This is why, as a gay man, I give people a look when they ask why I still rant about gay rights "even though you guys have marriage and stuff now".
It's 2025, almost 2026 and we're still doing this shit. I don't care if you think I'm icky, I think other people are icky sometimes but I don't try to stop them from existing for it. People are entitled to be who they are.
Most hetero people will never (thankfully) know that pitted feeling of having to check your surroundings and environment every single day when you simply want to hold your partners hand, chat to a coworker, book a hotel reservation, or book a night out to celebrate.
Every single macro outcome like this only demoralizes gay people just wanting to wake up and not think about anything other than the stresses and excitement of the day ahead.
If anyone reads this and you think it sounds dramatic, it’s not. It’s a reality, and Tim Cook knows that..he should do better.
Untrue and defeatist. Tim Cook does influence Chinese policy, you can't pretend he's the victim here:
EU: Tim Cook will *leave your economic zone* if you fraudulently label him as a monopolist, okay? If your government doesn't change, Apple won't bless your economy.
China: There's just nothing we could do. When they asked to backdoor iCloud we couldn't make any demands from them. They constantly demand authoritarian control and *never* let us say a single word. We're being abused, someone help us!
I am a straight man and I feel like some communities just become scape-goats
We have this us vs them mentality which some people use to collect power and influence at the costs of them
Ultimately I think that it is a very foolish thing because I think that as long as nobody bothers on my freedom etc., I should be in literally nobody's business bothering their freedom
> It's 2025, almost 2026 and we're still doing this shit. I don't care if you think I'm icky, I think other people are icky sometimes but I don't try to stop them from existing for it. People are entitled to be who they are.
I agree 100% with this message.
But one thing I have problem with (on the straight side of things) is that I have seen occasionally some extremely feminist comments which do try to impeach or try to have this very fundamental skewed problem that man are ALL the problem and its all man's fault etc. and I have seen the same in masculinity cultures as well and I feel like both of them are just radicalizing people to seize power and influence or sell courses or feel better about themselves.
I think that we sometimes forget that people are people and we should treat others with the same courtesy and kindness that we expect to be treated with, I guess. maybe we sometimes don't treat them that way or didn't treat them that way and I guess we should just apologize or try not to do that ever again. Mistakes happen but as long as we still have a mindset similar to doing good, I feel like things would be hopeful.
I didn't know that tim cook was gay and here is one message from wikipedia I want to quote
> In June 2014, Cook attended San Francisco's gay pride parade along with a delegation of Apple staff.[85] On October 30, Cook publicly came out as gay in an editorial for Bloomberg Business, saying, "I'm proud to be gay, and I consider being gay among the greatest gifts God has given me."[86] While it had been reported in early 2011 that Cook was gay,[87][88] at the time, Cook tried to keep his personal life private
I feel like Tim Cook should be a man of his words and try to actually help the community he is proud to be in but I am sure that investors might not be happy but that just goes on to show that maybe even some CEO's could be puppets of shareholders and can be forced to do things solely for profit where their heart might not lie.
I think that another point is that shareholders can also be puppets of CEO's in the case of Elon musk 1 Trillion $ deal shows that imo
I feel like we live in the times where morality can be side-lined for profit and be celebrated. The whole idea why even people can be puppets of each other could be because they get profits and power and influence because of it (basically money most of the times)
But what power do those CEO's have if they can't stand for what they think is right or educate themselves on these matters.
"No" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. The things he could do would be very painful, maybe a Pyrrhic victory. Maybe they're worth it if the alternative is aiding an abetting authoritarian regime. I'm not casting judgment, just presenting the options. Which do actually exist.
There is no middle ground. Mentioning "Greater China" isn't neutral. It's precisely the idea of considering "Greater China" as neutral that is de facto siding with the PRC.
No, this is Apple being confident that the USA will drop Taiwan and that this and that siding with China is the "responsible" thing to do.
Last October, 17 Office Management Specialists (OMSs) from posts across broader China convened at U.S. Consulate General Shanghai for the third annual Greater China Office Management Specialist Workshop. Participants included OMSs from Embassy Beijing and consulates across mainland China, as well as colleagues from Consulate General Hong Kong and the American Institute in Taiwan (AIT) Taipei. The workshop’s theme, Reenergizing Your Why, provided participants with a forum to discuss common goals, motivations, challenges and benefits of their career paths.
There are approximately 50 Protestant denominations, including Anglican, Baptist, Christian and Missionary Alliance, the Church of Christ in China, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal, and Seventh-day Adventists. The Catholic Diocese of Hong Kong recognizes the pope and maintains links to the Vatican; the Bishop of Hong Kong and his retired predecessor are the only Catholic cardinals in greater China.
The ROC also believes in one china, including one day resuming sovereignty of the mainland, no? I don't see any obvious indicator of the concept as siding with the PRC.
> The ROC also believes in one china, including one day resuming sovereignty of the mainland, no?
The ROC isn't a one-party state like the PRC and different parties in Taiwan have different positions on that. The KMT and other parties generally aligned with it mostly favor unification under the ROC (or a one-country, two-systems end state), the DPP and parties aligned with it tend to favor both Taiwanese nationalism and independent statehood. The DPP currently holds the Presidency and the KMT has the larges legislative bloc, so...?
I'd rather we drop the pretense or expectations that corporations have anything but one goal. That will help us direct our energy to where it can actually be productive.
If the marketplace demands better corporate stewardship, and people vote with their wallet, and companies decides to change then great, but the corporate ship is only ever getting steered in one direction and it's not for noble reasons.
Because what you consider moral issues are actually just issue prominent in media.
And yes, I want my business to be prudent in earning money. Doing harm to people is not effective or prudent. Getting in political name callings is also not prudent.
Nothing pro war about it. Read history books instead of making assumptions. It is referring to the mainland, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau as a whole. It became popular with the rise of China. Try any business newspaper in the 90s. It is less relevant now as Hong Kong and Macau are now part of China.
It isn’t unlike Benelux, or Scandinavia, or Iberian, or Balkan, or Gulf countries.
When was the last time Greater Italy being used? Right.
From the book “The Concept of “Greater China”: Themes, Variations and Reservation”:
The world is suddenly talking about the emergence of “Greater China.” The term has appeared in the headlines of major newspapers and magazines, has been the topic of conferences sponsored by prominent think-tanks, and is now the theme of a special issue of the world's leading journal of Chinese affairs. It thus joins other phrases – “the new world order,” “the end of history,” “the Pacific Century” and the “clash of civilizations” – as part of the trendiest vocabulary used in discussions of contemporary global affairs.
Yeah I think you may have understood my point. If you don't like Greater Italy, replace it with Greater Netherlands, it's much more relevant today.
EDIT: it would be cool if you add "EDIT" when editing a comment or maybe think for moment before posting so that I don't reply to a different comment. Every time I reload the page I see a different comment, it's pretty funny honestly.
And I don’t understand your point. Greater China continues to be used today, like it’s been in the last 30 years. Who get to decide it’s relevant or not? UN?
My point is very simple: "Greater Nation" has been used countless times throughout history to describe irredentist movements. Given the political status between the PCR and the ROC, it's very reasonable to think that the term has negative connotations.
GP called the term “pro war”. That’s what I object. I thought it was very clear?
As for “negative connotations”, you are entitled to your opinion, but that isn’t commonly shared, judging from how often it’s being used. I’m sure there are people in Finland who don’t like being called Scandinavian, given their distinct culture and language compared to other Scandinavian countries. That doesn’t mean it is unreasonable for someone to call them that.
If you're referring to Pan-Scandinavism, there was never a serious proposal to conquer Finland. In fact, the opposite is true: Sweden sent soldiers to help Finland during World Wars I and II, making no attempt to annex the country. I have no idea how "Scandinavia" could possibly be compared to the many "Greater Nation" out there. Maybe you should take your own advice and read some history books as your example is fundamentally different.
The CCP has Apple hostage. Their products are (effectively) all made there.
China has more control over Apple than the US does, at present. They are, of course, in crash override priority mode trying to change that, but nowhere else on earth can manufacture (on average) 20,000 iPhones per hour, 24/7/365. (TBH it’s probably closer to 50k per hour in the months up to release day.)
The iPhone is a Chinese product, made by tens of thousands of Chinese people, on machines in China, subject to Chinese jurisdiction and law. That’s an uncomfortable fact for the US economy.
If Apple doesn’t do exactly what China wants them to do, the iPhone does not exist, and Apple as we know it today does not exist.
US government has FAR more control over Apple as a company. China only has control of the Chinese operations. The president is personally beefing with companies and buying stakes in them. The tariffs alone could have severely hurt Apple, but Apple bent over backwards to appease the president. The US government can simply request an app be removed and Apple and Google will do it worldwide.
China does not have that power over Apple. China can threaten Apple but they have already diversified their manufacturing to other countries so China does not have a strangle hold on the supply line.
Apple has to comply by Mainland rules. In addition to the supplychain that is slowly getting diversified, all Mainland customer data is handled by a co-owned (not sure %, or if it is 100% outsourced) datacenter in Guizhou.
"Pro-war" seems like an odd assertion here. They're recognizing the status quo in a reasonably neutral way, which seems anti-war to me.
It seems like you're advocating for Western powers to take a position, using either soft or hard power, on a war that already ended many decades ago. Sounds quite a bit like imperialism to me, and pretty far from being anti-war.
An anti-war position, at least from the perspective of a Westerner and Western companies, is more like, you guys lost, suck it up and stop asking us to intervene on your behalf.
Push back, as in this thread, can change which hierarchies are accepted and which aren't.
In particular, the use of "Greater China" normalizes corporate acquiescence to Beijing's explicitly revisionist policy preferences.
Taiwan is an independent nation. It isn't lost. And all free nations should intervene whenever the right to self-determination of another is threatened.
They've been using this term for years. It's nothing new and nothing unique to Apple.
Don't forget that the "we are the only legitimate Chinese government and we own it all" attitude is shared by both Chinese governments. The PRC claims Taiwan, but Taiwan claims all of China as well.
It is unfortunate that iPhones cannot be made anywhere else in the world. No other country has the right tooling, workforce, or skill set, at that volume.
China made a strategic decision to go deep there, and the rest of the world decided it was post-industrial
of the 193 members of the UN, only 12 (6%) recognize Taiwan as a country.
the Kuomintang lost the war. its effectively the same as if the confederacy retreated to the Florida keys and China maintained a policy of deliberate ambiguity.
Why is UN recognition the metric here and not, like, idk the fact that Taiwan is a liberal democracy with the rule of law and freedom of speech and not a hypercapitalist dictatorship that disappears dissidents?
Neither are the real metric here. Taiwan is a US ally, China (mainland) is not, this is a US board. The reasoning goes backwards from that point.[1]
You have to be on the level of Israel’s aggression to lose the “liberal democracy” cover that most US allies get (or similar great titles).
[1] Enough to start a subthread with a very confident and polemic phrasing anyway. There are plenty who disagree with the OP here. I’m not saying that this place is an echo chamber on this point at all.
Your comment is the actual prowar propaganda though in my europeean eyes.
The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians, - where is China geonociding hundreds a week right now? Yeah nowhere, but the US is doing that every decade.
Incredible to see this angle that 'the good guys' are bowing down to bad China in this context when you have so much poverty, political repression and lack of gay rights, abortion etc in many right wing states to straight up hyper right wing terrorism targeting vulnerable populations every year.
I feel like in geo-politics. No country can be good.
Personally, I feel like america still has (had) hope with zohran mamdani but after the recent american shutdown, I would consider democratic party to be an extension of republican party or not doing anything radical except bernie,aoc, zohran and some other people.
I feel like America could have a hope to swing whereas china doesn't imo.
although, I feel like what is happening is that people made (short term?) decisions earlier generations earlier which lead us to where we are today where any country over-all needs a radical change as both europe and america and a lot of other countries need to radicalize what they are doing to give hope to the youngsters
Personally I feel like we shouldn't care much about US or chinese products but rather the ideologies of the product creators if we are worried about things and I think this is one of the reasons I love open source so much.
Hope to swing? The US has killed many more people in wars of conquest than China in the last 50 years. So i really see both as problematic but the US is still much more violent geopolitically. Ie worse in my eyes, Israels latest genocide being a creszendo on an already horrible track record.
>The US is worse than China in many aspects, from forever wars to climate over colonialism to fascism and support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide on over a hundred thousand civilians.
My man, the US and China are more or less the exact same here with the exception of forever wars.
Climate? China pollutes like crazy, and so does the US.
Colonialism? Maybe not in the same vein but China does engage in actions to other nations, such as Macau, Hong Kong, and Taiwan that could be classified as colonialism.
Fascism? Well yeah both countries are pretty much openly fascist right now.
Support for an ongoing extremely violent genocide of over a hundred thousand people? Yeah the US and China are both complicit there. In fact, in China, you're speaking about the regime itself, with context to the ongoing genocide of Uyghur people.
Yes its imperial logic so why arent you saying that to OP's bizzare US = peace and gay rights comment?
And the Uyghur repression is no genocide compared to Palestine thats complete US misinformation and frankly a sinister comparison - the US is much much more violent, again look at Palestine, before that literally 30+ wars for resources and markets with millions of civilians dead.
Im not naive about China but this US = beacon of human rights angle is frankly gross to me.
China has many problems but americans are literally worse and you wanting to boycut due to human rights, is this a joke?
How does that excuse China's pollution? They still chose to do that, no one forced them to. I do agree that other countries are guilty of China's pollution as well, but that certainly does not excuse China choice to do that pollution laundering for them.
It doesn’t. The right answer is that both China and the West suck and should have worked together to reduce consumption rather than accept the waste-surveillance capitalism system they both accelerated from 1970-present
It’s like trying to reduce prostitution, when society is demanding more sex, do you jail the prostitutes or the tricks?
If there’s no demand for sex workers then there’s no sex worker market. However if nobody is struggling to survive, then theres no supply.
You need to end the desire for consumption in order to eliminate authoritarianism
Right. So what was your point when you replied to a commenter saying the US and China are equally bad, pollution wise, with
> No the chinese people, most of whom do not have a ICE car, do not produce those carbon numbers
That sounds to me like you're saying that China is not as bad as the US, because the pollution in China comes in some part from laundered pollution from the US. If that's not the case, could you explain what you meant?
I really don't see that as a fair comparison. OP wasn't equating individual citizens, they were equating the nations as a whole. And China, as a state, definitely isn't akin to a slave being forced to do this dirty work.
Yeah i've looked into it and its bad still much much less violent than the over 100.000 civilians, kids and mothers killed in Palestine so whats up with this weird focus when you guys are littersally killing muslims by the thousands every other year with no remorse?
Do you condemn Israel? And if not - then what even is this concern of yours? Both are bad but Israel is much worse according to litterally all major NGOs.
Seriously do you condemn US imperialism and the genocide in Gaza too?
I didn't condemn or approve of anyone, I just answered your question. You're making a lot of assumptions.
You're focussing exclusively on violence. If Israel adopted China's Xinjiang methods they would:
1. Take direct administrative control over Gaza
2. Place any man even remotely linked to violence or Islam in a prison camp and use them as prison labour to produce products
3. Monitor all women and prevent them from having births
But, violence would go down. In Xinjiang the Muslim population is shrinking as the authorities prevent reproduction.
Following your logic you are saying you would find this less objectionable. Is that actually the case? I suspect not.
I write this to hopefully expand your view that more than one situation can be objectionable, that not everyone is American or Israeli and it is possible to analyze a situation on its own merits and say "huh that's bad".
China goes to great lengths to minimize actual violence, which minimizes attention, which lets them focus on shrinking the population of Uighurs. I doubt Israel could actually do this in Gaza, but I think it would be worse if they did.
So you don't condemn israels ethnic cleansing but are very worried about muslim minorities in China that are repressed?
I am totally on board condemning China, but you aren't with Israel and that says it all - and i don't believe you actually are concerned about this muslim minority if you aren't at least as horrified by Israeli actual warcrimes and an ongoing genocide.
They already monitor everyone, they already control all markets they dont just prevent births they kill kids in an ethnic cleansing according to experts at the ICC, Amnesty International, Doctors without Borders and many others.
Again, unfathomable to me that you can list "they prevent births" as worse than murdering over 40.000 kids in a few years in Gaza and 100.000 civilians according to the newest numbers - that's by all measures worse than what China's doing and why every respectable NGO and expert groups are talking about Israel and not the Uyghurs at the moment.
Why are you not condemning Israels/US ethnic cleansing when i'm condemning chinas actions on multiple fronts?
Looks like you almost have this habit of explaining/talking about things 'as a European', particularly when bringing up USA in the context of international relations like now...
I guess it's OK — I'm European too, for example — but it does seem like you're doing it to imply that your views are somehow (at least relatively more) popular among, or representative of, well, Europeans. But now that we're making such massive generalisations, I'd claim that well-educated English-speaking Europeans are often likelier to be more familiar with the views and internal debates among Americans than those of many of their fellow Europeans, and that you're probably no exception.
As for your comment, had you not addressed it to 'you Americans', I'd be hard-pressed to tell it apart from a pretty standard-issue American Left (or 'Progressive') rant, perhaps somewhere from the younger and more identitarian part of that crowd, for example (despite some of the quasi-tankie undertones). While I'll admit that scoffing at things like pro-life policies and/or American poverty is certainly easier and more common throughout the political spectra in (Western) Europe, I'd say your cringe-inducing bothsidesism with USA and China falls closer to the crackpot left camp in Europe as well.
Europe contains multitudes, and undoubtedly for some but not all, up until now at least, it has been a bit too easy to comfortably observe and judge things for so long as a world-political bystander from under the US nuclear umbrella, typically further from the Russian border too — whether you were an insular French with casual contempt for all things 'Yankee', a German atomic-phobic pacifist (or worse, a far-right, Pro-Putin knuckle dragger) from that 'European powerhouse' heated with Russian non-renewables, or even a Swede from the world's leading moral superpower, or something like that, anyway... ;)
I sometimes wonder what the comments will look like here when China invades/blockades Taiwan, and I suspect they will look a lot like this. Lots of US whataboutism. Note that the OP doesn’t mention the US at all.
Irredentist pro-war language, Tim Cook? I am so done with Apple. They knew what they did when they chose the words; they certainly spent thousands of hours deliberating them.
This is Lebensraum with Chinese Characteristics.
> "The term is often used to avoid invoking sensitivities over the political status of Taiwan.[16] Contrastingly, it has been used in reference to Chinese irredentism in nationalist contexts, such as the notion that China should reclaim its "lost territories" to create a Greater China.[17][18]"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_China