Ah, the "greater crime" doctrine. The guilty are free to go, so long as they can prove that the victim had already suffered at someone else's hands. After all, in civil law, only the first transgression counts.

How do you get "immeasurably more"? The West has been meddling in these countries for maybe a century. China has been doing it for millennia.

Even during the wars with the French and Americans, the Vietnamese were quite wary of China. They knew the westerners would leave, but China would always threaten them.