The heros in the story of Chinas amazing numbers of people lifted out of poverty is Deng Xiaoping and his successors. They've been basically thrown out with Xi. So modern China is unfortunately on the totally wrong trajectory.

It's ok to say "China was going the right direction between years X and Y" without being an "apologist".

The problem is that many people who say, "I just hate the CCP" go on to say things like,

* "China steals everything" (which essentially labels Chinese people as thieves).

* "Chinese scientists created CoVID-19 and then lied about it" (alleging that Chinese scientists have no integrity).

* "China only copies" (implying that Chinese people aren't creative).

* "Chinese numbers are all fake" (implying that millions of Chinese people are in on some conspiracy to fake everything).

In other words, in my experience, many people who say they just hate the CCP actually hold a huge number of negative stereotypes about Chinese people, and have a very conspiratorial view of the country.

One fact that everyone here should take into consideration is that the Communist Party has a very broad base of support in China, and is fairly popular. Most people actually approve of the central government, not in everything, but in general. If the Communist Party were as comically evil as people in the West tend to think, it wouldn't have this level of support, and it would lose power pretty quickly.

And one can't explain its popularity by claiming that Chinese people don't know what's going on - they tend to be far better informed about happenings in China than 99% of commenters in your average English-language internet forum. If you can't imagine why people in China would support the government, just consider the fundamental transformation that hundreds of millions of people have gone through in the last few decades. People who did not even have running hot water in their homes or reliable electricity are now wealthy enough to fly to Paris for a week.

I'm not trying to paint a rosy picture of the Chinese government or the Party, but I'm just pointing out that things are significantly more nuanced than most people here think.

More than ridiculous, it's often outright bigotry (the original comment here being firmly in that category).

And when there is a war?

USA is the number one threat to democracy in the USA. There's no point continuing to blame China, Russia or whoever else for domestic problems.

Please, please know your history[0] before speaking.

[0]https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...

> threat to democracy

> billions of dollars of IP

I like how your make claims about important societal issues, but the evidence provided is all about money.

I don’t like the CCP, but in practice the US conservative movement is probably the biggest threat to democracy in the West today. They are spreading the idea that elections need not be respected and spread conspiracy theories people are eating up all over the world.

For instance when we started getting problems with vaccination of people in Norway it was not due to China but fake news and conspiracies pushed by the radical conservative movement in the US.

The US holds a special position in advancing and protecting democracy, but is itself turning into a liability. China is a concern but first priority has to be to fix American democracy before it drags the whole West into the mud.