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[+] 88 points 1 year ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (12 children)
  • [–] 42 points 1 year ago

    Yeah also, adding to this, supporting the Pakistan military during the Bangladesh liberation war and threatening India with invasion if they entered east pakistan to stop the genocide. Like, lotta awful foreign policy choices during the cold war as a function of the sino-soviet split which only matter less now because there's no soviet side anymore.

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  • [–] 33 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Honestly, the invasion of Vietnam and support of Khmer Rouge should be included... along with America's support for the same. It then shows China's self-crit and divergence in policy from the US.

    I think the "L" needs to be taken since if nothing else it really shows the superiority of China's FP -- they haven't bungled like that since the end of the Soviet Union.

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  • [–] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)

    It then shows China's self-crit and divergence in policy from the US.

    Did they self-crit? I know there's an interview where deng, regarding supporting pol pot, said something like "well we didn't know what was going on there but we had to fight vietnamese (soviet) hegemony throughout southeast asia", but idk if the at the time or current chinese foreign ministry would say they did anything wrong or would do anything different regarding the broader sino-soviet proxy-wars because, to them, their most threatening enemy was the USSR (right next to them) not the US and their strategy worked. Though obviously they behave much differently nowadays

    They've diverged from US policy in part because their common enemy defeated itself before china really re-approached it in a internationalist manner (that is in taking joint action with the ussr), and now china itself is the enemy.

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  • [–] 23 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Conveniently starts in the 80s

    The 80's was 40 years ago; if it conveniently started like five or ten years ago you'd have a point, but 40 years is a gigantic period of time to have no wars. How long of a period do you require? 100?

    The reason we can criticize our own leadership is because we never stopped; we can't seriously claim we're not making the mistakes of the past while continuing to do them non-stop up to the present day. Even if the person who made the pic included China's Vietnam war era, the picture would still be a damning indictment for that gigantic gap of no wars.

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago

    Starting it in the 1970s would show one war at the beginning for the Chinese heads of state and then nothing. In a way that would be more of a contrast, because it wouldn't just look like a different category where "they just don't have wars there".

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  • [–] 21 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    China didn't have a president during the 1979 invasion of Vietnam. The office was unoccupied between 1975 and 1982.

    I guess a better image would show how China often doesn't care about who they sell guns and equipment to. They've armed both sides of the Kashmir conflict and have sold guns to Israel for decades. Not great. But they haven't had any formal military conflicts other than occasional intelligence gathering/trading since the 1970s.

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  • [–] 11 points 1 year ago

    China didn't have a president during the 1979 invasion of Vietnam

    Yeah but Deng was running the show so the L is his, he was the one who contacted Jimmy Carter to tell him he was gonna do it too, Carter advised him not to but said the US wouldn't raise a stink.

    I remember reading how he made it so the position he occupied had a bunch of powers concentrated in it so that he was for all intents and purposes the leader of the CPC.

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