They don't sell weapons to Russia, as Wang Yi said in Brussels, if they'd put their full weight behind Russia the war would be over, this is the middle position for them.

Which, I agree with you btw, I don't like but I can understand rationally. We still buy oil and gas from Russia too. And with 20% of the world's supply casually going offline after America's own 3 day special miltary operation the Chinese would be insane not to.

What one cannot understand rationally to come back to the Snowden era in which Denmark spied on us in Germany on behalf of the US, which is insane to begin with, is being threatened a decade later with annexation of their territory. China is on some fronts a rival, hence the tension around Russia, but the US is as destabilizing and unpredictable for the world as Russia itself now.

Americans truly seem to have no concept that they're in the middle of their own post-Soviet meltdown and look like a rogue state to the world now, which makes China which is no saint more and more attractive simply by being a source of order.

The other option is the one that kills palestinians, and we don't even get free models out of it.

It's hard to call either side good. It can be argued that the side which had the highest powers and oligarchs implicated in Epstein files, and which has also threatened attacks on European nations, isn't the better option. Also the nation which actively funds the war in middle-east.

And what makes you think that the US still has such a system?

Neither of them has that

You absolutely should remember the Chinese war with the first of those; if you have trouble, a good way to remind yourself is that it was not long after the US one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War

Tibet, Manchuria, it should be somewhat obvious that a nation that is as ethnically diverse as China was not a nation borne out of lots of different people deciding simultaneously that they would like to create a country together.

What is modern China has only existed for 100 years or so. When the country collapsed there were ethnic divisions that were erased after the country was unified.

The hallmark of successful ethnic cleansing is people claiming that there were never any wars, that things were always this way. The same is true of Kaliningrad, the most German city, centuries of history as a leading nation within Germany and the HRE, now a completely Russian city. It is only in the West that you see any narrative around division, in places like China or Russia history is erased (and how could it be any other way, the cornerstone of Chinese politics is one nation, one people...there is no political value in this narrative in Western countries).

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

It certainly wasn't a denial. China could learn a lot from that.

I think you're kind of missing the important bit; there is no threat of invasion and there never has been. People just want reasons to be mad at Trump, and so they make things up

Since the late 60s there has been explicit federal legislation. I assume you meant this as a rhetorical question but there is a definite answer because the US is a transparent system. Law is passed, the courts enforce.

The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened.

It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.

The inability to conceive of a country where these things would happen and you would have no idea that it had ever happened...and, perhaps more importantly, wouldn't care that you didn't know.