The CCP is quite unlikely to come out with a quote that they're cracking down because they feel insecure in their position. Very unusual for any regime to admit that. But it seems the most obvious reading of the situation.
> I think Xi is quite clear on his view of China's place in the world
Yes, Xi may have a view. Again, the problem for the regime, and presumably the reason for Xi's crackdowns, is that China, as in the population, is less clear on its view of Xi's place in China.
I will be pleasantly amused if China's imperial aspirations actually stop at Taiwan. It would be so tempting to turn the Belt and Road into an invasion route.
> I will be pleasantly amused if China's imperial aspirations actually stop at Taiwan
For a Western person, with the implicit cultural and historical ethos, and the actual modern history, it's natural to apply aggressive stance to a rising power.
For a Chinese who had the same kind of knowledge from the Chinese heritage, it's laughable to expand. China in the Han dynasty, already figured out that expansion just results into stretch of power and evetual breakdown, which is natural for any complex system. So that's what happened after Wu Di the second great emperor after Shi Huang, he realized his military expansion in the end does not achieve it's strategic goal, I.e., extinguish the roaming noamd tribes from the earth. He even wrote a self criticizing official doc to confess. And changed the policy to use economic and royal marriage to manage the nomad tribes.
You can equate the cultural and economic management as expansion, just like what US did in 20 century. But that's inevitable anyway. I.e., culturally and economically advanced nations are mimicked by others even if they are not doing anything...
Those were under Chinese sphere since Tang dynasty. But not a formal sovereign subject. This relatively weak bound was fine at the old time, since the farther outsphere does not have the influence to encroach to the Chinese sphere.
In 19 & 20 century, things changed. Those strategic areas have to be under China's control for national security, which was under siege from Russia (the most expansionism nation on earth).
Like USSR inherited Russia's imperial territory, and India inherited great Britain's, CCP conveniently inherited Qing empire's as well (indirectly through KMT, the nine dashed line was a KMT invention...).
This is projection. Just because our rulers would do it, and our idiotic war media would find some "humanitarian" fig leaf to justify it, doesn't mean that all, or even median, humans would.
Invade where? Tajikistan? The thing about belt and road is.. we could do that, too. Instead we blow a fortune in the middle east and get salty at them for being smarter.
As far as china's ambitions go, anything can change but they have a long, long history of non-interventionism. It's hard to justify ideologically when they teach every schoolkid about the century of humiliation and the evils of colonialism.
Your current account has an unmistakeable pattern of using HN primarily for ideological and nationalistic battle. I believe you're posting in good faith in the sense that you sincerely hold your views and are not misrepresenting yourself —as some people have complained, and as I'm happy to say in response to the complaints. That's not enough, though. You're clearly not using HN as intended, and you're clearly violating the site guidelines.
We ban accounts that use HN primarily for political/ideological/nationalistic battle because they destroy this community for the thing it is supposed to be for: respectful, curious conversation on topics of intellectual interest. Therefore I've banned this account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. As you know, they're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I didn't say you were disrespectful. Actually I'm grateful for the amount of restraint I noticed in your posts—especially since you're representing a minority point of view, as we've discussed more than once in the past. All that is fine.
The problem is that that's not enough. Accounts that use HN primarily (exclusively?) for political/ideological/nationalistic arguments are breaking the site guidelines. This site is supposed to be for curious conversation on intellectually gratifying topics, and an account that only uses HN for arguing about $hot-divisive-topic (be it China or any other) is clearly going against that spirit.
That's just not an accurate summary of my posting history. I post on a wide range of topics. The last 2 weeks I posted about bitcoin, education policy, tax policy, the British royal family, software architecture and that upvoted comment on the Chappelle thread that you flagged (which was admittedly wading into the muck a bit).
I'm sympathetic to the fact that flame wars about China are too common here, and hey, banning the non-american point of view might end them, circlejerks can only go so far on their own. So maybe you're right, but I wouldn't be super satisfied with that solution.
We're not "banning the non-American point of view" and I don't think you should stoop to such a cheap shot, which is exactly the sort of thing that garden-variety trolls come up with. I've consistently defended the minority viewpoint here [1], not out of political agreement but because I know how difficult their position is, and how most of them are posting in good faith—they're not spies, shills, bots, or agents, they're legit HN users whose background or relationships have naturally led them to their views.
> That's just not an accurate summary of my posting history.
I looked through your most recent 60 comments and counted 9 that weren't on flamewar topics, and that was being generous, because several of the latter were about Bitcoin and religion. It's true that a few were about software - but on the other side, quite a few of the other 51 were blatantly breaking the site guidelines. On balance, your account has clearly been using HN primarily for ideological/political/nationalistic battle. As you know, we ban such accounts. I spend a lot of time replying to people who feel that we don't apply these rules evenhandedly (from all ideological/political/national sides, btw), so I think it's pretty important to actually do so.
[1] I put this list together yesterday for a user who emailed because they were worrying about Chinese spies on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/chinamod. I think it makes the situation pretty clear, if anyone has the stamina to slog through it.
Just so long as we're clear that my "ideological battle" was scattershot takes across a bunch of different topics. I'd hate to be thought of as having a coherent ideology :)
China has a long history of non-interventionism, but the Communist Party does not. Now that the CCP controls China, I don’t expect China’s track record in that regard to continue. The only reason it hasn’t happened yet is b/c China wasn’t powerful enough, but that’s clearly changing.
I think Xi is quite clear on his view of China's place in the world: hegemon in their region but no desire to be global police like America.