过去几周以来，中国小红书以及随后深度求索公司推出的人工智能模型所引发的热潮促使很多西方人说起了中国的好话。自然，这也意味着有许多西方人会迫不及待地跳出来回应称：“实际上，中国相当糟糕。”

某些西方人一听到有人说中国的好话就会浑身不自在、坐立不安。他们最热衷的事是告诉人们，中国比西方糟糕，或者说两者一样糟糕。

让我们从客观事实和可衡量的角度来看看。21世纪，中国没有发动过导致生灵涂炭的战争。中国没有在全球建立数百个军事基地。中国没有因他国拒绝听命于自己而动用制裁手段，并使被制裁国家的人民陷入困境。中国也没有在过去的15个月中在中东点燃战火，纵容一场“实况直播”的种族灭绝行为。中国更没有推行危险的核边缘政策，危及世界安全。

每当我指出上述这些，那些为西方霸权行为辩护的人就会说：“我们还没看到中国搞那些恶劣的外交政策，那是因为他们还不够强大！”这种说法也是荒谬的。中国并非不具备给世界制造混乱的实力，只是它没有选择这样做。

有一些西方人总爱宣称中国制定了“有朝一日征服世界的秘密计划”，但如果真去深挖这些阴谋论背后的证据，就不难发现，这类人所提供的“证据”只能证明中国公开宣示过的目标，即希望建立一个不由华盛顿主导的多极世界。

我们西方人的祖辈扬帆出海去征服世界，而中国人的祖辈则修筑长城。认为中国有“统治白人”的意图，这种观念就如同那些古老的种族主义迷信一样毫无理性依据。中国的文明并非更加神奇或完美，但我们的文明中却有着征服与反乌托邦的基因。中国人做着正常的事，而我们却做着反常的事：中国让本国公民的生活越来越好，避免不必要的战争。而眼下一些西方国家的政府却在令本国公民生活水平下降的同时，还每隔几年就发动大规模战争。

因此，为何我们要对中国提出诸多批评呢？这就好比一个生活在“第三帝国”的德国人放眼海外，却对巴西指指点点。

我觉得，没有什么比生活在美国霸权阴影下的西方人花费自己的时间和精力，去批评那些处于这个权力制度之外的国家更可悲的了。这是一种令人尴尬、甚至可以说是“马屁精”似的行为模式。倒不如把精力用在反省自己实际经历的错误上。

By Caitlin Johnstone

The buzz around Xiaohongshu and then DeepSeek has had an unusually high volume of westerners speaking positively about China for the last couple of weeks, which of course means we’re also seeing many westerners falling all over themselves to say “Well actually China is actually quite bad actually” in response.

Western liberals who fancy themselves enlightened and critical of power tend to get very squirmy and uncomfortable in their skin when they hear people saying positive things about the PRC, and love nothing more than to tell you that China is just as evil and tyrannical as the western power alliance, if not worse.

This is objectively, measurably false. China hasn’t spent the 21st century killing people by the millions in wars of aggression. China isn’t circling the planet with hundreds of military bases while working to destroy any nation or group anywhere in the world who disobeys it. China isn’t strangling nations around the globe with starvation sanctions for refusing to bow to its dictates. China didn’t just spend 15 months lighting the middle east on fire and backing a live-streamed genocide. China hasn’t spent the last three years endangering the world in frequently terrifying acts of nuclear brinkmanship with a rival nuclear superpower. Only the US-centralised empire has done this.

Whenever I point this out I get empire apologists going “Well yeah, SO FAR! We haven’t seen China doing all that evil foreign policy shit YET because they’re still not powerful enough!” Which is just silly. China absolutely is powerful enough to be a whole lot more abusive and murderous abroad, and it simply isn’t. Westerners love to claim that China has secret agendas to conquer the world someday (hilariously implying that these hypothetical future abuses make China morally comparable to the US empire’s current known abuses), but if you actually dig into the evidence for these claims what you’ll find every time is that all they provide evidence for is China’s openly stated goal of a multi-polar world that isn’t ruled by Washington.

Our ancestors set sail to conquer the world; their ancestors built a wall. This notion that China has an interest in ruling over a bunch of white foreigners has as much rational basis as old racist superstitions that black and brown people wanted equal rights so that they could come and steal white men’s wives and have sex with their daughters.

They’re just a better civilisation than ours—not because theirs is miraculous or perfect, but because ours is just that murderous and dystopian. They simply do the normal thing while we do the freakish thing: they make the lives of their citizens better and better and avoid unnecessary wars, while western governments make the lives of their citizens worse and worse while plunging into new acts of mass military slaughter every few years.

Any criticisms you could level at China—that their domestic policy is more authoritarian than ours, that their culture is more conservative, etc—are eclipsed in moral terms by the depravity of our own western governments by orders of magnitude. And why would you even level such criticisms while living under the single most bloodthirsty and tyrannical power structure on earth? That would be like a German living under the Third Reich looking overseas and bitching about Brazil.

I find nothing more pathetic than a westerner who lives under the shadow of the US empire spending their time and energy criticising the abuses of nations who lie outside that power structure. It’s an embarrassing, bootlicking way to live. Focus on criticising the far greater abuses of the far greater evil that you actually live under, loser.