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In the US elected representatives in a few places have decided to remove statues of proponents of slavery, after significant public pressure. This is not happening to statues commemorating deaths of soldiers or protestors. And nothing stops you from waving a confederate flag and "celebrating your heritage" if that is your belief system. Actually, the state-funded police department would at least pretend to send officers to separate you from counter-protesters and attempt to make sure both sides are protected. This seems quite different from removing statues commemorating student protests (that went bloody due to state violence)


I guarantee you that more Chinese people approve of their government's approach to separatism than the Americans do.

i.e. more Americans per capita support the Confederacy than Chinese support Western separatist movements in China.

If you have been to both places, this should be obvious.


That is true (and pretty obvious), but the attitude to separatism was not remotely relevant to my argument, which is the whole point.


If most people support it, then it is the will of the people. To oppose that would be undemocratic. Not that complicated.


On the contrary, an equally important base principle of the modern democracies coming out of the Enlightenment is that the minority should be protected from the "tyranny of the majority"[1]. Don't get me wrong, it is easy to agree with you that the majority of the Chinese people might enjoy the strong-arm stability provided by their totalitarian government, but there is no way around the fact that minority opinions in China frequently get brutally stomped out, while minority opinions in (flawed) democracies like the US have many (imperfect) protections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority




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