I’m well aware of what happened under Mao…and what is happening now to the Uighurs under Xi. That’s why I referred to their own crimes against humanity. Many of those millions of deaths was directly due to nature of Mao’s dictatorship. Chou En-Lai once related a story about when Mao directed that people make their own personal steel forges. One week Mao went on a train to inspect the product, and at every stop was a stack of high-quality steel, and he was very happy. Problem was, the peasants only produced low-quality stuff not worth using, so what Mao’s sycophants did was to take some steel from a good company and hauled that same steel from location to location to make Mao think that his program for personal forges was a resounding success. It was mismanagement like this that led to most of the deaths.

China - like so many other nations including our own - is also rife with racism and ethnic prejudice.

That being said, look at what we did in Iraq - over 100K civilians died in our invasion (and occupation) that we conducted on false pretenses. Look at the plethora of regime changes we instituted, and the regimes we supported (including Saddam Hussein’s). No, our hands are also quite bloody - and the difference between us and China is that China tends not to meddle with nations outside its immediate vicinity.

Don’t get me wrong - I’m no big fan of China. I don’t want to live in a nation where I can be jailed and my family’s life ruined because I said the president was an idiot. But we must be objective, and objectivity requires acknowledging what *both* sides do right and wrong.