Are these valid criticisms? Did everyone forget about the NSA spying scandal a few years back where the US was monitoring huge amounts of internet traffic in Europe on American owned platforms.
I don't know if they're valid. I think my point is structured in such a way that it doesn't matter in this context: those concerns, if they are or were ever valid, are not rendered invalid by the points that the above commenter was making. I don't believe I have the background to comment meaningfully on whether TikTok is an actual security threat to US citizens or whether the US government would be hypocritical in banning TikTok for such a reason. The question of hypocrisy also seems like a separate one to me (i.e., should one not do the correct thing because it would be seen as hypocritical by some?).
True, but if an objective party was reporting on this, I think they would mention that it was in fact a thief taking such precautions, rather than a non-descript local resident.
Would you rather a country that many people around the world wants to migrate to in order to pursue their dreams spying on you (USA), or a country where people are put in concentration camps (China and the Uyghurs) spying on you?
I don't know about you, but I prefer the former as lesser of two evils.
As someone who has family in Syria that was bombed by US and their allies but had never been bombed by China, I'd rather China be spying on me. As far as I know, CCP has never attacked any country out of its borders.
If you are in America from Syria and have a dislike for America because of past bombings I would be more concerned with them over China.
As far as never attacked anyone. Of course they have. China is part of that US allies group fighting terrorism in your families homeland. Here is a list for you of all of the conflicts:
Those are almost all internal conflicts within China. The only major foreign wars China has been involved in since the founding of the PRC are the Korean War, the Sino-Indian border conflict, and the 1979 Sino-Vietnamese war. It's been more than 40 years since China was involved in a major foreign conflict.
It has border disputes, but it hasn't been involved in any major military conflict since 1979.
Most (probably all) countries in South and East Asia have multiple border disputes. Japan has disputes with China, Russia and South Korea. India has disputes with Pakistan, China and Nepal, and used to have disputes with Bhutan, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh. See a trend? Every major country in the region has or has had disputes with every neighboring country.
I am not in America so your argument is not valid.
As for your link, most of it is about peace keeping missions. The others involve countries that share a border with China. As I said, China has for the most part never attacked countries it didn't share borders with and I don't live in any of these. Even then, they haven't done carpet bombing, used chemical or nuclear weapons against these countries unlike the US.
I think the use of government surveillance is less likely to be used to conduct drone strikes and far more likely to prompt a Tiananmen square esque response to dissent. Thus I would firmly disagree with this sentiment.
I'd very much prefer Chinese spying me over USA, as they have significantly less effect on my life.
For example, if USA found out something about me that they don't like, they might prevent me from visiting USA in the future (which is something I might want to do), or they might force U.S. companies (e.g. PayPal, Google) to close my online accounts. And they might do those things unilaterally as I'm not a U.S. citizen.
On the other hand, I wouldn't care much if China banned me from visiting or from business with their companies.
US has their own camp too, not as bad as Uighur camps perhaps, but on a big scale: the Gaza Strip. It's status has been maintained through US's UN security council veto power for decades.
On a much smaller scale, we're still running Guantanamo.
If you're going to bring up Israel and the area around it, I was just looking at Wikipedia's page on wars involving the PRC, which reminded me (if I ever knew) that Tibet has been annexed to the PRC for just about the same time that modern Israel has been around.
I think it's worth mentioning that the US has not always been the preeminent ally of Israel since its founding. A lot of people seem to just have this vague sense that it's always been the situation. It's something that happened relatively recently.
