Lu Zwei wrote: Fri Jan 23, 2026 2:18 pm
OrthodoxEaster wrote: Fri Jan 23, 2026 11:16 am
Am I, personally, very worried about China or Russia fucking up my perch in NYC? Not really. But wow, I sure know a lot of—often liberal or even leftish—immigrant communities who are. Never mind my friends abroad, who live closer to the hostilities.
Ah yes, the Cubans in America. Now also, those leftists hate China too, because they live in the greatest democracy since Plato and Aristotle, unlike those imperialist Chinese people.
OrthodoxEaster wrote: Fri Jan 23, 2026 11:16 am
Empires all gonna act like empires.
I will always side with China on this one. Solely based on the current history of not behaving like the other two.
Cubans? Not so much these days. Are many anti-Communist Republicans? Sure. But they tend to worry more about this hemisphere. I've even met Miami Cubans who love that Putin/Trump-style yachty bling. Full-on horseshoe theory.
But for literal anxiety over modern-day, oligarch Russia, it's more about Slavs (not just Poles or Ukrainians), Balts, Finns, Norwegians, Romanians (over Moldova's partial occupation), Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tatars, Chechnyans (now there's a genocide for ya'!), Dagestanis, Georgians, Azeris, Armenians, Afghanis, Syrians, and that list goes on. Just go hang out at some bars and cafes in Queens or Brooklyn. Oh yeah, wait, you can't; Croatia isn't all that diverse. Forget it.
In terms of being harassed by imperial and modern China (the world's first empire?), it's often Southeast Asians, Taiwanese, Hong Kong Chinese, Nepalese (especially), Uighurs, Tibetans (yikes), Koreans, keep going...
If you have a decent calling plan, I can give you the phone number of a Uighur family over here whose neighbors and relatives were abducted by the current Chinese government before they fled the country a few years back. Ask for Ahmed. One of the missing kids apparently turned up stitched like a cloth sack, sans several organs. Almost makes ICE seem easy, right?
As for your second statement...
Harper's wrote:
From transcripts of interviews conducted by David Stavrou with Sayragul Sauytbay, a Uighur woman from the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region of China, where the United Nations estimates that between one and two million Uighurs were held in internment camps in 2018. When Sauytbay was released in March 2018, after five months of imprisonment, she fled to Kazakhstan and reunited with her husband and children. The family was granted asylum in Sweden, where they now live. Portions of the interview were published in Haaretz in October of last year.
https://harpers.org/archive/2020/03/uig ... -of-china/
No, not at all "behaving like the other two."