alt Hacker NewsWhataboutism isn’t a useful game. The claim was that they don’t interfere with politics of external countries. They do.
The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now. Believing it’ll stay there is naive.
Playing the moral superiority game is uninteresting in either direction. Games of power inherently are devoid of morality.
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I'd like you to familiarise yourself with a legal and societal principle we use in civil law countries:
> de minimis non curat praetor
Which basically means judges are not interested in minor disputes. When you add the USA to the mix, China's actions pale in comparison to the point of being negligible, no point in discussing them given the scale of USA's warmongering, overseas and local crimes. "They never interfered in [...]" is an exaggeration which shows the lack of importance of China's crimes when compared to the USA's, that's all.
The "whataboutism" here isn't a deflection strategy, it shows the hypocrisy and correctly minimises the scale of China's actions in comparison to the hypocrites'.
Whataboutism is a very useful game to reveal whether people are being honest or not.
If someone is vocally complaining about country A doing some oppressive activity, while ignoring country B doing 100x the same activity, the comparison does not forgive or excuse country A, or make them right or admirable.
But it does allow us to conclude that the person complaining is biased. Either they don't care about the oppressive activity and want to attack country A for some other reason. Or they have a particular fondness for country B and will never accept that it does wrong. Or some variation on these.
>The claim is they don’t engage in warfare when they do, just exclusively in the digital domain for now.
Come on, are you seriously equating hacking to literally bombing and killing people? That's just arguing in very bad faith.
Calling hacking "warfare" is just intellectually dishonest, if not downright disgusting toward the actual victims of American wars.
Ok, let's follow your rules then. If we remove morality, we are left with what? Pure numbers? If you want to be technically correct China foreign interventions are > 0, indeed. But the scale of US actions is, I would dare to say, at least one magnitude bigger. An empire should be judged for how they treat their own citizens, their allies and their enemies. And if we do that, maybe China and the US are not so different.