Tell that to the British/Spanish/French Empire or Uncle Sam!

So you're suggesting we should apply mid-1800s ethical standards to a global superpower in 2023?

Colonial attitudes have changed. Western powers gave up their territorial maximalist doctrine a long time ago. Basically all former colonies of the West are now independent.

Meanwhile China is engaging in neo-colonialism with Belt and Road. You can handwave about "might makes right" but the reality is that by the standards of our day, China is not proving to be a force for justice or equity either at home or on the world stage and we ought to frown on that.

Western powers didn't give up their doctrine easy. There was entire movement of anti-colonialism and non-alignment, sometimes followed by the wars for liberation - French Indochina, Vietnam, Algiers, just to mention few. If there were no wars, I doubt that western powers would give up on their colonies on their own.

I disagree, it simply would've taken longer. The West is democratic, and attitudes changed. In the mid-to-late 1800s, the prevailing philosophy justifying colonialism was rooted in racism, e.g. Kipling's "The White Man's Burden".

75 years after that was written, it was well outside the political mainstream.

What I am saying is that "ethical standard" have never been a thing with respect to those kind of issues.

I'm pretty sure that's just objectively untrue. Some nations are subject to public opinion and the ethical sensibility of their electorates, and some are not. That comes into stark relief when some nations chop up journalists inside their embassies.

It's not objective, only subjective through the lens of those who are writing the narrative, who are?...

Objectively, what China is doing is not worse than what the US have been doing, or than any Western powers have been doing because it's just how it goes.

So if certain western countries had done something back in the 19th or first half of the 20th century it's supposedly alright for China to behave the same way now?

Why? Your 'arguments' don't really make much sense. I mean whatever US was doing in the 19/20th centuries was no worse than what the other colonial powers did a hundred or two hundred years before that. Which was no worse than what the Mongols did during the middle ages. So according to this 'logic' everything everyone does is completely justifiable because someone did something worse at some point in the past? Absurd...