Was the British Empire worse than the Nazis?

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Ah, sorry: wasn’t meaning to imply that it wasn’t a sh***y thing to do.

Because it definitely was.

Just musing on technical terminology.

(I actually quite like the concept of Confucian Bureaucracy: definitely streets ahead of any contemporaneous western theory of administration)

I don't understand why you think an empire isn't an empire anymore if it's attacked by a more powerful empire.

If the Brits had marched out of British ruled India into the Himalayas to invade Tibet (which was part of the "Chinese Empire"), and the Chinese rulers of Tibet fought back, and the two fought a war over whether Beijing or London got to be the colonial oppressors of the Tibetans then you could talk about both being imperalist empires.

But we are not talking about China lording it over subject non Chinese vassal states. We are talking about China trying to control the ports of entry into China proper itself. China doing what we do at the Mexican border trying to keep out drugs out of our own homeland country. So its China's role as a sovereign nation that is relevant to the issue at hand, not its role as a nation that subjugates other nations. China as a nation, not China as an Empire.

I think Hitler and the German atrocities are seen as more despicable than what the British Empire did was because of the time. For the British Empire, they did those things when the rest of the world was doing the same, which leaves them "not to be blamed." For Germany, it was supposed to be a time where the world is more civilized, and since countries were more connected through communication and had rules of war, they chose not to go along the path that the rest of the world was doing to be behaved and just.