Oh come on. China has clear ambitions to be the worlds superpower. I have my gripes about the US, but China is clearly a much worse outcome for human rights. It’s not that they are the “enemy”, it’s that it would be flat out unacceptable for the CCP to control the entire planet. What’s plaguing American academia, and America at large, is China’s influence and bribes.
China is still the single greatest threat to world peace, from Tiananmen Square to ethnic cleansing, the government of China is a despotic regime of murderers. Anything the west can do to combat this, it’s a good thing, and shame on any American brand that puts profits over human rights.
I would much rather continued US world domination than cede that power to China. Yes, that's easy for me to say as an American, but I can't help but think that other Western nations would suffer as well under China's dominance.
Yes, the US's liberal democracy isn't in the best of shape (to put it mildly), but China is an isolationist, authoritarian nation where state censorship and human-rights abuses are the norm, not the exception.
China is and has been for sometime the single greatest threat to world peace and security. To be fair, the other hemisphere will say the same about the United States. All things being equal, I'm more worried about China than anyone else.
I’m mixed about this. On one hand the US as the most powerful country should lead and be an example of the free world. On the other hand China is playing an asymmetric game with foreign companies and has banned many US companies from entering their market.
Now they’re still a developing country, so this would be fine by me, except that the Chinese government is committing crimes against humanity and getting more and more powerful at the same time. This is really dangerous, and the only thing I can think of is germany pre-WWII where Hitler had huge approval ratings. Chinese people are extremely pro-CCP even in the US, this is frightening imo. And most countries are doing nothing about the xinjiang and hongkong situations. So maybe this is a good move...
I love this very naive view. China is 100% trying to beat and surpass the US as a superpower. They are not benevolent at all. Have a look at the ridiculous claims on the South China Sea for a start. I have spent lots of time in China. They still want payback for the humiliation they believe they endured in the 1800s. That is a one of the single most important driving factors in everything they do.
China is the single greatest threat to freedom, human rights, and prosperity, the world over. I don't know how anyone who makes money from China can sleep at night.
I don't want to dismiss Chinese influence as a threat to Western values; but we have to keep this in perspective. China is thrice the population of the US and has a comparatively sized (arguably a bit larger, arguably a bit smaller) economy.
We expect their influence to catch up with their size and be comparable with the US government. The US government has long reach and a strong grip (eg, Assange, Snowden, the general pretence that their ongoing aggressive military posture is legitimate, synchronisation of global norms for intellectual property to American interests, Hollywood, etc).
This wouldn't bother me very much, except for the absolutely horrendous corruption, racism, and colonialism that China seems to promote. Look at what they're doing to the Uighurs and imagine a world where they're the world's biggest superpower and no one is willing to tell them to stop. A world with China setting global policy will be a complete nightmare dystopia for anyone who isn't Han Chinese.
China is repressive and has very low standards for human rights. If China becomes more powerful they may decide to conquer the US properly. This may be along way off but this is the fear that's behind not wanting China to surpass the US economically.
Is China not a uniquely threatening force? They have the second largest GDP, the second-most expensive military with the most personnel, considerable influence over other important Asian countries, and a major role in manufacturing the world's products, and they continue to rapidly expand across all of those facets. They are very much in opposition to Liberal values (free speech, democracy, privacy), and they are somewhat aligned with other US adversaries (Russia, North Korea).
In 1910, I'd absolutely attribute focus on China to racism. Today, if I were to rank the biggest threats to US for the coming decades, I would put China in distant first place. But I'm no geopolitics expert, am I missing something?
China has been the world's top economic power for the VAST majority of the past two thousand years. People need to accept that they are just assuming their rightful place atop the world order. Chinese people come over here and dominate Americans academically. Their top students now beat our top students (including Chinese immigrants) in every major academic contest. Theirs is a society that values intelligence. Ours is a society that praises ignorance.
The thing that most commenters here in tacit support of China fail to take into account is that China and the US are global superpowers (unlike the litany of baddies that have been mentioned here)... The US taking a hard line on China can have a cascading affect. The US can’t boil the ocean in regard to fixing all of the worlds ills, and we’re by no means perfect. China is simply the best hill to stand our ground on at the moment.
I have yet to see a single wholly positive article in western media about Chinese innovation. I feel that we on the west are plugging our ears and going nanananana, rather than facing up to the fact that we have a really competent new super power on our hands.
China is evil, they are exploiting 3rd world mineral reserves in the most unjust and environmentally destructive manner possible. Their democracy is even more of a joke than that of the US. But they aren't stupid or incompetent, and how well the west trusts their scientific results means nothing to nobody.
We should stop trying to convince ourselves that China is failing and start trying to understand what it means to have a non-democratic sci-fi dystopia in charge of the world and how we can escape that totalitarian fate.
This is par for the course for any nation or alliance with desires to extend its power globally. I am very tired of people treating China as some terrifying exception with no comparison.
Ironically, this sort of quashing of freedom is the only hope the US has of maintaining any sort of global hegemony.
If China had a political process robust enough to elect and then retire a Trump-like figure, the US would simply be the inferior superpower. The only structural advantage I see for the US these days is the superior legal and political framework.
What exactly is wrong with considering China as the enemy? China is a genocidal, totalitarian state that actively tramples over human rights. IMO it is the closest thing to pure evil in this world next to the DPRK.
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