Suppressing China

Both the Biden and Trump administrations have been trying to prevent China from growing as an economic power. This is the wrong approach.

Instead of making itself more competitive, the US is trying to prevent China from being a fair competitor to the US. While much is made in the US of China supposedly stealing US intellectual property, that is largely what most large corporations in the US have done to their competition without much opposition from the government. In trying to enforce use of the US dollars in all international transactions through the Bretton Woods system after WWII, the US was trying to control all its competition. Playing fair is not in the US playbook, so its stance against China is very hypocritical.

Preventing challengers is what the US has done whenever any nation tries to improve itself in a way that rejects US imperialism, often by creating coups to install dictators who will violently prevent their own citizens from wanting to challenge US interests there. The real US issue with China is that oligarchs there do not get to control the economy like they do in the US, but the government directs its economy as it sees fit, and is why is has been able to pull most of its citizens out of poverty over mere decades along with being able to quickly reassign resources.

The oligarchs in the US do not care about their citizens, nor for their governments to do so, except for them. Of course, such ideological priorities, accompanied by the self-centredness and limited thinking about consequences that involves, means that the US economy is not able to quickly adjust to challenges to its hegemony, hence their resorting to suppression as any real process to actually have a better local manufacturing base would involve a lot of government support and decades of time, which the oligarchs do not want to bother with.

All this is the same modus operandi as white men claiming to be naturally superior, but instead of allowing women and people of colour to just be the supposedly inferiors that will not be able to rise to the top, they suppress them and sabotage their access to resources. This makes the white men actually look inferior because they are acting inferior. The US is acting inferior by trying to suppress China and we are seeing it is now actually is weak. For too long we believed them to be the true economic power, as they tried to portray themselves as, but we now know that they are actually weak.