US vs China
For decades, the US has seen China as a competitor on many fronts for them, but are their perceptions of China being a threat blinding them to having a working relationship with them?
Over recent decades, China has transformed from a largely agrarian economy into an economic powerhouse, almost rivaling the US as the dominant world economy. This is in spite of being exploited for its low-cost labour by Western corporations. China used that to improve its understanding of the technologies it was building for the West to improve its own industries. Why anyone expected them to blindly keep handing over all the benefits to foreign interests without there being a price to pay is just plain delusional by those thinking they were the smart ones in the room.
The US continues to see China as a threat to its economic and political dominance, and so it should. But doubling down on a system that has been responsible for gross inequality in the world, along with creating countless proxy wars and economic instability, is not a stable path forward. The US has used the guise of democracy to enforce anything but in its efforts to thwart any challenges to its economic interests. This has resulted in a divide between those that have been equally exploitative and hegemonic into the 20th century being aligned to the US, and most other nations.
A common criticism of China is that their government is subsidising industries to give them an unfair export advantage by lowering the landed price of goods in other countries. However, this is exactly what many monopolistic US enterprises do to eliminate competition. The only difference is that China has been far more proactive in having a comprehensive trade policy framework and long-term planning than the often US vacillation between laissez-faire and belligerent blustering, which is often geared towards populist domestic sentiment than any concerted trade policy.
That the US has been allowing such monopolistic policies to run rampant with only token attempts at curtailment, does not give such arguments against China much moral weight. China has been in a balancing act between control of its economy and how much its companies can set the economic agenda, which is how it has been able to modernise itself in mere decades. Contrast this with the US letting corporations drive the economic agenda without much interference, but which has now culminated in aggressively increasing domestic inequality, coupled with excessive domination of national narratives.
The US has sabotaged its place in the world by using bellicose rhetoric rather than solid long-term trade policy to push its own largely monopolistic cultural and economic agenda. China is showing how corrupt, empty and short-sighted the US playbook has been, and no amount of populist domestic appeals will change how effective China is in changing world trade. Trump's election is a sign that the US is actually losing ground in its world influence, as it was largely reliant upon its dominance of the economic and cultural agenda after World War II.
The US interfered in the internal affairs of other governments to head off any possible challenges to that dominance, but that has relied upon having the largest military to ensure enforcement and acquiescence of other nations. While early Chinese efforts were about countering the US by engaging in proxy wars, unlike Russia, it pivoted towards economic influence by helping to build up infrastructure in developing countries, using a far more cooperative engagement model. This has resulted in China being seen as far less intrusive by those countries than dealing with Western institutions.
Western governments have used the World Bank and International Monetary Fund to manipulate countries it is supposedly helping to change their internal politics and economies to be more friendly towards exploitation of their natural resources and people by the West. It is against this blatant sabotage and exploitation that BRICS has been created to bypass the current US-centric banking systems that have exerted a stranglehold over trade, and enabled US-led economic sanctions to keep other countries towing the US line.
Of course, BRICS is being used by Russia and other nations to bypass some legitimate concerns about their hegemonic actions, but if the US had not been so bullying about enforcing its world view through overt military and economic force to maintain its dominance, such alternatives would not have come into being. China is using BRICS, along with its Belt and Road initiatives to build a more cooperative alternative to Western overt hegemonic dominance, and it obviously works for African nations far better than the former exploitative colonial European regimes that still hobble their economies.
Rather than making the US stronger, the election of Trump, and the elevation of tech company executives to controlling the US political agenda, has turned the US into one big grift circus. This is just the culmination of its self-inflicted delusional propaganda of the supposed supremacy of the selfish individual that has been used to allow the exploitative wealthy to maintain their domestic hegemony while distracting their citizens from challenging them. In contrast, while China keeps obvious political control over its own citizens, it is not trying to brainwash them into acquiescence.
China has improved the lives of its citizens far more than the US has its own, and in its economic cooperation with other nations, it has created much infrastructure and skills-improvement for their populations, allowing them a far better chance to improve their lives than any US-led economic bullying. The US is losing to China in the economic race that it continues to sabotage itself with, and thus lose the diplomatic leverage that has enabled it to enforce its own corrupt agenda with.
Unless some adults with far less delusional ideological blindness start to run the US, it will continue to decline as the global agenda-setter. Continuing to rely upon its self-aggrandising cultural propaganda as being suitable for the world is what is leading the planet to cooking us all. The genocide in Gaza has shown that the US does not care about the world other than it being for its own enrichment and hegemony. Nations are seeing that the US and other Western nations are the cause of the world's problems, and are actively willing to find alternate partners that are not so exploitative.
China is not showing the same disregard for the wellbeing of the nations it seek to influence, so even if it gets some advantage from its relations with them, it is not sabotaging their sovereignty to the point of subservience. The US continues to pretend that China wants exactly the same dominance that it wants, and that is why it is going to continue to fail in its efforts to thwart China nor prevent it from overtaking it on the world stage. There are issues with how China controls it peoples, but the US is pretending it does not, while actively sabotaging its own democratic institutions.
The influx of US citizens to the local Chinese social media RedNote app after threats of banning TikTok has opened their eyes to how much their perceptions of China have been defined by overt long-term US government propaganda. Inadvertently, Chinese members of the app have come to realise that what the Chinese government has been saying about the negatives of living in the US are actually true, and not propaganda. It is all showing that the US is relying upon its self-proclaimed superiority as the sole reason for why it should be dominant, and its arguments against China are largely false.