China's ruling communists are fooling themselves if they think the West resents China's "progress" rather than its aggressiveness and tyranny.
Some diplomats talk of living through a turning-point in Chinese foreign policy. History buffs debate whether the moment more closely resembles the rise of an angry, revisionist Japan in the 1930s, or that of Germany when steely ambition led it to war in 1914. A veteran diplomat bleakly suggests that China’s rulers view the West as ill-disciplined, weak and venal, and are seeking to bring it to heel, like a dog. ...
Diplomats describe a China that is hubristic and paranoid. They say some Chinese officials are convinced that the EU will soon drop its Xinjiang-related sanctions, because Europe cannot recover from the pandemic without Chinese growth. Other Chinese officials worry that their country is making too many enemies, and tell diplomats as much. Alas, they are outnumbered by those who blame China’s unpopularity on Western resentment of Chinese success.
The Chinese might want to look at their own not-quite-glorious present. China's miracle was lifting the foot that Mao put on the throat of China's economy to throttle it. Basically, one can look at China as "a world-class economic power and as a Third World country."
That effect of ending Mao's self-sabotage is running out before per capita GDP has reached Western levels. I've noted this.
And China seems determined to alienate trading partners by thinking browbeating them will work. Is "King Cotton" leading China to demand you are either with them fully or against them fully?
Also, whether or not the Chinese Communist Party conduct against the Uighurs constitutes "genocide" under international law misses the point. It is at least multi-generational genocide.
Still, the USSR was a threat despite a broadly similar situation that blended military technology and Third World poverty. But Russia also had the benefit of starting out next to the core objective of the NATO alliance, West Germany.
The Chinese are wrong that Westerners have a poor opinion of China because of their success. The West helped China achieve this success. That was the formal point of Western policy for decades.
Unless we just effed up making money, with transforming China a convenient fig leaf for selling China the figurative rope to hang us.
Westerners have a poor opinion of China because China did not use that success to become more free or more supportive of the current system that allowed their progress. Does China really think that Westerners resent Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, and India for their economic progress? Really?
Yet I don't think China has any single easily reached target whose capture would harm the West as much as the Soviet option. China may have grossly over-estimated what its greater power can achieve.
We'll see if the massive income inequality within China is a stable foundation to build a super power on. I'm skeptical. I for one don't buy the notion that Chinese rulers chose wisely because they can plan decades and centuries ahead with innate wisdom and prescience.
Truly these are interesting times.
