I’ve noticed that all media reporting on US-China tensions assumes that the USA is basically in a dick-measuring contest with China, with the USA jealously trying to thwart China due to China’s ascension and superiority. The line of argument goes that the USA, insecure of our inferiority to China, and utterly obsessed with being superior to all other countries, is trying to unfairly undermine China with the China Initiative, TikTok ban, accusation of COVID coming from the Chinese lab, and accusation of plagiarism with DeepSeek.
There is a lot of evidence that elite thinkers and business people believe that being at the forefront of innovation is a critical economic goal for the United States. A recent example that comes to mind is Jeffrey Sachs’ “What Ails America – and How to Fix It”.
The jealousy/sabotage theory of our anti-China behavior is a take that Ron Unz seems very interested in. He has written more articles about it than I can count:
I’m wondering if this is true. I wonder if the truth is instead something else, something twofold.
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The conservative Congress members are like characters in Shingeki no Kyojin, in that they have been basically driven insane from fear. Yet, that their fear is mostly baseless, being rooted in intracultural trauma here in the USA, and thus they assume that foreign powers are evil and intent on harming us, without any grounds.
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The USA establishment is wide-open, a.k.a. globalist, especially with immigration, which is far more liberal than Europe, and this leads right-wing types of people with a great deal of generalized anxiety that we are not protected against ecological competition from outgroups. Canada and Aus/NZ have the same immigration, but I assume that the right-wingish Aussies cope with it with their ability to seamlessly immigrate to the UK. Anyhow, as the USA is such, people are dying to do something to protect themselves from outgroups, and these Chinese examples are convenient excuses. They are not the only excuses, as you might predict. There are examples against many national outgroups - Mexican “illegals,” Indian “H1B scammers,” etc.
What is the truth? Is the USA trying to defeat China by hook or by crook? Or is the USA lashing out in an insane fashion due to our own national failures?
I tend to assume the latter. I never believed that conservative Americans are so obsessed with being nationally superior, such that they even would do this. I could be blind…I’ve been blind before. The people at the top of the Republican party are indeed strange animals.