I've been seeing a huge amount of anti-Chinese sentiment online, from obvious places like reddit, to even misinformed friends on social media falling victim to viral posts filled with misinformation.
What are we to make of this? Is this the slow march to war, by portraying them as pure evil, à la the fake story of Iraqi soldiers killing Kuwaiti babies to help get the public on board with our military response? It seems disadvantageous for the US and their allies to fight China, as we are incredibly reliant upon them economically and don't stand to gain much from the conflict.
Are these the irrational decisions of a dying empire? Or is there something else at play?
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It’s very interesting, it represents quite a pivot by our ruling class who have been pretty happy to go along with the idea we are entering the “Chinese century” until now. I’d honestly thought it was more likely we’d slowly transition from an American aligned middle power to a Chinese aligned one, as we transitioned from a British imperial subject to an american one in the middle of the 20th century. But the political class and the media have definitely been pumping out plenty of anti-China propaganda lately.
This shift to me is evidence that China actually is serious in its Marxism. If it was capitalist like we've been told, the ruling class would find refuge there. They wouldn't be threatened by it.
There's no other explanation in my mind for the wild and bipartisan anti-China sentiment. The bourgeoisie are scared because they've destroyed any goodwill they could have in almost every nation on earth, and one of the last places they could implement neoliberal looting is actively hostile towards them.
I like your materialist view of the situation, I would counter (somewhat playing devil’s advocate here) that it is historically the case that bourgeoisie of different nations/empires compete internationally for access to markets. Even if China was a purely capitalist power it wouldn’t be bucking a trend if western bourgeois interestS united against it.
That's a good point, I guess Eastern and Western bourgeoisie have different interests due to competition. The UK and US are more similar to each other.
Xi Jinping has reversed a shitton of the Dengist liberalizations
People joke about China becoming Communist "any day now", but I think Xichas actually taken some steps towards not only economic reforms that help the workers, but also cultural reforms that make China a more hospitable place for non-chinese workers. There's still a ton of nationalism, but that can't be fixed in a day. Everyone knows that. At least they're trying though.
Someone on the Sino subreddit linked to a Chinese rap contest where the top 2 contestants were both Uyghur muslims. Which I think is a great way to try and shift the public opinion from negative to positive. Like they're actually trying to incorporate Uyghur culture without making them an "other". It's a very hard beam to balance on.
If this trend continues, China will be a pretty awesome place for inclusivity and worker rights sooner rather than later.
Edit: for some reason that Uyghir rap video is tagged as "sensitive content" by Twitter.
That is slave labor, they are forced to perform there, you can see how he hates it.
Lol that's what I would've said if I'd be a lib. But in all honesty that is pretty dope, I have to look into chinese hip hop.
Could also be:
Probably some mix of all of the above.
This is far beyond garden variety racism. You don't AstroTurf racism this hard, Americans kinda just do that on their own (and already were). Linking China with "Antifa terrorists" is a good way for them to justify massive political arrests at home though. There's a lot of shit going on. This is just going to open a lot of shit up on a lot of different fronts.
Yeah, I did a piss-poor job of explaining what I meant. My thinking is that if there was a white replacement capitalist hegemon (say the EU was becoming the economic superpower China is) that would be easy for American capitalists to accommodate. But some evil Oriental replacement hegemon? Even if it's capitalist, all the white supremacy baked into American society makes that a tougher pill to swallow. It's an alternate explanation that fits even if China isn't actually anti-capitalist.
That's definitely more clear, racism is just the a topping on the capitalist, imperialist, hegemonic neapolitan.
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