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?
I've honestly found everyone I've talked to in person about it to be very receptive of my takes. Like I know a few hopeless upper middle class sucdems who are swallowing the propaganda hook line and sinker, but idk I do think we tend to put a lot of weight on the astroturfing we see and the opinions of petite bourgeois. Working class people I interact with have mostly been "I don't know shit about China" and generally listen when I talk about all the sources and stuff I've read about it. Maybe that's a unique experience, dunno, but it's been mine. However still it's not like there's hordes of people dedicated to combating the propaganda, so we'll see.
It's definitely evidence that the supremacy of the IMF and US imperial control is waning.
Just as sidenote, maybe if one is in such a discussion it might not be bad to slide in how the media was banging on the war-drums, uncritically regurgitating the WMD lies.
Just to remind them that the media has made horrific misjudgments, if you want to give them the benefit of the doubt.
This has fortunately been my experience, too. The material reality of it is that most of the bits of productive industry we have left source loads of what they need from China and even the chuds know that's what's putting food on the table. I worked a warehouse job moving what I eventually found out were off the shelf components for navy shit (and left when that realization happened lol) and I was literally relabeling boxes straight from southern China it was hilarious. Trade relationships can of course change but I don't know if the rest of the world has the industrial capacity to feed the glutton that is the American economy if we cut out China.