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 haven’t read The Long Twentieth Century by Arrighi but I have seen some summaries of it, and he posits that periods of time during which one hegemonic empire is in decline and another is rising are usually marked by globe-spanning destructive wars - WWI/II while Britain was declining and US was rising, Napoleonic wars when the Dutch Empire was declining and the brits were on the way up, War of Austrian Succession and the Seven Years War as the Spanish empire was fading, etc. etc.
and of course leave it to the USSR to let their dissolution happen peacefully in the end