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?
The US is trying to cold war 2.0 with China. They want to encircle, isolate, and balkanize them (hence the Uigher shit to try and push separatism in a vital trade region, hence HK shit, etc). Some amount of the capitalists have come to understand the liberalization of China has failed, their attempts to steal its wealth has failed and it is gaining the upper hand and has a communist party with many disciplined communists in it in power and they are in panic mode now.
It's also a nice distraction for them, they can, instead of taking the blame themselves for outsourcing to increase profits blame the Chinese for "not playing by the rules" and "stealing" intellectual property (something the US government has done in the past). It's building up nationalism to counter the rising inequality and scape-goat the issues onto China. While the people are distracted by the media with tales of intrigue and yellow peril, of a "genocide" in Xinjiang they will pay less attention to all that is going on at home from rising homelessness to the sinking of even mild social democrat reforms (ala Bernie), to BLM. BLM is especially of interest although not the underlying cause of this push, by making China out to be more brutal and downplaying US brutality they can still claim "at least we're not as bad as China".
They realize the position they are in and they are desperate. Trump is specifically pushing it because he's a racist nationalist who has to blame outsiders for being unfair but Democrats (including the much vaunted AOC) are quite on-board with the anti-China stuff and you'll see, they'll surprise you by working hand in hand with Republicans just like in the cold war to crush the left and build up a villain narrative against China.
People like to talk about the great firewall of China. The day a fourth of China can speak English and is unleashed on the US internet is the day the US would build our own great firewall to keep them and their opinions out. Same thing with surveillance, they like talking about Chinese surveillance but the US is second to none and getting more bold. I predict an attempt to make encryption economically untenable for all large companies to maintain (by withdrawing safe harbor) will pass within the next 5-10 years. I expect further measures of censorship against "disinformation" to be pushed by the US government and accepted and implemented by private companies. Anyone who posts counter-narratives against the US propaganda may very well be silenced in multiple ways.
something I've found worthwhile to point out, too, is that all the US companies steal ungodly amounts of data from us. The Chinese internet still has facebook/twitter analogues, China just built their own platforms instead of selling out their people to US private companies. Yes, this results in Chinese people being sheltered from US opinions, but honestly I can't entirely see that as a bad thing, considering how horrific the US internet is already.