| I am, without complicating things with moral judgements of the different powers involved, simply making the claim that China’s goals are at odds with the West. You seem to question this claim and yet go on to provide significant support for why China has historical reasons for this. If you are interested, Read further down in the thread of another comment to my post that I responded to and you’ll see that I cover this a little more, but to reiterate a bit of it: The Opium Wars and Ensuing 100 Years of Humiliation, despite any change to the governmental structure post-revolution, is still very much in the zeitgeist of China’s perception of the West. And China has taken that lesson to heart, in particular the lesson that: just a little technological superiority by an adversary can nonetheless allow a massive nation with significantly more resources but a lower industrial/technological base to be decisively subjugated to the will of a much smaller opponent. This very much informs Chinas desire to increase it’s power and sphere of influence, along with advancing to the point that it is, at minimum, significantly more self sufficient at a similar level of technological advancement to the west, and preferably more so. This unavoidably puts its geopolitical goals at odds with the West because this cannot be accomplished to a significant degree without disrupting at least a little bit the power and influence that the west (particularly USA) has in the world. I am deliberately not bringing anything like forms of government, realpolitik games, moral judgements and human rights issues etc into my claim because those are all extremely complicated topics and muddy the water in addressing the very narrow and simple claim that China’s goals are not the same as the goals of western powers, and this necessarily results in conflicts and disagreements between these powers. You and I probably disagree and other aspects of these issues, but from what you wrote I don’t thing we disagree on the claim that goals differ, and that is the source of many conflicts, and that this is true before bringing in any value judgements of which side is right/wrong/has the moral high ground/etc, which are separate (thought certainly intertwined) claims. Finally, to address the dependency issue: a significant reason that countries are worried about over reliance on China is for the same reason people should be worried about having a single point of failure in any critical system. |