[kibwen]

> Westerners are taught by the media and education to idealize Japan and hate China almost everywhere.

As an American educated by the American public education system and indoctrinated by American media, our government is certainly stupid and vengeful enough to make me want to support this if it were true, but it's just not. The much more banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by projecting a favorable image of itself via the media it exports, whereas China is just comparatively terrible at exercising this sort of soft power.

[jimbokun]

I suspect that’s related to China’s lower levels of individual freedom relative to Japan. Censorship does not fit well with producing powerful and influential cultural exports like manga, anime and video games.

[ajmurmann]

This is supported by looking at what happened to Hong Kong cinema that was huge till the early 2000s.

[makeitdouble]

> our government

We're talking about media and narratives mainly.

On idealizing Japan, people here seem to think it's benefic and pushed by Japan, where I think it's more complicated. If the goal is to keep the US customers and workers in a state of fear and adversity, you need a credible threat from a somewhat powerful enemy, and idealization becomes needed.

That was Japan a few decades ago, that lead to the bashing movement, and I think it kept going t a smaller pace still, while China got set as the next unstoppable threat.

[lacewing]

Not being a single-party, notionally communist dictatorship may be helping with the image too? I don't know, spitballing here.

I think the default approach in the West - and that's not a US-specific thing - is to treat exotic faraway lands with a mix of curiosity and awe. But China is a geopolitical rival with a political system that rightly makes many Westerners queasy, so it doesn't benefit from that anymore.

[kibwen]

> Not being a single-party, notionally communist dictatorship may be helping with the image too? I don't know, spitballing here.

No, everyday people are perfectly content to warm to brutal dictatorships who successfully put on a friendly face. Case in point: Dubai.

[lacewing]

I don't think there are many people in the West who profess love for the UAE. But there are several reasons why it's not as disliked. First, it's a monarchy, and monarchies are harder to parse, given that many European countries are notionally monarchies too. Second, it's not by any stretch of imagination a serious geopolitical or economic threat to the West. Third, although it is authoritarian, by most third-party assessments, it's not nearly as authoritarian as China.

[Pay08]

People seemingly often forget how brutal Chinese authoritarianism can be. I don't know whether it's the fault of the news or if it's selective amnesia, but there are few worse cases of authoritarianism than the country that welded people into their apartments.

[kibwen]

You're giving people too much credit. People in general simply do not care about whether or not a government has committed atrocities, even when that includes their own government, as long as they think (rightly or wrongly (usually wrongly)) that atrocities won't be happening to them.

[eunos]

Laugh in Plaza Accord and 80s anti Japan scare. At one point American was more concerned with Japanese economy than Soviet lmao/

[ajmurmann]

Not being worried annoy the Soviet economy makes sense though

[eunos]

Is not economy per se. Japanese economy was putting more pressure than Soviet military in perception