I think that until China views the West as safe, it will continue to do these things. Chinese tend to view Westerners (Anglo/American in particular) as dodgy, yet charismatic, which is the reason for these trust issues.
Rooting this attitude is an observance of the events of the last fifty years. In others’ minds, Japan was competing pretty fairly, and beating the U.S. until the Paris accords. Russia was freed from communism, only to enter a 2nd-world decline in which it was mocked in major papers like the New York Times. The Iraq occupation, and the Arab Spring reinforced the distrust that the American goal of spreading its style of governance was more about itself than the rest of the world. It made for a good story, but it did not follow through. There is, above all, the inability of the third world to modernize under the American-supported capitalist framework.
The attitude given in the article is problematic because it doesn’t quite capture how Chinese engineers feel about this dynamic. It feels more like the narrative that Western Americans want to hear. I’ve gotten the impression that many feel that their government is overbearing. But I don’t get the sense that they trust what America says more. That’s a real legitimacy and credibility issue, and as we should know, politics is rooted in legitimacy. More one-sided criticism of China’s strategy is not going to help America’s case. It feels dodgy, too good to be true.
Rooting this attitude is an observance of the events of the last fifty years. In others’ minds, Japan was competing pretty fairly, and beating the U.S. until the Paris accords. Russia was freed from communism, only to enter a 2nd-world decline in which it was mocked in major papers like the New York Times. The Iraq occupation, and the Arab Spring reinforced the distrust that the American goal of spreading its style of governance was more about itself than the rest of the world. It made for a good story, but it did not follow through. There is, above all, the inability of the third world to modernize under the American-supported capitalist framework.
The attitude given in the article is problematic because it doesn’t quite capture how Chinese engineers feel about this dynamic. It feels more like the narrative that Western Americans want to hear. I’ve gotten the impression that many feel that their government is overbearing. But I don’t get the sense that they trust what America says more. That’s a real legitimacy and credibility issue, and as we should know, politics is rooted in legitimacy. More one-sided criticism of China’s strategy is not going to help America’s case. It feels dodgy, too good to be true.