>I would love to understand where the war-like anti-Chinese sentiment is coming from in US elite circles.
In my opinion, it's not about communist vs democracy, IP theft, ideology, Taiwan, etc. Elites hardly care. These are just the topics used by the government to get common people riled up.
The sentiment comes from increasing competition from China in the upper value chain where these elites get their wealth from. These elites want China to manufacture phones for them. They don't want China to design phones and sell it to consumers directly.
The same sentiment was found when Japan looked like it was going to take over the world economically.
It's a lot easier for the government to get its citizens to become anti-China if they use anti-communist, IP theft, human rights, etc. propaganda. Commoners resonate with these much easier. It's not going to work as well if the government tells you to hate China because they're increasingly more competitive at high value things such as design and services.
Take Zuckerberg for example. He went in front of congress and spouted as much anti-china rhetoric as he can. He obviously does not want competition from Chinese social media companies such as TikTok. He wants TikTok banned. Meta even admitted that it hired a PR agency to try to connect TikTok to CCP.
Take Elon for example. He definitely wants Trump in office because he knows if Chinese EVs ever make it to American shores, Tesla would have fierce competition. Trump wanting massive tariffs on Chinese goods matters little to Elon. Elon doesn’t care if he has to pay $5 for a Chinese good at Walmart instead of $2.50. Only commoners will suffer. But as long as Elon gets extremely high tariffs on Chinese EVs, he’ll be happy.
For Schmidt, it’s clear that he has big ownership stakes in American tech companies. Chinese tech companies are a real threat to them in competition.
For what it's worth, we in the UK have pretty good labour laws and welfare systems, minimum standards, environmental protections etc. All of this has evolved over time as a way to ensure no race to the bottom happens and most people can lead a decent life.
Now, some people may disagree with this on a philosophical level (libertarians for example), but it is what it is.
If you now just mass import anything and everything from a country with much lower "standards" (I use the term to encompass all of the above and whatever else), then it means your own working population get cheaper stuff, but suffer from the loss of jobs. Not only that, but it creeps into everything. Where once you were high value design, even that starts leaking out of society into a country willing to undercut you on "standards".
This is all very well known, so I don't really think it is much of a surprise that there is a push back. I'm just surprised that it hasn't happened more and sooner.
In my opinion, it's not about communist vs democracy, IP theft, ideology, Taiwan, etc. Elites hardly care. These are just the topics used by the government to get common people riled up.
The sentiment comes from increasing competition from China in the upper value chain where these elites get their wealth from. These elites want China to manufacture phones for them. They don't want China to design phones and sell it to consumers directly.
The same sentiment was found when Japan looked like it was going to take over the world economically.
It's a lot easier for the government to get its citizens to become anti-China if they use anti-communist, IP theft, human rights, etc. propaganda. Commoners resonate with these much easier. It's not going to work as well if the government tells you to hate China because they're increasingly more competitive at high value things such as design and services.