China doesn’t want to go to war with Taiwan, because a war with Taiwan would lead to the biggest “international system cascade failure” we’ve seen since the outbreak of World War I. To that end, the current Taiwanese KMT government needs to remain in power, look strong, and maintain enough credibility to prevent Taiwan from voting for full independence from the mainland. Ma Ying-Jeou has currently been on rather shaky ground from moving too quickly for rapproachment with the mainland (despite the fact that everything he’s done to date has generally involved giving Taiwan all the benefits of being “part of China” without the loss of sovereignty); he needs to look strong to opponents of reunification in order to keep the KMT dominant. Buying more arms from the US does this.

China will send the usual letter of complaint through the usual diplomatic channels; they will be ignored by everyone- and behind the closed doors of Zhongnanhai, Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao will light their cigarettes and breathe sighs of relief that the Taiwan disaster has been averted for another few years- because they don’t want it either.

(What, you say that they simply don’t have to go to war with Taiwan? They are dictators, right? They call the shots, don’t they? Well, not quite. But that’s a lecture for another day…)

A more apt metaphor is the vampire who gives his victim CPR to keep the blood flowing out of the wound. That being said, on the economic stuff, we’ve mostly done it to ourselves. China just seized the opportunity to play a long winning game against an ADHD-affilicted opponent.

And how about them cyber attacks on our infrastructure?

China bashing now tends to conflate two threads: freedom and money. The freedom stuff we know well, but we put that together with a combination of fear and envy and other emotions over trade and the value of the Yuan and China’s holdings of dollars. The US approach is generally that China must raise the value of the yuan / RMB and thus alter their trade policy away from massive export. The Chinese response is generally that they are still poor and the US has a number of problems that it brought on itself, notably the failure of US regulations and US markets to understand, price and control the risk of financial catastrophe. The Chinese literally don’t understand why they are blamed when their holdings of dollars are an immense help to the US’ ability to finance itself. They do understand that they export vast amounts but they also know that US buyers consume those exports and that the lower prices and continuously higher quality is a benefit. The Chinese feel that the US – which every year has been making more not less – is responsible for its own propensity to consume and that they are selling to fit needs, not creating them.

The US fears China. The US fears Chinese holdings of dollars – without recognizing that the Chinese are tied to the US because of those holdings and that the Chinese don’t want to lose hundreds of billions on them. The US is unable to understand that it’s choices have put it in its current position – and you certainly won’t get that understanding from the GOP, which is now resisting regulation because they feel an anti-government stance of any kind is the best way to get votes. The GOP is also arguing for tax cuts, something which the Chinese must marvel at because those tax cuts are why the US is in such terrible fiscal shape (see the cbbp.org charts on the makeup of the deficit).

dave, you could easily and clearly insult a friend of yours by suddenly and loudly listing everything negative you can think of about them. Each thing you said might be true, but your choice to say them loudly, without also mentioning the good things you know, would show you were “bashing” them.

Instead, on the heels of the failure of the Copenhagen conference, at which China, seemingly intent on becoming a new blockade power, did its best to play the spoiler, the mood in the old industrialized countries could take a turn for the worse.

From France 24:

China intensified its clampdown on local and foreign media last year with reporters facing violence, censorship and arbitrary detention, according to a report by an international press watchdog.

These articles were literally the first articles that I found mentioning China on these sites. That’s not proof that China-bashing is common, but it’s strongly indicative.