Me two years ago:

I surveyed the last ten China new articles in the Post and NYT. … Top US newspapers are in full fledged China bashing mode. (more)

I expect similar results today. Often, hostility to foreigners appears as opposition to letting locals buy stuff from foreigners. Yet sometimes it also appears as opposition to letting locals sell stuff to foreigners:

As China moves to invest billions in businesses around the world, one major industrial nation has so far soaked up very little of the cash: the United States. … Chinese business owners who want to invest in the United States say they often have a difficult time obtaining a U.S. visa to be able to travel and see projects. …

In 2005, the Chinese oil company CNOOC dropped its $18.5 billion bid for the U.S. oil firm Unocal, after some members of Congress expressed security concerns and asked whether CNOOC had unfair access to cheap financing. In early 2011, China’s largest maker of telecommunications equipment, Huawei Technologies, withdrew its bid for the assets of the American company 3Leaf after a review by a U.S. government panel on foreign investment raised concerns about Huawei having links to China’s People’s Liberation Army, which the firm denies. “After that, Chinese investors are kind of lost and bewildered; they don’t know what they can invest and what they can’t.” (more)

Presumably this stupidity is due to some sort of psychology, but what? Why object to both buying and selling to foreigners? Can people really think both sides are hurt by a trade?

My guess: because firms are larger than customers and employees, we see the firm as dominant in both firm-customer and firm-employee relations. So buying into ownership of a firm is buying into a position of dominance. Thus people object both to locals buying stuff from foreign firms, and to foreigners buying into local firms, because they object to locals being submissive to foreigners.