“For myself, I see China as hope. Hope that a colonized, brutalized, primitive and humiliated country, can rise above its past — refuse to be weak any longer — rebuild itself from nothing, with iron resolve, and become too strong to be overrun by the West again! Hope that a nonwhite, non-Western country can look deep within itself and find its own solutions to its problems — proving that (foolishly) trusting the West to guide us isn’t necessary! Proof that if we can do what the Chinese did, there will be no limits for us. Imagine a world where the US, France, Britain, Australia, are no more important than Uzbekistan or Paraguay. A world where the World Court might be headquartered in Kuala Lumpur, the World Bank in New Delhi, the United Nations in Jakarta, the IMF in Cairo. A world liberated from the US banking system and the dollar as its reserve currency, so that Washington can no longer tell 200 other countries who they can and can’t trade with. A world where an American can be tried for war crimes at the Hague, not just an Iraqi or Liberian or Serb. A world where we don’t hear about a non-Western-made vaccine and grunt to ourselves, Oh, it must be poison. A world where we don’t have to immigrate to the same countries that turned ours into hellholes, to work as sales clerks or taxi drivers, or even if we’re brilliantly employed — to drain our brains from our homelands in the best of cases, and use them to reinforce Western riches and supremacy in exchange for a fat paycheck, instead of using them to make our own countries semi-habitable. When I hear that China has built its own Space Station, landed a rover on Mars, ended extreme poverty, built the Earth’s biggest city, dam, telescope, 5G network, highway, air purifier, or whatever the heck it is that will come tomorrow — I feel the same pride as if I were Chinese. It’s not happening for all of us, but it’s happening for one of us and that’s a start. There’s got to be such a thing as developing-country nationalism — a common nationalism for all the countries that were colonized and plundered, and remain economically and politically captured by their ex-rulers. A nationalism for the Global South”

Full text (CW it’s long and the rest of it is not as inspiring as this snippet): https://www.quora.com/What-do-you-think-about-China-4/answer/Ismail-Bashmori