What makes anti China propaganda so effective is that people want to believe it.
Believing that western system is fundamentally better allows justifying all the horrors we see day to day by saying that the alternatives are even worse, and so we shouldn't even try to change anything.
Accepting that China managed to find a better path that the west is actively fighting against means having to accept that the west is on the wrong side of history. That's a hard pill to swallow for a lot of people.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I fully agree with the author here on all of it but he definitely raises a lot of good points, and I think his “strategic consequences” section is worth consideration. At the very least, I think the strategy he lays out is more likely to be productive than castigating liberals for being wrong. Not that castigating liberals isn’t fun and not that it doesn’t have its uses but it’s not likely to change the mind of the target, but I’ve also seen strong arguments made that investing significant effort in attempting to win over what the author refers to as the “bourgeois proletariat” is a fool’s errand anyway.
Yeah, I’m not sure if I fully agree with the author here on all of it but he definitely raises a lot of good points, and I think his “strategic consequences” section is worth consideration. At the very least, I think the strategy he lays out is more likely to be productive than castigating liberals for being wrong. Not that castigating liberals isn’t fun and not that it doesn’t have its uses but it’s not likely to change the mind of the target, but I’ve also seen strong arguments made that investing significant effort in attempting to win over what the author refers to as the “bourgeois proletariat” is a fool’s errand anyway.