Patrick Bryant

My hot take is that Western liberals, I'm using the term in the broad and historically important sense here (which includes most conservatives in the West), are projecting their own attitude on China. The truth is that, despite their self-conception as tolerant, people in liberal democracies are some of the most fanatical and proselyte people in history, because they’re incapable of seeing the fact that other countries have a different political system as anything other than a direct attack on their liberal democracy. Say what you want about the Chinese, but they aren't like that. You don’t hear the Chinese lament that Western countries haven’t become one-party states, whereas the idea that we should somehow decouple from China because it failed to fulfill our expectation that it would move toward liberal democracy has become a commonplace, hardly ever challenged argument in the West. Of course, the Chinese have no compunction about bullying other countries when they think it's in their interest, but they don't care about how their political system per se. Liberals on the other hand regard the mere fact that a country isn't a liberal democracy as a direct threat to them and a permanent outrage. They can only tolerate it as long as non-liberal regimes are weak and politically subservient to the West. The Chinese just think that their model, which I think is merely an expression of nationalism for them, is better and are intent on proving it, hence their national obsession with overtaking the US, which although it also leads to stupid shit is still a lot healthier if you ask me. I say that as someone who definitely doesn’t believe that their model is better, mostly because I like to be able to read what I want and more or less say what I want without being thrown in prison or losing my property, which is why I prefer to live in the West even if it's not perfect even in that respect.