The underlying question is why? Surely this activity could have started in 1950,1920, 1890 or any other year. What change occurred that seemingly has removed any long term/societal concerns from the minds of leaders?
It did start in 1890. Read about the Populist Party, Cross of Gold speech, Pullman strike, Haymarket affair, US occupation of the Philippines. All of this started before the 19th century. In any old industrial city, check the date when the old national guard armories were built. Why did large, fortified national guard armories start popping up all over the industrialized parts of the country just before the turn of the 20th century?
But I think the reason we are seeing this more front-and-center now is because the effects are starting to become noticeable, and because globalization has made it easier for the rich to not really care as much about their home country's economic success; they'll profit regardless, as long as they've made the right investments in the right places.
They can make money far more easily by employing Chinese workers, growing Chinese industry, than they do local.
And of course, anyone that pushes back against this is (conveniently) a "xenophobic, racist, white supremacist, Trump-voting blah blah blah...".
I think ideology plays a part in why this is "bad", as well. As an American, I wouldn't mind so much if the next growing superpower believed in democratic principles. As much as I'm happy I was born in and grew up in the US, I wouldn't see a problem with a "better US" growing beyond the US in terms of economic and political power. But I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea of an authoritarian country in that position; China already constantly uses its political clout to censor US citizens and businesses, for example. I expect China's power over citizens of other countries, people who will never even set foot in China, to increase over time, and that worries me quite a bit. It often feels like our only hope is that China makes some huge strategic mistakes, or succumbs to unfixable/unknown structural issues.
Effectively the us threw open the gates on the hypothesis that it would be a Cold War win and that China would eventually liberalize. This problem was well understood by the 90s but the war on terror ultimately blocked any US policy shifts.
Chinese labor force isn’t going to help defend Taiwan by making tank gadgets for them. Investing in Chinese labor has so many issues. If we didn’t have a rust belt (that led to Trumpism), we would have left a better nation to lead the world and maybe we can think about leveraging world wide labor - but this time with fair conditions and well paid workers.
It’s not just US, it is the same in EU and many other G20 nations.
Your thinking is appealing to emotional and not rational understanding of the globalism. Truth is probably somewhere in the middle.
I don't agree with this take. The terms "developed" and "developing" is just a politically correct term to classify countries based on their industrial base.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Developing_country
It's use has less to do with developed countries and everything to do with the need to frame the issue as countries working to get where others already are at the moment.
> This entire thinking and it’s psyche in our society feels like straight up propaganda. It used to be first-world and third-world.
I also don't feel you're right here as well. "Third-world" does not refer to a ranking. It was a classification based on where a nation was with regards to the Cold War. Either they're a NATO and NATO-aligned country, a Warsaw pact and USSR country, or you kept yourself out of the cold war and thus were a part of the third world.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_World
Development and industrialization and economic output had nothing to do with it.
Outsourcing also freed how labor pool to other pursuits such as college and white collared jobs. Without a large pool of workers eager to leave to Rust Belt, Silicon Valley may not be the same place that it is today.
https://quillette.com/2021/07/21/silicon-valleys-cynical-tre...
It was obviously foolish to help China become an economic power since the CCP has been at war with the US since the end of WW2 (2 Taiwan Straits wars, 2 Korean wars, Vietnam war), largely driven by Maoist ideology. (The USSR was involved in stopping the Straits wars to prevent wider conflicts.)
(The USSR dealt with an aggressive CCP by obliterating their forces during a border conflict using overkill. The CCP doesn't understand anything less. The USSR also planned to use nuclear weapons on Beijing around 1969, but the US intervened.)
I followed outsourcing to China in the business press from about 1972 to 2000. I shook my head at the end of each article. But here we are.
What's important to realize is that both the CCP and Russia make public statements and:
1) they're either obviously hyperbolic or
2) they accurately represent their actual plans.
#2 is not well-understood by our politicians for some reason. Pompeo is one of the few people to get it, hence the US' very effective strategy for the CCP during the Trump administration.
Note that China has structural weaknesses that will diminish its power: they import 50% of their energy and food, and have a demographic problem that could cut their population in half. They also have serious flooding issues, with 100,000 questionable dams built since 1945.
And the US can currently only make one F-35 per week, while in WW2 the P-51 was literally stamped out.
This is the only thing that gives me hope, honestly. The West is too busy trying to play nice for whatever reason[0]. I think the only thing that will save us is China making catastrophic mistakes during their continuing rise to power, or the structural problems you mention that they may not be able to do anything about at this point.
[0] Any thoughts there? You seem to be pretty knowledgeable on this topic. My general assumption is that business interests like where China is going (a richer China means more and more access to a huge market), but don't care about the long-term effects to the US economy. But that sounds too simplistic to be the whole story.