Funny that this is being done partly in the name of RF Kuang, whose book "Babel" promotes a pretty violent strand of anti-white anti-colonial theory. That particular protagonist, a young Chinese boy rescued from poverty due to his innate magical talents, was walking one night when some awful racist louts threaten him and also accuse him of being willing to betray the nation of his benefactors; completely randomly (or so the story would have it) when a page later he runs into an ethnic Chinese who is obviously a criminal, the boy immediately "naturally" feels a kinship with him and decides to join his gang, which uses terrorism against innocent victims etc. It's pretty disgusting to write a validation of basically racist, anti-enlightenment feelings that "being of the same race as someone" is a strong positive reason to feel kinship/allyship with someone, even when that person is obviously breaking the law, and to also betray people who, although harsh and screwed up, clearly saved you from extremely serious immediate death. The author retcons some of this attempting to make the boy's rescuers evil enough to validate his utter betrayal of them... but again, being "mean" and not taking responsibility for a child is somehow considered more significant in this world than
saving someone from literally dying within a few hours of the plague and
giving him 10+ years of the worlds best education and
inventing technology, which in our world's correlate, has led to billions of people escaping poverty. No, the fact that his dad is a meanie/jerk/sexist fully justifies firebombing him and his ilk. okay...
And in the author's world-building, although magical resources are widely distributed, the only group which seems to be figuring out how to actually exploit them to increase wealth is England. But to the characters in the book, figuring out how to use those things at all, i.e. natural resource exploitation/study/efficiency improvement/industrialization is viewed as nothing more than stealing from indigenous people, rather than being a positive sum contribution to humanity. The fact that the original possessors of the silver, and other magical goods weren't doing anything with it is not mentioned. (at least in the 20% of the book I read before this scene, which basically suggests that non-white people should naturally coordinate to attack their white oppressors, led me to deleting it.)
It's also funny that in this book, she's putting out pretty basic CCP anti-western rhetoric, like many other bloodthirsty communists I've met; yet here, she is being defended by normally pro-american, anti-censorship voices, while the CCP is being cast as "oppressing" her. Kuang, an illiberal person, whose education consisted of private school (Greenhill school, today's tuition 32k->39k/year) => Georgetown => Oxford => Yale