Of course Western companies have made a lot of money off China with cheap labor and massive marketplace, so it wasn't entirely an altruistic endeavour.
No, the kid gloves are off because "they are not democratic." It's like being nice to the weird kid in school and the weird kid steals your lunch. No more being nice to the weird kid.
Also, consider if they were democratic, we might not be having the grievances we are currently having.
Unless you’re trying to argue that the rapid economic growth happened because they are not democratic, the idea that democracy has any relevance on US relations is laughable propaganda.
If the countries were really school kids, then I might accommodate for the idea that the school bully actually believes that he’s no longer nice to the weird kid because he’s weird. But even if some US citizens are childish, countries are not school kids.
>I think the hopes were that China, once prospering in the global marketplace as a big player, would turn democratic. Over the last decade or two, we've come to realize the opposite has happened and the Western powers are adjusting.
Which part of that do you disagree with?
There's certainly research on the subject.
https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/economic-integration-and-tran...
Exploiting improvements in air, relative to sea, transportation that occurred since the 1960s, and combining survey data with country level measures of democracy from 1960 to 2015, the authors document that trade with democracies increases both citizens’ support for democracy and countries’ democracy scores. Trade with non-democracies has no impact on either attitudes or institutions.
According to our results, doubling trade with democracies (a change in exposure equivalent to the inter-quartile range in our sample) increases an individual’s support for democracy by 0.58 points on a 1 to 4 scale. This is similar to the difference in attitudes towards democracy between Mexico and Norway, or that between Philippines and Italy. At the country level, our estimates imply that increasing trade with democratic partners by 80% (or its inter-quartile range) raises the democracy score by around 4 points (on a scale from -10 to +10). This is equivalent to the gap between Malaysia and Canada in 2010, or that between Turkey and Senegal in 2015.
>Trade with non-democracies has no impact on either attitudes or institutions.
And actually it’s good that there’s research about it. Different correlations between economic and political attitudes are interesting, I believe that the relation is from the political to the economic side, not otherwise yet, my biggest gripe is, that the idea that markets would result into democracy is a big assertion with shaky foundations.
And I mean, is not like we don’t have history of countries trying to open other’s markets, sometimes even forcefully. I saw the same, now dressed with modern ideologies.
Citizens are very satisfied of their government, despite some of its excesses, unlike so called western democratic governments.
Their material condititons are as good as in Europe, at least for most folks.
Just because you do not directly elect the president of your government doesn't make you less democratic. Switzerland doesn't elect its government by universal suffrage, neither does the UK, or the EU. Their democratic model is just different.