Turning Tides in the West: From Willingness to Learn Toward Fear, Envy, and Bashing—and Back Again?

This chapter continues elaborating on the message of the book, learning to learn an unagitated perspective about China in our own interest, and expands on it by means of an investigation of Western mainstream literature and media news. There is much fear-mongering, up to the extreme motto of the pre-Trump (2.0) administrations’ to be “at war with China in 2027!”. The latter seems to have been given up only recently through Trump’s 2.0 National Security Strategy 2026, and some economic truce seems to have been achieved at the highest political levels between the USA and China. The chapter also shows that countries like Germany, other EU countries, and the UK are split in terms of political postulations of decoupling (called de-risking) and the precedents that the corporate economy has long been setting by ever more intense investment in China in production and R&D. “Technology theft” has been a dominant motivation behind European and Anglo-Saxon travels to China since medieval times and the invasions and plundering of China since the 1840s. Contrary to ongoing claims in many Western publications and media, where China is portrayed as only able to steal and imitate from the West rather than innovate itself, and also as being in a permanent “crisis” and always about to collapse, the Western corporate economy invests dozens of billions in China, particularly in R&D centers, aspiring to Chinese start-up firms and joint ventures, in order to take advantage of the large Chinese engineering workforce, value-added chains, regional clusters, and highest-level innovation. Western corporate leaders have been largely silenced about China by Western mainstream media and politics, and instead tacitly “vote with their feet”. Finally, the chapter explains the complex structures and mechanisms of global value-added chains and the paradoxes of conceptions of decoupling, friendshoring, or hybrid war. The future positions and roles of the EU and the UK between a Trump and post-Trump USA and China are considered.