China

> we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on

That depends on how you measure it. There's a good case to be made for the thesis that we've been in a trade war ever since opening trade with China, but it's only recently that we've actually started counter-attacking.

Also, while it's gained traction recently, the political scientists I know personally have been decrying China's human rights violations for the past 20 years. Some of them were hoping things would improve as trade continued and the Chinese economy forced liberalization on the political sphere. That doesn't seem to be the way things have played out.

> The conversation about China has shifted from being relatively peaceful during the Obama years to war like today.

Just because the fight is now verbalized and on the forefront of the public's mind doesn't mean it wasn't already occurring, just not acknowledged. And I don't see the threat of war as being a serious one, given the nuclear deterrents of both sides.

I don't know why you are being downvoted. Yours in an unpopular but a valid opinion.

> Not to say that China isn’t violating human rights. They are. But we, the Americans, are the ones who started this fight by goading them on.

Americans goaded them on to human rights abuses? I strongly suspect that many Uighurs would be in concentration camps even in America had done everything that Beijing wanted.

Did America block Chinese social media services?

Did America steal Chinese intellectual property and build entire industries based on copying Chinese products?

A trade war doesn't just mean tariffs, it can happen in various forms. American companies did not have a fair game from the getgo competing with chinese companies, it's just that no one cared until now.

So, who started this?

Some Chinese sources have cited the War on Terror as a template for their anti-muslim measures. Of course that could be a convenient post-hoc rationalisation.

I would disagree with your 'crux' of the argument, as the majority of the article is discussing human rights violations, capitulation of some of America's largest institutions to CCP demands, and recent protests in Hong Kong.

I would also disagree with calling a fairly well cited call to action as 'half baked repetitions of what we hear every day'.

Could you go deeper into how we, the Americans, 'goaded China on' to commit human rights atrocities.

China goaded itself on. It's really a "boiling a frog" situation if you look at it historically. China's abuses of human rights, intellectual property, dissident repression, history whitewashing, etc. have slowly ramped up over the course of decades. Then Xi came to power, declared himself de facto dictator for life, turned the Nationalism dial to 11, and refused to take US demands for trade fairness seriously.

Yes, the current presidency is partly to blame, but don't pretend that it's the only, or even primary cause of the current narrative.

Absolutely agree. Also, as a European, I can tell you that this perceived escalation is not an American phenomenon based on Donald's rhethoric. It's based in increasing perception of Chinese misdeeds in the West and around the world. And it's real in actual escalation of what China is doing.

In 2015, during the umbrella movement, there was discontent in Hong Kong over the taken-away promise of near-future free elections in 2017. In 2019 Hongkongers have their rights taken away NOW and are affected NOW. In 2019 we have a fairly accurate picture of what's going on in Xinjiang. The list could go on...