Chinese strategy was/is to become the worlds factory. China successfully manipulated the west's biggest weakness. It created a situation where every individual

Chinese strategy was/is to become the worlds factory. China successfully manipulated the west's biggest weakness. It created a situation where every individual is incentivized to do the wrong thing (set up factories in china) and the only solution is collective action via regulation. Through it's success, it has cemented itself as a single point of failure in the worlds supply chain. China now has a knob to turn up the pain on anyone who defies it or attempts to hold it accountable. A government has an obligation to protect national security. Letting another country be a single point of failure in your supply chain is a major failure of national security and ability to self determine. The government failed to regulate IP transfers and failed to restrict businesses from behavior that, while individually harmless, is collectively harmful. The US governments failure to regulate very much ceded power directly to China. Add to that the unequal trade agreements of china practicing protectionism while America does not and the result is a stunning American foreign policy failure. The prevailing idea was that the west thought an economically successful china would liberalize, and therefore this ceding of power was ok and a net benefit. I think the violation of Hong Kong and Xi's wolf warrior diplomacy has been the turning point where the west now understands that China is an ideological enemy with a zero sum ideology.