I don’t know what the exact threat is, do you?
I also don’t have a gunboat.
The threat from China is like so:
An economic model which protects their own industries from competition, and subsidises them, while also enjoying unfettered access to overseas markets. This means that they have the capacity to flood markets with artificially cheaper goods and put local competitors out of business. There is also the issue that they do not enforce copyright (there are loads of copyright infringements of Apple with Huawei phones for instance, but Apple do not pursue litigation because they don't want to lose access to the Chinese market) while engaged in an organised campaign of patent-trolling and litigatiousness overseas in places that do enforce copyright law. This is combined with widespread and organised industrial espionage and IP theft. The lopsided nature of it is a structural economic threat, and removing them from the WTO or at least erecting barriers to their market access is not just "trying to keep them down" but actually essential to avoid economic ruin in the long term.
They have studied how the west became dominant and are using it as a guide. This includes, btw, building railways in Africa and Central Asia which allows for export of raw materials back into China for manufacturing, and then export back out into the markets of developing states, while also getting them to pay for infrastructure themselves through debt traps and bribery of elites, which is essentially how Britain colonised India and they are using that as a guide.
The other threat is in the Chinese practise of targeting the elites of other countries to consciously create a comprador class friendly to Chinese interests. There has been a backlash since but the existence of this group explains to a large extent why countries have previously or continue to pursue economically suicidal policies towards China. In the west this could be Wall Street wanting profits from cheap Chinese labour, but in developing countries there are more extreme examples, the economic ruin of Sri Lanka is a good example. The ability of China to astroturf "boycott" movements and the use of informal sanctions against companies who defy them gives them an unusual degree of influence over international companies and is a kind of blueprint of how a Chinese centric world order would function.
There is also an effort to export Chinese Internet rules and governance. This goes hand in hand with an effort to entrench corrupted comprador classes by using high tech social control and censorship pioneered by China. It also allows for more control by Beijing of the digital environment overseas. This will only benefit an elite and should concern anyone who claims to be on the left.
China has been quietly exporting its system of online control — in both technique and proprietary technology — to governments across the world. This proliferation is a key component of China’s geopolitical strategy and represents a sweeping bid to own the infrastructure and ideology supporting...
thechinaproject.com
And finally there is the massive military build up. We have seen how China uses informal sanctions and economic dependency to exert control over other countries. The risk of an invasion of Taiwan and achieving naval hegemony over the South China Sea as well as land routes through Silk Road infrastructure means that they will have the ability to block all of the world's trade to create compliant elites on a global basis. Defeat of the US over Taiwan would also enable them to blockade South Korea, Japan, and the countries of Oceania to turn them into compliant satellite states. Such a world order would not be one amenable to socialism that the "multi polar" fantasists dream of, and it must be opposed by the left just as fascism was - as, indeed, that is what the Chinese system truly is.
China is running into problems now because of demographics but also because people have woken up to it and are pursuing "derisking", and there are more barriers to China than before. But these barriers are absolutely necessary and so is reducing economic exposure to China, and preventing Chinese industrial espionage and influence on our economic and political elites is also important. The threat is manageable if these steps are taken but ONLY if these steps are taken.
