With freinds like these...
While I always disagreed with those who felt threatened by our economic relationship with the Japanese over the last 30 years, China is an entirely different matter.
The Japanese had this superiority attitude and a bunch of historical animus towards the West BEFORE WWII - which we nuked them out of. They picked up a whole bunch of shame after the war due to the revelations of their own conduct (and a with a great deal of re-education at our hands during the reconstruction) and so they are not the same people they once were.
China is an entirely different situation.
First off, they are filled with annoyance at the West over how they've been treated during the days when they were a colony and now as a power worthy of respect. They are a proud people with a long history (quite a bit of which has been "rewritten" in the last couple decades) of civilization. After centuries of disrepair, they are returning to new days of glory and power and their relationship with us, their dependence on us financially, and their disgust with our whole attitude (both our arrogance and our historical irresponsibility to our own position and society) are convincing them that those who encourage removing us (both as a threat to their present economy and as a competitor against their future) may be worth listening to.
They have done much recently to imitate us when we were strong and now that we seem to be bent on removing ourselves from the world equation as a leader they are showing increasing signs of viewing us as merely an unclean impediment to their rise to the place in the world that they believe is theirs.
Even worse, they are very well aware that our current bent towards self-immolation could quickly reverse itself and we could become a real threat. Not only that - NO ONE SHOULD EVER FOR A MOMENT THINK THE CHINESE ARE STUPID!!! The folks who lead them are astute students of history. I've been to various parts of China and they are far more aware than is the average American about the past and applying its lessons tor the future. ALL OF THEIR MILITARY IS REQUIRED TO STUDY US. They are required to study our failures, our successes, our strengths, and our weaknesses.
*****They were one of the first groups who ever postulated using airlines against ground targets!!!*****
Think about that for a minute. Not only did they game using them as missiles, but as delivery systems for WMD's. The Chinese have been aware for a long time that starting with a straight up military attack on us will be foolish for a number of years into the future - although with Obama I'm not so sure if this is really true anymore.
One thing that they are absolutely sure of is what they have discussed at length in their analysis of WWII and Pearl Harbor: you do NOT EVER make the mistake the Japanese made in thinking that butchering a bunch of our sailors and sinking a couple of handfuls of obsolete relics into the mud of a Hawaiian harbor is going to convince us to sue for peace. That got the only Japanese nuked - after we'd wiped out most of their military.
Chinese war games wrap around massive attacks on our communication, manufacturing, and energy infrastructures; deployment of nanotech, biological, and chemical WMD's to kill as many people and cause as much chaos and destruction as is possible; the use of a whole multitude of asymmetrical warfare techniques to keep us off balance until we simply have nothing and no one left to fight them.
With our dependence on them economically and our need for their products we have placed ourselves in a very untenable position - one which I see no way out of right now. Demolishing our economy and then strangling it with Socialism is a disaster that may very well spell the end of our country. We are in more trouble than anyone realizes and no one even seems to be trying to understand the ramifications.
How much trouble? Here's a little clue.
http://www.newsmax.com/navrozov/china_haotian_chi/2009/12/10/297144.html


