“Well, how can you blame us,” the conversation usually continued, after agreeing on China’s desire for self-sufficiency, “when you see how the US uses export controls as a weapon to contain us and keep us down? You need to understand the deep sense of insecurity that China feels.”

That is reasonable enough and blame does not come into it. But it leads to the following point, which I put to my interlocutors and put to you now: if China does not want to buy anything from us in trade, then how can we trade with China?

A good question. But also a you problem. China didn’t start this, the ones who started it are the ones who need to figure out the way out by making good faith gestures of submission and compromise.

China didn’t weaponize trade, openly announce plans to “keep the west 10 years behind us technologically so they can’t challenge us militarily”, announce open plans of containment, announce open support for division and destruction of China, announce that the west cannot be allowed to rule or be a ruling power, announce the existence of the west’s system as a threat to China’s order, announce the west as their number one military and economic threat to be aggressively confronted this century. The list goes on and on. The west struck first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seven, eighth, ninth, tenth against China and after that China finally struck back in the most passive way possible by making moves to ensure it could be self-sufficient should the west’s threats and desires of decoupling come to pass as part of a drive to suppress China and keep it submissive to western military and technological prowess and power. They merely took logical steps after the west had already been sanctioning and strangling them for years with unfair sanctions on military related companies, unfair sanctions on high tech, unfounded spying accusations that were pure projection and their own weaponization of trade to plant hardware backdoors in shipped Cisco network gear sent to China to compromise and spy on their networks.

It is not on the one defending themselves against aggression to lower their shield first. It is on the one who is the aggressor to put down their sword and put their mind to work on how they can make amends, reassure the one they aggressed against, and so on. Step one might be dropping all support for Taiwan which is support for the separation, partition, and destruction of the Chinese nation. Step two would be pulling back propaganda, admitting Xin’jiang is not the site of a genocide and repudiating their tools who said it was, dropping sanctions on Xin’jiang products and acting FAIRLY towards Chinese competition without slanderous excuses to prevent use or import hidden behind made up atrocity propaganda or accusations of spying that are never proven.