I feel like I don’t hear much internal critique about China from the ML side of things - is this more of a ‘critical support’ posture or are people just generally more optimistic about long-term socialization of their market?
edit: if there are more reading materials that discuss this topic in-depth, I am very interested in recommendations
I was trying to find some western coverage of China from the 90s but didn’t have much luck.
I did find this from 2023 which lays out the current coverage pretty well
https://thediplomat.com/2023/02/anti-china-rhetoric-is-off-the-charts-in-western-media/
There was a very favorable documentary by Ted Koppel in 2008 called The People’s Republic of Capitalism that basically made the argument that this wasn’t your dad’s China anymore: open economy and society, secret prisons replaced with a couple days in the drunk tank for noisy political dissidents, emergent middle class similar in outlook and interests to middle income Americans. This was about 4-5 years before Xi so it tracks.
I don’t know of any analysis about it, maybe fair.org has something, but from what I remember there was a shift towards relentless negative coverage shortly after Xi came to power. Especially when the belt and road initiative started.
Obama’s “Pivot to Asia” was around 2012, so this tracks