How China got a U.S. senator to do its political bidding

- The US allowed China into the WTO, urged by globalist corporations who thought it would be massively to their benefit. That was the spark that sent their economy skyrocketing. Their economy had been growing at a healthy clip, however immediately after joining the WTO it doubled in size in just five years from $1.4t to $2.8t. It is still widely believed, perhaps naively hoped for, by major US corporations and financial interests that China can be a growth opportunity for investment and trade. That keeps the criticism more subdued than it otherwise would have been (and that appears to be gradually fading, as it becomes obvious China is running an almost strictly mercantilist economic nationalism strategy).

- China repaid some of the trade imbalance, which provided them with vast piles of dollars, by buying up a small chunk of US debt. China recognized it as being in their self-interest, just as it was with Japan, providing some additional influence. That bought them a small amount of political cover.

- China has largely stayed out of several prominent spheres of US military dominace, including in the Americas, the Middle East and Europe. That may change of course, as China has begun pushing its military outwards. [1]

- The US has a slightly unusual liking of China, which goes back a century or more. The US protected China from being nuked by Russia in 1969 [2]. The US destroyed the Empire of Japan and fought side by side with the Chinese to push the Japanese out of mainland Asia. The US was primary in working with China to open its economy, including work done by politicians like Nixon / Kissinger, and US companies / investors. The US is among the few global powers of the last 500 years that didn't seek to invade, conquer or humiliate China, but instead traded massively with them and invested massively into them (despite the fact that they were hard Communists and the US Capitalist). There's some kind of kinship (despite the occasional adversarial tones) between the two nations, the US maybe sees some of itself in China's rise. On the economic side there was actually less hysteria in the US about China's rise to global power than there was with Japan during the 1970s and 1980s (with Japan actually overtaking the US GDP per capita figures by 1987), despite China's climb being far more dramatic.

[1] https://www.theatlantic.com/news/archive/2017/07/china-djibo...

[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/china/7720461...

Why we are not threatening China at the moment is a complete mystery.

In the first place, politics is more often the driver of economics than the other way around. No way would American political leaders sacrifice the good of the nation for the good of individual corporations. To allow China to do this literally means they're sleeping at the wheel. Americans have always been fiercely America-first, up to and well beyond the point of being willing to go to war over it.

This is, quite literally, the one job that a lot of people in government have, to come up with foreign policy strategies and assess the situation and recommend policy to political leadership. Those people are still there, doing their jobs, assessing and recommending. Yet we still have not started pursuing an effective strategy for containing China. Why?

Your other theme, that Americans just somehow like China, doesn't really hold water either. Americans had a similar like for Russians, but that didn't stop us from fighting a decades-long proxy war with them.

American leaders just seem legitimately confused over the direction the nation should be going, allowing China to fill a leadership void. It almost seems like we're just tired of global hegemony.