JF

I think the familiar culture-war/racial veneer kind of obscures that the insistence on the name "Chinese virus" is primarily intended to lay the blame at the feet of the PRC.

Not that I'm offering original analysis here, but the minute the "democracies are better at handling pandemics" victory lap became untenable, they shifted gears and we started hear about how China was to blame for/was going to take advantage of the virus.

blaming/having fits about china seems so absolutely old-fashioned since it was the big neocon "justify our ideology" totem pre-9/11. it seems now that the fear-mongering about islam fails to move anyone outside of the chud demographic they're going back to the greatest hits

Well there are two big reasons afaict: 1) China and Russia make far more plausible adversaries to justify unlimited military spending than ragtag militias 2) China's economic growth actually does threaten US hegemonic status and they won't consent to be junior partners

The TPP and "pivot to Asia" were the liberal aesthetic answers to the same question really

There's already a wing of the GOP that is ready to call it Chinesium Sneezium or whatever the fuck, as both evidence and reason to put boots on the ground in Asia. They want a shooting war because we blinked first on the trade war and it's made them extremely grumpy