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shockingdevelopment OP t1_iy0kcuh wrote

Reply to comment by DarkAlman in ELI5: Why did geopolitics become focused on West vs East alliances? by shockingdevelopment

It seems to be fading due to the China Threat*. Countries like Japan and Australia are joining the UK and US in an economic group to fight its growth.

*the threat being China's... existence, since they don't do whatever the US says

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DarkAlman t1_iy0uvty wrote

It still all leads back to WW2

China was in the midst of a Civil War during WW2 while also under occupation by the Japanese and being a British colony.

The Capitalist and Western aligned Kuomintang were fighting against the Chinese Communists.

Afterwards the Communist faction took over and it became a State loosely allied with the Eastern Bloc. While the remains of the Kuomintang ran off to Taiwan.

During the 80s while the Soviet Union collapsed China started becoming more capitalist while maintaining state control of everything. It's economic prosperity is what caused to be reach it's current near super power status.

The new Cold War is economics. The Chinese are doing a bunch of stuff that is Morally and Politically counter to the West but the West doesn't want to do anything about it because they are so economically dependent on China at the moment.

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shockingdevelopment OP t1_iy0vq81 wrote

What do you mean by morally opposed and doing anything about it?

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DarkAlman t1_iy177vj wrote

The Chinese regime is extremely authoritarian, spies on it's own citizens, implemented a social credit system, arrests people without warrants, makes people disappear for going against the government, and there's a possible active genocide happening against the Uyghurs right now just to name a few.

The West typically wouldn't want to do business with a country like that but tolerates China and doesn't denounce them as much as they normally would because they are too afraid to lose the economic benefits.

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shockingdevelopment OP t1_iy2pel3 wrote

Yknow, the US is best friends with Saudi Arabia.

And were And is avoiding Chinese technology even though it'd help them, as a move against China

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