Its so weird how there were no complaints about China for the past decade or two while they were just making your iPhones, but the second they put their own interests ahead of the US all I hear & see is about how crooked & corrupt they are...

There has been plenty of criticism of China's authoritarian policies and human rights abuses, from all of the Western world, for decades. Someone better versed on the topic could probably describe it better than me, but everything from communist policy, the great leap forward, the Tiananmen Square massacre, Falun Gong persecution, the lack of rule of law and so on, has been criticised since it first happened.

US authorities seem to have only stepped up the criticism recently as China has become more of a viable adversary on the global stage though. The US government doesn't particularly care about the ethics of most countries, and will mostly criticise it when it's in their own interest. There's also stuff that's only come to light in the last few years. Chinese authorities flexing their power in ways that directly affect US interests is one of these.

Of course im sure there have always been critics but the bar is not any instance of criticism - thats an awfully low bar. its the wide shift from being nowhere in mainstream consciousness to pervasive.

As an uniformed reader of mainstream media and social networking sites, China was just not on the radar a few years ago. Politicians didn’t talk about it, people didn’t talk about it, news didn’t talk about it.

This doesn’t reflect my impression as a Northern European. The criticism and sentiment has certainly stepped up in the last year, probably in part due to focused efforts by US authorities, but it’s been quite vocal all along. Famously, Norway was in the doghouse of China for 7 years after giving the Nobel Peace Prize to Liu Xiaobo, and government officials discussed human rights issues with Chinese officials up until that point. The media covered this in detail, along with the human rights abuses in question.

Maybe what you’re describing is true for the United States. I wouldn’t know.

Gotta say, that's straight up wrong. China has always been a huge issue. Mostly from a sympathetic view for the deeply exploited people getting poisoned and dying from recycling our plastic and electronics.

But also the large buddhist community in America will never forget China invading Tibet and murdering the successor to the Dalai Lama. That still gets talked about a lot.

I'm not sure what you have been reading, but that is simply not true. There has been an increase of coverage in the last couple of years, but China was certainly on the radar a regularly discussed in mainstream news for a long time.