There were tons of economic low-hanging fruits by building out large infrastructure projects, which corruption happily siphoned off of.
The ROI of these infra projects have been gone for a while, yet they continued. Also it's been stealing intellectual property, trade dumping, exporting deflation. Soaking up the manufacturing oxygen of everyone else through subsidies, elite capture, then using the leverage gained and veiled threats against others to force them to yield resources, market access and political control.
Another way of saying it is China took the most advantage. And it has gone way overboard in taking advantage. So the backlash is expected and necessary.
Part of fixing things involve doing things that seem like it's destroying the order that the US created itself.
The conditions the average Chinese works in are abysmal, even from the American point of view.
"They eliminated poverty... but at WHAT COST? They did good things but they trampled on the intellectual property of our beloved billionares? *sob*"
All the while going into a demographic death spiral. Partly cause by the draconian 1-child policy, which attempted to fix the pronatalist policies of Mao.
I'm not saying China is the best and whatever, just saying they've proven every "China is about to fall" headline that has been circulating around for the past 15 years. Maybe we should learn some things from them.
When you have massive buildups with no hope of returns, it's a a bad financial decision and the public carries the debt burden.
Pure BS
Not a fan of CCP but pretending like there was no extreme poverty in China before CCP is insane position.
(not sure what you mean by "corruption we tolerate in US allies"?)
There is extreme corruption in the U.S. as well, but we've legalized it so it disappears in statistics.
This is notably an area where the US is massively crippled. States can manage many year projects easier, but the federal government must conceal all such projects behind defense spending. Even that is wildly mismanaged (see: all the canceled naval purchases over the last two decades, and we still have an outdated, if large, navy)
We also have endemic corruption siphoning off funds all over the place, ESPECIALLY in the big projects that have the attention of the current administration.