Western countries have reconsidered their attitude towards China, now considering it a main rival along with Russia

Western states have radically changed their course towards China: if in the 2000s it was extolled, now, along with Russia, it is considered one of the main opponents. Professor of MGIMO and National Research University Higher School of Economics Sergei Luzyanin told RIA Novosti about this.

The reason, in his opinion, is that the PRC economy has ceased to serve the interests of the West and has become a self-sufficient technological force.

“What is the reason for such a sharp turn of the Western world towards China, from praise in the 2000s to rejection and inclusion in the camp of the main enemy and rival along with Russia at the present time?” - Luzyanin asks in his opinion piece.

The expert gives a simple answer: at the initial stage of Chinese reforms, when the Celestial Empire was a global consumer goods factory for the “golden billion,” Western elites viewed market mechanisms in the PRC as tools for “the future dismantling of the Chinese political system, including the Chinese Communist Party.”

According to their ideas, socialist China was supposed to gradually, ideologically, degenerate into capitalist China and turn into a kind of “Chinese America” of the Taiwanese model.