The world would have been a totally different place, if not for China. China is changing how the world is perceived: COVID-19 is dealt with seriously, a big population is considered a blessing, and “carbon emission isn’t that bad”, all thanks to China.
First, COVID-19. If it wasn’t China which first reported it and launched a national effort to end it, it would have been just another pandemic like what it has been in USA/West: “nothing to see here”. It would have been another “Spanish flu” (though it started in USA). By “just another pandemic like what it has been in USA/West”, it means that COVID-19 was treated as nothing special. No one care about the health and death of millions of people in the West. It is treated like a “natural disaster”, such as a tornado or a wildfire: everyone do nothing and wait for them to run its course. In USA alone, COVID-19 killed over one million people and no national leaders were held responsible for them.
It was only because of China’s supposed over-reaction that has made it “special”: life matters after all. China tried all it could to save people’s life. But that’s not the case for the world. For example, just in recent history, the early years of this century, and hopefully still fresh in memory, from 2009-2010, a mysterious flu “H1N1” killed tens of thousands of people around the world.
Second, population. Before China’s “recent” success and even in some old-school “white left” booklets, population is a liability, instead of an asset. The white left care so much about Planet that they want people to die for the benefit of Earth. Plans (or conspiracy theories about them) are being hatched to reduce population “artificially”, like by man-made pandemics(!) With China’s seemingly effortless success in industrialization, population has suddenly become an asset, something desirable. The West has been looking around the world for the next China. Even dirt-poor India or Africa is held up as a potential candidate only because they are like China in some way, big population or big size, etc. But that assumption is really idiotic: population remains a challenge even for an industrialized country like China where “structurally” there might be too many people and too little work (a mismatch between jobless people and available jobs): unemployment. Let alone poor countries like India and Nigeria where feeding the population remains a problem.
Third, global warming/carbon footprint/emissions/climate change. It’s totally bullshit. The Earth used to be hotter than today *without industrialization and coal burning*. For that matter, a hotter climate is *a good thing for China*. China welcomes it. All China’s most powerful dynasties coincided with hotter climate because hotter climate makes better farming: more arable land which means more food and bigger population and a stronger country.
Anyway, before China’s success in “green electricity”, that bullshit about carbon footprint was designed to put the developing world (including China) permanently in pre-industrial era: the West has long ago completed infrastructure and industrialization and reached carbon peak, but now developing countries are not allowed to burn coal or cut down their trees to power their industrialization.
But China has swiftly industrialized itself and moved on to green economy at lightening speed, leaving the West in the dust and flabbergasted: China has begun to export cheaper and better EVs to the West and threatens to kill automobile industry. So, of course, no free market or free trade now. Instead, national security matters. There is now much less talk about global warming/carbon emissions in the West where backpedalling has begun: plans to adopt NEVs have been delayed and some of the West’s smart guys are forming theories about green economy being bad for the humanity, e,g, China’s supposed overcapacity.
Nonetheless, the automobile industry is dying in the West (Germany) and in South Korea and Japan in East Asia. Their carmakers are closing plants and laying off workers: they are losing the critical market of China, very bad news for the profitability of their business; and Chinese EV makers are taking global market shares away from the West.