One thing I've noticed is a perhaps unconscious intellectual projection of what are ills when China does them but are either ignored or standard operating procedure for the US. Now China is a brutal repressive country so I don't have much sympathy for it, but it's worth considering the striking doublethink that occurs in intellectual circles.
The biggest of these are what is called "state capitalism" which is defined as "market forces...allocating resources...under the macroeconomic guidance and regulation of the government" when China practices it but apparently doesn't exist for the US. In fact, people like Fareed Zakaria have gone so far as to say there is no industrial policy in the US.
History would say otherwise. In a rather stunning article for ZNet, an enormous history is given on how electronics and the base of the entire US economy is the result of "the macroeconomic guidance and regulation of the government."
To give an important example, the shrinking of semiconductors, that is, what's making computer chips and by extension computers, smaller and more efficient was a gift through the government:
In its early years, up to 100 percent of the [semiconductor] industry's output was purchased by the military, and even as late as 1968 the military claimed nearly 40 percent....
The government continued to pay for a large share of R&D through the early 1970s, providing roughly one-half of the total between 1958 and 1970. As late as 1958, federal funding covered an estimated 85 percent of overall American R&D in electronics....
Of course the examples are endless,
Computers, Satellites, GPS, The Internet etc. were all either outright created by or were given massive public subsidies. NASA even has a journal literally called
Spinoff to show what technologies came out of NASA into private use. If that's not "state capitalism" or an industrial policy I don't know what is. You would have to be a rather disciplined intellectual to assume these were all "accidents" that happened to massively enrich our economy.
The other and more vague example is the structure of the Communist Party itself, or rather, the elite interests that control the country. As Slavoj Zizek points out in his review of The Party: The Secret World of China’s Communist Rulers, the Communist Party is a mysterious entity that "...exists outside the legal system altogether," and functions as a "half-secret coterie [that] controls the government." As such, while this group controls the country they are not simply government officials, they also control the banks and are more like the elite of the nation that exists outside the law.
This is contrasted with other states where institutions like the military act as a "apolitical, a neutral force protecting the constitutional order...." But is it all that accurate? Of course in the US there is no shadowy cabal making decisions behind the scenes, but as mountains of evidence has shown, both political parties are driven by elite corporate interests and the government will work outside the law when those interests demand it.
One clear example is the massive illegal union firings that occurred in the 80s because the government looked the other way. Another potent example is the 90s banking deregulation which was done in large part to retroactively legalize a formally illegal merger between Citicorp and Travelers Group. These were clear cases where the interests that controlled the country overruled the law much like what occurs in China.
As such, I think the people blaming China ought to take a second and look back at the US is doing.