China can be a trading partner while also being a geopolitical rival, no?

It’s difficult to talk about this stuff when starting from 0, but I’ll try to kick it off and leave it for someone else to wrap up.

China adopted an intentional strategy where western companies for benign reasons of profit leveraged China’s immense human capital to produce products and lower costs for everyone across the planet. This was a win for many. China got to industrialize and lift citizens out of poverty, and companies across the world were able to deliver mass produced good (eventually high quality) for cheap. The United States for example was the champion of China joining the WTO.

But China because it’s a communist dictatorship restricted its market and began doing things that were long-term oriented toward depriving others of power and manufacturing capability for their regime’s private gain. For example today we see that China has over-built its manufacturing capacity (like it did with housing) and has used artificially cheap labor, unjust laws, and currency manipulation (among many other things) to prevent entry into their market while running companies from other countries out of business leaving them dependent on Chinese manufacturing. Prominently you can look at Germany today where sales in China have collapsed, and at home their vaunted manufacturing industry is going through what happened in the US in the so-called “rust belt”. The US has smartly enacted tariffs and other measures to protect its market to some extent from China’s strategy here.

So when someone says something like “all this talk goes out the window about competition when it comes to China” you’ve got to understand a bit more about how China has behaved toward other nations and the egregiously unfair trade practices it has enacted to understand why many countries ranging from the US, to Mexico, to Australia and of course the EU have enacted various restrictions and industrial policy to combat China’s embarrassing and poor behavior on the global stage with respect to trade.

If the Chinese government is such a friend why are they employing spies to work around trade restrictions?

It's interesting because they like apparently missed the part where in literal wars companies (ex. Ford, Alcoa) literally supply both sides and nobody broke those companies up.

> If China is the enemy then why do we have entire stores selling nothing but Chinese made goods in the US? Why is everyone running to China to manufacture anything?

Because geopolitics is a lot more complicated than leaving a group chat? This is like the inverse fallacy of Trump's take on trade deficits. Trade volume isn't the sum total of foreign policy.

> All that talk about competition being good for the market goes out the window when it comes to China seemingly.

I'm no fan of the "but muh free market" arguments, but generally competition is seen as good for the market only when it's "fair"...