In a way i’m kind of looking forward to reading what deranged fantasies they will come up with…call it morbid curiosity.

This is really cool and innovative and i’m happy for China and glad to see them advancing the progress of science and medicine… but all i can think of when i read this over here, where so many people are so brain-broken by living in this capitalist hellhole, is that this news is going to create a whole new wave of conspiracy theories and paranoid fearmongering from the anti-vax crowd…

This is an excellent response to the above comment which raised some fairly widespread and reasonable concerns. In addition to what you said about such a shift away from China not being as easy as many people think, the thing to remember is this:

One of the great things about multipolarity is that it doesn’t need to be China alone that sucks up the West’s manufacturing and industrial economy. This task can now be distributed across the global south as a whole and places like India and Vietnam becoming more industrially developed as a result. In fact i believe China welcomes this as it dovetails perfectly with their overarching geopolitical and geoeconomic policy (as exemplified by the flagship BRI project) to lift up the global south as a whole, helping it develop its productive capabilities and thus enabling it to assert more independence from the western neo-colonial hegemony. The US may think that it is playing a smart game by shifting to other countries that they believe they can manipulate against China, but in doing this they are sowing the seeds of their own demise as the more that these countries develop the less leverage the US will have over them.

The point isn’t for China to become the new center of the world around which everything revolves, i don’t think China wants that role or that responsibility, rather it is to distribute power (economic, geopolitical, and other forms) more equally and democratically in the world. And due to the simple fact that the West only makes up a minority proportion of the world they should and will only have a minority of the power once the rest of the world escapes the neo-colonial underdevelopment shackles that have been holding them back and keeping them from catching up. This in turn will make it impossible for the Western imperialist bourgeoisie to crush nascent workers’ states and revolutions the way they have in the past when they enjoyed unipolar or near-unipolar (during the latter half of the cold war) global hegemony.

Co-operation > competition.

I am just waiting on the day when the news breaks that China has decided to block rare earth exports to “unfriendly” countries. The West has no alternatives, it would simply be checkmate.