"Chinese feelings of cultural superiority are monumental, deriving as they do from a three thousand year tradition (Edwin O. Reischauer, The Japanese)." (E. O. Reischauer was appointed ambassador to Japan by President Kennedy.)

Everything is gigantic in China. Elites had gigantic political power, gigantically exploiting a gigantic number of masses, as they do in China today. A gigantic wealth accrued to gigantic political power. The masses suffered gigantically, but elites were gigantically indifferent. Gigantic political power required a gigantic ideology or a gigantic lie. The trouble with China is that the Chinese people themselves do not believe anything but gigantic, as I said in my comment, American Humanism, on Chinese Comfort Women, amazon usa.

There are only three Confucian societies in the world. Pick out three from the below: China, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

The answer is China, Korea and Vietnam. Korean culture is more Confucian than Chinese culture is.

Japanese immigrants most swiftly assimilate themselves to American mainstream culture but Chinese and Koreans do not.
Two and two make four in Japan, but accorging to Jeffrey Wasserstrom/China In The 21st Century: What Everyone Needs To Know, two and two are five, a Chinese logic. 2 + 2 can be any numbers but not four.

Some years ago, when French pig raising industry was losing competitivenss to Chinese, a middle-aged Frenchwoman said to NHK (a Japanese BBC) that she would buy French pork; she said it did not matter that French pork was expensive. There is much wisdom in her opinion. The world is not flat; it is full of cultural and political convexities and concavities.

The economics theory of free trade is based on the empirically false idea that the world is filled with economic men whose explusively chief and principal concern is economic gain. (So much greed blinds us to the plainly false fact. We love money so much.)
The British propounded free trade in the middle of the nineteenth century and the Americans after the World War II, both as a theory of economics and a theory of international peace.

China has little changed historically in terms of world view and foreign relationship. It was an autarkical country; it had foreign trade but the size was small compared to the size of its gigantic domestic economy and mandarins took political care that its domestic stability should not be affected by trade.

Today China faces a radically changed international circumstance in spite of its internal unchangedness; it cannot afford to be self-subsistent; it has got to conduct business with the outside world. Unless it engages in foreign trade its economy should dwindle sharply and markedly.

The question is why has the free world got to keep China engaged in the so-called free trade system, endowing it with economic profits so that it can challenge liberal world order? Are we afraid of losing a big market for our commodities at the expense of liberalism?
The economic liberalism of making products where they can be made at the least cost and selling them to the bidder of the highest price is no longer tenable. It needs to be modified.

Michi,

You ask why?

Simply because politicians, bureaucrats and business people are dishonest and untrustworthy and focused on their personal wealth and power.

We have democracy but we still don't have democracy. The autocrats have just been replaced by the oligarchs and the hoi polloi are still getting pushed around and disadvantaged. I assume you have read Animal Farm.