"Bill Clinton pioneered this policy framework. The idea was called ‘engagement' with China, and many Western China watchers, in an orientalist fantasy world, sought to ‘shape’ China as a great power compatible with the liberal international order. As I wrote in June, this policy was part of a “a global utopian view, peddled most aggressively by Thomas Friedman in his 1999 book The Lexus and the Olive Tree and his 2005 The World is Flat…. China would become a democratic state, slowly, because its people wanted McDonald’s and X-Boxes, and McDonald’s and X-Boxes turned countries democratic.” Clinton’s policies sent large chunks of the U.S. industrial base and American factories to China. Under Clinton, U.S. businesses exported capital and technology and even armed the Chinese state, accidentally transferring missile machining tools to the Chinese military.

George Bush and Barack Obama continued this policy architecture. Bush oversaw the main years of the ‘China shock', when Wall Street, private equity, and China cooperated to rip the economic guts out of the midwest. During the Obama administration, despite some rhetoric of a ‘pivot to Asia’ to deal with China, this policy architecture largely dominated D.C. One very clear example is that of how Joe Biden sought to sell American entertainment product while Vice President."

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/how-joe-biden-empowered-chinas-censorship