>>478671The idea that there is a distinction between "hard power" and "soft power" misunderstands what rule and empire really is. No empire rests entirely on the threat of violence to survive and insists on this Germanic idealist faggotry where they believe they make reality. The smart empires, and the British/American Empire was for a long time like this, think about how to manage their domains, how to keep vassals or clients on side. There is still the beast that the people around FDR built way back when - it was the default. The current people have inherited it and ran it into the ground as fast as possible, the "shit up the world Any%" speedrun. No empire has been cursed with a worse ruling clique than this one. It really is charlatans like Musk and old money assholes who love the smell of their own farts.
The US sees its "peaceful" tentacles as a war machine, no different from its armies and police and every instrument of violence it commands. "War is Peace" has been the ruling ideas for some time now. That produces are very peculiar take on cultural influence, and the Empire is far beyond anyone else in the world. The whole world speaks English as the language of commerce, technology, basically anything that really matters. No one else comes close or even expects to compete in that game. The next rival that can claim to come from a "different world" is still effectively beholden to the Empire for its position.
>If China is a imperial partner rather than a anti-imperial rivalStop, just stop. Stop believing narratives. The CCP made its deal with the devil when Nixon did his thing. The CCP's legitimacy rests on the belief that Mao bossed around the foreigners and made China great, and if it comes out that Xi takes his orders from the Big Man up there, the people would be scandalized. Think of how bad it would be if, instead of pandering to the American people, the rulers openly said they're going to replace you with better foreigners and that your time was up. The American rulers come awfully close to that, but even in this denuded state, there are limits to what they can get away with outside of the vanguard club. China's ruling clique rules China, not the world, nor does China have pretensions that it's going to export its system or way of life. Even to their closest allies, the Chinese are not concerned with conforming to their system or ruling ideas. This is largely because their geopolitical stance is decided for them, so there's nothing for them to fight for - nor are they stupid enough to believe in great numbers that nations really are essences in eternal Schmittian struggles. But, a country pressed upon, that doesn't enjoy the greatest enthusiasm for its institutions the way Americans are trained to worship the institutions like gods, is far more likely to see themselves besieged, regardless of their actual situation. The CCP besieges its own people to a large extent and this is open policy, whereas in the US, there is a facade of so-called liberal democracy which contemptuously lies. In China, this is just stated flatly under the communist system, or the system calling itself communism these days. The Party has an explicit right to lord over you and no one is under the illusion that it works any differently. China does this not out of malice or some peculiar trait of the race, but because they have to, and this is what their people know. If you told them about the fictions of liberal democracy, they'd laugh in your face at such an absurdity and ask where the real emperor is. It does help that China makes hatred of liberal democracy a calling card of their propaganda - and when you look at liberal democracies producing a Trump who tells the world "liberal democracy is the most retarded government ever", screams it and beats it into the ruled, the CCP has an easy job to confirm that libdem does indeed suck ass. There has been a game played with China since the 1970s - and really this has been the game of the Empire with China all along - where the Chinese have to emphasize that they're under attack from the empire, and during the 50s and 60s they were under attack and sabotaged in ways that would make your skin crawl. Poisoning the crops en masse and probably causing the famine of the 1950s is just the tip of what imperial fuckery did during that time. It would take a long time to habituate the Chinese to embrace the imperial ideology, so what they do now is a long run mission to normalize it. It's very aggressive - China didn't always have social credit and this isn't a thing that is "inherently Chinese" like it made sense to them. So much of the "Great Firewall" stuff was built for them by American/imperial software engineers.