The last time China went to war was 45 years ago, if you don’t want to do business with Chinese companies you can just say no. If you don’t want to do business (meaning be gutted by) AmeriKKKan companies they kidnap your president.

From a traditional imperialist view, the last time China did anything close to that realm was Tibet. That was both decades ago, and throughout history the western periphery of China has always been in flux. So I’d argue that’s more in line with that history than as analogous to the British or Spanish empires.

In a post-imperialist, or market imperialist, sense, it’s completely different from the IMF/World Bank model both in terms of quality and quantity. Just look up Varoufakis talking about going to the Chinese to restructure the terms of Greek debt. They were super amenable, they had no issues with adjusting the terms mid-bond to accommodate Greek needs and economic growth. Whereas the Western institutions would never do that, debt is a control mechanism for them, not a tool for mutual growth.

For quantity, that’s simple math. The debt the “developing world” owes to China is a tiny, tiny fraction of what it owes to the Western imperial institutions.

You should take different approaches depending on your audience and your desired effect. You can use pithy dismissals to shut someone down, like asking which country they last invaded and compare that to countries not run by a communist party, that kind of thing. If you want to actually educate, then you should try to select and control the venue where this happens, selecting for those who will actually listen, and prepare materials, because you will need to teach people what imperialism is and what imperialism is not, and dive into economic statistics and concepts like unequal exchange, technological advantage and trade restrictions that impose it, quantifying exploitation, and where the military and financial tools like the IMF fall into this, not to mention a quick primer on Lenin and following scholars of imperialism. You’ll need at least 30 minutes of a captive-ish audience, preferably multiple sessions in a series. Teaching these concepts is a long term project and you will ideally want to do it as part of an org, or maybe start your own tiny org with people who want to help.

I say all of this because most people don’t know what imperialism even is, including self-labeled people on the left. They just have some vague idea that it’s when war happens or when members of one country owns stuff in another country.

The kidnapping of Maduro inflamed this rhetoric, and now they claim China, Russia, and the USA set a deal for splitting Venezuela, like how the Allied Powers split the Ottoman Empire.

US: illegally kidnaps the president of a sovereign nation

Reactionaries: okay here is why this is China’s fault

Yeah, not much to work with here. I wouldn’t spend your time trying to play defense, because a reactionary rhetorical tactic is to always keep you on the defense.

Stick to verifiable facts. You can condemn verifiable imperialist actions. Condemn China when it take verifiable imperialist actions. Condemn the US when it takes verifiable imperialist actions. At the end of the day, China has done nothing, except in their imagination. US is like an infinite fountain of imperialist bullshit.

Interesting how different people are. Basically none of the people around me have such a specific opinion on China, they usually just accept the broadest sinophobic tropes.

The core of my advice is the same as everyone else: meet them where they’re at. Use your understanding of them to use focus on more emotional, abstract or analytical arguments. I’m too much of a social failure to actually do this and I unintentionally try imposing my ideas. (Rather, I start losing plot of the conversation and suggest perspectives, leading my interlocutor to the starting point somehow) Here are some pitfalls I can warn against though.

Zeroth, in the tradition of my vocation and because it doesn’t actually address the question, nevermind China. Embracing AES as decent or even actually good countries is a tough pill after a diet of constant libel presented as obvious fact and accepted without debate. It’s not a hill to die on because the interlocutor has already got machine guns and cannon at the peak.

First, Turkey has always on some level prided itself for being a Social State and over the years I’ve seen plenty of Communists (especially usians I’m guessing) use instances of AES taking care of its people by some means to advocate for them. Talking about assistance to newlyweds, some utility being free or some cool museum having only a token cost might have some impact on usians or the Swiss, but it won’t affect the Turkish and SocDems latch onto those like lampreys. You’ll tell them all the things Gaddafi’s Libya provided for the people and they’ll imagine AKP doling out charcoal before elections.

Second, Turkish people don’t actually recognise they’re in the imperial periphery. It’s really annoying and traces to before the founders doing Francophile shit. This results in a complete failure to comprehend their actual conditions and assume a European-like outlook on many areas. I’ve had people realise that German fascists look at them as they look at Arabs, only to conclude that the guest workers should’ve perhaps assimilated better. When faced with a social phenomenon they don’t understand, they just as easily revert to stereotypes, tropes and outright bigotry of it lets them rationalise what they’re looking at.

Third, closely related to the previous, a lot of Turks have a completely liberal view of democracy. You may present whatever benefits of democratic centralism or foundational contradictions of liberal democracy, they’ll have a visceral reaction to China’s perceived lack of democracy. Assuming you’re talking to opposition types, you also have to reckon with with whatever inane comparison they make between AES “dictators” and Erdoğan. This is one often impossible to overcome of they’re not quite far down the road towards Marxism-Leninism. It’s a rhetorical landmine that’ll send you back to square one more times that you can count.

Just today I was subjected to the notion that the Sumerians were the worldwide hegemon to explain how Maduro was probably the US’ guy anyway and had a falling out, because apparently the US wouldn’t have let him be of he weren’t and these are just hegemon things. My arguments that superpowers don’t always get what they want exactly as they want it, or that the US has been attempting to remove Maduro far years have been fruitless. Such is life.

I have an acquaintance (on other topics fairly intelligent) who I think gets lots of his news from the neoliberal twitter sphere, who told me, in passing, how the BRI was slowing down because the debt-trap diplomacy China was doing was failing, he said “turns out there is not much you can do to a sovereign nation even if they owe you money”.

The whole debt trap diplomacy story is just CIA propaganda. Here is an article on Sri Lanka. One of the authors, Deborah Brautigam, is a professor at John Hopkins studying the economic ties between China and Africa, and she has written numerous books on the topic and her work is quite positive of China. Maybe you can use her work to at least make people question this narrative.

No idea how do explain to people who have been outranged about how China is going to invade Taiwan and Hongkong any minute now for the last decade that China is not an empire. They just live in a different world.

With Russia there is at least something to talk about.