The difference is between benevolent and malevolent.

"For much of the last century, the US managed and protected the rules-based trading system it created at the end of World War II," wrote Prof Raghuram Rajan. "The US served as a benevolent hegemon, administering the occasional rap on the knuckles to those acting in bad faith." Then came China. "Like Japan and the East Asian tigers, China grew on the back of manufacturing exports. But, unlike those countries, it is now threatening to compete directly with the West in both services and frontier technologies." Trouble is, unlike Japan and the East Asian nations, China is huge with a population in excess of 1.4 billion, and unlike the US, it is malevolent and not benevolent. Japan has a population of 126 million, South Korea has 56 million, Taiwan has 24 million and Singapore just 6 million people. China is a constant threat to India and illegally occupies Indian territory. Beijing has cleansed Tibet of Tibetans by sending in hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese. China is not satisfied by confining adult Uyghurs in concentration camps where they are forced to learn Chinese and to submit to the supremacy of the Communist Party but also separates children from the parents and teaches them to forget their cultural identities. The Nine-dash line is a forcible occupation of the South China Sea, Its ambition is to be the only dominant power in the Indo-Pacific region, but that would be an absolute disaster for India and other nations. No other country can stand up to the Chinese threat, only the US can. It would be idiotic and calamitous to fight a war to stop Chinese aggression so the only way is to hit its trade because that is how it has built up foreign exchange reserves of $3.1072 trillion and is able to spend $177.61 billion on defence, which is three times what we can spend. China's exports fell by 1% in August, compared to last year, despite a weaker yuan, and exports to the US shrank by 16% to $44.4 billion. Faced with mass protests which show no sign of weakening, Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam was forced into a humiliating climbdown and promised to kill the hated extradition bill which would have allowed suspects to be sent to the mainland for trial. Although Lam has taken full responsibility everyone knows that she could not move without Beijing's nod and so it is an enormous snub for Beijing. It must be infuriating for Xi Jinping that he cannot crush the protests, as the government did to Tiananmen Square protesters, because of Hong Kong's importance as a financial center, but also because the territory's people do not like China. Protesters waved US flags, sang the Star Spangled Banner and asked US President Donald Trump to liberate the city. "It took a Depression, a World War, and a superpower to make the world see sense the last time," wrote Rajan. Will not be so dramatic this time. A recession is well worth suffering to rid us of China's threat. The world will be grateful.