Alternatively it could be due to emergent outcomes from our societies and systems.
Is there a word or concept that explains the idea that "people in power are controlling us"? Maybe the word is related to hierarchy? I also see it in conspiracy thinking (Rothschild, lizard people). The assumption that somebody is in charge manipulating us, and that we can discern their motives based on what their incentives are imagined to be.
A past example might be the red menace - which appeared to me to be part of US culture (politicians pushed it but I think they also took advantage of a natural us-versus-them zeitgeist). People seem to collectively desire a labeled enemy (you also see it about sports teams).
Individually even very well educated people don't seem to see systems and effects of systems: e.g. every thread about economics. Maybe it is just all memes.
You seem to be an American so I'm very confused. You'd have to be willingfully blind at this point to not see the anti-chinese propaganda that has been going on in America for (at least) the past decade.
As an American educated by the American public education system and indoctrinated by American media, our government is certainly stupid and vengeful enough to make me want to support this if it were true, but it's just not. The much more banal truth is that Japan is extremely talented at exercising soft power by projecting a favorable image of itself via the media it exports, whereas China is just comparatively terrible at exercising this sort of soft power.
I think the default approach in the West - and that's not a US-specific thing - is to treat exotic faraway lands with a mix of curiosity and awe. But China is a geopolitical rival with a political system that rightly makes many Westerners queasy, so it doesn't benefit from that anymore.
No, everyday people are perfectly content to warm to brutal dictatorships who successfully put on a friendly face. Case in point: Dubai.
This is actually a great example for extant romanticization of China. People lauding Chinese expediency in the context of industry and construction often don't realize it's almost entirely enabled by extreme underregulation and underenforcement of industrial safety standards. Chinese people themselves will often point this out, though depending on the person they may frame it more in a style of "The West is slow because of all of the red tape!"
Of the subset of Westerners who are aware of this, sometimes I have to balk at how many of them will take that framing to heart and paint it as a positive thing. Even most Chinese don't have a positive view of it, not in reality. At most it's a tragic necessity required to build China up, though younger Chinese rightly tend to see it for what it is: corporate exploitation of laborers.
Of course in the context of solving political problems, the Politburo readily cutting through its own invented problems is another matter.
Kind of like Tesla's latest factories, or DR Horton building homes with massive problems from day 1?
Or Silicon Valley being a collection of superfund cleanup sites?
Or just the environmental pollution, in general, in Texas?
No one has figured out how to balance growth with safety. Ideally it shouldn't be hard, the total amount of money saved is pennies compared to the overall investment, but making everyone follow the rules via regulations ends to being a huge cost and time multiplier.
(For the record, I would put Japan above both China and the US at the moment in that regard.)
Now back in the 80s? Back in the 80s, despite being aligned with the West, they were perceived a lot like China is today. Everyone was scared that they were going to start eating the West's lunch and various negative stereotypes and exaggerations started to bubble up: it was a futuristic land, but a futuristic land of suicides, with little drone-like salarymen crammed into little shoebox apartments the size of a Western bathroom, working 20 hour days.
Between the Plaza Accords and the bubble bursting and decade after decade of Lost Decades, the Japanese threat was successfully neutralized. I think Cool Japan is mostly something they've earned for themselves, frankly.
Yep. A lot of cyberpunk fiction from that time that demonized corporate influence and power was inspired by the rise and perceptions of Japanese technology companies.
I can remember one of the American news magazine shows, maybe 20/20, showing a Japanese school with long hours and intense discipline and contrasting it with fat, illiterate American kids (the same stereotypes were made about the Soviet Union).
A lot of the perception of Japan, especially among Gen X and younger, is influenced from exports of Japanese culture. Nintendo, JRPGs, Manga, Anime, and even the quirky stuff reflects well on the Japanese though American eyes. No propaganda is needed.
So basically just what the west is becoming?
Rather, the west seems to be characterized mostly by insanely expensive housing caused by an extreme antipathy towards denser housing as populations grow, and a K-shaped economy where white collar coastal elites are actually doing relatively well but everyone else - namely blue collar and service workers - are doing worse and worse. Suicide rates aren't rising dramatically, and are nowhere near where they were in Japan at their peak in the 80s, which itself was always overstated (they were higher than they were in the US at the time, but were comparable to many other western countries).