There's an ugly trend - as many of my colleagues have seen - of labeling anyone who doesn't endorse the most hawkish position or assertion regarding China as being a CCP dupe or agent. It's slanderous and it needs to be called out every time, by intelligent hawks most of all.
I've seen people I know who have been harassed and beaten up by CCP thugs casually called traitors to the US because they criticized some unfounded assertion about China or urged more thoughtful deliberation. All it does is dumb down an important debate.
Especially on economics, I've seen some China hawks whip themselves up into theories that have proven badly mistaken and very faulty premises for policy making. When anyone questions them they are asked which side they are on. This makes America weaker, not stronger.
This isn't the first time this has happened, of course. In the 1950s, some of our country's best-informed China experts were labeled "Communists" merely for predicting that Mao had the upper hand and would come to power. That was information we needed but didn't want to hear.
Then we flew blind for two decades because we imagined the Chinese were in lock-step with the Russians, which they most definitely weren't.
