China is not an enemy. It is a nation trying to raise its living standards through education, international trade, infrastructure investment, and improved technologies. In short, it is doing what any country should do when confronted with the historical reality of being poor and far behind more powerful countries. Yet the Trump administration is now aiming to stop China's development, which could prove to be disastrous for both the United States and the entire world.

China is being made a scapegoat for rising inequality in the United States. While US trade relations with China have been mutually beneficial over the years, some US workers have been left behind, notably Midwestern factory workers facing competition due to rising productivity and comparatively low (though rising) labor costs in China. Instead of blaming China for this normal phenomenon of market competition, we should be taxing the soaring corporate profits of our own multinational corporations and using the revenues to help working-class households, rebuild crumbling infrastructure, promote new job skills and invest in cutting-edge science and technology.

We should understand that China is merely trying to make up for lost time after a very long period of geopolitical setbacks and related economic failures. Here is important historical background that is useful to understand China's economic development in the past 40 years.

In 1839, Britain attacked China because it refused to allow British traders to continue providing Chinese people with addictive opium. Britain prevailed, and the humiliation of China's defeat in the First Opium War, ending in 1842, contributed in part to a mass uprising against the Qing Dynasty called the Taiping Rebellion that ended up causing more than 20 million deaths . A Second Opium War against Britain and France ultimately led to the continued erosion of China's power and internal stability.

Toward the end of the 19th century , China lost a war to the newly industrializing Japan, and was subjected to yet more one-sided demands by Europe and the United States for trade. These humiliations led to another rebellion, followed by yet another defeat, at the hands of foreign powers.

China's Qing Dynasty fell in 1911, after which China quickly succumbed to warlords , internal strife and Japan's invasion of China beginning in 1931. The end of World War II was followed by civil war , the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949 and then the upheavals of Maoism, including millions of deaths from famine in the Great Leap Forward , which ended in the early 1960s, and the mass destabilization of the Cultural Revolution and its aftermath until 1977.