Some things never change. For as long as I can remember, people in the west have been paranoid about the Orient — and about China in particular. I grew up in an ultra-devout Catholic household in rural Ireland and I remember my mother being terrified by what people then called "the yellow peril," by which they meant the supposed threat to Western civilization posed by the Chinese communist regime.
This paranoia was not confined to my mother, incidentally. It was shared by most postwar U.S. administrations. It led Harry Truman to go to war in Korea; and, decades later, to the Kennedy and Johnson administrations becoming embroiled in the jungles of South Vietnam. And although a kind of unlikely rapprochement was engineered by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger in 1972, profound suspicion of China endures to the present day.
It is widely believed, or at any rate confidently asserted by the United States, for example, that the Chinese government is the most persistent abuser of cyberspace. (A bit rich, that, coming from the home of the National Security Agency, but we will let that pass.) Special units of the People's Liberation Army, operating from buildings that have been identified by Western analysts, spend every waking hour hacking into the servers of American high-tech companies and government organizations. And this abusive hacking, so the Cassandras maintain, is intensely purposeful: Its aim is to steal industrial secrets (intellectual property) from the West so that they may be used to give Chinese companies a market advantage.