It is like a loser mentality. When you can't compete, you change the rules.
Marx wrote a book about it, but even if a person has never read the book, if we just took ten seconds to think through what "free market capitalism" means, it should become obvious that the entire goal of capitalism is "rich gets richer." That's only become more the case, over time, with the rise of financialized capitalism, which is what the US ended up making its main ideology and the basis of the international system.
The "rules," in other words, were made to be beneficial to the West and to maintain its hegemony. They were never fair. They were never intended to give a level playing field. When Google or Facebook or Microsoft comes to your country with hundreds of billions of capital behind them, they are not competing fairly against your back yard start ups. When Western whale funds come in and buy up your most promising companies and talent, they are not competing fairly against your village businesses.
Yet you still have useful idiots in so many countries buying into Western propaganda and thinking this is "fair" and that it's China that's "not playing fair" just because Chinese leaders were intelligent and organized enough to realize that the West was playing a rigged game, and that the only correct response to that is to **** the rules. I just don't get how people can be that stupid. The West created a winner-takes-all system where they're already the winners, and we're supposed to go "oh yeah, totally fair?"
