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Cruelty is the point. It is to show that any country that even dares to veer into socialism will end up like Cuba, Venezuela or the DPRK.
People often think socialist countries can get a China treatment by the US, but China was a completely different story. It was unique and a historical product of its time. The US hegemony in the 1970s was under assault from all directions, both domestically and internationally. The Civl Rights movement and the counter-culture movement, losing Vietnam, Nixon Shock, Bangladesh Liberation War, Yom Kippur War, the 1973 Oil Crisis etc. all cornered the US empire into a highly untenable position, and having to deal with multiple fronts and crises at the same time.
Michael Hudson said in a recent interview that after Nixon ended the Bretton Woods in 1971, the US government literally thought they were doomed. All the newspapers were dooming about America’s losing hegemony. The economy was going to crash! It wasn’t until they discovered Hudson’s Super-imperialism and consulted him (Herman Kahn, the character model for Dr. Strangelove, played a huge role in discovering Michael Hudson) that they realized the true power of fiat currency and how it could allow the US empire to get “free lunch” all over the world with dollar hegemony.
China came into this equation at the perfect place and time, having a huge reserve of cheap labor that could replace the entire American manufacturing base, and allowed the capitalists to quell domestic working class movements and their growing dissent. At the same time, China was also beefing with the USSR, and was eager to ally with the US empire to bring the USSR down. China saved America from multiple crises that erupted in the 1970s and 1980s, and the discovery of the power of fiat currency allowed the US empire to use China in this way.