There are some striking parallels between China and Japan, not so many between China and Holocaust victims.
In the 1940s, great industrialized nations vied with each other to see who could commit the biggest atrocities on the other guys. Japan lost out, but once set straight, they began an impressive multi-decade recovery.
In the 1950s, Japan's own considerable efforts, along with help from their former enemies, started to pay off. In the US, we were slow to let go of old grudges, though, and the (understandably) poor quality of Japanese exports was a standing joke. As tuatoru points out, anything that said "Made in Japan" was almost guaranteed to be crap, similar to the outlook many people have towards Chinese exports today.
In the 1960s, Japan's reputation as an industrial power was growing, but they were still mostly seen as imitators rather than innovators, again very much like the Chinese are today. The Japanese took an early lead in areas like solid state electronics, exploiting inventions that mostly originated in the West but weren't being used to their full potential in the consumer space. Companies like Honda and Toyota were also starting to sell a few cars here, but nobody took them seriously.
In the 1970s, the gas crunch hit. People stopped laughing at small Japanese cars and started buying them. There was still a lot of latent resentment towards the Japanese, though, coming from everyone from organized auto industry labor who saw their well-feathered nests falling apart, to WWII veterans whose interactions with Japan had proven too traumatic to forgive and forget. Not to mention anti-Asian sentiment being on the upswing as a whole, thanks to Vietnam and the "boat people" who were, of course, "coming to take our jobs" or worse.
The Chinese aren't selling cars in the US market but you can bet there'd be a lot of prejudice out there in the roads and parking lots of small-town America if they were.
Later, in the 1980s, Japan emerged as a player in computing and data processing, but we all knew that they were culturally ill-adapted to develop good software, so no biggie. Of course, this was just a refrain of 1930s-era prejudices. "They're all nearsighted. No way these guys can fly fighters and bombers." By the 1990s, many young people thought of Japan as the country where the best video games came from, and any notion that they were somehow incapable of writing code was forgotten.
So with respect to China and the US, I think we'll end up as valued trading partners in the long run. It's just a matter of waiting for one irrational prejudice after another to go away. This will take time, but it'll happen... if neither of us does anything stupid.
It's okay to prefer American made products without bringing some kinda racial implication into it. The whole "buy local" movement is simply an extension of this. It's okay to prefer to trade with your local economy.
While we've never been at war with China, it's not infeasible given their attitude towards Taiwan. And there's very real trade-offs with convenience of importing everything vs. the resiliency of having your own supply chains which we saw a small taste of in the early days of 2020 with medical supplies.
We already buy many China-made things including iPhones and we don't bat an eye at the "Designed in CA, made in China" label... but there's a lot of us that feel uncomfortable with yielding our manufacturing base to globalism, not least of which is that it puts you in a bind if you need to stand up to said country when they encroach on more ideologically-aligned democracies.
A principle difference between Japan and China is that the war was followed with the Marshall Plan, which brought Japan a new constitution and elected government. That hasn't happened in China and it isn't obvious that it's about to.
In the 1940s, great industrialized nations vied with each other to see who could commit the biggest atrocities on the other guys. Japan lost out, but once set straight, they began an impressive multi-decade recovery.
In the 1950s, Japan's own considerable efforts, along with help from their former enemies, started to pay off. In the US, we were slow to let go of old grudges, though, and the (understandably) poor quality of Japanese exports was a standing joke. As tuatoru points out, anything that said "Made in Japan" was almost guaranteed to be crap, similar to the outlook many people have towards Chinese exports today.
In the 1960s, Japan's reputation as an industrial power was growing, but they were still mostly seen as imitators rather than innovators, again very much like the Chinese are today. The Japanese took an early lead in areas like solid state electronics, exploiting inventions that mostly originated in the West but weren't being used to their full potential in the consumer space. Companies like Honda and Toyota were also starting to sell a few cars here, but nobody took them seriously.
In the 1970s, the gas crunch hit. People stopped laughing at small Japanese cars and started buying them. There was still a lot of latent resentment towards the Japanese, though, coming from everyone from organized auto industry labor who saw their well-feathered nests falling apart, to WWII veterans whose interactions with Japan had proven too traumatic to forgive and forget. Not to mention anti-Asian sentiment being on the upswing as a whole, thanks to Vietnam and the "boat people" who were, of course, "coming to take our jobs" or worse.
The Chinese aren't selling cars in the US market but you can bet there'd be a lot of prejudice out there in the roads and parking lots of small-town America if they were.
Later, in the 1980s, Japan emerged as a player in computing and data processing, but we all knew that they were culturally ill-adapted to develop good software, so no biggie. Of course, this was just a refrain of 1930s-era prejudices. "They're all nearsighted. No way these guys can fly fighters and bombers." By the 1990s, many young people thought of Japan as the country where the best video games came from, and any notion that they were somehow incapable of writing code was forgotten.
So with respect to China and the US, I think we'll end up as valued trading partners in the long run. It's just a matter of waiting for one irrational prejudice after another to go away. This will take time, but it'll happen... if neither of us does anything stupid.