Rather than engage in substantive discussion with locals, I often resort to Communist propaganda slogans from the 60s and 70s in an attempt to both utilize reductio ad absurdum argumentation techniques and practice Chinese. Perhaps I’m incapable of communicating sarcasm in Mandarin since this morning my office mate, a teacher turned fund analyst, gave me a book as a gift today titled 新帝国主义在中国 (New Imperialism in China) which came out in January. The book was written by Nationalist public intellectual (intellectual here being used in the Glenn Beck sense) Lang Xianping. There’s a section in the intro titled 美国到底在干什么 (What, after all, is America doing?) which concludes with:

I believe that after reading this book, readers will understand, imperialism has never really gone away; it has just been reincarnated in a new form. So, what should we do? Chairman Mao once said a very important guideline: when illusion is lost, prepare for struggle!

我相信在读完本书之后，给位读者会了解，帝国主义从来没有消失过，他们只是以不同的形态借尸还魂罢了。那么，我们该怎么办呢？毛主席的一句话非常具有指导意义：丢掉幻想，准备头争！

Will report again if I read it cover to cover, at this point the text seems to focus on various reasons why American financial hegemony is extremely harmful to Chinese interests. American conservatives often point out that China owns ~USD2tr of Treasury Debt; Chinese conservatives lament that the American Treasury has a printing press. American conservatives say that free trade has hollowed out the American working class; Chinese conservatives say that free trade has forced Chinese laborers to manufacture products in exchange for increasingly worth less pieces of paper.