The Broke-Ass Superpower

James Fallows of the Atlantic explains that while China looks like an unstoppable power from outside, from within the picture is quite different:

What I was trying to convey is how different, both intellectually and emotionally, the phenomenon of "China's unstoppable rise" looks if you're actually here seeing the people in the middle of the process, versus how it must sound if you just hear about it from afar.
I had traveled in China in the mid-1980s, when virtually everyone was poor and the "rich" people were farmers with their own pigs. To be in the middle of the Chinese phenomenon now is to be respectful of and, yes, occasionally awe-struck by what China has achieved. But I think any visitor here has to notice how many, many challenges China has to deal with -- and how preoccupying those internal challenges are to almost everyone in the country.
My impression is that outsiders think Chinese officials really are sitting around mainly thinking about their ever-improving place in the world. I'm sure they spend some time on such thoughts. But I am saying that, if you were here, you would probably feel as I do that China's officials and people spend 90 per cent of their time thinking about the next 99 problems the country faces, and how they can deal with them.

Outside of the cities, China is mighty poor, and as any reader of Charles Dickens, or Upton Sinclair can tell you, the life of a poor urbanite living in the midst of unchecked industrialization is a tenuous one indeed.
Fallows is careful to say that just because China is poor does not mean that it poses no threat to the rest of the world--just look at North Korea, he says. What Fallows might have added is that the "90 percent of their time thinking about the next 99 problems" might actually make the country MORE dangerous, not less. What better way to calm internal unrest than by starting a foreign war! It didn't work for the Argentine junta, but it seems to have worked for George W. Bush.
This is why it is important to frame protest against China in a way that emphasizes solidarity and minimizes the resemblances to the West's sorry history of meddling in China.