Backwater? Growing power?
Same thing happened with Japan.
This is before my time but I’ve known lots of older people who born in the 50s and grew up in the 60s and 70s.
Products made in Japan were once considered cheap things. I ride motorcycles so I talk to a lot of people about the history, especially with Honda and Yamaha. North American motorcycles were first British, German and American. When the Japanese started in the 50s and 60s, everyone laughed at them … a common racist thing to call them back then was ‘rice cookers’ … but within a decade, they took over and by the 80s they were dominating.
The same thing is happening in the EV market. Right now everything is even and the market is still new. But in a decade or two or less, the Chinese will dominate everything.
I remember the late 90’s saw a trend of making bad guys in movies Chinese instead of Russian like they typically were previously. It probably would have continued well into today, but 9/11 made it so the bad guys were now middle eastern.
I don’t watch live action shows much, but in animated shows the antagonists seem to usually be cishet white men, unless they’re destined to join the protagonists, in which case they can be diverse.
