Why the American political mainstream has turned against China

For the record, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did not say this:

The United States has named China, Iran, Libya, North Korea and 10 other nations that it wants the U.N. to hold accountable for alleged human rights violations. The U.S. ambassador to the U.N. Human Rights Council said Wednesday “too many governments repress dissent with impunity.”
[….] She said the U.S. opposes China’s “growing number of arrests and detentions of lawyers, activists, bloggers, artists, religious believers, and their families.”

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen did say this, however:

“Taiwan inspires all victims of Beijing’s totalitarian oppression that they need not be faint of heart. It is for this very reason, this shining example of liberty, that the cynical old men who still rule in Beijing are so fearful of Taiwan. It is for this very reason that they strive to eliminate this beacon of democracy. And it is for this very reason that Congress, through the Taiwan Relations Act, must strive to help preserve a Taiwan that reflects the aspirations of its people.

Video of her full statement here. Taiwan’s government occasionally makes itself look silly. By contrast, Beijing’s government frequently makes itself look brutal, thuggish, and far too arrogant to concern itself with such trivialities as the consent of the governed. What legitimacy does the Chinese government have to rule, and on what basis can it be said that the Chinese people want that rule to endure? I can see that these are questions that some people would rather not ask or answer, but they’re dispositive to the destiny of China, and consequently, all of Asia.

Today, the grievances against Beijing are widespread, yet fragmentary and isolated:

Who supposes that a government with no legitimacy can suppress those grievances forever, or prevent the fateful day when they coalesce, probably with the assistance of new technologies that the government won’t be able to suppress?

Some cynics will say that the growing hostility of both political parties toward China means that it’s now election season. Other cynics will say that the absence of visible hostility until recently could only mean that it wasn’t election season, though the chairmanship of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen has clearly has an outsized effect on our national debate about China. The greater truth is that both trends reflect the deep suspicion and hostility most Americans feel for the Chinese government, trends that Beijing’s recent behavior has amplified, and not just in the United States. My suspicion is that the 2008 Olympics and the Olympic torch relay in particular were a turning point in global perceptions, and there is some evidence that the games coincided with a downturn in global perceptions about China.

There are several ways, none of them very precise or useful, to define the perjorative “neoncon,” but if you define it to mean someone who believes that democratic, representative government is superior to all other forms of government and destined by some Hegelian process to supplant them, your definition includes the entire American political mainstream, and for that matter, probably includes most of the developed world.