Here's an interesting, to me anyway, excerpt from the article which confirms something I've believed for many years, but it's always gratifying to have personal opinions confirmed.
Kissinger’s
1972 opening of China is typically seen as a geostrategic masterstroke
whose purpose was to further divide China from its rival communist
power, the even more threatening Soviet Union. The reality is that
Kissinger’s vision of China as America’s bride-in-waiting derived from
much older ideas about the country.
More
than a hundred years before, China’s defeat at the hands of France and
Great Britain opened the country to foreign trade as well as foreign
visitors, most notably Protestant missionaries. Thousands of American
families joined their British counterparts in the Far East; fertile
ground, they believed, for spreading the Gospel. These missionary
pioneers would come to shape American foreign policy and attitudes
toward China for generations to come, as their offspring filled
positions of influence in the government, academia, and media. Henry
Luce, for instance, the founder and editor-in-chief of Time magazine, the 20th century’s most influential publication, was raised in China to missionary parents.
Another way Kissinger miscalculated was in thinking his own ideological rock, the Westphalian system, would prevail everywhere. The Chinese don't recognise borders in the same sense. For them power & influence radiate out from the centre in concentric circles, getting weaker with distance. There is no notion that it stops dead at a boundary, on the other side of which they have no sway.
As to the detail of the article about Feinstein & co, who can doubt that the de-industrialisation of America didn't benefit the ordinary man.
