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I'm not sure if my travels could cut cleanly in one way or the other on this honestly. If someone's vision of China is of cities openly falling apart then that's at least definitely not true of Shanghai or Nanjing. It may have been due to the older, mostly to my experience solved, problem of smog but I do remember the buildings browning more than I've noticed in American big cities. I certainly didn't stay long enough or speak enough of the language to get a sense of any kind of society wide duplicity. My wife reported that obeying traffic rules had improved since her last visit and you did still see pretty frequent incidents of scooters riding on the walking area. I was in the familial ingroup for most of the people I spoke to, someone living and breathing the culture would have a better idea.
I'll recount the story of a friend of the guy I met in Osaka who is hopefully getting out of Chinese prison soon, call him Andrew. I do trust this Osaka friend but am less sure how much I trust Andrew. Supposedly Andrew moved to Beijing on a business visa partnered with some local to start an American BBQ business that took off pretty well, growing to a couple locations. Fast forward to covid and Andrew needed to go home for some reason, can't remember if it was family or Chinese policy. When he returns he finds that his previous partner has opened a competing chain and claims that Andrew lied on his original work visa, landing him in Chinese prison while the previous partner took possession of all of his restaurant assets. This is of course an anecdote and perhaps a dubious one, Osaka friend vouches that Andrew isn't the type to falsify business documents but you have no reason to believe that and I give it maybe a 20% chance he's at fault. My wife found it plausible if that means anything. I like almost all the Chinese people I met, but I don't think I'd want to try and live in China full time.
I've noticed a trend of our Russian posters being very obsessed with framing American views on geopolitics in a racial angle. I haven't seen a single American call Russians orcs but seen many Russians accusing Americans of thinking in those terms. If Americans have a racial view of Chinese people it's as nerdy math kids, hardly the kind of people you'd be prejudiced against when it comes to ML research. Among the researchers I've known there has definitely been some sneering at the research paper output of the mainland, Wife and Mother in law both say that in the past it was a problem where China produced a lot of not very good papers but supposedly this has gotten better. Americans certainly have some neurosis around race but not in the way you should be merging it with American Exceptionalism to form American Racial Exceptionalism. Much ink has been spilt on how Americans deal with being a very multi-racial society and how that experiment is going. American's views on China has much more to do with their communist government than with their racial character.
I've seen plenty of Nuking Three Gorges Dam posting, “China is the welfare queen of nations” posting, “we built up those chinks with our toil and look at how they repay us” posting, “Ways That Are Dark” posting, “only steals and poorly copies” posting and all other sorts of unhinged, entitled and dismissive posting that receives applause lately that I feel secure in saying that there is an undertone of stereotype-driven racial animus and condescension/cope, and it goes way back to the Chinese exclusion act. Again, this is also visible in the smug confidence with which Trump's team initiated a trade war, assured that Xi will fold due to his sweatshop of a nation being existentially dependent on exporting cheap junk to the US. It is perhaps not at all or only marginally present in normal people, but then again normal people probably don't care a lot about the topic. I'll also say that I've definitely seen some Americans liken Ruskies to Orcs, but generally it's a European (or even specifically Baltic) thing, I will grant that Americans do not imagine themselves Elves, they're happy enough being citizens of a real great nation.
Your anecdotes sound completely believable, I don't put much trust in Chinese law system or IP protections for foreigners and recognize that most of the country is pretty poor.
Scooters on sidewalks, however annoying, are a far cry from human feces on sidewalks - a matter of lacking civic virtue or manners, but not decay of civilization. I don't see scooters on sidewalks here in Buenos Aires, but I do have to look where I'm stepping. Was the other way around in Moscow, would that it were the same way here.
There are more groups than the normies and the kind of people who are engaging in the China vs US threads on X. I'll note that when I have the misfortune of making the algorithm think I'm interested in China related politics I am fed some truly outrageous sludge both from anti-china hawks and mao apologists all slinging the hottest takes they can think up. There's a dynamic there and I fear you may be being misled about what smart Americans actually think on this subject. Things like the three gorges dam posting strike me more like apes pounding their chests at a rival than the thoughts of serious people.
I would hesitate to draw much inference from what the guy who clearly doesn't understand trade deficits thinks about the ability to win a trade war. Yes yes, to my great shame this idiot was elected to the highest office of the nation. I understand that this is what might be called a bad look. I'm just saying that him in particular being smuggly confident and wrong about some subject shouldn't really be taken as the opinion of thinking Americans. Thinking Americans, when they want to speculate on an Achilles heel on China are more likely to come up with the birthrate issue, the inflated housing market or the general issues of having a state substantially run by the kind of guy who can make people who bring him bad news disappear. These are all arguable points but they're not "these people are racially incapable of defeating us".
Most of what I've noticed when the topic of Russia comes up, and it's really fallen quite a distance out of focus, is that people are mostly talking about Putin in particular and not Russians in general. It's described as "Putin's war" and if people are feeling spicy they might bring up the oligarchs. Maybe it's a hold over from narratives of us spreading freedom but usually if we believe a country to be headed by a dictator we mostly feel bad for the citizens and pour most of our animus into the dictator. Deep in our cultural outlook we still believe if we got rid of the corrupt leadership that either the people would immediately thank us or the scales would fall from their eyes and they'd embrace us as friends.
The scooters on sidewalks was more noting that things tended to be trending in the improvement direction as far as orderliness goes.
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