You got to it too slow.
The gist of the piece is easy enough to figure out.
EXCERPT:
The trouble is that it also widens the scope of the conflict beyond toy imports and intellectual property law. It implies that, absent a round of glasnost, there is not much China can do to answer US concerns. Its very system is the problem.
The Democrats will not fret quite as much as Mr Trump about the bilateral trade deficit, and for this nod to Ricardian logic we must be thankful. But they seem more likely to define the US against the Chinese way of life: to moralise what is for now a largely material conflict. No doubt, it will be meant well. But then no one “had better motives for all the trouble he caused” than Pyle, the erring innocent in Graham Greene’s novel The Quiet American.