I think what we call the skill of "analysis" is to divide an abstract object into a set of its containing elements, and then differentiate those elements and treat each element for its own different case.

China is one such abstract object...It's never about pro-china or anti-china -- after all it is a society of 1 billion individuals who are all differentiable from each other (and we have to differentiate a random chinese people from their government)...if we find a certain aspect of China appealing and potentially benecial to our own society, then why not just "like" that aspect and learn from them?

In the last few decades of the 5th century BC, Sparta and Athens fought a war with each other, which Athens had lost...but this did not prevent Plato (who was an Athenian) from praising certain aspects of Spartan society.