Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "VisualPolitik EN" channel.

  1. End of 2021: "We invest way too much on Defense!" End of 2022: "We invest way too little on Defense!"
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  2. IIRC, Ho Chi Minh himself thought that enforcing straight ideological Communism was stupid (as was being shown by Mao's China across the border) and that Viet Nam needed to take capitalist measures to develop a stable economic base -- he realized the Deng Xiaoping version of China before China itself did. Unfortunately the 1950s Americans didn't realize that the Communist world was not a unified monolith and tried to prop up a more inept anticommunist South, with the disastrous choices and strategic results that followed.
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  3. Despite what we hear about China, it's likely more vulnerable there: they polluted their own lands and seas so much that they're a net importer of food with a still growing deficit. They also rely on importing fuel and raw materials from abroad, cut that off and their massive industrial capacity will be largely idle. They're already woefully inefficient with their industries in general because automation kills exactly the jobs their underemployed and underskilled workforce needs to not think about alternatives, and China at war would likely see too many of their most skilled workers trying to escape the country at the first opportunity. China would quickly run into trouble simply by scaring off civilian ships with the crossfire, and they'd rapidly deplete their war chest not only paying for overland alternatives, but also the increasing need to redeploy its forces inward for "stability" operations as internal discontent grows.
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  4. The only reason Taiwan isn't a "sovereign country" was the ego of Chiang Kai-Shek, who as the autocrat of the then one-party ROC believed he still had claim to all of China. By the time Taipei accepted the fact they would never retake the Mainland, the trend of One China was already set by all the new nations as they decolonized.
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  5. Although a lot of it is relatively new too, as in some East Coast subway lines were old enough to get a pension by the time East Asia first opened theirs (with almost all of China's being the newest). Time will tell if the increasingly intensive maintenance will let it age gracefully like Japan and Taiwan, or just stay marginally operational like Indonesia and the Philippines.
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  6. The Xúzhōu Chained Woman took away a lot of attention domestically. In places where the Games were showing, there felt like even less enthusiasm than a regular intercity sports league match.
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  7. Taiwan was also a similarly oppressive dictatorship until it democratized. What irritates Beijing most is how Taiwan provides living depiction of what 華人 could be without the Party.
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  8. It didn't work out so well when Iraq tried to invade and seize oil-rich Khuzestan while Iran was in a much more tenuous internal position following the Ayatollah takeover. A direct conflict could see another patriotic rallying effect in favor of the theocracy that runs the place now.
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  9. Interested to hear how Macao is supposed to take the reins from HK, since it's notorious as a gateway for Chinese money to escape the Mainland and doesn't have a whole lot of space to go for much else 🇲🇴🎰💸
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  10. Have you heard of Sejong City? That's the already completed South Korean equivalent, and likely what Xióng'ān will likely end up repeating 🏢🏢🏢😪
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  11. Singapore is what the CPC wants to think it's leading China toward, if it conveniently ignores that S'pore: 1) is a democracy where the dominant party accepts the results, even if its popularity fades; 2) is overtly and inclusively multicultural, not trying to Sinicize its citizens; 3) admittedly relies on foreign immigrants for much of its basic activities; 4) doesn't present a territorial threat to its neighbors, despite its superior military; 5) literally cannot survive without open trade access, and works constantly to build real trust among as many nations as it can; and 6) cracks down on even perceived corruption among its officials and enforces well defined laws dispassionately with everyone in its jurisdiction, not vaguely and selectively out of political convenience 🇸🇬
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  12. Switzerland modeled its constitution largely from the US one, and practice their governance more in line with what America's Founding Fathers seemed to have envisioned. However, Switzerland wasn't handicapped by the economic interests of chattel slavery, expanding its territory before another European power got hold of it, or subsequently populating those annexations with whatever people they could attract.
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  13. US strategy involves the "Indo-Pacific", which also includes India and its classic sphere of influence from the Himalayas to the Maldives (and the Asia - Europe/MidEast/Africa sea lanes it dominates), as well as Australia and New Zealand with its historical influence on the Pacific Island Countries. "Asia-Pacific" is more a PRC term designed to isolate India and Australia from the picture.
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  14. If just feeding people and tracking positive/clearing negative COVID cases in Shànghǎi is any indication, the PRC will still be shockingly inept. The virus doesn't shoot back, they're limiting their own options mainly out of suspicion and fear from their own side; now imagine if those logistical assets were specifically targeted, along with their abilities to communicate.
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  15. It's China who doesn't want a united Korea. NK is a useful physical buffer against Western forces, a source of cheap material whenever they can sneak it in, and its fall would be a crushing blow to the totalitarian Communism that the Mainland advocates. China deliberately delayed the ceasefire of the Korean War until Stalin's death meant an end of supplies to the otherwise impoverished PRC.
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  16. Right, capitalism becomes self-defeating when it deems care for dependents as purely "personal" and a "net loss" to the firm.
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  17. I know government and corporations often maintain a stock of "China Only" laptops and phones with minimized local data (instead using a overseas cloud services via VPN at every opportunity) and with operating systems that are wiped and reimaged upon return. It's highly recommended to bring such "burner" devices because just connecting to any Chinese network (cellular or company wifi like in hotels) practically guarantees secret installation over the air of spyware tools to at least accurately track your location, if not activate the microphone or camera as well as reading the storage of your apps. All those things you fear about the CIA doing to you, in the PRC these are actually true. Beijing spends a lot more of its budget on "internal security", as in at least as much as on the military.
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  18. Also the celebration of "liberty" expressed through the consumption of drugs, and by extension supplements and other substances where the "safety" and "benefits" are based merely on the word of its advertisers without independent scientific criticism.
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  19. Moldova is historically tied to its Romanian neighbor, so a merge is arguably a reunification from its artificial creation by the Russian Empire/USSR. Transnistria could be ceded to Ukraine, which nowadays is a lot more prepared to assert control.
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  20. Religion in general is authoritarian and incompatible with democracy.
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  21.  @barbiquearea  Right, the CPC won because not only of Soviet and rural support, but also because America abandoned defending the flagrantly corrupt KMT thinking the then-allied Communists would do a better job. It wasn't until the Korean War that Communism became a global threat and the US got serious about defending what was left of Blue China on Táiwān.
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  22. They might want to revisit how they pay out those pensions, making it a share of taxpayer size and input... meaning it's bound to shrink if they don't have kids and don't pressure their kids' employers to pay more.
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  23. China has the opposite problem, where outside of employment or heritage interests practically nobody spends their money to learn Chinese
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  24. The US has been "on the brink of collapse" since 1812, yet survives each usually violent crisis often more in tune with its goals of "and more perfect Union" through "liberty and justice for all". This is in contrast to how China's history tends to swing wildly between "harmony" and active revolt against the central authority, a cycle arguably only broken in Taiwan when it democratized.
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  25. Not to the extent of France though. Immigrant communities not on the Mexican border tend to be the more quiet of neighborhoods.
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  26. Ironic considering the Mainland uses imperial history to justify its 'totally not imperial' ambitions. The PRC has never held control over Táiwān.
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  27. The way China is aging, polluting, and taking on debt, not by much and not for long 📈📉
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  28. It was lower for the populations that “mattered”
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  29. The PRC complains about a Century of Humiliation, but to the Vietnamese it’s a Millienia under multiple Chinese dynasties. And that’s just the times where China was successful.
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  30. I think even a regular dedicated "Fat Camp" for new recruits would help a lot, because getting paid a lower-enlisted rate to have your exercise and diet controlled wouldn't add much to the budget or time in service yet provides needed bodies for the service and a healthy extension of life for the servicemember.
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  31. Considering how often the US has been deemed on the "verge of collapse" since 1812, Americans use the coffin as a coffee table we put our beer and feet up on while watching everyone else freak out over the chaos and spectrum that we thrive on.
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  32. America is too focused on pleasing private businesses, even to the point of demanding that government activities should be able to make profits on its own. Thing is infrastructure is practically never profitable -- it's a literal part of the economic environment from which profits have to be processed out of.
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  33. Japan is even offering free houses to those younger folks willing to move and stay there. Problem is it's not strictly having a roof over their head, but more fundamental flaws in the economy especially for those same young adults seeking to establish a livelihood they can predict will carry them through potential parenthood and retirement.
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  34.  @MrHarumakiSensei  Both. Raising a kid to productivity has only gotten more expensive because they're increasingly competing against automation that is much more intensive to stay ahead of. At the same time corporations have successfully lobbied to globalize their labor and break the bargaining power of its employee unions, giving them more funds to M&A away the competition as well as accelerate the development of career-ending automation without providing balance through loss-leading investments in education and developing overall human capital.
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  35.  @daniely500  China's last organized ground war was against an even more lightly armed Vietnam who is literally next door, where they made few gains at alarming costs against the local militia and reservists. The PLA ran back to China before the regulars could get into position.
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  36. Because the prices you pay aren't tied to the amount of your wealth, so of course the poor end up spending more of what they have on regular living expenses. For most people there simply isn't enough to set aside into investments and simply live off the gained equities and interest.
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  37. More like rebellion, of which criminality falls under.
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  38. 현대 sounds more like "hyun-day". Although even their official ads butcher it to "hun-day" or "hyun-die" because Korean reputation was fairly weak (especially in the car market) until fairly recently when more than military, missionaries, and migrant teachers became familiar with the language.
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  39. America has regularly been on "fragile ground", like the War of 1812, the Panic of 1837, the Civil War, the anarcho-communist insurrections, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement. Each time we come out the other end fine and often more harmonized with our own ideal of "liberty and justice for all" (not just landed white male puritan conservatives). As much as our media dramatizes the current MAGA-"woke" culture war, we've already been through far worse.
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  40. Tell that to China, whose own diplomats confirmed they have an attitude of "we're big, you're small, therefore you have no leverage in these discussions" despite having much less historical influence and integration in the South Pacific than the British and its former colonies.
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  41. Overpopulation is becoming a risk in Africa, as long as religion and traditional tribalism continues to pressure its people to "Birth 'em all and let God sort it out", at the expense of rational education that would increase productivity to the point where they can at least feed themselves.
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  42. Ironically more wars would help diversify our defense production capabilities. The end of the Cold War triggered the consolidations we suffer from today as demand for those companies cratered.
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  43. Probably because the weakness of America's public welfare means that school districts end up taking on the roles that a larger dedicated statewide program should provide. It sounds like Estonia as a whole provides the fundamentals such as student meals, healthcare, and teacher training, whereas in the US the individual states, districts, and campuses have to budget all that in.
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  44. Ukraine is still holding, and it doesn’t even have direct warfighter involvement from its supporters. The PLA though has yet to prove its competency treating combat injuries and battle damage from an opponent who actually shoots back. And unlike Mainlanders, Taiwanese are much more proactive to support each other and take up arms without government direction.
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  45. Defense spending at least has clear "trickle down" effects to the rest of society, unlike say corporate tax breaks 💸
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  46. The F-35 could be that aircraft carrier, having line of sight pencil beam links with wingman drones to help prevent them from getting remotely hacked and going astray.
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  47. Russia actually has combat experience though, and if they're performing this poorly (especially in logistics under fire) the PLA's failures would be even more dramatic. Remember the last time the Mainlanders tried a mass deployment, they got routed by unprepared reservists in Vietnam.
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  48. Stimulants feel good for the near future, but long term causes horrible damage. That's what China is experiencing with its overcapacity in apartment shells and passenger transport infrastructure, and what Russia will encounter as its richest customers set up permanent alternatives to their pipelines.
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  49. Swiss gun culture would a huge lesson. They actually practice the "well regulated Militia" qualification through screening and training along with enforced proper storage and carry, unlike in America where simply being alive (and not black) grants you the absolute unconditional option to unilaterally threaten anyone else with instant death at your whim.
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  50. That only came about because there were two major adversaries to worry about after WWII: the USSR and the PRC. Before then the US was quite isolationist, wanting at most to deter and diminish European control in the Western Hemisphere.
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  51. I liken America's overdramatized politics to walking: it's in constant reaction to inherent unsteadiness that you actually take a step forward. Some steps might be bigger than advisable, some are real tepid, some might go sideways, but as long as one side isn't allowed to overly dominate the movement, the entire body is not that likely to faceplant.
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  52. It might have been a consideration of leaving Afghanistan for China to take... right when China's productivity has begun stalling and creditors have begun calling.
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  53. Democracy is a fundamental interest of the US. If defending Taiwan leads to breaking the unchallengeability of the CPC on the Mainland, that's what America will do 🇺🇸🇹🇼
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  54.  @peekaboopeekaboo1165  What's inaccurate was the _when_, not the _if_. The CPC lately has only accelerated instead of reversed its self-made fundamental problems of aging, debt, and pollution. I've seen firsthand the collapse of optimism in China especially among the younger folks -- there's a real danger in the coming years of China stagnating and getting overtaken from collective inaction and anomie, which will only raise discomforting questions about how the people actually benefit from the Party.
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  55. The public sector has to exist to fund things that are required yet short-term unprofitable to a privatized industry, like infrastructure, education, and regulation. Though there is a balance to be achieved and China is certainly way biased towards its overbearing government.
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  56. Aviation components, medical equipment, and agricultural goods of all sorts are some of the things China depends on the US for. That's before considering the education and tourism to Chinese visitors which if considered exports the US has a massive trade surplus on.
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  57. Short of guaranteed free housing and healthcare for life on VA compounds in major cities, recruits are usually looking for something much earlier in the contract like education support and sign-up bonuses.
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  58. Problem is our most advanced equipment could get used up quickly, and then we really are back to obsolete kit if there's any that we hadn't already disposed of. Compare that with the PLA where their stuff may not be the best, but at least it's new and thus not soaking up as much resources in maintenance and upgrades for a while. Plus with the consolidation of competitors, we lack the multiple independent lines of effort that China's SOEs also face, but we don't have a command economy that streamlines something to happen. Much of our efforts are wasted on compliances as demanded by America's voters for the government to "save money" on strictly the lowest bidder without much consideration of product quality or vendor reputation, as well as paying for various levels of bean counters often working on a 12 month budget that wasn't authorized until a few months into the fiscal year.
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  59. Yes climate change is an identified threat that would cause conflicts to flare up, along with the associated supply chain disruptions and mass migrations. Also reducing our need of fossil fuel for static assets like generators also reduces the risk to supply lines and the personnel who are tasked on them, because trucking fuel between bases is among the most hazardous of missions.
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  60. You think that's bad? You should hear how badly they butcher Chinese and Korean names.
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  61. Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao were definitely real people. But yeah the zealous veneration of those guys and their ideals certainly creates unnecessary aggression.
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  62. Like 5 or 6, only 2 or 3 of whom might have completed school due to having to split family funds. Children are surviving but this realization hasn't reached young couples yet, and its harming the prospects of their children as uneducated ones get left further behind economically. Plus there's their church/mosque/traditional parents pushing them to "Birth 'em all and let God sort it out".
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  63. Sadly the politicians who advocated it are not around long enough to be held accountable.
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  64. That's if China's economy keeps growing at the same rate, which is already slowing and likely to stall due to unreversed aging, overleveraged debts, and pervasive chemical pollution. There's a reason why the PRC has gone all "wolf warrior" and its "Dynamic Zero-COVID" measures are expected to persist: their economy is no longer reliable on indefinite growth and the distraction from politics provided from delivering on promises of future wealth.
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  65. The host country also has to accept and support the immigrants like any native resident when they do communicate and try to contribute. Notice how more ethnically-identified Europe tends to have more problems with newcomers compared to the immigrant-driven Western Hemisphere.
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  66. The PRC is heading that way too, talk to any Chinese national as a foreigner (not a fellow citizen/potential Party informant) and you'd see they know a surprising amount of "unpatriotic" knowledge and embarrassing news. The turn towards uncritical nationalism and state control over the markets hints at the Party running out of options to continue its unchallenged rule. A lot of critics say the US is going that way too, but it's been on the "verge of collapse" since 1812. Part of the reason it's so durable is because it holds the potential for revolution every year or so through periodic voting. Plus America thrives on chaos and loosely-defined limits; arguably the disturbing pushback comes from when those societal red lines start getting found and established to the detriment of the privileged.
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  67. They have their freedom, the US just doesn't want to make direct trade with Cuba. Yet despite a literal world full of willing alternatives, the Cuban government still manages to screw up the wider nation in support of its much narrower "security" interests.
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  68. Blockades are legally considered a full act of war, and may be reacted to accordingly by Taipei’s allies. Plus the PLAN hold on the Pacific side will be tenuous at best since they’ll be on the opposite end of Taiwan who will resist any missions to support the vessels out there, especially since the eastern half of the island is where all the defensible mountains are.
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  69. That’s the ideal. But as the PLA continues to plus up its capabilities, Taipei must improve its overall counterforce to match.
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  70. I've survived the other extreme, having lived in the low-tax weak-state libertarian paradise of Subsaharan Africa, where personal family and faith dominate public policy. It's just as dangerous and dismal as "collectivist" nations, but they trade tangible improvements like decent infrastructure and industry for blind optimism and self-confidence. That environment of local gang territories, strongman entrenchment, arbitrary "rules" and "fees", random violent petty crimes, and harsh punishments with zero deterrent effect (for with nothing substantial to fear losing, any risk becomes promising) is where I see America heading should MAGA with its much more narrowed sense of compassion continue to advance.
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  71. It's not just childcare and parental leave, but the two decades of education (especially creative ones which dissent from classic value of loyal discipline) needed to keep automation an assistant rather than a replacement. Only with such an assurance of livelihood can couples really consider having more kids.
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  72.  @seh1080  Even then, taking Táiwān wouldn't necessarily grant the PRC that high value-added human capital the Taiwanese possess in their brains and democratized governance. That durable prosperity comes through societal trust and exploratory dissent, which can't develop under Communism.
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  73. The PLA isn't short on wasteful spending either. They spend way more time on grand parades and patriotic indoctrination when they could be out training in the field and figuring out how their equipment will hold up away from the luxury of garrison maintenance.
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  74. Turn against Australia? The Aussies are prolific in the expeditionary use of its army, and are consistently lauded for how well they do in combat.
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  75. No, Canada isn't part of this arrangement. They're within the Five Eyes intelligence sharing group, although their focus is primarily on Russia.
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  76. How so? China relies on the US for food and other raw materials for its industries. Cutting off China (and especially convincing some of our other friends to do the same) would force them to quickly empty their treasury ordering from alternative markets. Combine that with actual combat in the East and South China Seas scaring off civilian ships, and the PRC would implode in unrest as cities go dark and food prices skyrocket while the Chinese people wonder how come their only child disappeared on deployment.
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  77. What's important is the QA in the process, which have to abide by strict international standards and not Chinese corner-cutting because Chinese airlines are flying Airbus and Boeing airframes overseas (including back to the EU and US).
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  78. That's before considering the suspicion that a significant share of RMB was double-printed, which better explains Beijing's push for digital e-CNY.
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  79. The US military provides the GI Bill to veterans, which pays for tuition and a stipend for attending higher education (not only academic university, but also expensive trainings like flight school). There's also additional Tuition Assistance for those actively serving and doing courses in their off time. The education benefits is by far the biggest bait to enlist new recruits.
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  80. I'd imagine if Russia invades and keeps the upper hand, Ukraine could petition for NATO after publicly ceding Donbass and Crimea to Russia... who will then have the tough choice of accepting or forcing them to be independent, which then raises troubling ideas in other parts of the Federation.
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  81. Kinda wondering how popular an American version of Patriot Park would be 🪖🙋‍♀️
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  82. Iraqis also provided considerable support to take down Saddam, and a lot of the hardship was caused by local insurgent groups trying to establish their turf when the Americans weren't around. Ukrainians have long ago rejected affiliation with Russia, and civilian casualties are clearly caused by Russian forces.
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  83. You can thank Putin for that, along with Xi.
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  84. China has to start by being able to separate the CPC and PRC government from the Chinese people, history, and culture. But this is exactly what the Party does not want you to do. Notice how emotional a Chinese national would get if a foreigner criticized some aspect of modern Chinese politics, even though you might believe the same thing, because an outsider's comment feels like a random insult against your own parents. The world will then be less malicious to China because you discover that it wasn't as malicious towards all of China as your authorities had told.
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  85. Huh, always wondered why Panama was a top choice of a business base. I've heard similar with the Russians and Seychelles.
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  86. Defending Taiwan will be a mostly technical battle of ships and planes, which America has the upper hand in both equipment and experience deploying, and very little opportunity for press camera embeds and plainclothes combatants. If anything this plays into the US military's strengths.
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  87.  @eternalelysium4944  Actually the US had been reducing its military investments in the decade after the Soviet collapse. 9/11 turned that around.
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  88. Right, the work culture prefers we pay for that "fun" now and not into decades of caring for dependents.
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  89. Ironically at some point you'll be more likely to find it abroad, since Koreans who expatriate tend to be more religious and thus generally have larger families.
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  90. The Mountain Pass Mine in CA recently reopened after renovations that fixed its earlier pollution issues, and within two years went from 0 to 15% of the world's output. Next year its refinery should be fully operational, cutting China out of the loop for ore processing and giving the world a new cleaner alternative for rare earth elements.
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  91. China is facing a downward spiral of aging, household debt, soil pollution, emptied seas, and endemic corruption. If anything it's the West that can sit back and wait for China to peak in the next couple decades.
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  92. If it means lowering the bar on the definition of "poverty" and not really providing the freedom of movement and information needed to break upward, it's not really that much of an achievement.
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  93.  @JK-gu3tl  It certainly worked for Táiwān, which was just as autocratic into the 1980s. Nowadays the Republic of China doesn't even come to mind among foreigners when they hear about the "White Terror".
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  94. Which only makes China going to war even more risky for civilians, since their scope of "threats" is much wider. All it takes is a couple tankers to be mistaken as warships and suddenly nobody will be willing to sail anywhere near potential Chinese crossfire with the food and fuel China itself relies on.
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  95. The PRC has had a horrible kill-death ratio for the objectives they achieved against a foreign force. In fact their modernization efforts may have been inspired by the Gulf War, where the curb stomping the Iraqi Army received didn't bode well for the PLA who were using similar equipment and doctrine.
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  96. Have you ever noticed that STEM folks make for horrible managers and often don't last long as politicians? It's because the strong technical focus usually ignores the things people actually care about. This is why leadership positions get ironically filled by those who studied stuff like art and history.
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  97. What matters more is overall debt to GDP, along with how fast it's growing. America's grew by 10% across multiple administrations in the same last 10 years while China has doubled under their single Party, and China faces much greater challenges moving forward due to its own mistakenly tunnel-visioned policies and failure to generate trust in its claims of "win-win" partnerships.
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  98. Modern China seeks its pre-industrialization glory, desperately wanting to return to an age when the mass of muscle under its management meant superiority, ignorant of the fact that creativity combined with power tools have made that strategy obsolete.
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  99.  @simonjones9455  The US has been on the "verge of collapse" since 1812, and various Panics, and the Civil War, and the anarcho-communist insurrection, and the Great Depression, and the assassination-a-month Civil Rights Movement. This "woke" vs MAGA battle is tame by comparison. America has already survived much worse.
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  100. We like to dramatize our challenges and faults, because that's also how we at least partially resolve them too.
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  101. VisualPolitik originates from España 🇪🇸
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  102. That seems to be happening, but absorbing the regular army could make the IRGC so powerful that they can start formulating state-level policies and strategies independent of the Ayatollah. There's rumors that the PLA in China (who are in this situation now that the ROC Army got ejected to Táiwān) have begun doing so, and that the CPC has to constantly watch their own army more than ever.
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  103. ​ @beni4366 Which shows how long-tailed the extreme right has gotten, and that's especially concerning considering how America's "liberals" would be "mildly conservative" in any other developed nation.
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  104. The US has been the leader of precision weaponry since the end of WWI, when we realized we're not the type to accept millions of dead men in an mass mobilized slugfest. Hence the focus on instrument-compensated bombsights, guided missiles, smart bombs, drone observers, and increasingly automated weapon systems to ensure each shot renders the intended effect to clear the path for our soldiers, organizations, and ultimately diplomats.
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  105. We've been wanting to get out of the irreconcilable Middle East, but its centrality to shipping, aviation, and internet lines of communication make it impractical.
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  106. It is famous within Africa. Lagos drives African modern media much like California does for the English speaking world. And Nigerians are also wary about phone scams, because they get targeted too (often about fake real estate opportunities).
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  107. Right, a lot of folks don't realize how difficult it is to store hydrogen. Pure heat is more straightforward and efficient, so I'd wager we'd see molten salt solutions before hydrogen ones.
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  108. China got confident that Shànghǎi can have all the benefits of HK without it being a safe harbor for Western thoughts and values. But I doubt a more legally whimsical Shànghǎi will attract as much foreign investment, and this leaves China more brittle by relying even more on the façade of internal economic prosperity.
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  109. HK was a safe Western portal into China, and I doubt Shànghǎi will attract foreign currency to the same extent. If anything, China is losing a major way of attracting overseas investments by closing down the HK gateway.
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  110. Correction: Republicans, through their policy of isolationism and disengagement.
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  111.  @ipg6772  Singapore is a democracy, and what the PRC thinks it itself is on a much bigger scale. However they conveniently forget that: 1) S'pore relies on positive relations with its neighbors, including well-defined boundaries; 2) The SAF isn't an existential threat to its neighbors; 3) Government corruption is a huge deal and the fastest way to fall from grace, whereas in China it's really the only way to rise in the Party ranks; 4) It openly embraces and promotes ethnic diversity, instead of trying to Sinicize the place; and 5) The ruling PAP has been waning in popular support as its citizens gradually want more than sterile prosperity 🇸🇬🗳
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  112. Third one looks to be East Asia, likely cross-Strait or in Korea.
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  113. If anything Taiwan should be first, since they're the lynchpin of both US allies and free movement of global trade in Asia, while also being fairly inexperienced with actual combat and softened by decades of a deceptive "peace dividend" with the Mainland.
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  114. There's wide discrepancies in China's purported census data and other counts like hukou registrations and school enrollments, totaling millions of Chinese who don't actually exist. The true number is probably closer to 1.2b, making China second to India by headcount.
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  115. If it can afford them, along with the network of long-range sensors needed to keep the missile on target. Hypersonics are _expensive_. Meanwhile the US just came out with a bolt-on guidance kit that can handle moving targets (ships, tanks, etc) for its hundreds of thousands of dirt cheap gravity bombs... Russia apparently exhausted its stockpile of precision guided munitions already.
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  116. Macau exists solely to transact with China, and that's the attitude that the PRC advocates for. But money doesn't buy love, and from the Macanese I've met, they seem like the type who'd be the first to abandon ship when China fails to pay rent for their attention.
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  117. A PRC collapse would at least not be as painful to the Chinese people, who have always been great market merchants able to trade their way out of hardship. How violent the transition and how fractured China ends up becoming (the cities and provinces are quite independent in daily operations from each other) is anyone's guess.
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  118. Socialism refers more to distribution though, while capitalism and communism focus on production. Clearly capitalism is superior to "public" state control in getting resources where it's wanted, the main battle is how socialized do we want the profits to be versus how much wealth those who earned/stole get to keep with libertarianism. Then there's democracy/autocracy which governs the policy. So the real evolution might not be feudalism > capitalism > socialism > communism, but finding the mix of policy + production + distribution. It's arguably possible to be a capitalist socialist democracy.
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  119. The US arguably still holds China's fate, just as it did since the end of the Opium Wars: empire-ending Western education, WWII materiel, abandonment of the KMT, switch of diplomatic recognition, support against the Soviets, introduction to global markets, allowing integration into the world economy post-1989, and constant infusion of knowledge and dollars. The Mainland also relies on the US for agriculture and open sea trade to import cheap food -- Americans can adapt to digital hacks and expensive gadgets, the PRC can only ignore polluted meals and empty stomachs for so long.
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  120. Right, the PRC survives because it had to abandon the ideological purity of Communism. That's why critics are alarmed by Xi's push to return to its "roots", which hints that the Party is also losing its grip on an economic prosperity-driven legitimacy with little else but hateful nationalism to maintain unchallenged power.
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  121. Right, it takes the replacement of experience and mindset to make the changes durable, which unfortunately involves a lot of physical burials over time.
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  122. We should also look into raising registration fees on heavy vehicles -- the formula for estimated road wear involves the fourth power of average vehicle weight. This will help to get EV owners to pay their fair share, as their curb weights are surprisingly heavy.
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  123. Which is unfortunately controversial there because they often see it as some sort of genocide to limit family sizes by any means, even though they're spending a lot more of their limited wealth juggling resources between many kids and leaving little to invest on improving individual productivity and developing reliable market connections.
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  124. China might surpass America for a bit, but it faces increasingly strong headwinds with things like an aging population, an unattractive modern culture, explosion of debt, and overall lack of trust. I wouldn't be surprised if America regains its dominance simply by waiting out the PRC's peak 📈💸📉
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  125.  @Arcaryon  Right, modern China is like china -- hard and impressive but also very fragile and brittle. The PRC keeps saying to itself that it is loved around the world... but I've lived around the world and the locals express resignation at best and extreme suspicion at worst over Chinese intents with their countries, and it all smells a lot like the colonization which they have recent memories of if not lived through. It seems like the Party is waking up to the fact that money doesn't buy love, hence their increased aggression in securing their interests, because unlike America they don't have an attractive modern culture to retain peaceable engagement when the money stops flowing.
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  126. Not to mention these include the Defense Attaché liaison offices at the 100+ US embassies, as well as military reservations that between exercises are merely empty fields.
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  127. That's probably why RCEP needed to be so weak, hardly better than the WTO baseline. Nobody trusts that China won't use it to exert political impositions later on.
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  128. More like the peaceable global economy is done for. The Pound and Yen are decadent, the Euro is uncoordinated, and nobody really trusts the Rupee or the Renminbi. The resulting chaos will likely lead to more conflicts gone kinetic as the values of payments lose predictability.
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  129. All propped up by an explosion of debt, making our children pay for a short burst of political gain... which he promptly failed to defend when a pandemic made paramount the protection of our human capital as opposed to "normal" commercial vibrancy.
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  130. The "charter" schools have to continuously compete against each other for real student achievement and thus public funding. Plus the teachers get subsidized intensive education themselves. None of this letting a church or other private organization set up a curriculum that's merely alternative to the government-run "failure".
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  131. Japan and Táiwān are both threshold nuclear powers, able to design and gather the material for a nuclear warhead within a year or two. "No first use" China would also be inviting its total destruction if it nukes either of them especially before a proven test detonation.
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  132. Not to mention 50~100 years of production followed by thousands of years of nuclear waste afterward ☢️
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  133. Tom Clancy wrote "The Bear and the Dragon" going over this scenario, though it's a pretty fantastic one 🧚‍♀️
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  134. Defeating an invader means just surviving, which is a much easier objective. The US has multiple decades of experience on the wrong end of booby traps and ambushes in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and are nowadays teaching the Taiwanese on how to politically defeat a similarly well equipped occupier.
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  135. That identification has to come at no cost to the voter anywhere in the world. Remember citizens who are homeless or overseas are also fully eligible to cast a ballot. We specifically abolished all forms of a poll tax because at all prices it was such a deterrence to valid voter participation.
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  136. Japan is literally giving away vacant homes to young folks willing to move out and stay there. Problem isn't the costs of a house, but access to the wages, amenities, and opportunities that are only found though the specializations cities provide.
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  137. Peak productivity still hasn't changed from the 25~65 age range, and automation is much more easy to replicate among the competition. A market where the bulk of the labor force is past its prime isn't as promising as an equally automated alternative who is in its midst or at least upcoming within a couple decades.
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  138. The greater threat comes from the regime who is aiming to normalize grossly inaccurate reports, official corruption, legal opaqueness, disappearances for dissent, and mistakes expressions of unpopularity as military-grade violence. Meanwhile a lot of those hard builds are getting built like 50% larger with half the technically prescribed material so that the official in charge can pad his achievements and pocket the difference -- in China structural failures of brand new construction seem to be an annual incident at least, and overseas even the locals watching the BRI projects note an alarming lack of rebar and concrete, yet they're still on the hook for all those debts incurred.
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  139. Rail and road links alone won't make up for the loss of shipping by sea, and all the West has to do is provide enough crossfire to make civilian ships reconsider the costs of entering a war zone with the food and fuel China needs because they're too polluted, inefficient, and overextracted in their own lands. Choke off the supply lines (it doesn't even have to be completely) for a year or two and the Party's grip will collapse in the explosion of unrest within the Mainland.
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  140.  @joem0088  China's debt ratio has been growing alarmingly fast, riding on a less diverse portfolio of shoddily-built structures with quickly shrinking returns on investments. They're losing their low-end manufacturing to South and SE Asia, while lagging in high value-added services because of the lack in societal trust and exploratory dissent that truly creative ventures require -- their economy is becoming as brittle as the flaky concrete of their "modern" buildings because that's literally the only place they can trust their money to grow in.
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  141. Probably not. Chinese people aren't as brainwashed and infantilized as North Koreans (who generally would sacrifice themselves for the glory of Kim and the Korean race), and the deaths/disappearances of so many only-sons could incite open revolt against the Party now that those families have no legacy left to lose.
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  142. But does their equipment work as advertised? They're already getting complaints of low quality and high amounts of downtime in peace, imagine those things in the degraded maintenance environment of war.
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  143. Right, if you take military spending out of both, how much is that GDP then?
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  144. The CPC ☭ A diverging Taiwan gives the Party the justification to further reinforce societal controls and get everyone to ignore the insane amounts of debt they're racking up, while Taiwan and the West squabble over how much of the reality about the Republic of "China" they're willing to recognize.
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  145.  @troywalt4834  Satellites are naturally weak and laggy signals, and can be easily jammed or hacked. Iran stole an American drone mid-flight just by remotely commandeering the controls. A drone that has a line of sight pencil beam to a manned asset and is hard-coded to prioritize commands from there would be much harder to infiltrate.
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  146. You can tell it's there, but the return is so small that it's hard to distinguish it from the background noise, and even harder to keep a lock on it especially with the puny radars on the missiles themselves.
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  147. If they can afford to develop it. The project partnered with Indonesia and even then they're finding it a bit too expensive with still no firm timeline on initial delivery.
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  148. Airlines have a very high barrier to entry, and aren't that profitable for the costs of operation. Competition won't be as strong especially if governments abandon them, which means higher logistics costs and reduced mobility going foward.
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  149. During a conflict, it's generally better to be open to the initial waves of refugees, since these tend to be women, children, and professionals with valuable skills. As the conflict drags on though, you start seeing hardier but less skilled people who will also be much more persistent in trying to cross in while the rest of their family waits at home or in a refugee camp for their sponsorship to immigrate, for increasingly economic reasons rather than political violence and vulnerabilities.
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  150. Right, it would take time for a new Russian expat to earn the trust that they don't secretly serve the old country, whether by intention or exploitation of any ongoing personal vulnerabilities they couldn't shake off in the escape. This limits their opportunities largely to routine maintenance, open source development, etc where they don't have the powers to hide their activities until they develop that trust over time.
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  151. Yet Visa can handle tens of thousands of transactions per minute globally, whereas Bitcoin has to compromise the inherent security of the blockchain with Lightning side channels just trying to keep up. And that's considering most people with a cell phone haven't even generated their own crypto key pair yet, while happily moving money through transfers of airtime credit and other financial apps which structurally operate more similarly to traditional banking and card networks.
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  152. Lightning is basically an off-block side channel where microtransactions can be done before publishing it into the main blockchain. It trades the blockchain's inherent security for convenience, and there are scenarios where this can be used to compromise Bitcoin transactions (e.g. mass closing of channels and flooding the block, creating errors in legitimate transactions in the race to verify them all).
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  153. The US specifically prevented Taiwan from achieving nuclear capability because of the threat of a cross-Straits conflict blowing up into WW3. Taiwan remains however a breakout power, able to build a warhead probably within a year if it wanted.
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  154. If you look at China-flagged movements globally, they want to take as much resources around the world as they can get their hands on. The real infrastructure they build focuses on getting those resources to the open sea where they ship it over, not so much is done with education and interconnecting the host nation like an actually benevolent aid package. It's all but copying what the Europeans did with their colonies a century ago.
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  155. In a cross-Straits war there's really no land for casual combatants to booby trap, and no reporters around amplifying the message of the resistance -- in the air and on the sea would be nearly pure combat of technology and experience. If anything invading Taiwan will be the Vietnam/Iraq/Afghanistan for the PRC.
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  156. Indo and M'sia only protest because they don't want to prematurely get cut off from the lucrative trade with China. Given their history with both Chinese and Communists though, I'd wager if they must decide it's going to be with the West.
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  157. Rumor is Australia is getting British Astute boats anyway, since the UK is about to complete its original order (and thus have engineers about to go idle) while the US is still maxed out at the shipyards trying to build for itself. This would explain why the UK is part of this alliance for a theater on the other side of the world.
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  158. The C919 is smaller, shorter-ranged, and less fuel efficient, making it a tough sell for airlines that plan to fly it over the next 20~30 years. That's on top of being like 60% imported American parts. COMAC has a long way to go to hope to be the next Embrear let alone an Airbus or Boeing, especially with China's economy itself stalling from aging, debt, pollution, and global divestment.
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  159. Sadly the way the A380 was designed it won't have much of a second life as an airfreighter either: the top deck can't be removed to make space for lucrative oversize cargo, the cockpit is in the way of a nose door, and it doesn't have the thrust/weight ratio needed to take advantage of all that space before reaching MTOW. Being designed for passengers first it's impractical to retrofit, much like trying to turn apartments into a warehouse or a cruise liner into a container carrier. Part of the genius behind the 747 was that it's actually a cargo plane with seats bolted on, as the engineers had doubts for its success carrying only passengers. I can see the A380 possibly becoming a hybrid where the middle deck can get loaded with ULDs, with passengers only on the top deck. It will be a rare conversion though, as pretty much every other airframe will end up in a boneyard to part out to the few airlines and routes that have economical usage for the superjumbo.
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  160. Right, a common currency really needs a common budget to work properly. I doubt Brasilia would prefer to have its public spending driven by Beijing.
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  161. Taiwan has been a threshold nuclear power for decades now, they could probably get a warhead together in a year. In fact America has had to stop the ROC from proceeding further to not antagonize the Communist Bloc. Granted this was before Tiananmen when the Mainland seemed to be heading the Western way, much like how Taiwan was likewise about to end the KMT dictatorship and democratize.
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  162. Let's hope if the war obliterates anything Ukrainian, it's their infamous corruption that had kept the country weak.
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  163. That's because the government isn't putting downward pressure on the debt amounts it's forgiving, it's just paying out whatever the college bureaucracies say they're worth.
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  164. The USSR prioritized its STEM grads, and look where they ended up. STEM folks are notorious for being horrible at leading other humans, not to mention they often dive into solving whether could it technically work without really asking what are the wider effects of trying. China today is heading down a similar path of developing technical prowess yet undermining their efforts with toxic mistrusting relationships and an increasingly brittle society facing self-made aging, household debt, and soil pollution. If anything humanities and social sciences will become more important over time as those products are harder to reverse-engineer, they're not as vulnerable to automation, and they help focus efforts on what truly matters to humans.
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  165. Uncontrolled subsidies, not questioning and limiting payouts to what college administrators say they're worth.
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  166. That's not necessarily a bad thing, going through the suck helps let the soldier narrow down what tasks are useful and what's BS (even if they say all of it is).
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  167. That leadership probably won't come from a place that can't even openly discuss its own history. Limiting themselves to STEM fields won't help either, STEM grads tend to make for horrible managers of humans.
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  168. Not necessarily, online can do dry instruction, but for application in the real world full of humans, there's no substitute for meatspace meetings. Education is more than just memorizing formulas, it's also learning how to get others to care about your work.
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  169. Because America in general is so political. If you want to avoid ideological controversy in your higher education, China's universities have plenty of seats reserved for foreigners (even then most "foreigners" there are just Chinese anchor babies raised domestically).
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  170. It's not, but post-Tiananmen "patriotic education" ensures that Chinese students avoid exploring narratives outside what the Party says, and to rat out fellow students who try. Colleges look the other way because they're a reliable source of money, and the "teaching" of politics is really less a deliberate agenda and more a reflection of American willingness to confront and converse about politics regardless.
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  171. Although America's colleges were cheaper and at least as good when the state provided more funding. The problem is their priorities followed the Boomers, cutting education to save on what makes retirees happy voters.
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  172. But that would be “socialist”, says those who look forward to their next “business-related” tax break and Social Security check.
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  173. Violent crime anyway. Commercial crimes like fraud and hacks are surging.
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  174. Reported crime.
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  175. That treaty though was proudly punitive to keep Germany from rising again through reparations debts regardless of changes in leadership and policy. The current sanctions are meant to degrade Putin's ability to cause that damage in the first place.
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  176. Nuclear is also expensive and increasing in costs while also creating thousands of years of hazard on the tail end. Renewables by contrast are getting cheaper and more available. The main problem isn't sourcing, it's storage of the excess for when demand surges later like it does every evening.
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  177. Russians still largely tolerated Putin, especially when considering their prosperity compared against the relative fiasco of post-Soviet Yeltsin's Russia. We've been warning about how his political adventurism is going to cross the rest of the world, who will ultimately push back; no other real democracy recognizes Russia's need to reimpose the USSR's political colonies in Eastern Europe. The same can be said with Putin's PRC umbilical cord and their dreams to reestablish China's old imperial arrangements over East and SE Asia.
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  178. Paradox of Tolerance: to have a tolerant society, intolerance cannot be tolerated lest it take over like a psychological cancer.
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  179. China and Russia already weaponize the internet through nearly shameless trolls and hacks, with China further destabilizing poor countries by feeding local corruption through their loan arrangements and not demanding better governance and transparency like Western aid does. The weakening of globalization comes more from the realization that a "Sunshine Policy" ultimately fails, as the prosperity emboldens autocrats while not effectively compelling them to interpret the rules the way everyone else does.
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  180. China is certainly eyeing for an opportunity to take back the relatively resource-rich Siberian Far East that the Russians "stole" from them back in the 17th through 19th Centuries.
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  181. I feel that Indonesia still has a simmering yet healthy suspicion of anything Communist and/or Chinese too.
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  182. Combat eats through stockpiles surprisingly quick. Really the only weapons we have plenty of are a couple hundred-thousand dumb gravity bombs left over from carpet bombing Vietnam, and only because we're not producing bolt-on JDAM guided fin kits fast enough.
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  183. Remember last time a bunch of traditionalist reactionaries tried to fight for their state and way of life? They lost ownership of all their slaves. A century later they lost legally sanctioned dominance over their descendants too. America's "Great Experiment" doesn't reward going back to a flawed past.
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  184. It's also what's counted in "defense" spending. The US includes Veteran's Affairs expenses, while China isn't publishing how much it spends on militarized "internal security" even though it's likely at least as much as what's going to the PLA.
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  185. ​ @michaelmayhem350  The PLA is trapped in its own country though, they'd only be overwhelming if we literally tried to invade China. For the air and sea battles we're all expecting though, there is no place for crafty ambushes and suicidal berzerking; the side with the superior technology and the combat experience to employ, supply, and repair it more effectively will determine the victor.
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  186. So lobbying by Northrup-Grumman and Raytheon are the cause of Russia further invading Ukraine?
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  187. The PLA has fairly new equipment, although they're also "Designed in China" and it's not like they have a great track record against adversaries who actually shoot back in the past like 50 years.
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  188. The PRC government is very much right-wing: ethnocultural dominance, traditional values, paternalist governance, Make [this country] Great Again attitude... all the hallmarks of fascism. Remember that the term "Nazi" is itself a contraction of the German for "National Socialism", and the CPC promotes combining both nationalism and its idea of "socialism".
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  189. Problem is popular media thrives on edgy dissent, and modern China discourages alternative thoughts and vaguely defines where the edge even is. Notice how cultural powerhouses deliberately dramatize their own issues, while forgettable ones are full of mere pretty faces and childish plots.
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  190.  @GamingAccount-ru1gi  The PRC wouldn't want to risk it now, even with conventional weaponry. The CPC can't afford anything but a quick and decisive victory as they would inevitably lose trading partners to import food, oil, and other crucial resources from, and most families only have one child which would be societally devastating if a critical mass of them get lost in battle. Plus there's Taiwan's highly defensible geography -- there's a reason the US opted not to invade Japanese Formosa even at its height in WWII. And then afterward the PRC would have to reconcile its not so "peaceful rise" to the rest of the world, the negative ramifications of violently conquering Taiwan would be like Tienanmen x100.
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  191. Taiwan has a formal partnership with the US, who could convince others to join in Taiwan's defense or at least economically-damaging disengagement with the PRC. It's also logistically trivial to get to with its open ocean, no surrounding countries to get transit agreements from.
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  192. Although the US also won by coming in after the first punches were thrown. We don't do as well capitalizing on preempted operations.
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  193. That might change though. The ROC long abandoned it's actual intention to reclaim the Mainland, and now the majority of its citizens reject even being called "Chinese". With the PRC's grand fumble on its "one country, two systems" policy, Taiwan is on the path to formally reconciling its de facto independence.
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  194. Taiwan and Japan are threshold nations when it comes to nukes. If they wanted, they could likely assemble a warhead in a year. It just hasn't been worth the financial and diplomatic ramifications yet.
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  195. Reinstitute SEATO?
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  196. Just keep tapping the right side of the screen (on mobile apps) or drag the time slider
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  197.  @lordcarl3374  HK was never physically defensible, whereas Taiwan has the world's biggest ocean (i.e. open sea and air access) as its backyard. Plus the PRC already had military and armed police presence in HK, whereas in Taiwan it's just an office building of bureaucrats.
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  198. China is already committing what is basically transnational organized crime with its state-owned fishing hordes stealing fish worldwide. Although Taiwan's equivalent isn't too much better, just much smaller and less blatant.
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  199. China has a "no first use" policy with its nukes, but it might end up using them on Taiwan under the excuse that the PRC considers Taiwan as part of China.
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  200.  Golden Eagle  Old generals might capitulate, but pro-unification sentiments might not reach all the way down their chains of command. Remember that Western military doctrine values independent initiative in the absence of good command; if anything the lower ranks (which as a conscripted population includes practically everyone) would self-organize into their own militias, providing the PLA occupiers with one or two generations of armed resistance and disappearing enough of them to raise questions on the Mainland about what's happening to their only sons ⚰️
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  201. There was a SEATO before, but that disintegrated with South Vietnam
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  202. No, there isn't much of a land battle for the press or plainclothes combatants to complicate the battlefield. Nearly all the coverage will come from seeing Taiwan getting bombarded by the PLA, inviting the rest of us to support Taiwan's defense.
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  203. Strict traditional values disappeared because the nation would not survive by sticking with it. Remember when SK started out, it was poorer than most of Africa.
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  204. Developed countries, especially puritan ethnostates, are not in the position to let "perfect" get in the way of "good".
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  205. Which if it was undergoing a demographic collapse is probably too toxic and anemic from the folks who got it to what it became. Like bloodletting vs blood transfusion, having fresh blood and minds from immigrants is the key to revitalization.
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  206. Muslim World just refuses to believe the West can care for Muslim populations, like the Uyghurs and Bosnians. Probably because their state governments want that same unchallenged despotism with economic strength that China achieved, and so steers all its masjid sermons and public narratives to indoctrinate its people accordingly.
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  207. The world would like China’s economic capabilities, but not necessarily its finished products. Being so “open” hints at an inability to afford being selective with who they can close deals with.
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  208. China’s military modernization began in earnest following the Gulf War, when the Iraqi Army invading Kuwait got curb-stomped and Beijing realized their PLA was too similarly equipped and indoctrinated.
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  209. The reasons come from an alienizing (i.e. lacks Asian faces) West and an overbearing China. SK offers a non-threatening and actively inviting alternative. Similar transnational niches exist out of Bollywood, Nollywood, and Latin America, but SK made it a government priority to go global in the arts.
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  210. Please research the proper pronouciation of native names before recording. Skipping this risks you getting a reputation of not actually having done fact checks are are just another opinion-driveling clickbaiter. 천리마 sounds more like "chul-li-ma". Even worse was your previous video about the 재벌 that dominate South Korea, which should sound more like "jay-ball".
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  211. Yet China isn't exactly building any soft power of its own, they lack a popular modern culture and it's only getting worse with increasingly vain, childish, censored media products -- India, Egypt, and even Nigeria attract a wider reach than the Mainland. The way they're going there won't be popular calls to support the PRC once it goes over the looming peak into the self-made downward spiral of aging, household debt, pollution, and corruption in the next few decades.
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  212.  @spacemonk26  Controlled access and hefty punishments for abuse would certainly help with our unique firearms-related problems; our military already does so to the point of complete base lockdowns over one missing sensitive item. As a prior servicemember, it's not comforting to see my fellow civilian Americans (especially politicians) not treat the discussion of firearms with the seriousness that everyone in uniform does.
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  213. Chinese companies are moving everywhere to get around the divestment. While it's mitigating, it's still damaging to them because of the permanent added barriers and reduced opportunities to Chinese workers.
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  214. Right, China is already about ready to drown in its own debts. The HSR network alone is expensive to operate, lacks passengers, can't move truckloads of cargo as China actually needs, and carries an cumulative debt load that dwarfs its real estate sector. There are likely other industry-level liabilities that we're not hearing about until its just about to kick the Party-state in the nuts.
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  215. At least he's consistent in butchering all of the Korean, I don't think he's said a single word correctly
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  216. I'd think the Koreans would instead point their nukes at Japan, as the hate is strong having been indoctrinated from childhood throughout all of living memory, despite China having invaded more often and more thoroughly subjugated the Koreans over the longer history.
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  217. Are the patents actually good and defensible though? Or are they more like the near jokes that the USPO was handing out in its early years?
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  218. These don't really exist in China either. China's structures often become hazards in a fairly mild incident, and they age surprisingly quickly due to shoddy workmanship. Plus China's healthcare coverage is a joke, covering almost nothing on a medical bill.
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  219. Bigger doesn't mean better -- the average Chinese worker is far less productive and only getting older. The CPC's allergies to dissent makes its education and creativity lackluster, and these are exactly what's needed to break out of the middle income trap. And China's own debts have shot up alarmingly fast, like five times the growth of America's in the past decade, much of it into shoddy hardly-occupied "real estate" because of even lower trust in their stock markets. Now they're having problems just keeping the lights on, because most of their coal plants are optimized for higher grade Western stock, and they might not have the funds to get alternative sources built without the social unrest caused by multiple freezing winters during the wait.
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  220. The US is currently undergoing something like the Great Resignation or Renegotiation, with former workers leaving old bosses out to dry in the resurgence of consumer demand as a strategy to finally experience that "rising tide" that's been promised for decades, but was instead dammed away with rich man tax breaks and offshoring.
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  221.  @brentdallyn8459  Right, it's otherwise inexplicable about crematoriums running 24/7 nonstop and the steep dropoff of cell subscribers (likely not just dual SIM users abruptly abandoning one provider)
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  222. That growth requires energy (which they're having trouble sourcing without high grade Western coal until they install cleaner alternatives while current funds are running dry), creativity (which is stifled by discouragement and enforcement against dissent), and the youth to produce and develop that growth in productivity over a couple generations. China would've had that room, if they weren't also old, cold, and constantly worried if something they once said will get them caged in an interrogation room signing vague confessions.
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  223.  @527ctguy  Right, China spends at least as much on internal "stability" forces as it does on the PLA. That's why its "military spending" seems so low -- it's not counting all the propaganda, guns, intelligence efforts pointing at its own people.
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  224. We also habitually dramatize our faults and challenges, because that's how we at least partially resolve them too.
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  225.  @RaulGonzalez-rs1be  As in their buildings are built so shoddy that they fall apart with alarming regularity. You can literally see that they age faster than their completion date suggests.
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  226. America at least listens to its people, because there's open discussions, independent journalism, and public elections. The CPC's patronizing attitudes makes it surrounded by sycophants and tunnel-visioned in its policies, which then have to overreact to unforseen/deliberately hidden issues that festered underneath.
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  227. Problem is China can't continue, it faces aging, debts, and pollution that simply can't be mandated away. Meanwhile America can find someone else to fill their order, and increasingly create small batches of it themselves.
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  228.  @michaelotieno6524  Only through direct payments, increasing reliance on imports, and a low bar definition of "poverty" compared to the true costs of upward mobility. It wasn't so much through anything the government did to help durably develop the impoverished. At least in America you're free to move about the country to where the jobs are, and changing residency is fairly straightforward; China's prescriptive hùkǒu system means a migrant loses nearly all their gains in private sector upcharges for things like schools and healthcare because they're not a "resident", all the while still enriching their executives and Party officials.
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  229. The CPC plays a father figure by infantilizing its nationals with childish slogans, tribalist ideals, blanket bans, and habitual overreactions. The West at least gives more privacy, predictability, and personal liberty to its residents.
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  230.  @arthas640  Right, this "woke" vs MAGA battle is tame compared with what America experienced before, like even the assassination-a-month Civil Rights Movement, not to mention 1812 and the Civil War where its continued existence was really in doubt. The CPC is starting to realize that they can grow the pie all they want, but if it tastes like shit it won't matter how they slice it.
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  231. The US military probably spends a workday a week shamming off, but at least its salvaging morale if not building rapport with your buddies in the unit. Unlike some classroom lecture on Maoist doctrine that is useless trivia in combat, and likely just propping up a facade of loyalty because you really joined the PLA for the job perks and not necessarily the Party.
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  232. China loves to show off its HSR, which is deep in operating debt (having to compete with buses, planes, and regular rail to all the smaller cities) and physically built too weak to offset the costs with freight trains. Hence why the US rail network is nearing saturation transporting bulk goods and HAZMAT while China is paying triple to truck it over (before all the long daytime restrictions and random traffic "inspections" all along China's roads).
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  233. America always criticized its debt load, but the debt doesn't necessarily make it weak. In fact the one time America cleared all its debts, speculations went so crazy that it caused the Panic of 1837, a depression and stagnation that lasted a decade with multiple states going bankrupt and defaulting.
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  234. More realistically the CPC will be asked a lot of discomforting questions when entire neighborhoods of only-sons start to "disappear" during their combat deployment.
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  235. The "continue" part is up for debate, since looming aging, debt, and pollution could see China stalling if not falling backwards. We might already seeing the effects as the CPC shifts focus away from peaceable marketing and towards ideology and militarism, trying to shift away from relying on increasingly impossible growth as the basis for continued tolerance among the Chinese people.
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  236. Hence why the long fight for $15/hr and human dignity in the workplace, which is starting to come to fruition now that businesses realize they can't threaten with finding replacement workers or automation that itself shows a lot of troubling biases and limitations towards the customers.
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  237.  @michaelotieno6524  China's middle class isn't doing so well either, with so many in multiple generations' income worth of debt just to attract a spouse and a better hùkǒu. All for overpriced "real estate" so shoddily built and maintained that it probably won't even make it to the end of the 70-year land use permit.
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  238.  @steenkigerrider5340  Arts, history, and humanities are what really drives education, because education is all about finding the norms and then stepping outside of it to explore ways to grow. Creativity and innovation come from intelligently violating established rules. STEM focused education by contrast is often tunnel visioned in technicalities and ignores what people actually care about. Hence why they often make horrible managers and don't do well in politics. This is why you often see a large organization headed by someone who studied something like English literature and then used those skills to get into law.
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  239.  @Mr.Septon  Yet there's an active political fight over how much we'll allow those elites to continue getting away with. Hence the "woke" "socialists" who want to get the pie shared more broadly vs the MAGA folks who are trying to return to an ignorantly flawed version of past "prosperity". The US isn't necessarily overstretched, since practically all of those bases exist practically by invitation. For friendlier countries it allows them to spend less of its budget to gain a similar level of effective defense than if they had to fund and experience all that combat on their own, and even for places like Cuba or Pakistan the American presence provides a convenient scapegoat to redirect any internal unrest. America is incredibly resilient and the American Pie overall has not lost its flavor. China can try to grow their pie all they want, but the CPC is realizing that theirs tastes like shit and no amount of slicing will ultimately get people to bite... and it's all the fault of who made the recipe.
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  240. Overtake forever, or peak and stall? 🐇🐢
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  241.  @qjtvaddict  Which when civilian shipping in the SCS and ECS gets scared off by the crossfire will be shockingly upcharged (overland) or useless (by sea).
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  242. The Foreign Legion is a part of the French Army, just set up to recruit foreigners
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  243. National Guard are an asset of a US state, occasionally called up for federal service. Their primary mission is a lot more localized.
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  244. Also the PLA, except in Mainland China there's no competing military whose allegiance lies with the state of China... that army was ejected to Táiwān (ROC Armed Forces).
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  245. Still the same battle of efficiency vs flexibility, where of course America's Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex in getting costs and competition down also leaves us vulnerable to changes in the global geopolitical situation (e.g a war in Ukraine eating through our stockpiles far faster than we're able to replenish them).
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  246. That's because prices for basic goods (water bills, groceries, etc) don't rise or fall to match the income of the buyer; the poor simply have less to invest once their survival needs are met, whereas the rich have disposable wealth to spend on high-cost durable goods that aren't consumed during its useful life and might even appreciate in value over time.
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  247. Right, if Africans don't educate their way ahead of growing global automation, they'll end up tribally fighting likely violently over the scraps of what little opportunities are available for them at the low end. But education has consistently meant staying out of menial jobs and parenthood longer against the pro-natal pressures of religion and tradition.
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  248. No, it just means they're officially talking government to government. Doesn't mean they're no longer willing to destroy each other if given the chance.
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  249.  @jantschierschky3461  Right, Nigerians are seen as quite obnoxious especially those fresh out of Lagos. But enough given time abroad eventually they do mellow out after realizing they don't have to practically scream and act so confrontational to every stranger they meet.
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  250. Isn't is more accurate to be "gbo"? (I know the sound doesn't exist in English)
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  251. Problem is practically nobody really trusts a Chinese stock market, and those who do aren't allowed to buy an considerably influential amount of shares. That's why the Chinese people basically threw all their investment efforts at the "safety" of real estate.
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  252. Japan, Korea, and Táiwān also democratized and unlocked their cultural potential: hence anime, k-pop, and bubble tea. The CPC spends a lot of its resources (with a budget probably even greater than the PLA's) stopping this in the name of "stability", with censorship efforts deliberately extending into other countries. Even Indonesia and the Philippines (#1 and #3 economies in ASEAN) removed their dictators through popular movement, and have since elected their leadership through the collective voice of all their citizens. But the even more developed Mainland China doubled down on authoritarianism, which is coming back to haunt them as aging, debt, and pollution stall the economy on which the Party's unchallenged rule rides on. Hence the Wolf Warrior Diplomacy and new cross-Strait crisis they're banking on to keep up the Party's appeal back at home at the cost of foreign attraction... and thus all the "anti-China" videos we're seeing a lot of these days from pretty much everywhere that lacks corporate sponsorship.
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  253. Also superior industry and moral justification: the Brits stopped trying to buy Southern cotton when the Union declared its goal to end slavery.
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  254. In Chinese language media, the US has already been made the enemy for even more minor and vague issues. This is really a conflict driven by the CPC, although luckily at least urban Chinese seem to know this despite all the censorship and propaganda. For the rest of the world, it's slowly realizing the overall parasitic trade relationship with Běijīng. Companies surrender critical IP and trade secrets just for cheaper goods and tenuous temporary access to the Chinese consumer market. Meanwhile BRI recipients receive a small army of Chinese workers who wall themselves into colony-like compounds and provide less local work opportunities than promised, while getting troublesome build projects, proliferated corruption, and added debt that's even harder to clear than their existing Western ones.
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  255. We still have to prepare for a Běijīng that lashes out with the PLA as the Mainland runs out of profitable economic opportunities for the CPC to justify its continued uncontested rule.
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  256. "Highly specific" subject to very loose interpretation by the Party, as with all of their other laws.
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  257. Probably waited until the UK lost its voice in the EU
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  258.  @SerenityM54L2SAM5L5N1  Because they're part of the horde of Mainland imports, or the minority of rich HKers whose wealth depends on the whims of Běijīng?
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  259. In both cases, it's subversion of injustice.
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  260. Right, the last time the Republicans ordered combat that ended well was 1990, which was against an opponent with clearly inferior equipment and narrowly-defined tactics.
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  261. WW1, WW2, and 9/11 proved that there's a pretty shallow lower limit on how much we can stand down and look inward.
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  262. Western countries have more capacity to include and integrate immigrants, unlike ethnostates like China. Foreigners don't remain all that "foreign" in an open society.
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  263. It's still more rosy than reality. There's a New Zealander named Tony who's an economic policy consultant in Beijing and runs the channel "China Update", and his daily videos are even more grim.
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  264.  @Zergcerebrates  It wouldn't take so long if Maoist ideology hadn't set China so far back with purges of its culture and human resources. The PRC is still trying to catch up to where China could be if the Chinese people weren't so restrained by the Party's tunnel visioned campaigns and gaslighting of project failures.
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  265. "Flexible employment" (gig work) isn't exactly opening their own business.
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  266. Western aid demands improvements to governance and transparency, which is exactly what corrupt African officials don't want. Hence why they go for Chinese and Russian alternatives who purposely look the other way.
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  267. I see parallels with how the US treats its black population, sending more police than public support because those in power don't want to see them as equals. Hence the escalation of protest that because they're not addressed at lower levels too often ends in street clashes and riots.
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  268. When it does happen though, it would play in favor of the West's resilience and creativity. Mainland China is already deep in a clash of civilizations mindset, but has little experience with dramatic setbacks which makes them brittle. Add how the PLA ranks are now filled by only-sons and how infamous the PLA is in taking casualties to achieve an objective, and the Party would be spending an increasing amount of its war chest on internal "stability" on all the families whose only son "disappeared" on deployment (not to mention all the simmering anti-Beijing elements who'd take advantage of the realignment of security forces). Plus China increasingly relies on imports for food and fuel, and that would further deplete their savings, supplies, and popular tolerance paying for overland alternatives because all the civilian ships are scared away from the crossfire. The PRC has to go hard on a quick and fairly painless victory, because that's the only way the Party can win -- and it's the same mistake that Imperial Japan did. Their China wouldn't survive years of warfare, sanctions, and businesses that went elsewhere, which is bound to happen in their promised invasion of Táiwān and the generations of insurrection that will immediately follow.
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  269. That's because hate is stronger than love, and those seeking power gain popularity by inventing someone to rally against. The Nazis were voted in by striking out against Jews, nowadays it's more anxiety over accelerating economic inequalities successfully deflected usually on foreigners instead of faceless corporations and robots.
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  270. Capitalism/communism focuses on production, libertarianism/socialism on distribution, and democracy/autocracy on policy. Arguably it's possible to be a capitalist socialist democracy.
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  271. Right, South Korea and Táiwān were likewise horribly repressive regimes when they started out, but are now highly respected cultural powerhouses. The difference is that their dictatorships ultimately yielded to its people, unlike their NK and Mainland counterparts.
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  272. Westerners directly, or do you mean all the local simmering feuds and foreign funded anti-US forces who deliberately targeted regular civilians to sow fear and doubt about the post-Saddam government?
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  273. Semantics are nice, but ultimately the popular interpretation is what matters. Much like how "autopilot" actually still involves pilot presence and attention, but "common sense" interprets it as complete automation as seen with Tesla driving mistakes.
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  274. Doing the opposite just further empowers the Communists who can claim their Western-seeded prosperity as totally their own, as was ultimately seen when the US opened up to Mainland China. But unlike Western dictators, Communist regimes are willing to fight to the death against dissent, challenge, and change even when their governance becomes a clear hindrance.
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  275. Yet the outlook in West and Central Africa isn't promising if their governance doesn't improve. The Middle East is likewise rich but not advanced, which also spells trouble for their future as oil production plateaus along with their national budget.
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  276. Yet Russia is getting beat back by Ukraine despite the advantage in both numbers and capabilities, which is only set to degrade further as NATO kit gets implemented.
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  277. You're hinting that Singapore (a territory that Malaysia deliberately ejected) contributes and gets support from the West; why then is it wrong to figure out what external entities its Muslim neighbors gets and receives support from?
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  278. It's a global force. Empires aren't so keen on conversing and negotiating agreements with their counterparts abroad.
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  279. What's back is America's progressive itinerary, not just stuck on the ground with its toxic baggage 🛫
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  280. Yet America retains its "imperialism" because those countries fear the alternative... who aren't nearly as interested in letting you express yourself ☭
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  281.  @ArawnOfAnnwn  China isn't short on hubris itself. The Party's paternalistic approach leaves a lot of its people bitter (but too scared to say so), and its exclusive tribalist pride will alienate it from receiving help from abroad when it eventually needs it like so many failed empires and dynasties before. In their narrow pursuit of money and political stability, they ended up developing strong headwinds like an aging population, unattractive modern culture, explosion of debt, and overall lack of trust. I wouldn't be surprised if America regains its lead position by simply waiting out the PRC's peak 🇨🇳📈📉 And much to the chagrin of the Mainland government, Táiwān's very existence proves that Chinese people can in fact thrive without the Party 🇹🇼
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  282. The "same" rules become an issue when China gets included, as they always want to "negotiate" them at their leisure through the lens of vague philosophies and even then enforcement gets interpreted very loosely.
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  283. Lack of employment security makes tenuous predicting such dramatic increases of income. Go to any place staffed with minimum wage entry-level jobs and note how many of them should statistically be in the prime of their career.
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  284.  @luisoviedo-perez2896  More like that's what our politics naturally converges on in a winner-take-all system where the collection of losers becomes the only other side. Unfortunately this administratively simple concept also encourages pushing the extremes as a way to differentiate one from the other, since the real political spread is more a continuous spectrum.
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  285. If it can hold Táiwān and somehow gain all its current comparative advantages, much of which can't be replicated in a Běijīng-ruled environment. That's even before considering the insurgency that the Taiwanese will put up if they do get successfully occupied.
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  286. Clean air is pretty important to society.
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  287. Renewables already produce local excess, and there's active development in storing it for nighttime/calm winds. Besides battery advances, there's also pumped-storage hydro, which is basically using the excess energy to pump water back up a hill for a dam to use later.
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  288. Bicycles are cheap and quite effective (especially when specifically designed to haul cargo), but most places would rather skip straight to cars because of its other advantages to its users (superior shielding, electricity generation, less muscle use). The issue with green energy is convincing people that clean air and stable sea levels are totally worth the extra cost.
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  289. Just ask the oil companies.
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  290. Natural gas has proven it can supplant coal, and burns cleaner. Then there's active development in storing energy, one of the most promising being pumped-storage hydro, which is basically a dam beside a hilltop reservoir created specifically to be released when renewables falter and recharged by pumping it back up during the daytime excess.
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  291. Táiwān would do better with masses of cheap weapons and training on improvising more for guerilla warfare. If it takes the constantly-warring US decades to withdraw from an insurrection, there's no way the much less practiced PRC will last that long especially after entire neighborhoods of families lose their only son on deployment.
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  292. More like 500k repatriated back to Japan, those staying behind numbering like 1~2k. It's just not convenient to think how so many Taiwanese look fondly at Japan, who brought infrastructure and rural development to the island, especially after the "White Terror" of the invasive gangster KMT.
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  293. The loss of Táiwān will bleed over though, first with the Senkaku/Diàoyú, then perhaps a "liberation" of the Ryukyu from Japan, on top of punitive strikes against the Home Islands.
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  294. Right, the whole conflict over Taiwan stems from the stubbornness of Chiang Kai-Shek to not give up on his "China" while they were ahead.
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  295. No, where it's implemented the usage rate stalls while survival and rehabilitation of users improve.
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  296. Republicans complain about drugs from illegal immigrants hopping the fence, when most of the drugs come either by boat or are snuck past Customs at staffed border crossings.
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  297. "Personal responsibility" Republicans made drug usage a crime to hide from rather than a condition to seek help for.
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  298. And what of the waste it produces which remains dangerous for thousands of years? We haven't figured out how to safely reprocess the ones we have now, and back then we weren't trying to replace every fossil fuel plant in the world.
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  299. If you conveniently ignore thousands of years of radioactive waste it produces. We still haven't figured out how to fully reprocess all the waste we have now.
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  300. Nuclear is expensive and has been rising in costs. It's likely cheaper to use wind and solar, with excesses stored in pumped-hydro projects.
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  301. i.e. Their plan is to kick the can down the road and hope somebody will be able to recycle it later on... while the can is full of toxic waste and not getting any younger ☢️
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  302. Depends on the local geography too. A shore with a steep dropoff won't see nearly as much swell as one leading towards a vast expanse of shallow flats.
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  303. Already takes another 20 years to design and build, and thousands of years of toxic waste, all for 50~100 years of production.
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  304. There's also pumped-storage hydro, which can pump water back up the reservoir when prices are cheap for use later when demand surges as the sun goes down. Any elevation difference can be considered to transform into this energy storage solution, even abandoned mines.
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  305. Defenses against earthquakes have been engineered into structures for centuries, the danger is really only for those who use nothing more than mortar for their brick/cement block builds.
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  306. Problem is the radioactivity generated remains dangerous for thousands of years. Fossil fuels could be phased out and the climate rebalanced in that time, while a single incident with nuclear waste can render whole areas permanently inhabitable.
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  307. Anti-ship missiles are fairly dumb without external precision guidance all the way to the target, which would be degraded by EW and shootdowns of surveillance assets. At some point someone's warhead would mistakenly strike a container ship thinking something that big was an aircraft carrier. Regardless of who launched it, this would scare off civilian traffic around Mainland China in general, and it's the Mainland that would more quickly empty its coffers paying for insurance upcharges and overland alternatives for the food, fuel, and mass export revenues it relies on.
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  308. 1) Kickbacks, reliance, and fear of retaliation from China; 2) Harmonization with a fellow autocrat; and 3) Uyghurs are ethnically Turkic, who are not as central to wider Muslim world
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  309. Beijing destroyed all its negotiating leverage with HK. It’ll take a couple generations until the Taiwanese might be open to considering converging with the Communists again.
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  310. Trump made it a vital campaigning platform for the GOP though.
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  311. America's role as the world's police fighting smaller local conflicts before they organize into industrial-scale wars is the reason for post-WW2 global prosperity. Pax Romana, Pax Mongolica, Pax Britannica, and Pax Americana are named as such because that one power maintained trade security for like a third of humanity at the time.
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  312. The one with delayed macroeconomic consequences, while emboldening aggressive adversaries with personal endorsement.
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  313. We need a voting system that allows for convergence on more than the winner-take-all from the collection of all losers, perhaps ranked-choice ballots.
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  314. ​Biden wasn't the one who cultivated the Afghan leaders who abandoned their people, and were entrusted to do their duty as we departed as the Office of the President (i.e. held by the previous guy) firmly promised.
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  315. Scary, but not unheard of. The previous culture war of the Civil Rights Movement was a lot more visible and violent. Same with the labor movements of a century ago, not to mention the straight up Civil War.
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  316.  @retrodripsupport7510  The price of efficiency is lack of resilience, i.e. putting all the eggs in one basket. COVID and China supply shocks show that it is possible to be too efficient in the corporate hunt for quarterly profits.
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  317.  @douglasgyi  We don't necessarily want China to fail, only the haughty (can't do wrong, conveniently forget Mao years and 1989), exclusionary (Han ethnicity >> everyone else), and patronizing (unchallengeable authoritarianism) attitudes that the CPC advocates. However the CPC deliberately equates itself to "China", and so calls for Communist downfall sounds like calls to take down the Chinese people, which the Party can then use to rally hateful support.
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  318. They're scared that it ultimately means political reforms. The CPC doesn't want to continually defend its dominance against political competition, even though that's what free market actors have to do all the time.
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  319.  @ivanbudianto1962  Make friends yes. Make families no, at least if they want to keep their identity as authentically "Japanese".
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  320. That will backfire spectacularly. The "uneducated" literally help keep our food affordable, along with keeping America's massive agricultural exports competitive. Plus coming down hard on whole groups of 'undesirable' newcomers also discourages consideration from the ones we really want.
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  321. That's exactly what Japanese companies say they support, but in practice are wholly hostile to.
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  322. The US recently came out with an improved bolt-on JDAM kit that turns cheap gravity bombs into warship killers -- there's tens of thousands in the existing stockpile launchable by practically anything that flies, each at 1/20th the cost of a regular anti-ship missile. A dozen-sortie raid would easily overwhelm even the most heavily-armed cruiser, and would be overkill for the practically defenseless patrol boats and coastal cutters that make up the bulk of the PLAN fleet.
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  323. Land forces aren't that useful in a largely air and sea battle of cross-Straits combat. In fact they may be a liability having to feed them all, especially when food and fuel prices explode in the absence of shipping to Chinese ports who got scared off by the crossfire.
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  324. America has been tearing itself apart constantly, critics have doubted its continued existence since 1812, various Panics, the Civil War, the anarco-communist insurrection, the Great Depression, and the Civil Rights Movement where even the President wasn't safe from some random sniper. These critics underestimate the American ability to come back and help each other just as fast. China also has a long history of revolt and reform, but each reform often requires a full and usually violent change of leadership, which is exactly what the Party fears.
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  325. Chinese soldiers aren't paid as much, but they're also stuck doing a lot of political indoctrination classes while American units regularly get sent to field exercises if not the combat zone. Plus PLA equipment gets enough complaints of breakdowns in garrison, imagine how reliable those would be in the degraded maintenance of war.
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  326. The US wouldn't be fighting to dominate China, it'd be more returning enough fire and gathering allies to make trade with China undesirable and prolonging the pain until the Party's dragon starves and collapses under its own weight as food, fuel, and foreign reserves dwindle. Even seizing Táiwān won't guarantee Communist victory, because it'll be followed by an insurrection in very defensible terrain by a prepared hostile population... who have been asking the US their direct experience on how to defeat the political agenda of a modern occupying force.
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  327. But then the PLA's budget is split between defending its territory from its neighbors (nearly all of whom carry considerable discontent with China), rehearsing and performing grand parades, and regular stand-downs for political indoctrination. This doesn't leave much to go toe to toe with a opponent with much more training and combat experience... and there's no land war for casual combatants to ambush them from.
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  328. Veterancy and experience would be especially important in this scenario, because there wouldn't be much of a land war where casual combatants can hide and ambush from. For air and sea operations, pure technical superiority is all that really matters.
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  329.  @HDsharp  What makes you say that? Maritime SE Asia is leaning anti-China -- I was just there, and that's the feeling I got talking with the locals.
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  330. The effect of the spending depends on access too, Afghanistan is literally surrounded by major anti-US powers on all sides so a lot of that money had to go into basically bribery for the gatekeepers. For Táiwān though there's only open ocean and plenty of friendly ports nearby... combine that with defensible terrain and a hostile population, and the island is arguably the Afghanistan for Mainland China.
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  331. US doesn't have to overpower China either, just dissuade trade with sanctions and potential crossfire, starving the Mainland of the food and fuel it has to import. That's if America wants to preempt the looming challenges of aging, debt, pollution, and corruption which threatens the continued prosperity of the PRC (and thus the legitimacy of an unchallenged CPC) anyway.
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  332. Once the missiles launch the supplies will dry up anyway. Anti-ship missiles aren't terribly smart on their own -- especially when the long range sensor assets are under attack -- and it only takes one container ship being mistaken for a juicy aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship to really scare away the civilian traffic who were sailing to China.
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  333. Don't forget that the Taiwanese will be fighting too. Even with a PLA takeover there's still plenty of space on the island from which they can hide and mount an insurrection... and they're increasingly asking the US on how even a minimally armed but determined population can defeat the political agenda of an occupying force.
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  334. Russia relies more on subterfuge -- it's estimated that their intelligence community is like 3x the size of America's. The cost being a culture-wide lack of trust in each other, on top of having not much else going for the average Russian citizen.
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  335. Right, Maritime SE Asia has been heading anti-China despite their "non-aligned" policy because of all the hostile acts with Chinese fishing hordes emptying the local seas. Indonesia alone could make it really hurt for China by stopping ships going through their waters -- they're already readily suspicious of Chinese, Communists, and acts of anti-Islam -- and along with Vietnam and the Philippines would easily empty the PRC's treasury by forcing them to use more expensive overland routes for basic food and fuel. I wouldn't be surprised if undeployed PLA forces were even left largely unmolested, just so they can eat through the Mainland's dwindling supplies and fuel unrest among China's civilians to cause even more division in operational efforts.
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  336. The US wouldn't have to occupy or even dominate the area around China though, just provide enough return fire for civilian ships to reconsider the waybill and insurance rates for sailing into Chinese ports with the food and fuel they rely on. Even a stalemate would mean the Party loses when their treasury and shelves empty out over the course of a year or more; no amount of patriotic education will suppress the literal starvation and subsequent desire to flee from or fight the failing authorities.
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  337.  @liu3gz  Which would make China unbeatable in a land war where simple machining and infantry moxy negates the advantages of high tech weaponry. Unfortunately the battles will be more at sea and in the air where casual combatants can't fight (or on Táiwān where the roles reverse), and China's reliance on imports for food and fuel means it won't be able to afford both beans and bullets for that long without getting distracted by the rising unrest back at home.
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  338.  @codechannel528  At the same time the PRC is not recognized as the government over Táiwān. It's more like North and South Korea where they both officially claim each other, but are effectively dealt as separate equal entities.
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