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

  1. 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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  2. I feel that Indonesia still has a simmering yet healthy suspicion of anything Communist and/or Chinese too.
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  3. 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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  4.  @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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  5. 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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  6. 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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  7. In both cases, it's subversion of injustice.
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  8. ​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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  9. Reported crime.
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  10. 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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  11. 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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  12. 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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  13. 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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  14. 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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  15.  @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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  16. 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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  17. 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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  18. And they've been preparing an elaborate unwelcome mat for the PLA over the past half century.
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  19. 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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  20. 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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  21. 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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  22. 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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  23. 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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  24. 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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  25. 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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  26.  @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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  27. 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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  28. 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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  29. 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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  30. 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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  31. 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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  32. 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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  33. 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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  34.  @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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  35. 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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  36. 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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  37. 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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  38. 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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  39. 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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  40. Only made, the designs come from the US and Japan. The making part is getting spread especially back to the US, while the physical sensitivity of chip fabs would quickly destroy its ability to spin up after hostilities end.
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  41. 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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  42. Beijing calls even the mildest resistance against them as a casus belli. It's pretty obvious they're actively hunting for righteous indignation if you've seen their untranslated Chinese state news over the past two decades.
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  43.  @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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  44. 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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  45. 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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  46. That's exactly what Japanese companies say they support, but in practice are wholly hostile to.
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  47.  @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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  48. Probably waited until the UK lost its voice in the EU
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  49. Violent crime anyway. Commercial crimes like fraud and hacks are surging.
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  50. 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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