Comments by "Winston Smith" (@kryts27) on "5 hard lessons the West should learn from dealing with the CCP" video.

  1. On a purely military basis, i will compare the CCP (or the PRC) to the military and scientific achievements of the past Soviet Union. Both these countries were and are very similar; both are founded on Marxist-Leninist ideology and are large countries in Eurasia. But the Soviet Union was a superpower, while the PRC is not and probably now never will be. Why is that? 1. The Soviet Union occupied Eastern and central Europe in 1945. This enabled them to put puppet governments into many Eastern European counties in a neo-colonialist fashion. China has not had a collapsing or client government on it's border (except North Korea) to enter into a predatory relationship with, but recently it has gained influence and neo-colonial status with Myanmar and Cambodia (Pakistan is a little too unstable for this). 2. China purged all academics, doctors, engineers and scientists during Mao's time. This lead to a massive brain-drain in China that lasted 30 years, and the PRC fell behind in technology with the rest of the world. While the Soviet Union had it's purges of academics during Stalin's reign, it was not as systematic and thorough as what happened under Mao, and those Soviet engineers and scientists who survived these purges of Stalin got to work under Khrushchev, and made the Soviet Union a forerunner in rocketry and space science in the 1960s, This enhanced the Soviet Union's superpower status (also with more ICBMs in total than NATO alliance countries by the 1970s), the Soviet Union was a genuine superpower for 40 years. The PRC has a total of about 900 nukes as we speak (never anywhere close to the Soviet Union at it's peak which had about 3000 nukes). While the PLA is now recently busy building up it's nuclear weapons stockpile, it has to produce several hundred more to be in parity with the United States. You know, massive destruction is a deterrant and even more massive destruction an even greater one (this is the Nihilistic logic of the Cold War 1, and we are now in Cold War 2). 3. The world has shifted in technology basis since the 1960s. In that decade, intergrated cicuits or chips had just been invented. Industrialized countries, like the Soviet Union at that time could all manufacture electronic components, needed for modern warfare. Now, all electronics requires silicon chips, and the most advanced belong to Japan, Taiwan, South Korea and the United States (the United States designs chips, it does not make them. Companies like IBM, Intel, Apple and NVIDIA). 4. The PLAN has currently the most number of warships, but not in tonnage compared to the USN, and it's carriers are second or third rate, even in comparison to Japan's. Definitely no comparison to the nuclear powered 11 supercarriers the USN currently owns (even the 40 year old Nimitz class supercarriers are better). Also, the US has roughly 2.5 times the number of 4th or 5th generation warplanes than the PLA or PLAN; more advanced and more stealthy. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union had more and better tanks than NATO (until the 1980s when Western countries starting building tanks that had Cobham armour and better main guns). And in terms of warplanes, apparently the Soviet Union during the Cold War had 3 times the numbers of warplanes than NATO had, although this figure is difficult to verify.
    1