Comments by "Doncarlo" (@doujinflip) on "China’s Military is Growing – Fast" video.

... who wants them there, because the alternative is even worse. Ask the Philippines how they fared with their territorial integrity after asking the Americans to leave.
14
@慕容沫子 India and Maritime SE Asia want you out of their lands. Tibet and East Turkestan too depending on who counted their existence. Russia is keeping an eye on you as you look to become an Arctic power via Siberia. And the Vietnamese hates you with their thousand years of humiliation across multiple dynasties.
12
Right, the PLA budget doesn't include support for the paramilitary fishing fleets ramming and fouling the boats of their neighbors, nor all the "internal security" intelligence and propaganda programs where the spending might exceed that of the military.
12
Russia has a fence between them and three sides of Ukrainian flatlands, and are still bogged down. Now try to cross an open Strait where everyone can see you coming to try landing on a mountainous fortress that hasn't been successfully invaded since before the airplane was invented. Oh and the population is entirely hostile, has multiple powerful friends, and has been preparing for your arrival for decades. Plus you're running low on supplies with a collapse of seaborne trade, your treasury is empty paying for overland alternatives, and there's a rising uproar back at home from all the families who lost their only son.
5
@r3dpowel796 Ironically the host nations just as regularly frustrate the planned closure of a base. The US has all that presence because ultimately the Americans are wanted there, and have much stronger concerns about what then happens in their absence.
5
@vimalalwaysrocks The same one that took in patients while full of roof leaks and uneven surfaces that other countries would have done cheaper and more effectively with trucks and tents?
4
Too many Afghans didn't want to fight their families, no matter how disturbing and abusive they are. Plus Afghanistan is literally surrounded by anti-US sentiments (Pakistan, Iran, China, Russian-backed -stans), so insurgents had no shortage of shelters and resources to fight with.
4
Which has been losing money (even when including the overall effects from growth in fapiao receipts) because passengers and mail don't pay that much, and is now bleeding itself to near shutdown with the collapse of regular travels under surprise COVID lockdowns. What China really would have benefitted from was a buildout of freight-capable rail.
4
What China gets out of all that spending isn't as valuable though. Lightly-built HSR when it really needs heavy freight rail to get overloaded trucks off the roads. Education that's all about "how" but devoid of deeply asking "why". "Engineers" that others would call mere "technicians". Patents that are simple and specific, difficult to commercialize and easy to circumvent. Band-aid healthcare distracted by untested TCM and constantly outdone by an environment of chemical pollution. It's no wonder so many Chinese people would expatriate to America at the first opportunity. Then there's all the "internal security" spending with invasive domestic intelligence and propaganda programs, which itself rivals that of the PLA's total spending. For the US government it's basically what's budgeted to police forces, since practically all the influence operations are privatized as advertising and lobbying under strong competition and public scrutiny.
3
It'd be even more embarrassing for the PRC, who have a much longer distance to cover that everyone can observe, no experience with provisioning support in combat, only to meet a hostile population that's better equipped with many more places to hide. Meanwhile seaborne trade would collapse, overland alternatives would deplete their foreign reserves, and Běijīng will have to start redeploying the PLA back home to suppress an increasingly restive population who's asking why their food sucks, why energy became unaffordable, and why their only son disappeared.
2
@terencekwong3033 I'd rather not be called on the debts for such flaky builds and lacking the knowledge to fix it. This is what the locals in Africa were telling me about what they're seeing in the Chinese projects -- they're alarmingly scarce on rebar and concrete.
2
Problem is the Chinese Dream doesn't empower the ethnically non-Chinese. Anyone can integrate into the core US or EU identity through residency and naturalization, whereas an Hàn ethnostate China doesn't beyond token minorities.
1