Instead of endlessly rehashing Blade Runner and ripping off Neuromancer, it would be nice to see film and TV execs produce something about the what the future world will look like when it’s dominated by the Chinese Communist Party.
They won’t though because the Chinese Communist Party is fucking scary and doesn’t take to being commented on.
All those little plastic widgets and cheap clothes we import are paying for this navy.
Don't we have that already? Star Wars has always been the story of authoritarian governments, hasn't it?
A lot of the aesthetics looked like they are meant to portray the Nazis, but the empire lacks (to my knowledge, I'm not really into it) the "we must exterminate the undesirables" part and feels much closer like an authoritarian power that branches out and suppresses dissent, classical empire stuff, but without the crazy. That sounds about right for the CCP.
> I’ll bet it’s less neon and flying cars and more boarded up retail shops and government sponsored troll farms.
No technological advancement? Has the CCP indicated that they'd prefer a stand still on that front?
I'm sure the future will be different as is expected when a large power claims its place. Whether the losses will be in the West or primarily in the Third World will be a major question. So far, the Chinese seem not too much into large scale empire building, but primarily exercising control over "their backyard", similar to Russia in Ukraine etc and the US in Latin America. But that might change, of course, if they ever become the most powerful nation with a similar margin over the rest as the US has enjoyed for the last decades.
They won't because they love money and they generate significant revenue in that market. Same reason nobody is calling China out for imprisoning a million Muslims in a concentration camp.
That's a big word do you have any proof other than military thinktanks rehashing the same old nonsense?
What's a good estimate on how many have been tortured, raped and murdered? (To use your words)
When the US still has more people in prison predominantly of one race (not per capita either, gross numbers) it's perhaps a good time to talk about the systemic imprisonment of black people that no one seems to flinch about.
For all the talk of Uyghurs literally no Western country is taking them in, do you see the UK or US lining up to take in a million Muslim separatists?
It's yellow peril all over again. Why is the UN human rights commissioner repeatedly refusing to visit the region despite getting numerous requests? Why are Muslim Western allies visiting and finding nothing extreme that matches the constant media bombardment we receive in the West? Our Western aligned Muslim allies are literally signing multicountry letters to the UNHRC saying that it's all a media beatup and yet no one here really wants to talk about that.
Are we really going to base all this on evidence from the people that insisted Saddam had weapons of Mass Destruction and that justified a 20 year war that resulted in millions of deaths mostly civilian? Do you honestly trust them this time aroundor is it _different_ this time?
https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002/abc-four-corners-tell-the...
Here's a solid read from an Australian policeman who cycled through Xinjiang province, nothing he sees lines up with the rhetoric you'll find from internet commentators who have never been to China.
Right, the one million seems like the lowball esitmate from the UN Human Rights Council and the US Congressional Committee.
Local sources like the NCHRD had the number of concentration camp inmates at 2 to 3 million already back in 2018. Of course it is possible that most have starved since or have become organ donors, so numbers are hard to pin down.
WestWorld (season 3) comes to mind but doesn't have the communist structure; but any future dystopia would likely see the party replaced by algorithms leaving just the inner circle and the proles.
The venerable “Firefly” series explored this a bit way back in 2002. The idea was that since china is _the_ superpower even the lowliest scum would know a curse word or two in chinese. Was quite an interesting concept back then.
China's plans aren't a big secret. There's Made In China 2025.[1] The 14th Five Year Plan is being drafted now. Unlike the USSR, China was reasonably successful in meeting the goals of the 13 Five Year Plans so far, with the notable exception of the Great Leap Forward fiasco of the 1960s.
The Made In China 2025 plan focuses on pharmaceutical, automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, IT and robotics manufacturing. The goal is to have a state of the art position in all those fields by 2025.
China is also pursuing eugenic strategies with the one-child policy, and controlled migration into cities (which encourages assortative mating). The Fertility Rate of 1.6 is reasonable.
By contrast many Western countries are pursuing dysgenic strategies through the provision of mass-welfare, and the intake of migrants from lower-IQ countries.
China just needs to sit back for 30-50 years and wait for these trends to play out, if it has the patience. We're already seeing the first reports of IQ declines:
This seems more like a dumb conspiracy, the kind of pseudoscience BS you’d feed to QANON’s.
Let’s go through it piece by piece:
1. Doesn’t define how IQ was measured in each country
2. Doesn’t state when for each country
3. Doesn’t define how the average was calculated
4. Doesn’t provide any data on rate of change of IQ - this is important, for those not aware IQ tests are reframed every few years to keep most people on the 85-115 range. The revision trend is always upwards so far - it’s arguable that we’re getting smarter because of flaws in IQ as a concept but we’re certainly becoming more capable in the modern world which is not controversial
Enough about IQ we could bang on more about statistical significance and anything between 85 - 115 is average but lets move on to the real meat to be refuted.
6. China’s one-child policy formally ended 5 years ago after many years of gradual reductions in restrictions
7. China is actively trying to walk back the damage of its 1 child policies and is incentivising married couples to have more than 1 child (and somewhat confusingly, has actually been doing this since before the end of the 1 child policy)
Now the real BS part
8. No country anywhere is pursuing dysgenic strategy
9. Welfare - help given to people who need it. I am intrigued what you actually mean here, are you suggesting we should let people die who can Otherwise be saved by provision of assistance?
10. Intake of migrants from “lower iq” countries - are these doctors and engineers on Visas or asylum seekers and refugees from areas rendered uninhabitable by war, climate or lawlessness?
It's called "industrial policy". The US traditionally has avoided that. It causes huge stress on the political system because it ties industry success to lobbying power. And until recently, the US didn't need it.
The UK did a lot of that in the 1950s through the 1980s, and it resulted in "lemon socialism" - the government had all the declining industries. Coal, steel, and railroads, mostly.
Japan did better, with MITI telling industry what to do, and advanced the country enormously. Until the 1989 bubble collapse and real estate crash, from which Japan never fully recovered.
I doubt they'll get to state of the art in aerospace, at least not in a plane that is actually capable of flying in every country.
Aircraft development is hard. Many states have tried sponsoring programs and they have mostly been duds, like Japan and Russia; even successful ones, like Canada's Bombardier and Brazil's Embraer, have or were about to sell to the Boeing-Airbus duopoly because the costs of additional aircraft development are far too high now. Pretty much every commercial aircraft program has come in late and over budget in recent years. And the MAX8 situation has made things worse for everybody involved because rather than take peer agencies' word for it, everyone is going to want to run their own stringent tests now.
It took Airbus 21 years to produce something that would sell. But they got there. COMAC is at year 12. The COMAC C919 has a few flying prototypes. It's been a troubled project, with major changes, such as going from carbon fiber to aluminum, along the way. Still uses imported engines. It's kind of a dud, like the Airbus 300 was. But the government of China is willing to keep putting in money until they get a decent airliner. The next one might be saleable outside China.
China is well on its way to being a super-power and will likely be the sole global superpower by 2040, fully capable of enforcing their will and policies on all nations of the world.
They have already successfully infiltrated most international and political organisations as well as the international press to ensure there is no consensual united stand taken against them.
They can successfully carry out mass sterilisation and genocide campaigns with little or no blow-back from anyone.
What amazes me is how few recognise the extraordinary threat they pose to the world today.
If you mean that vastly over estimated potential and politics from the Kennedy era, to keep increasing / justify spends on difference, yes I guess.
U.S. navy has more aircraft carriers than rest of the world combined. I don't see how any objective sense metric how China is even close to "largest" Navy. Sure if you count every boat/warship each navy has they might be larger. Just like Iraq had the largest army just by number of soldiers.
I wonder how much of the hundreds millions (billions?) of dollars China was able to save due its status as a "developing economy" contributed to its massive military buildup.
Or for that matter, that high priority for all developing economies, putting a lander on the moon.
https://www.scmp.com/economy/china-economy/article/3004873/c...
China surpassed the US in GDP normalized to PPP in 2014, which is the statistic that captures the power of their economy to manufacture and employ military force. Given current trends, it is inevitable that China's military will surpass the US's military power based on their economic prowess and manufacturing capability.
>China surpassed the US in GDP normalized to PPP in 2014
Non-PPP-normalized GDP is a better metric than normalized GDP in this case, as it also captures the ability of their economy to purchase things on the international market. China doesn't make all its military technology internally (and couldn't given it still hasn't caught up to the state of the art in e.g. semiconductors).
There was a strongly held belief that Japan will dwarf the US at one point too. And true, Japan has massively developed but is nowhere near a superpower.
Also, IIRC the EU as a block has a bigger GDP than the US by some margin, and yet isn’t a “joint superpower”.
Money is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.
Japan could never have dwarfed the US. Germany could never have dwarfed the US.
Barring a catastrophe in the US, you need to look at the numbers: Japan is quite small, most of it land is mountains, it has barely any natural resources, its population is about a third of the US's. There was some hysteria in the 80s but factually with such numbers Japan could never have surpassed the US.
In addition to that, because of WWII Japan is basically satellite state of the US, which means it cannot do as it pleases militarily (and even politically).
On the other hand, China is larger than the continental US, has plenty of natural resources, and has a population 4x that of the US. It is also, of course, not subjected to US domination.
The role are reversed and, as China develops, the numbers indicates that China essentially will dwarf the US.
This is really what has dawned on the American government and what explains their actions. They're not panicking yet but they are certainly alarmed (Japan never alarmed anyone in the D.C area since 1945).
Even the EU makes the US uneasy because, again, they know that the EU can be bigger than they are.
GDP with respect to the PPP exchange rate isn't a good measure for military spending as most of the spending I imagine goes through international currencies (and thus determined by the spot rate).
whether this navy is effective in a theater of war _today_ is a good question. They tend to be sub-optimal in a time dominated by PMC's and asymmetric warfare. Having a highly complex, maintenance-intensive fleet is nice for show and maybe to scare the odd South East Asian country into submission during disputes in the South China Sea. But for it to be effective it needs to be exercised in real life (kinetic) conditions. I think the PRC would get more bang for their buck by sending their troops to Africa (as they already do[1]) for them to get battle experience.
edit: I personally don't support any of their current & future war mongering and naval ambitions. The right foreign policy for the US would be maximum pressure and if they don't play by Western rules we should go to war with them immediately (we should have done so the moment they said Taiwan belongs to the PLC or when the news of the Uyghurs broke). Not doing so means we're only postponing this for a later point (when they are even stronger and when the damage will be even bigger on both sides).
China already went to war with the us over korea. not unsuccesfully and in times when China wasn't considered a threat. I'd say the US needs to treat the prospect of war with China with extreme caution. Why not shore up your own alliances first before attempting to undertake such a massive project?
yes timing right now would be terrible. if those alliances would be solid however then maybe there would be less reason to escalate things (because soft power and sanctions would be more effective?).
It's interesting how one can simultaneously think China is "war mongering" while at the same time see nothing wrong with advocating starting a war immediately.
True, but I doubt that is a good measure either. Production and logistical capabilities of missiles is probably more important. Large ships like carriers are very vulnerable and heavy pieces of metal to direct missile attacks or modern subs.
The US army doesn't need more funding, it needs less waste, and so do the European armies.
The inefficiencies in how armaments are produced and procured are a large part of that: due to political pressure (every state wants a slice of the pie) the manufacture of the Eurofighter (and all other Airbus/EADS products) is spread across the continent instead of one place.
China has not “leapfrogged the US military”, you are comparing dissimilar numbers. If you want to compare the real power of a navy, you’re better off comparing warship tonnages, while taking into account the force-multiplier effect of forward operating bases. China has many, smaller ships than the USA, and far less power projection capability, especially when it comes to naval aviation.
That is an important point. It is a strategic objective of the US to be able project massive military power any place in the world. However that is not the case for China (as it is now). China's main strategic goal is secure access to the pacific ocean (even if it is met with an American naval blockade).
It is obvious to me that that goal is much cheaper than the American goal.
China does not have secure access to the Pacific Ocean; U.S. attack submarines and air-launched anti-ship missiles mean that Chinese ships are at risk as soon as they leave the South China Sea, or possibly even port.
I think the Chinese objective is to have enough power to deny U.S. access to the South China Sea, and perhaps the sea of Japan. They also want to be able to project power in the case of more limited conflicts, such as civil wars in Africa or the Middle East.
I think it is a given at this point that the US will loose supremacy in the area because of the size of the Chinese economy and the fact that the South China Sea is their home-turf.
The Chinese military has not leapfrogged the US military. China has the largest military in the world, but that hasn't meant much in a long-time.
The US has by far the most advanced and sophisticated weaponry of any military and that level of sophistication can hardly be captured by pure statistics alone.
And while as a non-expert I can't confidently comment on the advantages and drawbacks of sophistication vs pure manpower/number of units, I wouldn't be surprised if in today's geopolitical environment the former is more important than the later.
Though I think it's likely that the US approach is more about reducing casualties in order to lower the political barrier to war than anything else. After all, in a democracy you lose a war when the people are no longer willing to support it anymore. China doesn't have this problem and continue fighting regardless of the number of deaths sustained.
Chinas increased investments in R&D are impressive, but where did you get the number 4.11% for 2018? As far as I'm aware, so far they've never even reached their target of 2.5% R&D spending per year.
"China continued its yearslong run of double-digit percentage increases in spending on R&D in 2019, but the nation is likely to fall short of a long-standing goal of increasing R&D expenditures to 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by this year."
This is probably just the US Navy making an indirect play for a bigger budget. The Chinese navy and US navy are not comparable.
But there is a real change afoot, it seems likely that the Chinese will master making battleships if they put their mind to it. It seems likely they have the industrial supply chains to sustain a real military build-up if they want to. Their manufacturing capacity is a very real thing and they're are no shortage of brilliant, well educated and respectable Chinese engineers, scientists and workers.
It is notable that they probably have cutting edge capabilities in nuclear engineering, software engineering and manufacturing engineering. They definitely know how to build drones better than everyone else. Hopefully the future of warfare doesn't involve drones.
They already have a sufficient mastery in making surface fleet, mainly because they also have a robust and massive civilian shipbuilding industry (neck-to-neck with South Korea). Their next target probably is to master making submarine and nuclear propulsion.
What I am looking forward is that assuming Chinese battery maker managed to lead the world both in research and manufacturing because massive Chinese Electric Vehicle growth, will it helps Chinese's submarine and drone development?
I don’t know how these things wind up on Hacker News, but I oddly appreciate the break from things like “Use Vim to wash your clothes”.
1. There are websites to foster fears of warmongering (or to assure oneself that Red Dawn can never happen) such as Global Firepower. Here is the USA vs China. When I’m feeling unpatriotic, it can be fun to play with this website and imagine the torment we could cause our enemies, despite us not being able to regulate ride-sharing companies.
2. I’m not sure why military expenditures should matter so starkly. If I buy a 10 laser cannons for $1 million, and you spend $50 million on 5 million rifles, I might still beat you with my Stormtrooper weapon. Point is, it matters more on what you’re buying and building - and how you manage projects - than raw costs.
3. This article is not really new. The NY Times made a similar clickbait headline a few years back. The Brookings Institute rebutted it then.
4. The IQ arguments are specious. If IQ won wars, we wouldn’t have any. Also, I’ll take Patton, Lincoln, and Washington over their adversaries of the time, despite their adversaries being noted for their intellect. Lastly, what’s IQ got to do with anything in regards to China, a country that doesn’t reward innovative free enterprise. Their best and brightest aren’t at liberty to try their hand in the marketplace of ideas, but are forced to build what the Party says must be built. And those are just the ones that get found out. I imagine the truly bright minds of China stay in academia, escape, or humbly work the rice fields and keep their head down. I would. Why risk notoriety?
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[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 135 ms ] threadThey won’t though because the Chinese Communist Party is fucking scary and doesn’t take to being commented on.
All those little plastic widgets and cheap clothes we import are paying for this navy.
A lot of the aesthetics looked like they are meant to portray the Nazis, but the empire lacks (to my knowledge, I'm not really into it) the "we must exterminate the undesirables" part and feels much closer like an authoritarian power that branches out and suppresses dissent, classical empire stuff, but without the crazy. That sounds about right for the CCP.
To quote William Gibson “the future is already here it’s just not well diffused yet”.
So what will our world really look like if we extrapolate from now?
I’ll bet it’s less neon and flying cars and more boarded up retail shops and government sponsored troll farms.
The CCP isn’t building this navy for fun.
Does anything China’s done recently make you think they lack ambition?
Just look at the extent of their fishing operations.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jul/27/chinese-...
No technological advancement? Has the CCP indicated that they'd prefer a stand still on that front?
I'm sure the future will be different as is expected when a large power claims its place. Whether the losses will be in the West or primarily in the Third World will be a major question. So far, the Chinese seem not too much into large scale empire building, but primarily exercising control over "their backyard", similar to Russia in Ukraine etc and the US in Latin America. But that might change, of course, if they ever become the most powerful nation with a similar margin over the rest as the US has enjoyed for the last decades.
But it is cultural genocide with widespread, systemic rape, torture and murder.
Also it is questionable about whether they are free to leave the Xinjiang area.
That's a big word do you have any proof other than military thinktanks rehashing the same old nonsense?
What's a good estimate on how many have been tortured, raped and murdered? (To use your words)
When the US still has more people in prison predominantly of one race (not per capita either, gross numbers) it's perhaps a good time to talk about the systemic imprisonment of black people that no one seems to flinch about.
For all the talk of Uyghurs literally no Western country is taking them in, do you see the UK or US lining up to take in a million Muslim separatists?
It's yellow peril all over again. Why is the UN human rights commissioner repeatedly refusing to visit the region despite getting numerous requests? Why are Muslim Western allies visiting and finding nothing extreme that matches the constant media bombardment we receive in the West? Our Western aligned Muslim allies are literally signing multicountry letters to the UNHRC saying that it's all a media beatup and yet no one here really wants to talk about that.
Are we really going to base all this on evidence from the people that insisted Saddam had weapons of Mass Destruction and that justified a 20 year war that resulted in millions of deaths mostly civilian? Do you honestly trust them this time aroundor is it _different_ this time?
https://medium.com/@jerry_grey2002/abc-four-corners-tell-the... Here's a solid read from an Australian policeman who cycled through Xinjiang province, nothing he sees lines up with the rhetoric you'll find from internet commentators who have never been to China.
Local sources like the NCHRD had the number of concentration camp inmates at 2 to 3 million already back in 2018. Of course it is possible that most have starved since or have become organ donors, so numbers are hard to pin down.
[1] https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/muslims-...
WestWorld (season 3) comes to mind but doesn't have the communist structure; but any future dystopia would likely see the party replaced by algorithms leaving just the inner circle and the proles.
It’s probably closer to the truth to imagine a world with no Western intellectual property or manufacturing.
That will mean “interesting” changes.
For example, what would it mean if most western pharmaceutical companies fail and access to cutting edge medicine was only available through China?
What power would that give the CCP and what would they do with that considering their current ambition?
Look at their expanding South American fishing fleet and naval action in the South China Sea for clues.
The Made In China 2025 plan focuses on pharmaceutical, automotive, aerospace, semiconductor, IT and robotics manufacturing. The goal is to have a state of the art position in all those fields by 2025.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025
It’s not secret but Netflix and Amazon aren’t exactly rushing to layout what the future will look like when the Chinese achieve these goals.
https://www.worlddata.info/iq-by-country.php
China is also pursuing eugenic strategies with the one-child policy, and controlled migration into cities (which encourages assortative mating). The Fertility Rate of 1.6 is reasonable.
By contrast many Western countries are pursuing dysgenic strategies through the provision of mass-welfare, and the intake of migrants from lower-IQ countries.
China just needs to sit back for 30-50 years and wait for these trends to play out, if it has the patience. We're already seeing the first reports of IQ declines:
https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/iq-rates-are-dropping-...
Let’s go through it piece by piece:
Enough about IQ we could bang on more about statistical significance and anything between 85 - 115 is average but lets move on to the real meat to be refuted. Now the real BS partIf not using eugenic strategies means loosing some war, I think I would opt for defeat and welcome our new Chinese overlords.
The UK did a lot of that in the 1950s through the 1980s, and it resulted in "lemon socialism" - the government had all the declining industries. Coal, steel, and railroads, mostly.
Japan did better, with MITI telling industry what to do, and advanced the country enormously. Until the 1989 bubble collapse and real estate crash, from which Japan never fully recovered.
Aircraft development is hard. Many states have tried sponsoring programs and they have mostly been duds, like Japan and Russia; even successful ones, like Canada's Bombardier and Brazil's Embraer, have or were about to sell to the Boeing-Airbus duopoly because the costs of additional aircraft development are far too high now. Pretty much every commercial aircraft program has come in late and over budget in recent years. And the MAX8 situation has made things worse for everybody involved because rather than take peer agencies' word for it, everyone is going to want to run their own stringent tests now.
That said, maybe we're due for an Escape from Honk Kong.
They have already successfully infiltrated most international and political organisations as well as the international press to ensure there is no consensual united stand taken against them.
They can successfully carry out mass sterilisation and genocide campaigns with little or no blow-back from anyone.
What amazes me is how few recognise the extraordinary threat they pose to the world today.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
I thought Obama already refuted this in 2012[2]
[2]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GK3ORgw-h_4
Also, the us military has a record of overplaying foreign military power, be it out of caution, keeping a low profile, or angling for more budget.
U.S. navy has more aircraft carriers than rest of the world combined. I don't see how any objective sense metric how China is even close to "largest" Navy. Sure if you count every boat/warship each navy has they might be larger. Just like Iraq had the largest army just by number of soldiers.
Non-PPP-normalized GDP is a better metric than normalized GDP in this case, as it also captures the ability of their economy to purchase things on the international market. China doesn't make all its military technology internally (and couldn't given it still hasn't caught up to the state of the art in e.g. semiconductors).
Also, IIRC the EU as a block has a bigger GDP than the US by some margin, and yet isn’t a “joint superpower”.
Money is a necessary, but not sufficient condition.
Barring a catastrophe in the US, you need to look at the numbers: Japan is quite small, most of it land is mountains, it has barely any natural resources, its population is about a third of the US's. There was some hysteria in the 80s but factually with such numbers Japan could never have surpassed the US.
In addition to that, because of WWII Japan is basically satellite state of the US, which means it cannot do as it pleases militarily (and even politically).
On the other hand, China is larger than the continental US, has plenty of natural resources, and has a population 4x that of the US. It is also, of course, not subjected to US domination.
The role are reversed and, as China develops, the numbers indicates that China essentially will dwarf the US.
This is really what has dawned on the American government and what explains their actions. They're not panicking yet but they are certainly alarmed (Japan never alarmed anyone in the D.C area since 1945).
Even the EU makes the US uneasy because, again, they know that the EU can be bigger than they are.
[1] https://defaakto.com/2020/07/18/chinas-other-presence-in-afr...
edit: I personally don't support any of their current & future war mongering and naval ambitions. The right foreign policy for the US would be maximum pressure and if they don't play by Western rules we should go to war with them immediately (we should have done so the moment they said Taiwan belongs to the PLC or when the news of the Uyghurs broke). Not doing so means we're only postponing this for a later point (when they are even stronger and when the damage will be even bigger on both sides).
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2010-07-01/andy-grov...
Gross tonnage or number of capital ships over a specific tonnage would be a better comparison.
US Military spending in 2019: $732 billion, or 3.4% GDP
China leapfrogged the U.S. by spending a little less than one third of what the US squandered. Just let that sink in.
Oh and you know what China really is spending its money on, instead of militarized local police forces? Research.
China R&D spending in 2018: 4.11% of GDP.
U.S. R&D spending in 2016 and max ever spent: 2.7% GDP
The inefficiencies in how armaments are produced and procured are a large part of that: due to political pressure (every state wants a slice of the pie) the manufacture of the Eurofighter (and all other Airbus/EADS products) is spread across the continent instead of one place.
That is an important point. It is a strategic objective of the US to be able project massive military power any place in the world. However that is not the case for China (as it is now). China's main strategic goal is secure access to the pacific ocean (even if it is met with an American naval blockade).
It is obvious to me that that goal is much cheaper than the American goal.
I think the Chinese objective is to have enough power to deny U.S. access to the South China Sea, and perhaps the sea of Japan. They also want to be able to project power in the case of more limited conflicts, such as civil wars in Africa or the Middle East.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_island_chain
I think it is a given at this point that the US will loose supremacy in the area because of the size of the Chinese economy and the fact that the South China Sea is their home-turf.
We are arming our enemies.
The US has by far the most advanced and sophisticated weaponry of any military and that level of sophistication can hardly be captured by pure statistics alone.
And while as a non-expert I can't confidently comment on the advantages and drawbacks of sophistication vs pure manpower/number of units, I wouldn't be surprised if in today's geopolitical environment the former is more important than the later.
Though I think it's likely that the US approach is more about reducing casualties in order to lower the political barrier to war than anything else. After all, in a democracy you lose a war when the people are no longer willing to support it anymore. China doesn't have this problem and continue fighting regardless of the number of deaths sustained.
"China continued its yearslong run of double-digit percentage increases in spending on R&D in 2019, but the nation is likely to fall short of a long-standing goal of increasing R&D expenditures to 2.5% of gross domestic product (GDP) by this year."
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/08/china-again-boosts-r...
But there is a real change afoot, it seems likely that the Chinese will master making battleships if they put their mind to it. It seems likely they have the industrial supply chains to sustain a real military build-up if they want to. Their manufacturing capacity is a very real thing and they're are no shortage of brilliant, well educated and respectable Chinese engineers, scientists and workers.
It is notable that they probably have cutting edge capabilities in nuclear engineering, software engineering and manufacturing engineering. They definitely know how to build drones better than everyone else. Hopefully the future of warfare doesn't involve drones.
What I am looking forward is that assuming Chinese battery maker managed to lead the world both in research and manufacturing because massive Chinese Electric Vehicle growth, will it helps Chinese's submarine and drone development?
also aging rapidly
china will be another japan in a few decades
1. There are websites to foster fears of warmongering (or to assure oneself that Red Dawn can never happen) such as Global Firepower. Here is the USA vs China. When I’m feeling unpatriotic, it can be fun to play with this website and imagine the torment we could cause our enemies, despite us not being able to regulate ride-sharing companies.
2. I’m not sure why military expenditures should matter so starkly. If I buy a 10 laser cannons for $1 million, and you spend $50 million on 5 million rifles, I might still beat you with my Stormtrooper weapon. Point is, it matters more on what you’re buying and building - and how you manage projects - than raw costs.
3. This article is not really new. The NY Times made a similar clickbait headline a few years back. The Brookings Institute rebutted it then.
4. The IQ arguments are specious. If IQ won wars, we wouldn’t have any. Also, I’ll take Patton, Lincoln, and Washington over their adversaries of the time, despite their adversaries being noted for their intellect. Lastly, what’s IQ got to do with anything in regards to China, a country that doesn’t reward innovative free enterprise. Their best and brightest aren’t at liberty to try their hand in the marketplace of ideas, but are forced to build what the Party says must be built. And those are just the ones that get found out. I imagine the truly bright minds of China stay in academia, escape, or humbly work the rice fields and keep their head down. I would. Why risk notoriety?
1. https://www.globalfirepower.com/countries-comparison-detail....
2. https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/09/10/w...
To put into perspective, according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy "[The USN] is larger than the next 13 navies combined, which includes 11 U.S. allies or partner nations"