It's absolutely foolish for the US not to offer open immigration to anyone in Taiwan without a felony conviction, or even without one in the past 10 years.
Best way to deal with this without risking US troops or risking WWIII is to just drain the island of all its talent and ambition.
Same goes for Russia. We should be offering open immigration to anyone fleeing Russia who passes a security check. Drain Putin's brains.
Brain drain from Nazi Germany and the USSR were arguably factors that propelled the US to superpower status in the 20th century.
I should have qualified that with: if China is actually going to invade and we can’t stop them.
I don’t think you are going to convince the US leadership to go to war directly against a nuclear power for Taiwan. They won’t for Ukraine either. If Taiwan can resist like Ukraine they will supply Taiwan, but China is considerably stronger and more advanced than Russia. I don’t think that level of resistance is likely.
If I were Taiwanese I’d rather have the option of having a good place to go as an alternative to forceful subjugation by a totalitarian power.
So you want America to publicly declare that it will not lift a finger to defend its ally, and instead skim the top of the cream of Taiwanese society and leave their friends and relatives to die in war? If the Taiwanese wanted to defend their country they should have learned to do it themselves, ha ha.
Imagine what kind of message this sends to people of Japan, South Korea, or Poland.
The message everyone hears from that is that if your country is threatened by an aggressive power, we'll give it up but let you flee it and come to us.
TSMC being essentially exclusive to Taiwan when it comes to leading edge nodes is paramount to the national security of Taiwan there is no way that the Taiwanese government would allow them to diversify.
TSMC is has been teasing both the US and the EU but they aren’t going to move anything substantial out of Taiwan.
ASML is essential to chip manufacturing and it's european, what about EU restricting exports for security reasons if Taiwan do the same?
I don't think chip factories will save Taiwan from chinese war, too much nationalism fueled by communist party and too weak economy in long term.
They very much serve as a trip wire defense. Taiwan famously has a scorched earth policy in regards to its own industry and they will physically destroy manufacturing plants and IP if they’ll ever be invaded.
This is done to both deter China and to push the west put their support behind Taiwan.
So there is zero analogy to ASML, Zeiss and a few other European players that are critical to the SC industry.
I think one day or another China will attack Taiwan anyway, scorched earth policy or west support (which to an island will be extremely difficult) are irrelevant, and so is Taiwan tech export policy.
* Russia has spent years financially divorcing itself from the West. China has no economy without the West. Being an energy exporter makes you much more independent than being a manufacturer.
* Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task. Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
* The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause.
Another key difference is that Russia is in decline and China believes they are in ascent. One of the main reasons Russia attacked in 2022 is because they believed that an attack would be more difficult in future years.
OTOH China believes that their balance of military power is increasing relative to Taiwan and the west so an invasion will be easier in the future. Better to wait than invade in 2023.
Loosing West as a trade partner will really hurt China but it will not be the end. There is the rest of the world to trade with. China is building trade with Africa, South America, Asia etc. etc.
Besides I do not think a real decoupling will happen bar some major catastrophe. It will be as much economic disaster for the West at its current stage as it will be for China.
As energy importer China can rely on Russia, SA and other oil rich countries whom the US does not love very much. So I'd say they're safe in this regard.
>"The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause."
I do not think China even needs this example. They can just simply wait.
Can they protect the sea supply lines from the US navy? Highly doubtful. Without those China grinds to a halt and starves. They are highly dependent on the americas for their food.
Being an export economy losing your market is much more devastating.
In particular the US could declare a blockade and drop a handful of naval mines near Chinese ports. At that point almost all neutral merchant ships would have to avoid those ports because it's virtually impossible to obtain insurance in conflict zones, especially because insurers can't risk violating US financial sanctions.
Yes, of course. Declaring a blockade and mining harbors would only happen as a response to some sort of major aggressive act by China. It would be an act of war, but still a step below direct kinetic attacks on the Chinese military. It's possible to de-escalate from a blockade.
How? Oh please remove the blockade, we'll be a good girl from here on? Yeah sure. You think they would even let it get to the stage when harbors are mined?
The only realistic and safe course of actions is for the West to get their shit together and start very gradual decoupling. This will of course be reciprocal and the end result will be multi-polar world with ever changing alliances.
And after a while the trade between "enemies" will resume again and the circle will continue.
>"Can they protect the sea supply lines from the US navy?"
The US will not attack China's ships (assuming China did not start the war). Doing this is straight WWIII scenario. All bets are off in this case. You think the US is suicidal?
> * Russia has spent years financially divorcing itself from the West. China has no economy without the West.
True, but by the same token the West (and the rest of the East, and the world) has no economy without China. It makes everything higher stakes for everyone involved.
> * Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task.
Also true, but supplying a small island is also much harder than supplying a country with a large contiguous land border with you/your allies. All but one of Taiwan's major ports lie on the strait. And since Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine, it has less strategic depth than Ukraine; there's nowhere for Taiwanese troops to fall back to.
> Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
I'm increasingly convinced that China's first act of war won't be shipping troops to the beaches but a blockade. That then presents the US with an unenviable choice: escalate to a full on shooting war to break the blockade, or give control of Taiwan's imports/exports (which is to say, Taiwan) to China.
China's first act of war will most likely be to seize some of Taiwan's minor outlying islands. There are several such small islands which are close to mainland China and only lightly defended. Then depending on the strength of the international response (or lack thereof) they might escalate to a blockade.
If china wants to see how it’s ships fare against anti ship missiles and submersible drone boats, I think they’re going to have a bad time. I don’t think the US will bat an eye to breaking such a blockade either. The US cares a lot more about Taiwan than it cares about Ukraine.
They are however rapidly strengthening their navy and air force. Eventually the US navy in the area might be outgunned to a degree that forces their retreat.
"Eventually" here is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's possible it will happen, of course, but is not within the realm of possible futures within the next ten to fifteen years.
For better or worse, the US is easily the most powerful force projection entity in world history. This was true before Russia was revealed to be badly broken and is more true now.
The superior ability of the US to project force in distant places does not inherently translate to the ability to beat China in its own backyard. The US has more and (much) better carriers, but China has, well, China, and a whole lot of missiles and planes there.
The thing about a blockade is that you just have to get commercial vessels to not want to enter targeted ports. Even excluding financial and economic tools that China can leverage against companies and supposing China's military couldn't compete with the US near its coasts (debatable), a world where the strait is littered with mines and blasted with missiles is a world where Taiwan is effectively blockaded.
And the US cares a lot more about Taiwan than Ukraine, but there's an equally large gap between how much China cares about Taiwan and how much the US does.
It doesn’t really matter though. If the CCP blockades Taiwan it just declared economic war on the west.
Will China be able to guarantee continued oil shipments safely reaching China? Food? Can China afford a slow economic burn while it blockades Taiwan for ambiguous gains?
I'm not arguing that China wouldn't wreck its economy by invading Taiwan. It would, and economic disaster would not be an overstatement.
But it would be able to wage its war. For food it's fine, although people would certainly be eating much less pork for a long time. Oil is the critical limiting resource; China consumes around 15 million barrels a day. But it domestically produces 4 million barrels a day (it once was doing around 5, but shut down some as they became uneconomic), can scale up to around a million barrels per day of imports from Russia and Central Asia, and has a stockpile of around a billion barrels. Most manufacturing except for militarily relevant industries would be shut down, and it would impose domestic rationing to decrease its baseline consumption by a couple million barrels. Depending on how you model things, China could maintain its wartime footing for at least a year and potentially indefinitely.
Painful for China, yes, but also economically horrendous for the rest of the world. As soon as the war starts, all of East Asia would be thrown into an immediate depression, as at a minimum 10% of economic activity is shut down overnight. Oil prices fall, putting severe pressure on oil producers whose economies themselves collapse. The EU and the USA themselves tumble into recession, as supply chains are destroyed. Domestic politics would react negatively to the new reality, and there'd be no Pearl Harbor event to motivate Western voters to prosecute a war for an island most can't even locate on a map.
Everyone would be in for a world of pain, and everyone would want a resolution of the crisis as quickly as possible. If China starts a war, it will be because it believes it can maintain itself in an economic calamity longer than the US and its allies can.
>Can China afford a slow economic burn while it blockades Taiwan for ambiguous gains?
Every year this becomes increasingly the wrong question to ask.
Who is going to blockade PRC? US?
Entire Malacca dilemma / anxiety / blockade scenario from 10+ years ago was underpinned by US having full naval escalation dominance with CONUS impunity because adversaries had no technical means to meaningfully undermine US homefront.
That leverage has essentially eroded with PRC ICBMs being able to conventional strike against CONUS infra in the last few years. PRC can simply run blockade and dare US to enforce by threatening to hit 130 refineries that sustains US existential viability. Fortress America era that has worked in US favour for 200+ years is over (vis a vis increasing PRC peer capabilities), if both PRC and US critical infra gets reset to zero, neither country has energy mix options or ag production (which depends on inputs derived from oil) that can even marginally sustain current society. The same ability to CONUS strikes also threatens major military capital projection assets.
The geostrategic reality when big bois have increasingly precise conventional long range strikes is US becomes Saudi Arabia, all the domestic production doesn't matter if you can't protect it against motivated advesary that has capbility to strike your extraction infra. PRC will guarantee continued SLOC access by guaranteeing US won't have access to any energy or calories if it attempts to to deny like access to PRC.
The pertinent question now is:
Can US afford an existential war with PRC for ambiguous gains? Medium/long term PRC incentive is stacked towards gambling an existential fightng US (using TW as proxy) to kick US out of PRC back yard, vs US who can afford to retreat to CONUS and pull strings as offshore balancer with intact navy and society at much less relative cost. US, by virtue of being hegemon has much more to lose if she gambles to lose everything versus foregoing something. VS PRC has everything to gain in TW scenario while long term game theory for worst case scenario is converging towards pyrrhic victory for US that would deter substantial US intervention at all.
Nope. Nor can China get away with missile attacks on various important domestic facilities in the US either without inviting similar obviously unbearable levels of destruction on themselves
IMO they would for same reason US TLAMs via sea/air or other stand off attacks aren't distinguishable from nukes. US has nuke capable ordnances using just about every delivery method, but US adversaries have to plan game theory / retaliation according to mere existence of overlapping conventional capabilities and their use doctrine. Utlimately, PRC is not going to sit idly by while her SLOC is being choked without retaliating within her means, the distinction being PRC rocket force can technically, for first time in modern US history, bring retaliation/escalation conventionally to CONUS. The intent is to deter nuclear war by deterring conventional war between US/PRC in the first place. It is also setting the stakes for who is willing to fight existential conventional wars over what.
With respect to TW, old nuclear consensus was PRC was more willing to trade Beijing for TW than US willing to trade Los Angeles for TW. US response at height of conventional military primacy was, if PRC wants TW than US, but we will impose crippling conventional costs in lieu of going nuclear. New conventional dynamic PRC is setting is, PRC wants TW more than US and if US tries to intervene then there will be existential costs on both homelands.
> True, but by the same token the West (and the rest of the East, and the world) has no economy without China. It makes everything higher stakes for everyone involved.
Both EU and US would actually benefit from manufacturing moving back. EU needs to do something about its stupidly car-centric economy and for US it just might help bring about a cultural shift away from extreme consumerism towards something more sustainable.
> ... supplying a small island is also much harder than supplying a country with a large contiguous land border with you/your allies. All but one of Taiwan's major ports lie on the strait. And since Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine, it has less strategic depth than Ukraine; there's nowhere for Taiwanese troops to fall back to.
They are armed with missiles to the teeth and they can hit some rather sensitive places in China. They will just claim that they are defending their independent country while China can't really domestically explain carpet or nuclear bombing "their own citizens". And there are unofficial communication lines open to work around censorship.
> I'm increasingly convinced that China's first act of war won't be shipping troops to the beaches but a blockade. That then presents the US with an unenviable choice: escalate to a full on shooting war to break the blockade, or give control of Taiwan's imports/exports (which is to say, Taiwan) to China.
I expect brain drain and leaving rest of the Taiwan to China while officially protesting it and banning Taiwanese products from US/EU markets for a couple of years to help local spin-offs stabilize. But Taiwanese might choose to fight, in which case US/EU will happily supply weapons.
Not as car centric as US or Canada but compared to the rest of the world EU is very car centric. At least the US and Canada are vast and their cities are much more young.
Americans have this romantic view of Europe as old dense cities.
That doesn’t make our economy car-centric… a car-centric economy would mean most of the GDP in the EU originates from automobile production, which is just laughably untrue.
> US it just might help bring about a cultural shift away from extreme consumerism towards something more sustainable.
If the US's best defense against a China-initiated economic war is to give up consumerism, that doesn't give me a great deal of hope for Taiwan.
More generally, it would be great for manufacturing to move back to the EU and the US. But that can't happen on the scale of months or even years; in a war with China, we'd face huge supply chain disruptions for the duration.
> They are armed with missiles to the teeth and they can hit some rather sensitive places in China.
This isn't a realistic appraisal of Taiwan's military capabilities. China dominates Taiwan on all aspects of military power; fanciful ideas about blowing up the Three Gorges Dam aside, China doesn't worry too much about Taiwan's military.
> I expect brain drain and leaving rest of the Taiwan to China while officially protesting it and banning Taiwanese products from US/EU markets for a couple of years to help local spin-offs stabilize.
As bad and dumb as this outcome would be, China would consider it a total victory.
> Taiwanese might choose to fight, in which case US/EU will happily supply weapons.
You have to get those weapons to Taiwan somehow, and Taiwan would need to be able to launch them from somewhere. China has effective countermeasures to both if American engagement is limited to that.
Taiwan is very close to the ryukyus, which has a heavy American presence. They aren’t so isolated as far islands go, blockading Taiwan would be really hard for China with Japan and the Philippines not very friendly with China.
> ...ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in
Assuming the CCP is willing to throw the PLA(N) into a charnel house, there are certain scenarios where they can trickle them in after a fashion. The eastern seaboard of China has more than 500,000 fishing vessels that can be mustered across the Strait, even in inclement weather if safety of the boats, crews, and the fire team to squad level passengers and their gear was ignored.
QUAD and Taiwan together doesn’t have enough missiles and anti-ship weaponry to sink enough of these boats to avoid a beachhead being established. In inclement conditions target acquisition of the small boats is very difficult. Not all boats need to hold troops. Not all of them need to be manned at all. Plenty of convoying drones in self-organizing meshes can carry supplies and surviving hulls can run aground at the beachhead to offer supply depots plus cover and concealment for manned boats. The CCP could use the massacre of this missile-absorbing force as a pretext to go nuclear on US CBG’s. They could “throw away” these lives on an unimaginably cruel scale.
And still have more than enough troops left over to mount a legitimate invasion with “real” ships after pretty much all missiles are expended.
There are many ways it can go pear-shaped in a hurry for either side. The only winning move is not to play.
It's probably not the route China will take, but China has pioneered gray zone tactics in the SCS, using paramilitarized fishing ships to harass other vessels and extend its influence. But yeah, transporting hundreds of thousands troops in them through a hot war seems a logistical nightmare.
China is actually in a better spot than Russia to detach from the west. They make things, their people can definitely use those things, they rely on the west for cash but not really for things anymore. Russia will trade with them for their energy needs, food, mostly soy beans to feed pigs, is where their most of their challenge lies, but they have plenty of trading partners that are not very influenced by the west for that also.
No it is not. China is the king of cheap low end manufacture. The really high end production machinery tends to come from outside. They are far from independent.
They do get lots of machinery from Germany, they can’t produce it as efficiently, but that doesn’t mean they can’t produce it at all. Don’t assume they don’t have a plan B even if it isn’t as cheap as plan A.
I would suspect Russia’s pain in Ukraine serves as an effective deterrent.
If China started amassing amphibious invasion forces near Taiwan, I’d expect the US to fill Taiwan with every javelin and stinger missile they can spare.
Ukraine isnt a deterrant. Taiwan isn't surrounded by US yes-men countries. Most Asian nations will choose not to get involved in any continuation of a Chinese civil war.
> Taiwan isn't surrounded by US yes-men countries.
Taiwan is close to key US allies (Japan and Korea) and several other nations that aren't huge fans of China lately. It's also more protected than Ukraine by natural features, i.e. a strait the Chinese invasion force would have to cross in an amphibious assault.
The deterrent from Ukraine is that conflict's showing how effective large numbers of man-portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles can be on an invasion force.
Do you believe Japan and South Korea would put their populations at risk to interfere in a Chinese civil war? I highly doubt it, they are smarter than that.
Both countries prefer a defensive posture in military deployment. If it isnt a threat to South Korea and Japan's territory, they will be reluctant to engage.
I don't expect either to risk escalating kenetic engagement with China for a 3rd party like Taiwan. This reunification glacier is moving in one direction and nobody in the neighborhood (except Taiwan) will be willing to stand in its path.
I bet they are carefully looking at the Ukraine war and observing the actions of the West, and the effect it has - and use this information in their planning.
I don’t think they want to oversee another 3rd world province. Might as well leave the locals in charge and just extract their resources at a deep discount
China barely cares about its own far north, let alone Siberia. It would much prefer to have Russia as a client state ready to supply oil and gas in the case of a war where sea routes for those are cut off.
I know it’s the social-popular thing, shit on their behavior and all - but this is just plain wrong.
China is building up, they’re the real historical successor the “it’s Hitler all over again” rather than Russia (maybe they get to be Italy?)
Not only that, but “tough” animals will signal greatly their desire to fight before engaging in the actual fight to intimidate their opposition. The actual fight will come at great cost regardless of power.
Yeah, you have to start building experience from somewhere. The Chinese Navy is both building many ships [0] (of which many would argue are among the most advanced in the world) and building operational experience [1] [2] [3]. While the Chinese Navy lacks actual combat experience, training if done properly can be very effective in its own right. It's only reasonable that the second largest economy in the world could sustain this level of development. China has the means and the will to build a very formidable navy.
Information coming from China can be suspect and I understand why some think their navy is a paper tiger. However, their ships are very real and their training exercises are also real, all sighted and confirmed by other navies. It's probably best to not underestimate their capability.
That's only worrying if they can reliably detect nuclear submarines. Until then, all it takes is a couple dozen torpedoes and their best ships get a free trip to the bottom of the ocean.
Worth noting that these drills aren't really newsworthy. They occur in international waters, have been ongoing since 2019, and are smaller than the drills the US has conducted in the South China Sea.
They didn't conduct "invade and colonize China" exercises. It's somewhat like the difference between carrying a weapon and brandishing it threateningly.
- Complete shutdown of all businesses not related to pharmacy or hospital, probably until April 2023. This includes factories. Check out on the ground videos by https://www.youtube.com/@xiaorenwu/videos, you will see completely empty malls, subways, and streets. Not only that, you will note all the anger from normal citizens, which is only really publicly visible this year. EDIT: the shutdown is either mandated by city, or voluntarily by the merchant, since nobody is traveling out to shop in fear of contracting covid.
- Few hundred thousand small and mid size business closures/bankruptcies. China does not provide small business relief like US did, so these closures are permanent.
- Market laggards like Apple finally moving out of China, and the rest of manufacturing laggards to follow
- Multinational consumer product companies moving out of China or reducing footprint
- Real estate collapse still unresolved
- Demographics collapse still unresolved
- Total debt still unresolved
- Closer alliance with Russia, and alienation from democratic countries. QUAD, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Europe all are aligning against China and Russia now.
So China's only card it can play is, being as sick as it is for at least a year more, is to be a paper tiger. and threatens with empty promise.
> So China's only card it can play is, being as sick as it is for at least a year more, is to be a paper tiger. and threatens with empty promise.
Everything you wrote before this, and in particular "you will note all the anger from normal citizens" is reason enough to worry that this time it might be more than an empty promise. China may end up needing more than sabre rattling to distract its citizens this time.
Millions of deaths per day is just outright fantasy. It's estimated that total COVID deaths China will occur now that they're pivoting from zero COVID to herd immunity will be 2-3 million. Not to mention, the vast majority of people adversely affected by COVID aren't military age.
China still would lose far more than it'd gain from invading Taiwan. This [1] does a good analysis of the geopolitical consequences of such an action. That said, the same was true about Russia invading Ukraine, but it happened anyway. The right path is to do rigorous analysis but be honest about the uncertainty.
I've seen these arguments turned on their head. From the perspective of a cynical elite, war solves many of these problems.
* Angry populace? Give them a fresh target for the anger and a fresh rationalization for their suffering.
* Small business apocalypse? Re-tooling for war creates an abundance of new opportunity.
* Loads of debt? Use war as an excuse to default. It is uniquely positioned to rationalize default while minimally impacting credit worthiness going forward.
* Trust issues in savings and real estate? War bonds are totally different!
* Spare men? Send them to die in war. It's the historical solution to the problem.
My inability to assign likelihoods to these bags of problems really demonstrates how little I know about national policy. Then again, wars have historically caught many experts flat-footed, so perhaps nobody else knows very much either.
On the ground in Beijing. I don't know what happened last week / the week before, was sick enough. However restaurants were all f-ing full on Christmas Eve.
It seems like that China just played the herd immunity card and get a really sharp wave due to Omicron and ineffective vaccines.
China is thrashing while the rest of East Asia is starting to feel confident
Look at Japanese Bonds, Look at Taiwanese resolve, look at Korean growth - Chinese citizens are starting to recognize that the only thing the CCP has left is fear and domination and they aren't going to support it anymore
So the CCP are going to freak out and start acting crazy, in a (hopefully) futile attempt to get people to react so they can mobilize domestically around national pride.
I trust that the Taiwanese people have the resolve, and the US has the resolve to support them in their resistance to these tantrums without overreacting.
East Asia after a period of sustained growth is experiencing serious headwinds.
Japan: Japanese bonds is taking a breather but a continued strengthening of USD will put serious risk of currency devaluation and its stock market is largely owned by the Japanese central banks.
Taiwan: Not good. DPP made a major election mistake by ignoring that many Taiwanese want to keep the status quo as the reality of their security situation hits-If the US and coalition wanted to defend Taiwan it would start building military bases, so far all they've done is the same approach to Ukraine-talk them over the edge and when conflict breaks out supply them with severely limited weaponry to not escalate risk by being directly involved.
Korea: Major 3ish sigma event coming to its household debt, pension pyramid scheme blowing up, municipal and government bonds tied to a rapidly deflating real estate bubble, the loss of China, its biggest trading partner, responsible for a huge chunk of its GDP. With increased competition from Taiwan's TSMC and its status as a sort of canary in the mine for global trade activity, all of this is creating a perfect storm. But the biggest punch will be its birth rate and it will be forced to turn to uptaking massive number of migrant workers, possible north korean collapse. I would grade Korea to be the first piece of the domino to trigger another Asian Financial Crisis. This time with much reduced bargaining chip as globalization is being phased out and you see all the investments being made outside their respective countries.
China: Major policy errors have put CCP in an impossible place. It's increasingly looking like Russia prior to invading Ukraine. Rapidly declining economy and aging population with accelerating low birth rate. They will not wait until Japan has finished building up its military. There's an angle to this lockdown system in that its a major way to mobilize and isolate large chunks of the population and unfortunately combined with the surveillance apparatus (the largest internal security on earth) and low morale amongst its people contribute to even more urgency to begin conflict.
The CCP leaders are probably smart enough to learn from what has happened in Russia-Ukraine. The degree to which "modern", by which I mean weapons that entered real development thirty years ago, weaponry has proven to be effective in a defensive context is a completely new experience in warfare. Russia isn't defeated, but the cost of undermining what most would have traditionally viewed as a fast victory has been shockingly low.
I'm not so sure about that. Since the bubble burst, Japan's GDP per capita has been flat for 20+ years. And South Korea is on the verge of a population implosion, with its pathetic 0.81 fertility rate. 2020s will be a challenging time for these countries.
>Look at Japanese Bonds, Look at Taiwanese resolve, look at Korean growth - Chinese citizens are starting to recognize that the only thing the CCP has left is fear and domination and they aren't going to support it anymore
I can't comment on the other items, but there's a fairly benign reason for the surge in japanese bonds as of late. It's not because the economy suddenly got better. It's because the BoJ relaxed their yield control policy, presumably because inflation was running rampant and they needed to do something.
The sentiment behind the Japanese bond market is literally increased defense posture so that they do not rely on foreign bond sales to bolster their domestic defense capacity
The govt just passed a stunningly aggressive military budget
This is high level strategic and intentional diplomacy my friend. Plenty of FP articles discussing precisely this.
China’s economy is slowing down long-term. This means that there is likely no longer sufficient constant increase in standards of living to keep the populace happy with the Party. A natural alternative for authoritarian regimes to keep their people in check is to nurture strong nationalism. This nationalism eventually tends to eat its own creators by pushing the leaders to declare war.
I mean, that's a theory I have heard, and subscribed too, but what's an actual example of this occurring in history? Nationalism and aggression was baked into Nazi Germany and Italy from the get go. Japan went to war in China in the 1930s not because of a ruling clique that wanted to maintain power, but because of the rogue actions of military officers. The subsequent declaration of war was about losing in China vs. internal political pressure. The USSR's invasions of it's neighbors in the 20s through the 40s ( and then periodically in the Cold War) went unpunished until it collapsed. It's invasion of Afghanistan might fit, but that wasn't driven by Nationalism, but rather by a Marxist view of history. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait didn't lead to his downfall, that was more his incident lie that he had WMDs. Portugal and Spain had Nationalist governments well into the 70s that seemed pretty stable. The only example I can really think of is maybe Serbia during the break up of Yugoslavia? But that hardly feels like a generalizable example.
> Japan went to war in China in the 1930s not because of a ruling clique that wanted to maintain power, but because of the rogue actions of military officers.
This is myopic. Yes, the Manchurian Incident was kicked off the invasion of Manchuria and then the Second Sino-Japanese War was a rogue act by a few officers. But that was just the spark that started a bonfire; who piled all the wood up? Who was responsible for the decades of military buildup that preceded it? Were the acquisition of all those battleships and carriers a series of rogue acts as well? Before WW2, the Japanese government spent decades trying to maneuver Japan into being an imperialist world power that could rival America or the UK. The 'ruling clique' of Japan didn't strike the first spark, but they did labor to engineer the circumstance in which such a spark would inevitably find ample fuel to burn.
After World War 1, Japan grabbed parts of Siberia, Manchuria and hundreds of formerly German held islands.
There was a huge earthquake and subsequent fire that destroyed Tokyo on September 1st, 1923.
Here I quote a 1928 atlas from its article about Japan, after it mentions the then recent earthquake:
"The old saying which everyone is familiar with: "It's an ill wind which blows no one good," seems to be the case so far as the Japanese disaster is concerned. The United States seems to have been selected by a divine providence as the beneficiary of the Almighty in reducing Japan through the recent disaster to a state where she may, be considered as impotent to take up arms against the United States for at least ten years, it is estimated. It had been reported by military experts of the United States the Japan, prior to the earthquake, was preparing for a break with the United States and it was thought that they would strike during the years 1924 to 1927. With the rebuilding program ahead of Japan, thrift and saving, among both the government and people, alone will make it possible for Japan to revive."
The tone probably doesn't sit comfortably in modern ears, but remember this was written by an American over 90 years ago.
No, your missing my point. I'm not saying nationalism didn't cause the war, I'm saying it seems more externally driven than internally. Japan going to war was about becoming a major power and putting it in a position where it couldn't be colonized by external powers vice maintaining power by creating a common adversary. The incident in Manchuria surely wouldn't have been possible without those circumstances, but it also wasn't engineered to strengthen the Japanese ruling elite.
The entire PRC economy slowing down hence need to rely nationalism from west is more projection than reality.
Even pessemsitic estimates of 3-5% growth is plenty to maintain visible QoL upgrades YoY. PRC isn't going to be west for the foreseeable future where decline in standards is much more pronounced. More PRC citizens in T3/4+ cities (where majority are) will be buying their first cars or whatever fancy domestic gadgets are and feel their life is getting better. There's still huge visible improvements happening.
Or that perhaps the directionality of "eating own creators" prediction is wrong, sometimes war is strategically desirable, and if so, it's prudent to prepare population by cultivating nationalism. Which really there hasn't been much despite western reporting, it's more natural generational awakening among younger cohorts who grew up in richer regions of PRC that west isn't all that, especially when they are now trying to contain PRC prospects. By my estimate, right now state of PRC nationalism is more like 6/10 vs most Anglo countries are 8/10s. Fervent nationalism voices are still largely repressed from PRC mainstream narrative while the other "indicator" of PRC nationalism in western rags are some cosmopolitan kids starting to renfaire hanfu costumes and preferring domestic brands. It's nothing. Just like these exercises in response to new US TW policy act.
Let's suppose, hypothetically, that you wanted to demonstrate that you're not a CCP troll. What opinions do you have that contradict the CCP's position?
(I don't mean nuanced but safe ones like "they should have dropped the zero-COVID policy sooner" either.)
Nowadays HN are littered with people just assume any non-liberal-imperisim viewpoints, are just CCP dogs.
China daily.
I dont even know this thing until this moment.
Thanks, you are more like the "me" in your mind, than the real me in reality. I hope you haven't been poisoned by China Daily as bad as you have been by the Main Stream media.
Funny, right? The accuser found himself more like the stereotype depicted by his accusation than the accused.
How can you cite provocation to hold a drill, unless the "drill" is an attempt at intimidation? Drills are done by the military, in secret, to prepare for war, not blasted with a PR pitch to a sympathetic news organization willing to repeat the demands of terrorists and totalitarians.
The PRC's aggressive disregard for the exclusive economic zones of it's neighbors, paired with backing Russia's travesties in the Ukraine have has erased any goodwill that their refusal to participate in the Iraq War may have generated over ten years ago. It is now utterly transparent that their goal is to greedily gobble up the foundries of those who invent their own technology rather than steal it and invest those R&D savings in weapons they can then leverage to further coerce the smaller and more vulnerable.
132 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 132 ms ] threadTSMC in talks with suppliers over first European plant: https://www.reuters.com/technology/tsmc-talks-with-suppliers...
TSMC ups its Arizona chipmaking investment to $40 billion: https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/06/business/tsmc-arizona-investm...
Best way to deal with this without risking US troops or risking WWIII is to just drain the island of all its talent and ambition.
Same goes for Russia. We should be offering open immigration to anyone fleeing Russia who passes a security check. Drain Putin's brains.
Brain drain from Nazi Germany and the USSR were arguably factors that propelled the US to superpower status in the 20th century.
What an extremely callous and deeply cold-hearted thing to say about an ally. Imagine someone said that about the US?
I don’t think you are going to convince the US leadership to go to war directly against a nuclear power for Taiwan. They won’t for Ukraine either. If Taiwan can resist like Ukraine they will supply Taiwan, but China is considerably stronger and more advanced than Russia. I don’t think that level of resistance is likely.
If I were Taiwanese I’d rather have the option of having a good place to go as an alternative to forceful subjugation by a totalitarian power.
Imagine what kind of message this sends to people of Japan, South Korea, or Poland.
>Imagine what kind of message this sends to people of Japan, South Korea, or Poland.
An honest one.
That's... not reassuring for allies.
TSMC is has been teasing both the US and the EU but they aren’t going to move anything substantial out of Taiwan.
This is done to both deter China and to push the west put their support behind Taiwan.
So there is zero analogy to ASML, Zeiss and a few other European players that are critical to the SC industry.
* Russia has spent years financially divorcing itself from the West. China has no economy without the West. Being an energy exporter makes you much more independent than being a manufacturer.
* Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task. Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
* The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause.
OTOH China believes that their balance of military power is increasing relative to Taiwan and the west so an invasion will be easier in the future. Better to wait than invade in 2023.
Loosing West as a trade partner will really hurt China but it will not be the end. There is the rest of the world to trade with. China is building trade with Africa, South America, Asia etc. etc.
Besides I do not think a real decoupling will happen bar some major catastrophe. It will be as much economic disaster for the West at its current stage as it will be for China.
As energy importer China can rely on Russia, SA and other oil rich countries whom the US does not love very much. So I'd say they're safe in this regard.
>"The way Ukraine/Russia conflict is going is likely giving them pause."
I do not think China even needs this example. They can just simply wait.
Being an export economy losing your market is much more devastating.
How? Oh please remove the blockade, we'll be a good girl from here on? Yeah sure. You think they would even let it get to the stage when harbors are mined?
The only realistic and safe course of actions is for the West to get their shit together and start very gradual decoupling. This will of course be reciprocal and the end result will be multi-polar world with ever changing alliances.
And after a while the trade between "enemies" will resume again and the circle will continue.
The US will not attack China's ships (assuming China did not start the war). Doing this is straight WWIII scenario. All bets are off in this case. You think the US is suicidal?
Pretending to.
True, but by the same token the West (and the rest of the East, and the world) has no economy without China. It makes everything higher stakes for everyone involved.
> * Taiwan is an island. Invading an island is a much harder task.
Also true, but supplying a small island is also much harder than supplying a country with a large contiguous land border with you/your allies. All but one of Taiwan's major ports lie on the strait. And since Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine, it has less strategic depth than Ukraine; there's nowhere for Taiwanese troops to fall back to.
> Also very questionable if they actually have the ship capacity to transfer enough troops. You can't just trickle them in.
I'm increasingly convinced that China's first act of war won't be shipping troops to the beaches but a blockade. That then presents the US with an unenviable choice: escalate to a full on shooting war to break the blockade, or give control of Taiwan's imports/exports (which is to say, Taiwan) to China.
[1] https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/statement-senator-...
For better or worse, the US is easily the most powerful force projection entity in world history. This was true before Russia was revealed to be badly broken and is more true now.
And the US cares a lot more about Taiwan than Ukraine, but there's an equally large gap between how much China cares about Taiwan and how much the US does.
Will China be able to guarantee continued oil shipments safely reaching China? Food? Can China afford a slow economic burn while it blockades Taiwan for ambiguous gains?
But it would be able to wage its war. For food it's fine, although people would certainly be eating much less pork for a long time. Oil is the critical limiting resource; China consumes around 15 million barrels a day. But it domestically produces 4 million barrels a day (it once was doing around 5, but shut down some as they became uneconomic), can scale up to around a million barrels per day of imports from Russia and Central Asia, and has a stockpile of around a billion barrels. Most manufacturing except for militarily relevant industries would be shut down, and it would impose domestic rationing to decrease its baseline consumption by a couple million barrels. Depending on how you model things, China could maintain its wartime footing for at least a year and potentially indefinitely.
Painful for China, yes, but also economically horrendous for the rest of the world. As soon as the war starts, all of East Asia would be thrown into an immediate depression, as at a minimum 10% of economic activity is shut down overnight. Oil prices fall, putting severe pressure on oil producers whose economies themselves collapse. The EU and the USA themselves tumble into recession, as supply chains are destroyed. Domestic politics would react negatively to the new reality, and there'd be no Pearl Harbor event to motivate Western voters to prosecute a war for an island most can't even locate on a map.
Everyone would be in for a world of pain, and everyone would want a resolution of the crisis as quickly as possible. If China starts a war, it will be because it believes it can maintain itself in an economic calamity longer than the US and its allies can.
Every year this becomes increasingly the wrong question to ask.
Who is going to blockade PRC? US?
Entire Malacca dilemma / anxiety / blockade scenario from 10+ years ago was underpinned by US having full naval escalation dominance with CONUS impunity because adversaries had no technical means to meaningfully undermine US homefront.
That leverage has essentially eroded with PRC ICBMs being able to conventional strike against CONUS infra in the last few years. PRC can simply run blockade and dare US to enforce by threatening to hit 130 refineries that sustains US existential viability. Fortress America era that has worked in US favour for 200+ years is over (vis a vis increasing PRC peer capabilities), if both PRC and US critical infra gets reset to zero, neither country has energy mix options or ag production (which depends on inputs derived from oil) that can even marginally sustain current society. The same ability to CONUS strikes also threatens major military capital projection assets.
The geostrategic reality when big bois have increasingly precise conventional long range strikes is US becomes Saudi Arabia, all the domestic production doesn't matter if you can't protect it against motivated advesary that has capbility to strike your extraction infra. PRC will guarantee continued SLOC access by guaranteeing US won't have access to any energy or calories if it attempts to to deny like access to PRC.
The pertinent question now is:
Can US afford an existential war with PRC for ambiguous gains? Medium/long term PRC incentive is stacked towards gambling an existential fightng US (using TW as proxy) to kick US out of PRC back yard, vs US who can afford to retreat to CONUS and pull strings as offshore balancer with intact navy and society at much less relative cost. US, by virtue of being hegemon has much more to lose if she gambles to lose everything versus foregoing something. VS PRC has everything to gain in TW scenario while long term game theory for worst case scenario is converging towards pyrrhic victory for US that would deter substantial US intervention at all.
With respect to TW, old nuclear consensus was PRC was more willing to trade Beijing for TW than US willing to trade Los Angeles for TW. US response at height of conventional military primacy was, if PRC wants TW than US, but we will impose crippling conventional costs in lieu of going nuclear. New conventional dynamic PRC is setting is, PRC wants TW more than US and if US tries to intervene then there will be existential costs on both homelands.
Both EU and US would actually benefit from manufacturing moving back. EU needs to do something about its stupidly car-centric economy and for US it just might help bring about a cultural shift away from extreme consumerism towards something more sustainable.
> ... supplying a small island is also much harder than supplying a country with a large contiguous land border with you/your allies. All but one of Taiwan's major ports lie on the strait. And since Taiwan is much smaller than Ukraine, it has less strategic depth than Ukraine; there's nowhere for Taiwanese troops to fall back to.
They are armed with missiles to the teeth and they can hit some rather sensitive places in China. They will just claim that they are defending their independent country while China can't really domestically explain carpet or nuclear bombing "their own citizens". And there are unofficial communication lines open to work around censorship.
> I'm increasingly convinced that China's first act of war won't be shipping troops to the beaches but a blockade. That then presents the US with an unenviable choice: escalate to a full on shooting war to break the blockade, or give control of Taiwan's imports/exports (which is to say, Taiwan) to China.
I expect brain drain and leaving rest of the Taiwan to China while officially protesting it and banning Taiwanese products from US/EU markets for a couple of years to help local spin-offs stabilize. But Taiwanese might choose to fight, in which case US/EU will happily supply weapons.
How do you expect anyone to take the rest of your comment serious when you state something like this?
https://www.reddit.com/r/fuckcars/comments/qu1ob8/european_c...
Not as car centric as US or Canada but compared to the rest of the world EU is very car centric. At least the US and Canada are vast and their cities are much more young.
Americans have this romantic view of Europe as old dense cities.
https://www.confused.com/car-insurance/average-cars-around-t...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_vehicle...
If the US's best defense against a China-initiated economic war is to give up consumerism, that doesn't give me a great deal of hope for Taiwan.
More generally, it would be great for manufacturing to move back to the EU and the US. But that can't happen on the scale of months or even years; in a war with China, we'd face huge supply chain disruptions for the duration.
> They are armed with missiles to the teeth and they can hit some rather sensitive places in China.
This isn't a realistic appraisal of Taiwan's military capabilities. China dominates Taiwan on all aspects of military power; fanciful ideas about blowing up the Three Gorges Dam aside, China doesn't worry too much about Taiwan's military.
> I expect brain drain and leaving rest of the Taiwan to China while officially protesting it and banning Taiwanese products from US/EU markets for a couple of years to help local spin-offs stabilize.
As bad and dumb as this outcome would be, China would consider it a total victory.
> Taiwanese might choose to fight, in which case US/EU will happily supply weapons.
You have to get those weapons to Taiwan somehow, and Taiwan would need to be able to launch them from somewhere. China has effective countermeasures to both if American engagement is limited to that.
Assuming the CCP is willing to throw the PLA(N) into a charnel house, there are certain scenarios where they can trickle them in after a fashion. The eastern seaboard of China has more than 500,000 fishing vessels that can be mustered across the Strait, even in inclement weather if safety of the boats, crews, and the fire team to squad level passengers and their gear was ignored.
QUAD and Taiwan together doesn’t have enough missiles and anti-ship weaponry to sink enough of these boats to avoid a beachhead being established. In inclement conditions target acquisition of the small boats is very difficult. Not all boats need to hold troops. Not all of them need to be manned at all. Plenty of convoying drones in self-organizing meshes can carry supplies and surviving hulls can run aground at the beachhead to offer supply depots plus cover and concealment for manned boats. The CCP could use the massacre of this missile-absorbing force as a pretext to go nuclear on US CBG’s. They could “throw away” these lives on an unimaginably cruel scale.
And still have more than enough troops left over to mount a legitimate invasion with “real” ships after pretty much all missiles are expended.
There are many ways it can go pear-shaped in a hurry for either side. The only winning move is not to play.
If China started amassing amphibious invasion forces near Taiwan, I’d expect the US to fill Taiwan with every javelin and stinger missile they can spare.
Are there any that many left?
Taiwan already has things like Patriot missiles and harpoons.
Taiwan is close to key US allies (Japan and Korea) and several other nations that aren't huge fans of China lately. It's also more protected than Ukraine by natural features, i.e. a strait the Chinese invasion force would have to cross in an amphibious assault.
The deterrent from Ukraine is that conflict's showing how effective large numbers of man-portable anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles can be on an invasion force.
Taiwan definitely got the Ukraine message, incidentally: https://twitter.com/MPWangTingyu/status/1607702645296492545
Both countries prefer a defensive posture in military deployment. If it isnt a threat to South Korea and Japan's territory, they will be reluctant to engage.
I don't expect either to risk escalating kenetic engagement with China for a 3rd party like Taiwan. This reunification glacier is moving in one direction and nobody in the neighborhood (except Taiwan) will be willing to stand in its path.
If Russia falls apart, and as the last grand colonial empire, it bloody well should, China should have a lot of influence over the regional pieces.
It's hard to imagine something this ingrained ending, but nothing is forever.
China is building up, they’re the real historical successor the “it’s Hitler all over again” rather than Russia (maybe they get to be Italy?)
Not only that, but “tough” animals will signal greatly their desire to fight before engaging in the actual fight to intimidate their opposition. The actual fight will come at great cost regardless of power.
Hard times coming our way…
Yeah, you have to start building experience from somewhere. The Chinese Navy is both building many ships [0] (of which many would argue are among the most advanced in the world) and building operational experience [1] [2] [3]. While the Chinese Navy lacks actual combat experience, training if done properly can be very effective in its own right. It's only reasonable that the second largest economy in the world could sustain this level of development. China has the means and the will to build a very formidable navy.
Information coming from China can be suspect and I understand why some think their navy is a paper tiger. However, their ships are very real and their training exercises are also real, all sighted and confirmed by other navies. It's probably best to not underestimate their capability.
[0] https://sgp.fas.org/crs/row/RL33153.pdf go to page 12
[1] https://news.usni.org/2022/05/23/chinese-carrier-strike-grou...
[2] https://news.usni.org/2022/12/19/chinese-liaoning-carrier-st...
[3] https://news.usni.org/2022/12/23/russian-chinese-warships-ho...
- Complete shutdown of all businesses not related to pharmacy or hospital, probably until April 2023. This includes factories. Check out on the ground videos by https://www.youtube.com/@xiaorenwu/videos, you will see completely empty malls, subways, and streets. Not only that, you will note all the anger from normal citizens, which is only really publicly visible this year. EDIT: the shutdown is either mandated by city, or voluntarily by the merchant, since nobody is traveling out to shop in fear of contracting covid.
- Few hundred thousand small and mid size business closures/bankruptcies. China does not provide small business relief like US did, so these closures are permanent.
- 37 million covid infections per day https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-12-23/china-est..., millions of death per day that overwhelms the morgue. Keep in mind their vaccine is ineffective, and re-infection likely to last throughout 2023
- Market laggards like Apple finally moving out of China, and the rest of manufacturing laggards to follow
- Multinational consumer product companies moving out of China or reducing footprint
- Real estate collapse still unresolved
- Demographics collapse still unresolved
- Total debt still unresolved
- Closer alliance with Russia, and alienation from democratic countries. QUAD, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Europe all are aligning against China and Russia now.
So China's only card it can play is, being as sick as it is for at least a year more, is to be a paper tiger. and threatens with empty promise.
Everything you wrote before this, and in particular "you will note all the anger from normal citizens" is reason enough to worry that this time it might be more than an empty promise. China may end up needing more than sabre rattling to distract its citizens this time.
I know people in Korla that got together and protested at the police station, and that city is no longer under lock down.
China also just lifted the travel quarantine requirement...
China still would lose far more than it'd gain from invading Taiwan. This [1] does a good analysis of the geopolitical consequences of such an action. That said, the same was true about Russia invading Ukraine, but it happened anyway. The right path is to do rigorous analysis but be honest about the uncertainty.
1. https://www.csis.org/analysis/reunification-taiwan-through-f...
That still does not change the fact that the op is clueless
* Angry populace? Give them a fresh target for the anger and a fresh rationalization for their suffering.
* Small business apocalypse? Re-tooling for war creates an abundance of new opportunity.
* Loads of debt? Use war as an excuse to default. It is uniquely positioned to rationalize default while minimally impacting credit worthiness going forward.
* Trust issues in savings and real estate? War bonds are totally different!
* Spare men? Send them to die in war. It's the historical solution to the problem.
My inability to assign likelihoods to these bags of problems really demonstrates how little I know about national policy. Then again, wars have historically caught many experts flat-footed, so perhaps nobody else knows very much either.
On the ground in Beijing. I don't know what happened last week / the week before, was sick enough. However restaurants were all f-ing full on Christmas Eve.
It seems like that China just played the herd immunity card and get a really sharp wave due to Omicron and ineffective vaccines.
Look at Japanese Bonds, Look at Taiwanese resolve, look at Korean growth - Chinese citizens are starting to recognize that the only thing the CCP has left is fear and domination and they aren't going to support it anymore
So the CCP are going to freak out and start acting crazy, in a (hopefully) futile attempt to get people to react so they can mobilize domestically around national pride.
I trust that the Taiwanese people have the resolve, and the US has the resolve to support them in their resistance to these tantrums without overreacting.
Japan: Japanese bonds is taking a breather but a continued strengthening of USD will put serious risk of currency devaluation and its stock market is largely owned by the Japanese central banks.
Taiwan: Not good. DPP made a major election mistake by ignoring that many Taiwanese want to keep the status quo as the reality of their security situation hits-If the US and coalition wanted to defend Taiwan it would start building military bases, so far all they've done is the same approach to Ukraine-talk them over the edge and when conflict breaks out supply them with severely limited weaponry to not escalate risk by being directly involved.
Korea: Major 3ish sigma event coming to its household debt, pension pyramid scheme blowing up, municipal and government bonds tied to a rapidly deflating real estate bubble, the loss of China, its biggest trading partner, responsible for a huge chunk of its GDP. With increased competition from Taiwan's TSMC and its status as a sort of canary in the mine for global trade activity, all of this is creating a perfect storm. But the biggest punch will be its birth rate and it will be forced to turn to uptaking massive number of migrant workers, possible north korean collapse. I would grade Korea to be the first piece of the domino to trigger another Asian Financial Crisis. This time with much reduced bargaining chip as globalization is being phased out and you see all the investments being made outside their respective countries.
China: Major policy errors have put CCP in an impossible place. It's increasingly looking like Russia prior to invading Ukraine. Rapidly declining economy and aging population with accelerating low birth rate. They will not wait until Japan has finished building up its military. There's an angle to this lockdown system in that its a major way to mobilize and isolate large chunks of the population and unfortunately combined with the surveillance apparatus (the largest internal security on earth) and low morale amongst its people contribute to even more urgency to begin conflict.
I can't comment on the other items, but there's a fairly benign reason for the surge in japanese bonds as of late. It's not because the economy suddenly got better. It's because the BoJ relaxed their yield control policy, presumably because inflation was running rampant and they needed to do something.
The govt just passed a stunningly aggressive military budget
This is high level strategic and intentional diplomacy my friend. Plenty of FP articles discussing precisely this.
https://archive.ph/rILqX
https://web.archive.org/web/20221225173355/https://archive.p...
This is myopic. Yes, the Manchurian Incident was kicked off the invasion of Manchuria and then the Second Sino-Japanese War was a rogue act by a few officers. But that was just the spark that started a bonfire; who piled all the wood up? Who was responsible for the decades of military buildup that preceded it? Were the acquisition of all those battleships and carriers a series of rogue acts as well? Before WW2, the Japanese government spent decades trying to maneuver Japan into being an imperialist world power that could rival America or the UK. The 'ruling clique' of Japan didn't strike the first spark, but they did labor to engineer the circumstance in which such a spark would inevitably find ample fuel to burn.
There was a huge earthquake and subsequent fire that destroyed Tokyo on September 1st, 1923.
Here I quote a 1928 atlas from its article about Japan, after it mentions the then recent earthquake:
"The old saying which everyone is familiar with: "It's an ill wind which blows no one good," seems to be the case so far as the Japanese disaster is concerned. The United States seems to have been selected by a divine providence as the beneficiary of the Almighty in reducing Japan through the recent disaster to a state where she may, be considered as impotent to take up arms against the United States for at least ten years, it is estimated. It had been reported by military experts of the United States the Japan, prior to the earthquake, was preparing for a break with the United States and it was thought that they would strike during the years 1924 to 1927. With the rebuilding program ahead of Japan, thrift and saving, among both the government and people, alone will make it possible for Japan to revive."
The tone probably doesn't sit comfortably in modern ears, but remember this was written by an American over 90 years ago.
Even pessemsitic estimates of 3-5% growth is plenty to maintain visible QoL upgrades YoY. PRC isn't going to be west for the foreseeable future where decline in standards is much more pronounced. More PRC citizens in T3/4+ cities (where majority are) will be buying their first cars or whatever fancy domestic gadgets are and feel their life is getting better. There's still huge visible improvements happening.
Or that perhaps the directionality of "eating own creators" prediction is wrong, sometimes war is strategically desirable, and if so, it's prudent to prepare population by cultivating nationalism. Which really there hasn't been much despite western reporting, it's more natural generational awakening among younger cohorts who grew up in richer regions of PRC that west isn't all that, especially when they are now trying to contain PRC prospects. By my estimate, right now state of PRC nationalism is more like 6/10 vs most Anglo countries are 8/10s. Fervent nationalism voices are still largely repressed from PRC mainstream narrative while the other "indicator" of PRC nationalism in western rags are some cosmopolitan kids starting to renfaire hanfu costumes and preferring domestic brands. It's nothing. Just like these exercises in response to new US TW policy act.
Yep
Not like some country where switching a figure head every 4 years can keep the peons happy
Whoa, resorting to censorship now.
HN routinely reject low quality posts.
If for a certain topic, the quality is so bad that allowing it just further drags the whole community, then it's reasonable to ban.
Like you don't want 3 years old to fight over who should be next us president.
That's not censorship, that's cultivating intellectual rigor
Let's suppose, hypothetically, that you wanted to demonstrate that you're not a CCP troll. What opinions do you have that contradict the CCP's position?
(I don't mean nuanced but safe ones like "they should have dropped the zero-COVID policy sooner" either.)
Good luck with that
I or anyone else could certainly do like you do. I'd just read China Daily https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Daily and repeat what they say.
Nowadays HN are littered with people just assume any non-liberal-imperisim viewpoints, are just CCP dogs.
China daily.
I dont even know this thing until this moment.
Thanks, you are more like the "me" in your mind, than the real me in reality. I hope you haven't been poisoned by China Daily as bad as you have been by the Main Stream media.
Funny, right? The accuser found himself more like the stereotype depicted by his accusation than the accused.
Come on, I dealt people like you so many times that I know this is a trap
The PRC's aggressive disregard for the exclusive economic zones of it's neighbors, paired with backing Russia's travesties in the Ukraine have has erased any goodwill that their refusal to participate in the Iraq War may have generated over ten years ago. It is now utterly transparent that their goal is to greedily gobble up the foundries of those who invent their own technology rather than steal it and invest those R&D savings in weapons they can then leverage to further coerce the smaller and more vulnerable.