Observation from Instapundit:
DISTURBING THOUGHTS FROM A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK: “At this point China may be like Wilhelmine Germany in 1914 after the mobilization orders went out. The Plans are being executed. To stop before a predetermined victory condition, such as the surrender of Taiwan, risks the collapse of the military and the economy and the destruction of the regime.”
This is disturbing, but I think it’s different: I think China is stirring up trouble on its borders to keep its neighbors off-balance and its military busy, because things are worse in China than they’re letting us realize.
China may be in a world of hurt behind its Great Wall (of Communist politics). They’ve made it clear that their goal is to supplant the US as the dominate superpower of the world. The problem is that their own policies are making it hard to do so:
- Their decades long “one child” may have stopped its “over population” but now China has millions of marriage aged men with no one to marry. Social unrest, anyone?
- It is also giving rise to a quickly aging population in which 25% of the population will be 60+ by 2025. With few children to support them, this will be a large expense to be borne by the State.
- The Communist leaders think that they may have “tamed” their “Hong Kong Democracy” problem – only to have the world see how it may deal with others if it becomes that singular superpower.
- They have also decided to build up to a “blue water” navy to contest the US domination of the world’s oceans tradeways.
- Its neighbors are are now scared of China and its military aggressiveness especially in and about the waters around China – they’ve almost become our best foreign policy stick. The “Asian Tigers” plus the Phillipines, Australia, and Japan are now coming closer to the US.
- China isn’t helping that by building up its military along the Indian – Chinese border. They are threatening yet another area of conflict besides Taiwan. The Left here in the US calls America the world’s bully – they ain’t seen nothing yet.
- Trump has called China’s bluff economically in a masterful way. What has allowed the above to happen has been the massive economic rise in China’s economy to the detriment of many industries around the world. China has become the world’s manufacturer in many areas but…
- …its trade policies enriched itself in a mercantilist fashion instead of the free trade that others desired. Instead of China becoming more like the West, it embolded them to become more hegemonic (see it’s One Belt and Road initiatives that are effectively ending up as debt traps for the developing countries it was going to “help” – only to become the “resource extractors” that our Left claims that the US is. These countries are also now starting to turning against China.
- Trump’s use of tariffs, redone regulations and taxation to make it friendly to re-shore American industries back home, doing the same for removing supply chains from China, are all affecting China’s companies (often owned or controlled by the Peoples Liberation Army) bottom lines – economically squeezing it.
- It’s GDP growth has slowed significantly and for the first time in modern times, the ChiComms declined to give a growth forecast (this in a land of “Five Year Plans”).
- …this latest pandemic has shown how poor of a partner China really is. From confiscating the output of foreign owned PPE equipment to its lack of candor and openness about where the Wu Flu came from (i.e., a wet market? It’s biowarfare lab nearby? Shutting down travel from Hubei Province to the rest of China but allowing outbound foreign travel?).
- Threatening to withhold medicinal trade with the US didn’t help either.
- Trump kicking out Chinese grad students associated with Chinese military schools is long overdue – it will shut down rather easy access to American research. China is a society that DEMANDS conformity (e.g., it’s new and HUGE Social Credit system) rather than ingenuity. Cutting down their spying and stealing of American intellectual property will hurt badly going forward.
Sidenote – WHY didn’t Obama, Bush II, Clinton, and Bush I stop this idiocy sooner????
- Neither did threatening our naval ships passing through international waters even as China claimed those waters for its own (without recognition from other countries)
- And finally, openly threatening to do to US politicians what the Democrats claimed that Russians did in 2016 – screw with our elections in 2020.
“…things are worse in China than they’re letting us realize.”. That’s just off the top of my head from memory. And remember, we have NO idea how extensive the China Flu has affected China. Does anyone REALLY believe that span of time when China was reporting NO new infections or deaths from it while the rest of the world was reeling from it?
We may find out soon enough that things ARE worse that what we know – perhaps much to our detriment. I have grave doubts that China would implode like the old Soviet Union and its satellite satrapys did when the Iron Curtain came down – quietly and with a whimper. Remember, both China AND India (see above) are nuke powers – things could escalate quickly and badly. Unlike Russia, China is a “face” country – there may no good way for it to “save face” given the options it has left itself with given the decisions it has and is making.
Look, I’m no China expert – just somebody who reads a lot of stuff all day long (sometimes to the detriment of actually writing about it). Our media has given us the idea that China is some bright, strong, rich, “cleaner” country than we are (decadent, selfish, strewn with discord, most of us are deplorable and irredeemables) – we aren’t all that and China is certainly not all that portrayal either.
Time will tell but I don’t think it will be a long time before we start to see changes. Or, like with the TEA Party or the old Soviet Union, a Preference Cascade happens and change come in a twinkling of an eye. I just hop that twinkling doesn’t come from a quick poke with a sharp stick.
