… with China. This hurts my head: the border between India and China is in the fucking Himalayas. They engaged in sub-zero temperatures, at an altitude that many of us have never been (other than inside an airplane) over a matter of which of these mountaintops marks the boundary between India and China (Tibet, actually).
This is hopefully going to be a minor incident, but these two most populous countries in the world both have those bright-flashy lanthanide-powered boomy things that have the potential to lead to some serious ugliness.
It seems like China has decided that all their disputes are going to be settled this year.
so far they’ve boxed up millions of Muslims to parts unknown, threatened Hong Kong, sunk a Vietnamese fishing boat and now their NK puppet is blowing up the liaison building.
The Chinese know that Trump is too incompetent to build a strong coalition to contain them. Trump still has 7 months in office. I hope the world can wait him out. Or better yet if his black little heart gave out…
Makes sense. The rest of the world is preoccupied with Covid, China itself has mostly locked Covid down, and the rest of the world is pissed at China anyway; more so than they’ve been in a long time. On top of that, Trump is president.
If there were ever a time to purge the aggression out of one’s system, now would be the time for it.
China and India are positively benign powers when it comes to dealing with minorities, Muslim or otherwise. Take a look at the great martial nation of Pakistan, the “fortress of Islam” and its glorious treatment of minorities:
Continues to undertake extremely violent religiously-motivated cleansing of ethnic and religious minorities in the land of Pakistan
Gave the world an endless stream of the most violent terror organizations, such as LeJ, Taliban, SeS, which are dedicated to the complete extermination of the Shia Muslim minority in Pakistan
Needless to say, Pakistan is one of the most violent and unsafe places for minorities of any stripe. Nevertheless, Pakistanis I have met tend to have a whole laundry list of gripes against India and the US (but not China, mind you). I guess when your country is a hellhole, and you are viciously persecuted with no recourse, you need to take it out on someone for sanity’s sake. Hence the US is the “great Satan” and India is “nazi”.
Both Indian and Chinese forces are under strict instructions to not fire at each other. This has been the case for decades. Border patrols on both sides do not carry firearms. That might change now, however.
They seem to have designs on all the Buddhist Kingdoms of the Himalayas. They took Tibet, now they’re after Ladakh, they already ‘claim’ Bhutan. And Nepal is mostly run by Maoists already, no invasion required.
And I doubt the world will care any more than they did about Tibet. Lots of lip service, nothing more.
Though we produce awesome tech toys and probe the deepest secrets of the universe, the stark fact is that human nature will never change. We simply have far more sophisticated ways of oppressing and killing one another. We may very join our predecessors; Cro-magnon, Neanderthal, Homo Erectus, Australopithecine, etc, as yet another evolutionary dead end.
A clarification - neither side shall open fire inside the 2 km zone, or into the 2 km zone? Because technically speaking, a tank located 2.5 km from the border firing at anyone crossing is not opening fire “within two kilometers from the line of actual control”. The ordnance may be landing there, but it wasn’t fired there.
The fighting must have been intense and brutal for so many hardened soldiers to have been killed. Indian soldiers were reportedly unarmed, while the Chinese were armed with batons with embedded nails and other fancy melee weapons. Indian soldiers were reportedly outnumbered 55:300 by the Chinese.
When push comes to shove, the PLA has proven to be no better than Pakistani terrorists, dragging away overpowered soldiers and then slaughtering them in cold blood.
The mighty PLA may also have suffered casualties, but they are not telling:
Meanwhile US Intelligence says 35 Chinese troops also died, but I am not sure if this is not just US propaganda to embarrass China. I am not sure if satellite photos can tell the whole story about casualties.
You know, China hasn’t really locked down this Covid thingy, right? They have something like 100 million people (officially) in lock down, and recently they have had an outbreak in Beijing that has them firing CCP officials and talking about military measures (all due to, supposedly, only around 100 new cases in a week and no new deaths :dubious:).
So, I don’t think this is a case of the CCP having handled the Covid outbreak and using this chance to hammer everyone else not so lucky…at least, not solely. I think this is a case of a calculation being made by the CCP to both distract their own people from the myriad issues hammering them, including the supposed containment of Covid, AND what you are saying…figuring they are going to push as far as they can as hard as they can this year, while the world is distracted.
Not sure how either of those will work out, as it seems the world might be less distracted than they think, at least I think the reaction in Hong Kong seems more than they were expecting. And I don’t think India is really all that distracted either wrt the incident in the OP.