Yes and no- a wealthy Chinese male will always have options. But a young male who’s not so well off?
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB933633318281546817
Manufacturing jobs are declining in China just as they have in the West, and a lot of the manufacturing jobs that ARE available go to women.
That leaves millions of underemployed young males, especially in rural areas, who have little money and no women. Kidnapping of brides is increasingly common.
Iraq is another example of exactly what I said. We entered into that situation not knowing how the other side thinks and their motivations. We had no clue of how to deal with the Sunni-Shite issue, and the tribal makeup of Iraq.
Our leaders thought that Saddem is a real SOB who does awful things let’s take him out and the Iraq people will love us for doing it. The one Army General (Shinisiki I believe) who publicly stated that will not be the case and it will take 300,000 plus troops to hold the country was promptly fired for saying that. Turned out he was right on the money.
That is my point. Making the assumption that our adversaries think as we do and have the same motivations as we in the west is a huge mistake we make over and over again.
Going back to China. To say hell no, never a war with them as there is too much trade going on back and forth between us and they would never risk that is totally incorrect. IMHO
If your point was that we could stumble into a war without understanding the causes or consequences of the war, then I agree with you. Except you stated that Western countries will avoid war at all costs. Did you mean that? Because it is clearly wrong. We don’t avoid war at all costs. Sometimes we charge into wars even though the costs will be high. How is that avoiding war at all costs? It’s the exact opposite of avoiding war at all cost.
Wars only require one party who believes they would benefit from the war, that’s true. Saddam thought he’d benefit when he invaded Kuwait, Kuwait didn’t. Turns out Saddam was wrong, he lost spectacularly. But it wasn’t like Kuwait benefited either, their country got flattened. Classic case of lose-lose, and misunderstanding the costs and the benefits of war.
Of course we could have a war with China, if Chinese leaders convince themselves it will benefit them to have a war with the United States, or American leaders convince themselves they will benefit from a war with China, then a war we will have regardless of how wrong the warmongers are. That they will almost certainly be wrong about the costs and the consequences of the war doesn’t mean we won’t have the war, just that the war will be a disaster for both sides.
But just because it is possible that China and the United States could blunder into a war with each other doesn’t mean it’s likely. China’s growing economy doesn’t threaten the United States. In reality Chinese prosperity has been good for the United States, and a Chinese economic downturn would hurt the American economy, not help it.
[QUOTE=AK84]
It is exactly “Rah Rah Rah Rah, USAUSAUSA!” as the article points out, this thing …
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Yeah…by spinning the numbers and a load of RAHRAHCHINACHINACHINA! horseshit. China has surpassed the US in:
So, they have to spin it to make China surpass the US. Then they go on about what the Communist Party has to say about where it’s going and how great it is. BTW, the article is light on facts wrt how China is or will ‘inevitably’ be better than the US. Militarily they are decades behind the US, and this is just in terms of technology…in terms of actual military capability they are even further behind. Economically they have certainly closed the gap, but at what price? And closing the gap does not equal surpassing.
Then they spin some horseshit about China being a 5000 year old civilization, conveniently ignoring the part where the Communist Party pretty much crushed that civilization and that the CCP is less than 100 years old…and the CCP, by their own assertions IS China.
This part is especially ridiculous in terms of current events:
I’m sorry, but this fact free assertion of opinion should be raising all sorts of bullshit detectors. China’s rise is inevitable? ‘Realists’ see it this way? Good grief, what a load. The US never demanded that the Caribbean or Atlantic were our fiefs, our direct territory. We COULD have done so at that time, but we never did. This is totally unlike what China is doing today in the South China Sea…they are attempting to claim direct sovereignty over these regions. Lesser role?? :rolleyes: China’s claim is the weakest except that they are the strongest regional power. And they haven’t tried to negotiate with the other claimants to the area, instead they are trying to win by fiat.
[QUOTE=AK84]
Nor can China be compared with the USSR of the 1980’s in any respect. The USSR had suffered a well attested economic stagnation since about 1970, which had been mitigated to an extent by the Oil crises. The USSR suffered catasrophic reductions in standards of living in that time; which the Chinese have not, indeed their economic growth pulled about a billion people out of poverty
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Certainly it’s not an exact parallel. But the common denominator is the communist party. The CCP has stayed in power by promising the people ever increasing economic growth in exchange for them not blowing up the country. But as seen over the past few years, especially the past 2, the CCP doesn’t have a clue what it’s doing, and eventually they will hit the wall. Another Tienanmen Square Massacre could happen at any time as things spin out of control. Right now, China’s economy is seriously slowing…and slowing in China is a very bad thing, especially for the CCP (which is why they try so hard to spin bad economic data to make it look better than it is). Between the ridiculous real estate bubble, the stock market bubble, the other economic and environmental damage, people out of work or working without being paid, China is like a pressure cooker on a slow boil without a safety valve…and right now the heat is turning up.
Mind, I’m not saying that China going down, or even partially melting down is a good thing that we should be cheering on…it’s already affecting the US and the rest of the world, and will even more if they go down hard. But as things stand, with the CCP in charge, a crash is inevitable…not global mastery and China ascendant, amenamenamen. The writer of that article should really be checking independent sources, not relying on the CCP for it’s data. It’s a nice theory, but a US/China clash is not inevitable based on the theory put forth in there because the projection of an ascendant China are anything but inevitable.
I don’t see how.
Yes, I understand that you don’t. You said, and I quote “The Chinese are mostly interested in doing business nowadays, and the U.S. is their biggest trading partner. They’ll do nothing to disrupt that arrangement, which war would.”
You think they will “do nothing” to disrupt trade. I disagree.
Look at Putin. He looked at the situation, makes a conclusion he can grab the Crimea and a chunk of Ukraine and the West will do nothing, and the cost can be carried. Obama in the last election made many comments that the bad ole cold war days were over, the Russians would never do things such as that. Well they did.
How does that make your point?
How does that make your point? Different country, different government, different international situation, and America was never Russia’s biggest trading partner.
Meh. The Coming Collapse of China has been predicted for a while now, but the CCP always seems to find ways to adapt.
It helps when you are willing to use the kinds of extreme measures that the CCP is willing to do to keep kicking the can down the road. Sadly, you can only kick it down there so many times. In the 60’s and 70’s people probably said ‘Meh’ about the possibilities of a Soviet collapse as well.
Besides, I don’t think CHINA will collapse…I think the CCP will, which will be a completely different thing. But who knows? Maybe they can keep kicking that can down the road long enough that their systemic problems will fix themselves…
:dubious:
The Japanese government had been dominated by a military-expansionist ideology for 50 years by this point, and the Home Islands had ceased to be self-sustaining in food production long, long before that. Japanese expansion was driven by a desire to get in on the colonial game, not concerns about dependence upon the importation of rice. I don’t think war between China and the US is either likely or inevitable, but it never ceases to amaze me when the canard is brought out that countries X and Y can’t/won’t go to war because it would be against their own economic self-interest to do so. Nations have been getting involved in wars contrary to their own economic self-interest since there were nations. It was being argued in some corners that the nations of Europe wouldn’t get involved in major wars again because they had grown so economically interdependent right up until the outbreak of WWI.
Also the US has a handful of nuclear weapons lying around somewhere or other, which I have reasons to suspect the Chinese government is aware of :dubious:.
Yup. And then the US closed its shop, dropping Japan in the economic khaki while they were already embroiled in a costly war.
If the US unilaterally stopped trading with China today (and prevented others from doing so, too), China would certainly be in the shit even though they’re diligently opening other markets… but then the US is a *lot *more dependant on Chinese trade than it was on Japanese exports in then 1930s, which makes the eventuality pretty unlikely.
Not so different, going by the many regime-change episodes in Chinese history – collapse of the country and collapse of the dynasty are usually (not always) the same thing, though which causes the other is debatable. And collapse of the government/CCP is what Gordon Chang was really foretelling. In 2001.
To have a war, you have to have some kind of intended outcome.
What outcome could China expect from war with the US? They aren’t going to be occupying LA. What war they do have is unlikely to go well. They just have nothing to gain, and they’ve to enough internal worries to be picking fights for fun.
Same with the US. Maaaaaaaybe we would defend Taiwan, though we certainly haven’t promised to. But the chain of events that would lead to an attack on Taiwan are growing more and more far fetched. And frankly the Chinese leadership would love to see this issue disappear entirely. They don’t care about Taiwan except as a way to keep nationalists happy.
I can never figure out what sort of Cold War nostalgia makes people so exited about this prospect. It doesn’t fit the reality at all. We are business partners that need each other. We exist on other sides of the planet. We have almost no conflicting interests. Of course anything good happen. There could be a zombie invasion. But China has been absolutely clear and consistent about their goals and their hopes in the region, and they have some geographic limits to their potential for military expansion.
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Same with the US. Maaaaaaaybe we would defend Taiwan, though we certainly haven’t promised to. But the chain of events that would lead to an attack on Taiwan are growing more and more far fetched. And frankly the Chinese leadership would love to see this issue disappear entirely. They don’t care about Taiwan except as a way to keep nationalists happy.
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What do you base this on? My impression is that pretty much the CCP is the ONLY ones who really care about this and want it to happen (i.e. insist that Taiwan is a rebellious province and much come back into the fold). The ‘nationalists’ (by which I assume you mean the government of Taiwan) would like nothing better at this point than to simply be acknowledged what they are, which is an independent nation state in their own right. The only thing preventing that is mainland China, which threatens war if Taiwan goes through with independence.
Or did you mean the (mainland) Chinese PEOPLE don’t care about it? I’m not even sure of that, though my impression is most don’t really care about it all that much.
Obviously China disagrees, since they have been the ones pushing the issue wrt the East and South China sea. I don’t think a war is likely between the US and China, but if there is one it will happen because China is more expansionist than people seem to think…and because they make a miscalculation (or Taiwan elects a government that is serious about independence, which I think is not likely but possible) either with the US or with one or more of it’s neighbors that brings the US in…or shit happens and some idiot fires and things escalate.
China would expect a clear path to regional dominance without any US interference from a (limited) war with the US. The US would probably expect a reassertion of it’s own dominance of the area and the furtherance of our allies in the region from the same. I doubt either side WANTS a war with the other, but China has definite designs on the area, many nations in the area don’t agree with those aims, and the US doesn’t either. The US also has several big allies in the region who might come into conflict with China. So, it’s always possible. And the thing is, wars often start because one side or the other (or both) make a serious miscalculation as to the intent of the other. A war could start in the region based on nothing more than China miscalculating a US response to a Chinese attack on an ally, or the US miscalculating and not giving the CCP a face saving way to get out of something like their island building campaign and backing them into a corner where war is the only option they see rather than lose even more wrt their own people.
I mean the mainland nationalist loonies-- the Chinese equivalent to the Tea Party.
The CCP drags these guys out when they need a distraction or just need a little boost. Nothing gets people fired up like a nice anti-Japan protest. But it’s an uneasy relationship because the loonies love China, and would gladly throw the Party to the wolves if they felt they weren’t being represented. And this is, of course, a deep historical fear in any Chinese political organization.
Unfortunately, some time ago the loonies got stuck on Taiwan. It was an easy way to play them for a while, and they really ran with the ball. But with all the change in China, it’s not really relevant to the leaderships political and economic goals. Indeed, it’d be a lot better if they could just let it drop. But the nationalists won’t let it go.
The only risk to Taiwan is if the Party begins to lose power, and tries to appeal to extreme nationalism to keep people on their side.
Depends on which nationalists we’re talking about. Hardliners in Taiwan were/are of the opinion that the Taiwanese government is the only legitimate Chinese authority, and that the PRC are a bunch of usurpers occupying rebellious provinces that must be brought to heel.
I think these jokers have by and large calmed down since the Nixon administration indirectly told them they were on their own with that plan, though.
Yes I can see this as a very real possibility. If or when China does fall into a prolonged economic crisis they will need to take some desperate measures to hold onto power. Starting a war is the usual solution that governments take in similar circumstances.
Launching direct attacks against Taiwan is their safest option. They can manufacture some false flag operation to justify it then claim its “an internal China conflict” and tell everyone else to butt out. It wouldn’t matter at all that they probably can’t capture and hold Taiwan even if the US does nothing, a prolonged conflict would be fine in terms of the political effects: Giving them excuses to appeal to patriotism and crack down hard on opposition.
The US policy on defense of Taiwan is “strategic ambiguity”, there hasn’t been a mutual defense pact since 1979. Would the US then really get into a war with a nuclear power to defend an island that the US admits is part of China already?