So more dikes, eh? It’s always the gays who start these things. First there was Alexander the Great and now we have to worry about Wilhelmina the Amsterdamer.
How do you know there’s massive numbers of Chinese. Do you just believe their official numbers?
I have it on good authority that there’s really only, like, eight Chinese. They just change clothes a bunch of times everyday so foreigners will buy the official population count of a billion plus.
Replace Japanese with Chinese, and that’s what was said in the 80’s.
Declan
China already has vast chunks of poorly controlled lands full of people who are none too pleased to be Chinese. They idea that they want another Tibet or Xinjiang is laughable. China has it’s hands full with China.
They do have something to prove in Asia, hence all the fighting over rocks. But that’s not about us, and it’s not really about expansion. They will get what they need out of that and calm down.
China is doing the one thing in Africa we never did- investing, trading, and starting businesses. I’m not sure why this strikes people as sinister, It’s not benevolent, but it’s also not a plot to take over the world. It’s just business. They don’t have the best partners to work with, but they do know what it’s like to turn a third world country into a developed one, which is something we’ve largely failed to do despite billions of dollars and decades of aid. They are a good thing to add to the African mix.
Let’s do keep in mind that while China is big, Chinese people are still quite poor. It’s still a place where owning a motorcycle or refrigerator is a sign on economic success. Chinese people go to Africa because it represents a chance at improving their lifestyle. And the Chinese governments first priority (well, beyond staying in power) is to fix that poverty. They aren’t going to do anything wacky that impinges on that goal.
So your point is: The OC policy has not been successful, and the population is increasing quickly. However, so committed are the government to maintaining the illusion of low birth rates, that they decided to relax the OC policy (not tighten it, or replace it with something else), and bring in other measures that would ostensibly increase birth rates.
It doesn’t make any sense, leave aside it being sans cite.
There are good reasons for supposing this situation is different. It’s a vast market, at the moment for buying from, but increasingly for selling to. China is increasingly opening itself up to the world, something the Japanese only ever made a token effort at.
That said, I doubt very much they’ll be a time where a large proportion of Westerners learn mandarin. English is pretty firmly entrenched as the lingua franca of business, and since learning a language is no small undertaking, no-one’s in any hurry to break that status quo, even if/when China becomes a bigger market than the US. Plus reliable spoken language translation devices are just around the corner.
I’m saying all this as a Westerner, living in China, learning Chinese.
I stand corrected.
Well, Japan did pull off something of a miracle in the 70s. From the end of the war to then, Japan was pretty much the world’s China, home of cheap knockoff shit and worthless plastic gizmos. In the 80s they suddenly became the kings of everything silicon and started buying companies and properties left and right. Now they’re one of the richest countries out there, and a big part of their culture is most certainly global.
Now apply that progression to a country with ten times the resources, a hundred times the population, a thousand times the landspace, and their own China (in Africa). Plus a much simpler language 
[QUOTE=Mijin]
That said, I doubt very much they’ll be a time where a large proportion of Westerners learn mandarin. English is pretty firmly entrenched as the lingua franca of business, and since learning a language is no small undertaking, no-one’s in any hurry to break that status quo, even if/when China becomes a bigger market than the US.[…]
I’m saying all this as a Westerner, living in China, learning Chinese.
[/QUOTE]
shrug And before that it was Spanish, then German (with French as the language of high fallutin’ diplomacy).
Don’t get me wrong, I fully expect resistance from the West, millions of people saying “why should we learn Mandarin ? It’s hard as shit, and who’s got the time ?!”. I also expect the Chinese to not want to bother learning English for the exact same reason, and them to be the ones with all the money and open contracts. The foreigners who do learn Mandarin will get ahead and push out the dinosaurs.
IOW, what happened in the 50s with English, back when America was the cultural and economic dynamo.
God, I hope not. How will I eat ? 
Uh. China is home to more English speakers than the US, and Chinese people don’t even expect long term expats in China to learn the language- much less people not planning to live in China.
Chinese people are well aware of the disadvantages of not having an alphabet, and while they are proud of their culture and language, China has largely embraced English as the international language.
That’s now. We’ll see then. I could be wrong, obviously, but we’ll see. I’m storing that one in the I Told You So time capsule for now.
It’s not going to happen. I lived in Japan in various periods from 1981 and then from 1990 to last year, most of that time was in business.
The number of Westerners who learned Japanese enough to be meaningful in business was small. For most Westerners, learning Chinese is much more difficult than learning Japanese.
I believe the OP, and many others, make a basic mistake is assuming all people and governments have the same goals and aspirations that we do in the west. Basically thinking “Well, I don’t want war and conflict therefore the Chinese, or Russians, or whoever don’t either.”
That type of thinking is entirely wrong and it is what gets us in the West into these huge messy situations. Furthermore all are adversaries on the world stage, are viewing the situation in the USA as becoming weaker in resolve, capability, and political toughness.
Whoever can’t read the news and see the problems brewing is either ignoring the news, or hiding their head in the sand.
Expect problems and sooner rather than later.
davida03801, is this based on any familiarity with Chinese culture particularly? Or just a sort of paranoid caution akin to how some women assume any man might possibly be a rapist?
Because what little I know of China leads me to believe that the Chinese are not really interested in an expensive and protracted war with white devils in foreign lands. They seem to like détente: We stay out of their business, they will get along with us even if they don’t like or respect us.
And even sven, who has posted in this thread, has lived in China, and seems to be leaning in the same direction. Do you know more than her?
You seem to have very limited knowledge in the areas of military strategy and world politics.
-
The US could launch strikes into China from Guam, Alaska, the Marianas Islands,etc without ever having to use aircraft carriers for anything other emergency landing platforms.
-
“Annexing” South Korea,Taiwan and Japan would entail significant conflicts of their own. So far China’s force projection capabilities have been demonstrated to be extremely limited in conflicts with bordering nations, which neither Japan nor South Korea are.
-
China’s military is concentrated near its population centers and in its interior, well away from the from Pacific theater where any conflict would occur. To reposition those forces to make them more useful in a conflict with the US, that would take months to do and it would alert the US that they are doing as such, thus ruining any potential “surprise.”
-
China has a pitiful blue water navy for a nation of its size. Any non-nuclear conflict with the US would have to entail China projecting force against US bases and that would involve naval assets which, again, China just does not have.
-
China has two allies. North Korea, which is essentially a vassal state and Russia which , at best, is an erstwhile ally. The US has defense treaties with most of the nations surrounding China as well one major one with NATO which states that an attack against one member is an attack against all members.
China is outflanked in any military conflict before a single shot is fired.
China may have 1.5 billion people, but it would fare rather poorly in any military confrontation with the US.
I have a familiarity with Chinese history, especially its interactions with foreign powers over the last 200 years. Without exception, it has been a series of humiliations for China as it fails to learn from its mistakes and attempts to solve external issues using methods suited only towards its own society.
From the Opium Wars, to the Tai-peng Rebellion to the Boxer Conflict to WWII to the Korean Conflict, whenever China attempts to flex its muscles against foreign powers, it gets its ass handed to it. After so many losses, it’s difficult to see where China could eke out a possible “win” if indeed such a thing exists in a conflict between superpowers.
It probably does seem that way to somebody who has no idea what he’s talking about. You think we could win a war against China with nothing but bombers? And you think China’s population centers are “far from the Pacific”?
It’s possible that some time in the not-too-distant future, American and Chinese forces will find themselves on opposite sides of some conflict. Even if that happens, though, both sides will very carefully structure matters to ensure that they’re not officially at war with each other, nor in any other state which would interrupt the continuing flow of trade. Trade between the US and China is just too profitable to both sides to give up over a war.
One might imagine, for instance, a war between the Koreas, with China officially allied with the North and at war with the South, and the US officially allied with the South and at war with the North, but with the US and China officially still at peace with each other. Even that, I think, is relatively unlikely, but it could happen.
foolsguinea my comments are based on my observations of the political world since I was a teenager long ago. My comments are direct to the OP statement of “War between USA and China is absurd in the near future”
Here is my point expressed in a different way.
We in the west think in one way and those in the east (by which I mean Asia and the Middle East) think with entirely different thought process, goals, and aspirations. The West constantly misunderstands, and misreads who we deal with in the east. Kipling said it best in a very simple way:
East is East and West is West
And never the twain shall meet.
Here is an example from Vietnam. Ho Chi Minh is quoted as saying “You will kill 10 of our men, and we will kill 1 of yours, and in the end it will be you who tire of it.”
He was right in many ways and those words were so true, and it is tragic that we not understand that. The West killed so many more of the Viets than we lost, very likely close to that 10 to 1 ratio Ho Chi says. Our political leaders could not conceive of the fact they kept coming and coming for more and wrongly assumed that western military could overwhelm Vietnam. In essence thinking western, not eastern.
So the OP states “War between USA and China is absurd in the near future” That is a statement from a western point of view, at least IMHO.
From an eastern point of view I think the people there read that statement, smile, and say what fools we have as adversaries. After hundreds of years, they still understand nothing about us.
I think it’s unlikely if only for 2 reasons already stated:
-
Any war would fundamentally be a naval war, or would be the US totally holding the initiative and picking and choosing when and where they’ll fight. And since China’s navy sucks in comparison to the USN, the second option becomes the likely one. Nobody in their right mind initiates a war when they can’t hold the strategic initiative.
-
China and the US (and rest of the West really) are too tightly coupled as trading partners to make a war worthwhile to either party. We’d quit getting cheap consumer goods, and they’d quit being able to sell them, causing economic ruin to both sides, and lots of popular unrest on both sides due to higher prices in the US, and less employment in China.
Yes, the US/West and China have different outlooks on the world, but I personally can’t see anything serious enough happening anytime soon to make the Chinese throw away their position as the largest exporter to the US, and as their single largest market for goods.
Bullshit.
Ho Chi Minh’s statement is not to be understood in a pseudo-mystical, bogus-philosophical, colonialist, stereotypal “Ancient Eastern Wisdom” way. Simply put : he was fighting for the independance of his country. The US was fighting for… fuck knows what. There was no question ever that the Vietnamese would win a contest of endurance - they had nowhere else to go and nothing else to do or fight for. If your country was invaded by a foreign power, would you stop opposing them, ever ? Would your children cave ? Fuck no. And that’s why colonization failed, hard.
A hypothetical Chinese imperialist invasion of wherever would be based on vastly different realities.
Point 1
I agree with you. At the moment, and perhaps another 10-15 years. No one can project after that time period.
Point 2
You’re Thinking Western.
You say all the economic interests override the political interest and long term goals. I say don’t be so sure of that.