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I consider myself center right actually. I'm sure you've noticed I'm very pro-business. Though socially far left as I think people should have the freedom to express themselves however they choose, that's really none of my business. But perhaps that's why you're not as freaked out as I am. Because the reason I think I'm center left is because I'm pro-business. Watching the supposedly pro-business party light itself on fire and commit to incredibly un-business friendly decisions, especially based on personal feelings and worse anti-LGBTQ reasons it has put me into despair. Who's here to protect businesses and make sure that the government doesn't overreach? Our deficit spending is already almost 1 trillion dollars in payments a year, that's insane. Cooler heads need to prevail and we need to get our economy back to normal. And part of to normal means normal trade with everyone. But who knows, like I said, maybe I'm over thinking it.
China will never attack Taiwan. I don't know why people think they would since they keep telegraphing what they'll do if push comes to shove. In the event that Taiwan declared independence and only in that situation (and Taiwan wouldn't, they just passed a law that states the president can't make that declaration alone) would China blockade Taiwan. They would try to starve Taiwan out and they could because as an island nation it's entirely dependent on imports. The question people actually need to ask is who would be willing to go to a hot war for that? Especially since China would make exemptions to let trade through anyway, that they would only have this blockade here until Taiwan submits. And then you'll have another frozen stand off like the one you have now. Because that's what China really wants. They don't want change they want stability. As you've so aptly pointed out, they are a patient people who are in no hurry for things to change. And you know what's really really sad? How the west had twisted Xi's words to make it out that he wanted to declare war. When Xi said the Taiwan situation will be resolved in this decade, what he was saying is he thought the relationship was going so well that Taiwan would wish to return to China willingly. You see at that time trade between the two was at a high point. People from Taiwan were going to China to get educated and find jobs there. Then the US started saying those were fighting words and that it meant China was going to attack to reunify within the decade. That China was only building up it's military to do this, the attack would come before 2027. I think you know what happens next.
USA's MIC is terrifying. They create scenarios and publish them and the news media gets ahold of them and suddenly fear is created everywhere. It just starts off as scenarios, they see one country has an advantage and then a torrent of articles will come out about it. Suddenly, now you have a new enemy. All China was doing was building up because as you said they're building up because they're wise. Well actually for sales, they really really want to be big in the arms market but that's another thing entirely. And now we have what we have. This awkward stand off where there are no winners. And it's all very sad really.
Ah, that makes sense. Yeah, I admit I misjudged you based solely off of the server you're from, which was rather immature of me. I imagine you've probably noticed that .ml has a high population of overt Marxist-Leninist folks on it, and is one of the hubs of leftism on Lemmy. That certainly doesn't apply to everyone who signed up on it though. lol Centrist does make a lot more sense in hindsight. I doubt you can really call yourself center-right anymore though, in the American scale at least, simply due to how crazy the right has gotten in recent years. That Overton Window jumped like 5 notches rightward on us, and left a lot of people behind. You could be a fairly typical neolib, free-trade, privatization, etc. We have a community of them here on .world, they post a fair bit of news, you might find some like-minded people if you are.
I agree wholeheartedly. The only places I've heard that extensively discussed are more serious geostrategic groups. CSIS most prominently. Most of the media plays into the more potentially ... dramatic possibilities though. Much better as clickbait I imagine, for us peons.
Regarding navy I'm not so sure. The scale of their fleet build up is very impressive. Generally, naval ships are not exactly a hot export market, especially when you're considering the larger, more advanced blue water stuff. They're pretty clearly moving towards global power projection capabilities. This does not necessarily indicate a future of aggression, though, as such a force also has a very important role in securing the sea trade that China relies so heavily on in addition to being a strong tool for diplomatic pressure. Look at how we use ours, after all. Naval power is also the sort of thing that needs to be developed over many years, you can't just spin up the institutions and knowledge base necessary to effectively deploy to another hemisphere in just a few years, it takes decades. So I see it as a long-term investment and hedge against the future.
You are absolutely right. I cannot rightfully call myself center-right anymore. The right has literally jumped off a cliff and I'm stuck here shaking my fists in anger at the sky. I probably am close to neo-lib. I would have used to call myself libertarian but whoo boy that went sideways. It's a sad reality for me. Maybe that's why I'm so upset about it all.
So here's a surprising thing about China's Navy. Besides small arms, naval ships are what China sells the most. There are a lot of weird political reasons for this, for example fighter jets and tanks are almost exclusively sold to close allies and allies just isn't China's thing. Just look what happened to Egypt's purchases of SU-35s as they got hit by CAATSA. So China decided to focus on a niche to get the word out that they're selling high end military equipment, not just small arms. Something that would go under the radar of many super powers (read USA) and would still be able to show off high end equipment. Secondly, you have to remember who China's buyers are. SE Asia is mostly island nations, so they don't go for the more conventional equipment that you're thinking of. They're islands, so they're more likely to buy maritime equipment rather than ground assault equipment that you would see pretty much everywhere else on the planet.
I mean just recently you have Thailand and Cambodia both buying Chinese Naval warships. Here's a super fun one, Malaysia is one of their customers. A country they're having a spat with over the SCS. So you have Malaysia buying Chinese warships to protect Malaysia from China.
https://www.voanews.com/a/malaysia-buying-chinese-ships-to-protect-waters-from-china-others/3780026.html
That all said times they are a changing. Egypt just signed a deal for J-10CE fighter jets and Algeria is ready to buy VT-4 tanks. Both are abandoning Russia in favor of Chinese military equipment for very obvious reasons. This is likely one of the reasons China is in no hurry to see the end of the war. Watching Russia destroy itself and having all of it's customer's go to China doesn't seem like it's against China's interests at the moment.
Yeah, exporting some smaller craft is definitely not out of the question. It's always nice when you can gather up additional buyers for your kit, that way you can leverage additional economies of scale to keep your own costs down. They are building large amounts of naval assets that won't be suitable for export though. Patrol craft are one thing. Larger seagoing warships are another--most countries simply don't maintain a very large fleet of them, as they're very expensive to operate and not broadly useful during peacetime outside of certain niche situations. Since its the type of thing where a few countries would maybe buy a few every few decades, it's never really going to be a big money maker for anyone.
That's an interesting insight on moving into Russia's export market. I hadn't thought of that, but it actually makes a tremendous amount of sense. lol Aircraft are definitely a hotter export market. They're just something you want in greater numbers, generally speaking, and have a much broader appeal.
You're smart, I like you. What your saying is absolutely correct which is exactly why China by and large doesn't build the large sea crafts and instead focuses on littoral patrol ships. Even the US had noticed it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2021/11/05/yes-china-has-more-warships-than-the-usa-thats-because-chinese-ships-are-small/
The US states it's because the Chinese navy is focused on power at home and not power projection. I say it's for sales purposes.
Now, China also makes the large super ships. But those are made in small numbers. They have their type 55 destroyer that has been compared to the Agies which I think there are 8 and their 3 aircraft carriers. But those ships are basically marketing brochures. They catch the attention of the media and not much else. These you hear talked about all the time, and China sails them everywhere for photo ops.
I know it's weird, but it actually is easier to think of China as a corporation that's gone off the rails rather than a country.
This is just off of wikipedia, so I'm not sure how up-to-date it is:
3 aircraft carriers 4 landing helicopter docks 12 amphibious transport docks 32 landing ship tanks 33 landing ship mediums 58 destroyers 54 frigates 75 corvettes 150 missile boats 26 submarine chasers 17+ gunboats 36 mine countermeasure vessels 79 submarines 19 replenishment ships 232 auxiliaries
Those corvettes, missile and gun boats could all be considered "small". The frigates and up are all capable of deep water work further out, independently if necessary. Interestingly, it's almost a revival of the 19th century French naval doctrine Jeune École, which was typified by a heavy reliance on torpedo boats, with the idea that that would be a cheaper way to operate a navy while still posing a threat to the larger battleships that dominated naval strategy during that period.
It's certainly more than just a big business. Which is also smart, a large country would want a significant blue water navy if it hopes for influence on the global stage. Even the UK and France have them, and they are much smaller countries. It would just be very illogical for China to ignore blue water capabilities.
True, while a lot of it is clearly for business purposes. I may have been flippant stating their blue water navy stuff, that absolutely won't sell, is just marketing material. In truth, their blue water Navy moves which only began like 10 years ago or so is in fairness quite impressive. They've created large destroyers that the US is saying is on par with Ageis and aircraft carriers that have shown similar sortie rates to UK's carriers. If it really was just for show as I'm trying to say, it would have probably been more like Russian equipment. What with their sole aircraft carrier constantly catching fire and their stealth fighter jet that they're scared to put into the front line. The fact that China can demonstrate the equipment working on a fairly consistent basis in different weather conditions should tell me they're much more serious about all this than I give them credit for.
That said, this shift is too new to know what they're really thinking. Plus, they absolutely have been parading around the Type 55 to future prospective buyers of their equipment. Yet there's also clearly some movement towards actually being able to use this stuff. For example about 4 years ago, India showed off to the world that they could operate both of their aircraft carriers simultaneously. Something that at the time at least China was unable to do. However, last month they sailed all three of their carriers out simultaneously. Clearly this is an attempted signal that we do have enough trained officers and we're not just building equipment without training soldiers.
China's just done the this stuff is for sales for so long it's honestly hard for me to see it any other way. On top of them actually doing the training starting so recently that it's hard for me to say this is a permanent shift and not just a way to throw off the comments from India mocking their training.
All in all, this IMO is why China was befriending Russia to begin with. China has powerful technology, but ironically they don't have the bodies to put behind them. The one child policy has basically made every parent in China refuse to let their kids become soldiers. Russia on the other hand seemed to have a limitless supply of bodies to throw at a problem as they're doing in Ukraine. With China's best friends constantly facing off with terrorists, Pakistan, Myanmar, Saudi Arabi, UAE, Egypt and many more I think it made perfect sense China wanted access to Wagner to deal with this. Then, uh... Well Russia PROVED they have the bodies to throw in the grinder because they threw the bodies into the grinder.
China does have a very large number of active duty servicemembers, though I don't think that's all that surprising when they're one of the planet's largest countries, and have been steadily modernizing over the last few decades. I also imagine their unusually high youth unemployment numbers contribute to the ease of recruitment. When you have over a billion population, keeping 1% of them active duty is probably not particularly difficult.
Russia has the advantage of global recruitment, and are offering frankly huge financial incentives to anyone willing to fight. It's got to be rapidly draining their coffers. I suspect Xi is mainly just war profiteering off of them. In light of western sanctions, this has probably been the best period to be a Chinese exporter in many years. lol Russia is likely willing to pay top dollar for whatever they require to fuel their war machine. And there's always their raw material exports as well.