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- Thread starter bd popeye
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Should not have taken 4 slaps to resolve. Should have been at most 2.
Sociopolitical rectification in HongKong is quite clearly incomplete. The central government needs to actively manage the situation, not just behave in an "all is quiet, crisis averted" manner.
There's nothing similar to China with Ukraine, the regions Kiev claims are literally another culture with another language and history, whereas Taiwan technically still claim to be the the government of all of China.
Kiev's claim over Russia's Ukraine region is only comparable to Israel's claim over Palestine.
A lot of people in HK has this pathological delusion about their place and the amount of real power Beijing has.
If the quality of propaganda that came out of the US in the latter half of Biden's presidency is any indication, CIA money was getting stretched pretty thin.
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Unpopular opinion but I do wish that China could annex Myanmar and actually turn it into a functional state instead of a shithole filled with drugs, scams, crime and gangs that is dragging down all of south-east asia as a whole. Probably won't ever happen though, even though full control of Myanmar offers up the Indian ocean to China.
Full annexation will never happen, but I wonder why does China let neighboring allied countries like NK and Myanmar do whatever they want and turn into pseudo-failed states. Doesn't China have enough influence to strong arm this countries into win-win economical policies that can turn them into the equivalent of Thailand, Vietnam or Laos?
Full annexation will never happen, but I wonder why does China let neighboring allied countries like NK and Myanmar do whatever they want and turn into pseudo-failed states. Doesn't China have enough influence to strong arm this countries into win-win economical policies that can turn them into the equivalent of Thailand, Vietnam or Laos?
It costs far less money to deal with the effects of failed states on your border, than it costs to actually go in and occupy those states. Plus occupations usually don't fix anything long term, see, e.g., Iraq and Afghanistan.
Also, in many ways, North Korea is less of a basketcase now than it was a few years ago. So sometimes these failed states un-fail.
I still haven't heard if China is sending the help to Myanmar or not. If they won't send any big team for help, for me that's a continuation of a blunder of Chinese foreign policy to Myanmar. That shithole (Myanmar) is sinking deeper and deeper, you have a failed state at the border who keeps thousands of PRC citizens in scam camps.
@Moonscape
NK is still a basketcase. It has almost zero impact economically on China, which declining Dongbei desperately needs NK to open. China-South Korea trade is like 300B$ not to mention mutual investments and factories operated inside both of them. Imagine how the North East China would look if NK wasn't such a petty hermit kingdom.
giving away your age man
It costs a lot to expand properly. Doesn't mean China can't eventually do it.
But honestly a lot of the idiosyncracies about Myanmar and NK can be pinned on China's chosen geopolitical strategy. The chief strategist Wang Huning doesn't seem to believe in expansionism at all. There is a strategic view which states China should be a high walled castle with wide moat, outside conflicts should be carried out with proxies that only get limited support, allowing the scientists inside the castle to build up much better tech than the "outside".
This viewpoint means that expansionism does not work/is not conductive to growth anymore. Instead, tech and industry are the most dominant methods of increasing national power. In some ways, the theory proves correct, because one could easily argue for example that one DJI would be worth at least 5 Iraq war victories, the Iraq war brought nearly nothing to the US in the end, despite being a perfect example of succesful tactical expansionism on the ground.
So therefore by building a high castle with wide moats and then using proxies outwards, China disrupts her enemies' growth in what matters (economy/innovation) while avoiding the pitfalls of wasteful expansionism.
In theory, there is a point of inflection where China's prosperity makes it so that all nations have to submit, or even so that it's irrelevant if nations submit or not, because the power difference in production, innovation and market share is so large that a nation like Myanmar's output would be a rounding error in comparison.
However, that's the current grand strategy, there's no reason to think it wouldn't change if a new strategist gets put in charge.
There are also good arguments that expansionism can work in China's context, namely how uplifting people from poverty creates massive growth and how the succesful uplifting of the backwards western regions powers the economic boom. One could draw the conclusion that expansionism didn't work for US because of endemic corruption letting US' enemy (China) simply outplay them for control of Iraq later on after the dust settles. And that if US was run competently, they would have gotten great mileage out of the Iraq expansion.
Personally I'm vocally for the creation of a wide China led empire, since I think it would let China continue the same virtuous cycle of uplifting poorer regions using richer regions, this time with China's core acting as the tier 1 region and third world countries acting as the 2nd and 3rd tier regions. The result will be insane, never before seen levels of prosperity in China and fair development opportunities (unlike what happens now) for the third world.
Also, nearly all these nations don't use their resources efficiently and are marred by corruption. By pooling all their resource rights into Beijing's proven competent government, these resources won't sit there and rot, they can be used for megaprojects that brings humanity forward.
I think this vision is a lot more compelling than China as a walled castle.
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