China's SCS Strategy Thread

[LesAdieux]

I heard this stuff in the 1970s oil shock and stagflation. Heard it again in the 1980s where Japan was supposed to eclipse America. Fast forward to today, and there's a new generation of history-challenged people troting out the same old tripe. Problem is, their wishful thinking fly against reality. And what is reality? To name just a few, America has favorable demographics. America's productivity continues to rise. America is more innovative and inventive, and will stretch its lead. And America's higher education system is without peer.

America isn't in decline. Relative to most of the world, it is still rising, with favorable long-term advantages its rivals can't match. What about the current social and political mess you ask? The periodic bloodletting between We The People and the ruling elites actually strengthen the Republic, along Thomas Jefferson's 'tree of liberty periodically refreshed by blood of patriots and tyrants.' America's sun is still rising.

America's productivity is not rising, it has been in decline for a while and failed to recover since the end of the financial crisis.

america has long lost its competitiveness in manufacturing, even in the IT sect, its productivity is very much in doubt. I'll give you an example: a couple years ago, there's a widely reported anecdote on out sourcing, a programmer in california outsourced his own job to a guy in China, he paid 1/10 of his own wage to the Chinese, the Chinese wrote programs for the American and the american played games in office. and guess what? the american was voted “the best employee" in his company. that is with 1/10 the cost, you can hire a chinese better than anyone in that american company. it's not wishful thinking, it's reality!

 

[Jura The idiot]

here:

... Countries like ..., Russia, and ... are using USD to buy up all the physical gold in the world like there is no tomorrow.
...

you're years behind (note I mean specifically Russia):
I just read the most recent

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saying the decrease of Russian GDP goes on (—0.6% this year, —0.4% Q3), it's off topic here so just:

...

Sep. 15, 2016 article
One of Russia's biggest economic problems is summed up in this chart

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...

(I've noticed you like to talk the Russian Navy
EDIT in https://www.sinodefenceforum.com/type-055-ddg-large-destroyer-thread.t6480/
also
Bltizo


so I thought I could let you know about something related)

 

[solarz]

You're the only one who's been talking about "bilateral takeovers" and "non-unilateral takeovers". Why beat on this straw man when it doesn't even exist and nobody is claiming it does?

You're just parsing words here. Let me put it this way. There are two eventual outcomes of a SCS dispute. First, both countries agree that one of them should have the island in dispute; this is a bilateral agreement. Second, one country unilaterally takes over an island without agreement from the other claimant; this is a unilateral takeover. There is no need to contrast the first possibility with any "multilateral agreement"; this would be nonsensical given there are only two claimants. The first possibility is rightly contrasted against the second possibility.

Okay, let me ask you this: how many territorial disputes do you know that gets resolved without one party first occupying the territory?

Territorial disputes end with a bilateral agreement, yet virtually all disputes involve one party "unilaterally" occupying the disputed territory. Therefore, what is the purpose of "contrasting" the takeover with the agreement? The two are not mutually exclusive. In fact, the "unilateral takeover" is almost always the necessary catalyst for earnest negotiations to start.

Like I said, the only meaningful distinction is whether the takeover is violent or peaceful.

Your mistake is assuming authority can exist without power. In a perfect theoretical universe where old ladies always get walked across the street and kittens never get punted, this may be the case. But in the actual, cold, hard universe of international realpolitik, one does not exist without the other. One has NEVER existed without the other. The Golden Rule of politics has been around as long as there has been politics.

Authority may require power, but power alone is not enough to have authority. The UN is an authority because virtually all nations acknowledge its authority. In contrast, few nations would agree that the USA has the authority to police the world.

 

[joshuatree]

America's productivity is not rising, it has been in decline for a while and failed to recover since the end of the financial crisis.

america has long lost its competitiveness in manufacturing, even in the IT sect, its productivity is very much in doubt. I'll give you an example: a couple years ago, there's a widely reported anecdote on out sourcing, a programmer in california outsourced his own job to a guy in China, he paid 1/10 of his own wage to the Chinese, the Chinese wrote programs for the American and the american played games in office. and guess what? the american was voted “the best employee" in his company. that is with 1/10 the cost, you can hire a chinese better than anyone in that american company. it's not wishful thinking, it's reality!

I would disagree that America's higher education system is without peer but the example you provided regarding worker productivity in the IT sector isn't supportive of the argument that American productivity is in decline. That particular example made headlines in the IT industry as a security incident but the particular person did this to actually increase his personal productivity. I recall he was a programmer or work related to that field which permits a lot of remote working. This person employed an outsourcer in China and paid a fraction of his wage not just to play games in the office. He actually got a few more jobs elsewhere and paid fractions of those salaries to the same outsourcer. As a result, his annual aggregate income rose a few fold. One can argue he merely emulated what corporate execs have been doing within their businesses and he increased his personal productivity and gain. He leveraged the cost of living differences between countries. He got caught because he got careless.

Part of the "decline" seen in the American workforce is due to the increased individual productivity as a result of advances in technology and automation. So the problem resulting is businesses need fewer workers. This problem will not be just an American problem. You see this when going to self checkouts. Now one cashier is needed vs four, that lone cashier really acting as tech support to monitor the four self checkouts. Each country moving up the food chain will encounter this issue as well.

 

[Blackstone]

You want to know what reality is? Google image M1, M2, and M3 money supply. Make sure you get graphs with dates starting in the early 1900s. If you don't know already how to interpret what you see, go and learn "exponential increase" and "hockey stick moment" and what this means for the US economy. What happened in 2008 was NEVER fixed. Derivatives are more voluminous than ever before. This isn't oil shock or Japanophobia; they are minor blips in US history. We are now at the precipice of the end of the King Dollar. Countries are leaving the USD like rats fleeing a sinking ship. Numerous countries are setting up bilateral and multilateral currency exchanges cutting the USD out of transactions altogether. Countries like China, Russia, and India are using USD to buy up all the physical gold in the world like there is no tomorrow. IMF is slowly but surely manuevering to set up the SDR to replace the USD as the world's main reserve currency. All of this has only started happening in the last several years. If the USD is so strong, why are so many countries leaving it behind? The answer is because it's not. Meanwhile we are sliding headlong into yet another recession. Yellen wants to keep her job so she will wait till after November to admit the US economy is anything but rosy. In any other economy in any other time both Hillary and Donald would have been turned out on the street by the end of the primaries. Not this time. Desperation is now driving voters on both ends of the political spectrum towards these two utterly flawed candidates. Desperation that is borne of privation.

You're all over the place. Drop the rants and try again. Keep in mind the rest of the world's currency when you evaluate the dollar.

BTW America does NOT have favorable demographics. Its fertility rate is below replacement. Its population growth is sustained by immigration alone. Its supposedly vaunted university system is propped up on life support by immigrants from China, India, and Eastern Europe. Meanwhile American fathers and mothers would rather their kids be the next Tom Brady rather than the next Richard Feynman. You may not have much contact with university graduate programs in the US but if you did you would know this. Try going into any graduate lab and look at the ethnicities represented there. Both China and India are piling on large sums of money to attract these people back to their native countries, and the brain drain has already started reversing.

America has favorable demographics, because it's an attractive destination for millions of immigrants. That's a source of strength for the US, and will continue to be thus. Not even a President Trump would stop legal immigration.

Your university rants are straw man arguments, and do nothing to diminish the fact US higher education system is the best in the world. As for other countries pouring money into R&D, wake me up when the combined China-India R&D expenditures come close to what US spend. And the bit about "reverse" brain drain: YAWN. Odds are good my great, great, great, great, great grandchildren will be old and grey before more 'brains' rather immigrate to China than the US. It might never happen at all, but never is a long time.

 

[Blackstone]

America's productivity is not rising, it has been in decline for a while and failed to recover since the end of the financial crisis.

america has long lost its competitiveness in manufacturing, even in the IT sect, its productivity is very much in doubt. I'll give you an example: a couple years ago, there's a widely reported anecdote on out sourcing, a programmer in california outsourced his own job to a guy in China, he paid 1/10 of his own wage to the Chinese, the Chinese wrote programs for the American and the american played games in office. and guess what? the american was voted “the best employee" in his company. that is with 1/10 the cost, you can hire a chinese better than anyone in that american company. it's not wishful thinking, it's reality!

American productivity is the best in the developed world, and it continues to rise. A simple search on Google would yield plenty of evidence. One of the biggest advantage America has on invention, innovation, and productivity is its ability to attract highly talented men and women from all over the world. One example is there are millions of Americans of Chinese ancestry, and as a group, we are some of the most successful immigrants in the country. For example, here's a story of an American professor who discovered a possible new source of renewable energy. I'm not sure if his ethnically Chinese graduate assistant is American, and if not, I hope we co-op the talent to stay.

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While thousands of people the world over continue to go solar to generate alternative energy,

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just made a major breakthrough on a completely unique new conductive material: wood pulp. While the mention of wood pulp mention leave many scratching their head, the lab found a way to manufacture floorboards out of the commonly wasted material, and did so in a manner that took advantage of its composition of cellulose nanofibers. In other words, the team of engineers managed to develop a flooring material capable of generating electricity by something as simple as a footstep.


After chemically treating the wood pulp, the team — led by associate professor of materials science and engineering Xudong Wang and graduate student Chunhua Yao — found that the manufactured flooring produced a usable amount of electricity after coming in contact with untreated nanofibers. Knowing this, they then crafted their innovative flooring and found it to excel at conducting electricity. So much so that the team reported having the ability to replenish the charge on batteries and power lights.

What’s particularly impressive about Wang and Yao’s creation is how it not only manages to address an alternative energy need but does so in an extremely inexpensive way. Bottling energy created by footsteps isn’t entirely new, but no prior projects have used wood pulp — a wildly plentiful and cheap material. In another potential win for the burgeoning field of roadside energy harvesting, the wood pulp floorboards could feasibly challenge solar energy if it proves to be a success.

“Roadside energy harvesting requires thinking about the places where there is abundant energy we could be harvesting,” Wang said in a

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. “We’ve been working a lot on harvesting energy from human activities. One way is to build something to put on people, and another way is to build something that has constant access to people. The ground is the most-used place.”

Related:

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As mentioned in the article, installing Wang’s wood pulp flooring in heavily trafficked areas like sports stadiums or universities has the possibility to generate a significant amount of energy. In addition, several layers of the flooring could be placed on top of one another, further increasing the energy output.

“Our initial test in our lab shows that it works for millions of cycles without any problem,” Wang added. “We haven’t converted those numbers into a year of life for a floor yet, but I think with appropriate design it can definitely outlast the floor itself.”

The findings were

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prior to being featured in the September 24 issue of the journal Nano Energy. Moving forward, Wang hopes to make the technology more efficient before installing it into an area on the campus of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

 

[dingyibvs]

Attracting immigrants cannot possibly replace grooming talent at home, it's a stop gap measure that'll become increasingly ineffective as the two biggest reservoirs of scientific talent in the world, China and India, become wealthier themselves by the day.

Attracting immigrants can, however, continue to be effective at addressing demographic issues, though that carries problems on their own. Trump is just the start of it, and Europe is having its own taste. It'll worsen especially quickly if the immigrants become increasingly lower skilled as China and India get better at retaining top tier talent.

 

[flyzies]

As much as I have enjoyed reading the articulate arguments on the past couple of pages (where both sides have brought up good points), can we please get back to the SCS?

 

[weig2000]

I read a few days ago that Philippines and China could not reach an agreement about allowing Philippine fishermen to return to Scarborough Shoal to fish. The biggest bone of contention was language used in the joint statement. Philippines side does not agree with the use of words "allow" or "permit" lest they have any implication of sovereignty by China; the Chinese side does not agree with any mention of the rulings from PCA. I was wondering how they would break the deadlock.

Well, it appears that Chinese pragmatism and vagueness are again at play now, from the news below. China effectively allows the Philippine fishermen to return, without either side having to make any official statements, at least for now. The implication I suppose is that this will stand as long as the two sides are on good terms and nobody tries to make a bigger deal out of it.

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Philippine government says China seems to have stopped obstructing Philippine fishermen from entering contested waters

ENLARGE
If the current situation holds, it could prove another boon to Mr. Duterte, who said he discussed fishing rights with China’s President Xi Jinping during his visit to Beijing. Photo: Associated Press
By
James Hookway
Updated Oct. 28, 2016 10:38 a.m. ET

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The Philippine government Friday said that since President Rodrigo Duterte

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, China appears to have stopped blocking Filipino fishermen approaching the disputed fishing grounds around Scarborough Shoal, off the Philippines’ western coast.

“For the past three days, it has been observed that there are no longer any Chinese Coast Guard and that Filipino fishing boats are no longer being intercepted,” Presidential spokesman Ernesto Abello told reporters in Manila.

Chinese vessels have long prevented Filipino fishermen from working in the area, a rich fishing ground which both countries claim as being rightfully theirs. An international tribunal at The Hague in July

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, and that there was no legal basis to China’s claim to nearly the entire South China Sea.

The verdict had been widely viewed as a victory for the Philippines, but Mr. Duterte has said he is setting aside the dispute to help warm relations with China. The Philippine powerful fishing lobby also has pressured Mr. Duterte to negotiate for better access to area.

If the current situation holds, it could prove another boon to Mr. Duterte, who said he discussed fishing rights with China’s President

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during his visit to Beijing, during which he also announced that the he would

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and pursue a foreign policy that wouldn’t always align with Washington.

Mr. Duterte left Beijing on Friday with economic agreements and business deals worth some $24 billion. Since taking office in June, Mr. Duterte has raised eyebrows in Washington and elsewhere with a series of frequently coarse remarks about U.S.-Philippine relations, often catching his own aides and officials off guard and raising questions about the solidity of the alliances which the U.S. has attempted to build in East Asia in recent years.

U.S. officials have said that ties with Manila remain strong and that Mr. Duterte hasn’t actually done anything to match his rhetoric.

China appears to be stepping up its diplomacy elsewhere in the region, meanwhile. Earlier this week, two Chinese frigates and a supply vessel made a port call at Cam Ranh Bay, a strategic deep-water port in southern Vietnam. Earlier in the month a U.S. Navy destroyer and a submarine tender docked at the facility, the first time U.S. warships had visited the site since the normalization of relations between the two countries 21 years ago, barring visits by technical and support craft. Vietnam has made a point of opening up Cam Ranh Bay to foreign navies in recent years—including China’s—to encourage a larger international military presence in the South China Sea, but this was the Chinese navy’s first visit there since Vietnam opened up the facility for foreign visitors.

Also, Malaysia’s Prime Minister

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is scheduled to visit China this coming week. In a statement issued Wednesday, Mr. Najib said he aimed to elevate relations with Beijing to new highs. Like the Philippines and Vietnam, Malaysia also claims waters in the South China Sea that are also contested by China.

Asked about reports that Filipino fishermen were returning to Scarborough Shoal, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang sidestepped the question during a daily briefing Friday, but said that relations between China and the Philippines had “entered a stage of comprehensive improvement.”

Mr. Lu also said that the Philippines and China discussed cooperating on fishing during Mr. Duterte’s visit, adding that “I can tell you that both sides remain in communication on that.”

—Josh Chin in Beijing contributed to this article

 

[Hendrik_2000]

Excellent news. This show that the Chinese are pragmatic. The biggest windfall from Duterte visit is change in paradigm. Slowly but slowly all those SEA states are taking stock right now and slow tilt toward China is underway
This is an excellent interview The Interviewer from Aljazeera as usual still live in the old paradigm of western supremacy and try to hector the interviewee into that direction. But Dr Victor Gao give an excellent rebuttal