I'm frankly surprised this was actually seriously addressed at all by some members. I know the rules aren't as strict in "Member's Club" as they are in the Military sections, but even if it was a slow news day, there really didn't need to be over 20 pages derailed for this drivel. This should go without saying but if there was even a remote chance that kind of Clancy wet dream nonsense could happen, it would immediately become the biggest breaking news since the start of the century in the West, bigger than 9/11 or COVID-19 or Ukraine.
You wouldn't need to be pressing your eyeball to your screen on Flightradar to count out the "airplane pixels" they have over Beijing ("Oh my lawd folks, only two dots at the absolutely bustling air traffic hour of 3:00AM BJT") to validate its plausibility. The BBC would cut away from their endless Elizabeth Windsor coverage, CNN would interrupt their own President's speech, all the Western war journalists in Ukraine would tell whatever refugee or injured soldier they were interviewing at the moment to sod off so they could switch coverage and get in on the action.
At least the wasted scrolling outed some of the gullible schmucks and concern trolls who came out of lurking to ignore-block. There's going to be exponentially far far more of these "China Collapse/Where is Peng Shuai?" disinfo news baits as the $600M US propaganda bill starts to payroll and the current information war dynamic intensifies and if the thread is going to catch a cold this way every time the Twitter "China experts" sneeze out something nasty, people might as well head to r/worldnews or r/geopolitics for their global updates. At least those Western propaganda aggregators don't allow discussion posts based solely on the speculations of Twitter and YouTube News Network randoms.