Pointless since they can just buy from all the European resellers. China cannot enforce a country specific or company specific rare earth ban. That's why they have focused on essentially controlling rare earth supply on the entire world. This is not EUV machine produced by only one company with less than 100 units sold per year, where every single unit can be tracked. This is just raw materials.
PLA Strategy in a Taiwan Contingency
- Thread starter pugachev_diver
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
It will be funnier when the airlines start planning these annual exercises into their scheduling to avoid needless losses and Taiwan is just cut off for a few days every year like clockwork.
But it still increases the cost of those rare earth input for the target companies. And such targeted sanctions could be combined with temporary seizures of their assets within China and HK, as well as targeting of associated personnel and companies. China can try to copy all the secondary sanction and foreign direct production rules Washington uses. For example, Beijing’s ultimately goal is to get Nexperia and the Dutch Government to backdown. However, Beijing could target all known companies and individuals that sell critical minerals and intermediate parts to Nexperia that scatter across the world. It could not only sanction the target companies and individuals but also demand that any companies that does business in China must cut off all contacts with these sanctioned individuals/groups or else have their assets in China frozen and personnel arrested (Meng Wanzhou playbook).
When push comes to shove, China can make most of its stuffs with exception of commercial aircrafts and top semiconductors (and lithography machines). China is keeping so many foreigners happily earning their bucks in the Chinese market because it still seeks to artificially preserve the WTO and hope other countries would one day revive the free trade bloc (which in turn benefits China’s manufacturers). But if the goal of western nations were to prevent Chinese manufacturers from gaining their rightful place through tariffs and other trade embargoes, then Beijing might as well adopt the MAGA playbook and with a dose of Russian imperialism.
China’s so called “peaceful rise” is a naive and immature concept constructed by a generation of arrogant pro-west and arguably self-loathing Chinese elites. Those Chinese elites, including Party leaders and government researchers, never foresaw that there indeed exists a global bamboo ceiling (keeping China permanently at the lower ends of global supply chain) imposed by G7 countries, which came crashing down during the first Trump Administration and caught the entire SeeSeePee peeing with its pants down. It was arguably China’s Pearl Harbour moment.
Many Chinese liberals and urban cosmopolitan elites would start argue that had China not pursued MIC 2025 industrial policy and happily stayed at the lower ends of global industrial supply chain, the West would never turn against China. But the problem with this assumption is that China’s wages would never rise, and that Chinese migrant workers would happily work 996 forever. Moreover, even without the one child policy, with so many migrant workers leaving their hometowns to engage in 996 sweatshop, China’s birthrate would still collapse at some point naturally. China would then get old without even becoming a middle income country. Once it gets old amid rising wages without even bits of tech self sufficiency, China would simply become a bigger version of Thailand and Philippines (deindustrialised and population heavily hooked to drugs, crime, sex, corruption, and tourism). Heaven for white westerners but hell for its own countrymen. MIC 2025 industrial policy’s most important goal is therefore to have China become self sufficient in technologies critical to long term competitiveness and national security BEFORE China gets old (think 2035, when the 1980s baby boomers retire). China therefore really has only one shot to become a tech superpower, and the 15th and 16th Five Years Plans would be the most critical.
I'm pretty certain Trump, his cabinet, the Pentagon, and the Senators on the armed services committee know they're fucked if they go that direction. The key is they're not going to reveal those realities with their puppets in foreign countries since they want them to voluntarily march their countries to their deaths at China.
Chinese urban cosmopolitan elites, like those in any country, don't care at all about the blue collar and rural working class of their own countries. And this is precisely why those urban cosmopolitan elites can never be allowed to have even the smallest say in matters of national governance. Municipal governance, sure. Never regional or national though.
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130 sorties overall, 90 in ADIZ
Not the highest but second highest. The highest happened during Joint Sword-2024B, with 153 sorties and 111 in ADIZ
Not the highest but second highest. The highest happened during Joint Sword-2024B, with 153 sorties and 111 in ADIZ
Under counted by 114 sorties.
" - Video circulating allegedly showing a Chinese recon drone operating over / near Taipei is false. The video was initially posted by the Global Times, a Chinese outlet, and then spread by CCTV's Channel 7, Chinese state media. The footage is actually from old live-streams by Ying Hanling, a Taiwanese drone hobbyist. Images show original footage, and another of his live streams from YouTube."
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Day 2 has began. Should be PHL-191 on Pingtan. Posted by Hole Hole the Chengdu Gay Guy Who Doesn't Admit He's Gay
It's kinda funny how joyful and excited the residents are
Edit: Yup it's Pingtan. Easy geolocate
Edit #2: This actually might be an old video because Pingtan should be cloudy today. We shall see.
It's kinda funny how joyful and excited the residents are
Edit: Yup it's Pingtan. Easy geolocate
Edit #2: This actually might be an old video because Pingtan should be cloudy today. We shall see.
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Trump gives his opinion, basically he's fine with the exercises.
God bless America for electing this useful idiot. The Great Downfall of the American Empire can't come soon enough.