In any event, I have a question for y'all. If every claim about China's treatment of its Uyghur minority were true, what would you do about it? What cure would you prescribe that isn't likely to be worse than the disease?

S&P be like:

China genocides an entire group and represses its people: *I sleep*

USA farts in the wrong direction: *REAL SHIT*

Basically, every time a Democrat does something that is remotely right of center, you cry foul. But China commits a heinous genocide and you defend them? Wow.

And how THE FUCK would a cure be "worse" than FUCKING GENOCIDE?

Genocide deniers: “believe victims.”
Grnocide demiers(when it’s their favorite totalitarian party doing it, to some race they don’t care about): claim that associated press articles, where victims are all telling the same story are ‘jihadist propaganda’(actually happened, in version 1 of this thread).

As for the last post, uh...maybe, boycott totalitarian states that commit atrocities? Suffer the economic consequences anyway. But then again, someone at the local US level did something unjust, out of racism, so why not just post on the internet, about a revolution that’ll never happen(that was sarcasm).

At the risk of being accused of mini-modding, I would like to make a suggestion for everyone's mental health. S&P stated nearly 200 days ago that her party membership requires her to lie about political-historical matters, especially as they pertain to notionally communist regimes. This is a politics thread, and the discussion has drifted to a notionally communist regime; presumably, little if anything she says here will be made in good faith, and absolutely everything she says on this specific subject will be made in bad faith. In other words, she's trolling. I can understand the natural revulsion felt if respectable posters falsify past and present to justify their worldview, but she is not a respectable poster; she's a troll. There's no need to legitimize S&P by responding to her, much less get emotionally worked up over her dehumanizing posts. As I said in the last thread, just treat her as parody account and move on. That's the most civil way to approach this, and you'll be exercising a bit of self-care by doing so.

I wonder what kinda whiplash y'all are gonna experience once you realize the atrocities the US has done, is doing and will do against other countries and to its own citizens. I'd suggest stocking up on neck braces. Here's a taste of what we're doing right now:

-selling weapons to Saudi Arabia who's using them to continue a genocide in Yemen. A bomb that dropped on a grade school bus filled with kids was confirmed to be one Obama sold.

-giving billions in aid to Israel to do shit that makes the Uyghur mess look like a humanitarian project.

-continue to occupy and drone the shit out of sovereign countries, most of which regularly ask us to leave.

-contain more prisoners BY NUMBER than China, which is 5x the size, and disproportionately to minorities.

-interefere in the internal politics and elections of nations across the world, destabilizing and often causing mass death along the way.


And that's just off the top of my head of the stuff we're openly doing right now. How you could complain about people attacking Democrats, who right now have the power to stop these but won't, while complaining about the internal conduct of a country we have very little non-economic interaction with is some top level Enlightened Centrist bullshit.

I find it heartwarming to see so many voice support for the Uyghurs, I really do. Now apply that righteous anger to the shit your own country is doing. Then we can talk about the evils of China.

You don't think that a war between nuclear armed military superpowers has the potential to be worse than whatever is going on in Xianjiang?

You don't think that fomenting civil war and the Balkanization of a country with 1.5 BILLION people has the potential to be worse than whatever is going on Xianjiang?

You don't think that imposing the kind of sanctions that resulted in the deaths of upward of a million people in Iraq in the 1990s on a country, that, again, has 1.5 BILLION people living in it has the potential to be worse than whatever is going on Xianjiang?

You don't think that destabilizing the entire global economy has the potential to be worse than whatever is going on in Xianjiang?

These aren't abstract questions of justice or righteousness, they're material issues with the potential to impact BILLIONS of human lives.

No, what you're doing (in this post and the next) literally is whataboutism. Like, textbook whataboutism. People are talking about a genocide that's underway against a group of people and you're bursting in through the wall like some politically woke Kool Aid Man and saying 'what about all this completely unrelated stuff that America does?' You're hardly better than Sedition and Pockets outright denying the genocide altogether. At least she isn't pretending to be 'outraged' by the genocide while using it as a pretext to bash the United States.

Sorry Earthcubed, you're right, but the above needs to be addressed - The above is exactly the response of the 'useful idiots' of the last century, who saw a small trickle of information as evidence of zero wrong doing in their adopted dictatorship. We have Chinese dissidents that escape to the West, we have whole families in the UK that have left Hong Kong to get out from under the jackboot - we have the real people, and their stories, just like we did in the 70s and 80s. The paucity of documentary evidence so far doesn't show that there isn't a problem, it shows how good these awful regimes are at controlling their messaging with modern technology.

On that topic, and to be honest the last thing I'll add on this segue, as I was really curious about how the new US administration would face this, and that's been answered - but let's further explore the issue with pictures -

This is a valid point to be made in the context of Beltway discourse, but it's misplaced here. Show me where anyone in this thread is justifying the prison-industrial complex, drone wars, support for Israel, what we are doing on the Arabian peninsula, the occupation of Iraq, the occupation of Afghanistan, or literally anything you just listed. Because I don't see anything like that going on here. There was a side-argument about our activities in Afghanistan in the 1980's, not the 21st century; there were posts applauding the possible withdrawal of military assistance to the Saudis, not calls for expansive US engagement. There was tepid support for a retaliatory airstrike in an active war zone, other than that I don't see anyone supporting any of our military actions overseas, much less endorsing our incarceral system. The closest might be Ezadara's comments a few pages back about the Korean war.

If at every point in our history we had applied the idea that we can't try to enforce or support some sort of international justice unless we fix literally everything revolting about our own politics, there is an entire spectrum of international laws, norms, rules, humanitarian assistance, and just general good governance that would have never existed or which we would have never taken part in. And if everything you just listed ceased to exist---if we withdrew all overseas military assistance and military forces, eliminated the DOD, and pardoned every drug conviction---China would still be oppressing the Uyghurs. This isn't a debatable proposition; China isn't oppressing them because of the legacy of Jim Crow or American imperialism.

1.) I'm sick of people using the horrendous acts committed against the Uyghurs as a smokescreen for relaying anxiety about the militaristic and economic threat posed by China, as well as misplaced (albeit somewhat justified) anger over the coronavirus. Don't get it twisted, that's what this is really about. There are crikets whenever anyone brings up Kadyrov or Modi.
2.) The purpose of accusing people of whataboutism is to highlight how they can effectuate or at least influence what they're dismissing (e.g. why are you worried about gun control when there are starving children in Africa). The second I or you start sending a check to China or live in a country that allies itself with China is the second this becomes an issue worth ruminating on. As it stands, I have as much of a vested interest in the Uyghurs situation as I do with Chechnya or Kashmir. Awful, but neither I nor my country can do shit, so maybe we should focus on things we CAN change?
3.) There are also degrees of atrocity. This combined with personal influence detailed above (the identity position, if you will) makes up a rational internationalist approach to understanding the world, which is essential for anyone commenting on global affairs.
4.) I'm "bashing" the country I live in and pay taxes to because I want it to do better, or at least do less bad.

^ #chinamaga

I've come close to being radicalized in a couple different ways before. Once you fall into a conspiratorial mindset, i.e. "the real truth is being hidden from us, only (faction x) knows what's really going on", you can be lead to believe or do virtually anything. Rhetorical flourishes conceal the fact that this process of "unlearning" is just internalizing Big Lies over and over again, if something plainly illogical or unlikely doesn't seem right to you, it's just because the people feeding you propaganda are just better informed or educated than you, they couldn't possibly be wrong. Atrocities are dressed up in the same logic that Holocaust deniers use- "that didn't happen, but if it did they deserved it" or "Actually it was the other side that did that". You're backed into a corner by ultimatums that make any more moderate position impossible- "if you're not with us, you're against us" or "If you're not on board with this horrible thing, this other even more horrible thing will happen".

All these factors, and many others, can easily lead someone to a place where they think slave labor and mass murder are good so long as they're happening to the right people.

It's abundantly clear that not one of you chuckle monkeys gives two shits about the fate of the Uyghurs beyond deploying them as a rhetorical hammer against people you disagree with on unrelated subjects. "We have to DO SOMETHING!" you cry. But when asked what you'd have someone do, fucking crickets. Wallow in your self-proclaimed moral superiority all you want, but none of you actually gives a fuck.

You say this without a sense of irony. This is why a lot of leftists are turned off by tankies.


HINT: GENOCIDE IS ALWAYS FUCKING BAD MORON

"None of you actually cares about the Uyghurs!" - woman who insists on referring to the genocide of the Uyghurs as 'whatever is going on in Xinjiang'

The history of capitalism is an unbroken record of centuries of unremitting oppression and genocide. You indict the system of socialism for every crime committed in its name, but give the ongoing horror of capitalism a pass. The hypocrisy is boundless.

Shut the absolute fuck up and quit giving horseshoe theory merit.

I like how crimes are fine under socialism "bEcAUsE cApItAlIsM".

Like it's some stupid fucking black/white binary. You're disgusting S&P.

Who the fuck said anything about socialism?

Fuck off, clown, you are in no position to tell anyone they don't care about the Uyghurs.

So, the essence of your argument is that the US is a hugely influential power with the ability to move heaven and earth to enforce its will for malign purposes, but cannot use that power for any good purposes, so our focus should be entirely inward.

Let me illustrate just how lacking your worldview is by using an example from my own field: I assume you agree with me that fewer nuclear weapons in the world is a good thing (if you disagree on that point, I'm happy to discuss further). I have in my hands right now an academic book which deals in part with how (secret) US security guarantees were partly but directly responsible for why Sweden abandoned its nuclear weapons program. Did you know Sweden had a nuclear weapons program? Yes, they did, and it was fairly advanced. They abandoned it in tandem with the decision to modify their runways specifically to accommodate American and British nuclear bombers (i.e., the kind Sweden didn't have, not to be confused with the lighter nuclear bombers they almost did have), as well as modify tankers to refuel NATO aircraft. Taiwan used to have a nuclear weapons program. Italy once pursued a nuclear weapons program. The strategy of nuclear latency is called "The Japan Option" for a reason. And right now, at this very moment, a huge percentage of South Koreans favors going nuclear, merely because of the suggestion we might not assist them, that it's not our business; less than five years ago, a clear majority did. One of the reasons we never embraced a No First Use policy in the cold war was to dissuade other European countries from pursuing nuclear weapons. None of the countries I just mentioned abstained from nuclear weapons purely because of us, but all of them abandoned them partly because we gave them alternatives. I don't see any room in your worldview for facts like these; in the skeleton world you have sketched out for us, there was nothing to do in any of these cases except a regime change war or a coup that would have made the situation worse, so instead we should have just focused on civil rights or something. Right? Well, there were things we could do, we did them, and they neither stopped nor slowed the civil rights movement.

We don't live in a world where US power and influence is incorrigibly malevolent and exercised purely at the expense of domestic issues. You are unconsciously accepting the false dichotomy implicitly used by neocons everywhere, that the only options in foreign policy are bombs or nothing. And you are accepting this in the context of discussing a country whose economy is substantially entangled with your own, in all likelihood using technology at least partially manufactured from that country. You aren't making a case for rational internationalism, you are making a case for insularity. It's simply false that there is nothing you and I can do about the situation, let alone the entire US government.

You're all so sure of your righteousness, comfortably ensconced in your glass palaces of of privilege. I haven't been so lucky. I've been raped for who I am. Beaten for who I am. Fired from jobs for who I am. Evicted from my home for who I am. Forced to sell my body to pay the bills. Ever sucked a stranger's cock to eat? I have. In my home state, as in 38 others, it is legal to kill me and offer up my identity as a defense for your crime. When I joined millions of others this summer to stand up and fight back for the right of Black people not to be murdered in the streets by agents of the state, I was gassed, shot with pepper balls and "rubber bullets," arrested, maced while bound in zip ties, and caged with men. You wanna talk forced sterilization? In the state where I live, if I want to get legal documentation that would allow me to live as myself and access basic public accommodations like restrooms and changing facilities, I am required to obtain—at my own expense—a surgical procedure that would render me sterile. My girlfriend endured years of psychological and physical torture at the hands of a paid therapist in an effort to force her to renounce who she is. Hundreds of thousands if not millions of my fellow LGBTQ folks have faced the same torture. Tens of thousands have died deaths of utter despair in face of that abuse, abuse which remains a legal source of profit in this country. In two months, I'll be 40 years old, and every day of my life has been a story of violence and trauma inflicted on me by this country and this system. Walk a mile in my shoes. For me, there's no way out but over the top. Live my life, then come back and tell me you wouldn't do anything—anything at all—to make that violence, trauma, and suffering stop. When you do that, then you can come back and pass judgment on me. Until then, count your fucking blessings and maybe back the fuck off a little.

^Holy shit.

Jesus christ, just cause you've suffered horrible things doesn't make you better than us by default. I witnessed a parent commit suicide when I was 4 due to the US shitty mental healthcare attention, yet you will never ever see me defend a genocide.

I'm truly sorry for the trauma you've endured. But no amount of suffering gives you the right to speak casually about "liquidating" entire groups of people, as you have done multiple times in the past.

I was donating to the PSL for awhile but if it produces people like S&P, I might just become politcally homeless.

When we talk about the "liquidation" of the capitalist class, we're not talking about the physical annihilation of the people that constitute that class. We're talking about the end of the ruling class as a class separate from the mass of the people, we're talking about the liquidation of class itself.

To be clear, I am not advocating that we try to kill our way out of capitalism. That has been tried, and it failed, to the suffering and misery of millions. I'm not going to sit and pass some sort of moral judgment on the people that tried to do this in the past. I understand why the idea was appealing, and I'm not arrogant enough to think that, had I been in their shoes, facing what they faced, under the conditions that they faced, that i would have made better or more humane choices. But the fact of the matter is that the methods of Stalin, the methods of Mao, those methods didn't work. Those methods ultimately made the task of building socialism and developing it into communism more difficult. I see no prospect that those methods, which in the end devolved into simple mass murder, could ever work to achieve what we must achieve, so they are not methods we have any wish or interest in employing. The path to ending the capitalist class as a class will not lie in killing people off, that path lies in eliminating the material conditions that allow class distinction and class exploitation to exist.

^ This.

Criticising the US, Western capitalist society in general and its systems is fine. A lot of it is justified. But when otherwise reasonable people who genuinely do want a better world start to defend a party and regime which is committing widespread genocide against sections of its population and imprisoning people to harvest their organs, I really do draw the line. Just because China isn't the USA doesn't somehow give it a free pass y'know. And also they are pretty imperialist themselves. The CCP charge about the South China Sea turning islands into air strips, claiming international waters to be Chinese territory, and increase their defence spending like a 15 year old playing Command And Conquer on Red Bull. Vietnam and other countries are now investing in their navies, while looking over both shoulders. I am somewhat surprised there hasn't been a major US/China naval engagement in the area yet. The US has a problem with xenophobia? So does China, who have been enacting a continually unwelcoming policy towards Westerners living and working in the country for some time now, forcing them to flee back home.

China also really is not that socialist, yeah the CCP controls everything but they've fully signed up to the capitalist tenet to a large extent. They've just figured a way of blending what appears to me to be the most exploitative and authoritarian elements of both systems. There has been progress in some areas, but inequality very much exists in China today just as much as it does in the US and is rapidly increasing. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of seven decades of Communist Party rule.

Let's also not forget the tens of millions of people who died under Mao's rule, either from crazy economic/agricultural experiments and policies or from straight up oppression. Oh and also the Cultural Revolution, whereby the state took one of the richest and oldest historical cultures on Earth and tried to do a Year Zero on it, an action which can only be classified as true insanity. Even the CCP admits that it was a disaster and regrets it happening. I honestly don't quite understand how China as a collective survived the twentieth century, the sheer upheaval they went through was mind boggling and went on for decades (and this isn't even counting WW2).

Some time ago someone (not on this forum) who I consider a sensible and reasonable person opined that they thought the US had a worse corruption problem than China. Err I don't think so. Sure there's a lot of corruption in the US - the difference is that in any democracy (no matter how flawed) there will always be a greater level of scrutiny from either the regulators, the general public or the media than there will be in a dictatorship. Whistleblow in the US and you might get a lot of opposition, but you can also put your case out there, even if you don't get very far. Whistleblow in China and you will end up under house arrest, in prison, or dead, because there is no freedom of speech or expression and the state has 100% authority to do exactly as they please with you in a way that I suspect people like Ted Cruz could only dream of in their most fevered fantasies. There is no scrutiny whatsoever, so the corruption goes deeper. A recent anti-corruption drive by the CCP actually slowed the economy down and decreased the country's GDP, which shows how deep it goes there.

This tirade is not necessarily directed at S&P personally and I can understand her frustration with the situation in the US, but to try and stand up for a murderous regime that flouts international law openly on the basis that they aren't part of the Western capitalist edifice is an insanely black and white attitude that helps no one. Such defences of China (and Putin too, from other people online) frankly remind me of all the left-leaning anti-imperialists in the 1930s who openly expressed support for Stalin because in their view the USSR was simply being picked on by the Western imperial elite to preserve their hegemony - all the while conveniently choosing to ignore the mass genocide by starvation that occurred in the Ukraine, or the constant series of purges and the extensive gulag system. In some way those defences were more understandable, in that information at the time was limited to radio, newspapers and first person accounts coming out of the USSR, so it wasn't always easy to assert what was going on. But with China there is no such excuse. The atrocities are many, the documentation is extensive, and it's readily available to research at the few clicks of a mouse.

Long rant, sorry. I just have no time for the CCP at all. China is a long established culture which has given many great inventions, ideas, philosophy and art to the world. The CCP have turned it into a country which is now mainly known for producing knock-off goods, stealing intellectual property rather than concentrating on invention and research, and mass genocide and occupation of its own and other neighbouring peoples. Defending this on the basis that "it's not the imperialist West" is not acceptable.

I've never claimed to be better. All I'm saying is that the fact that the world has beaten a certain hardness into me doesn't make you better than me, either.

The reality is that nothing you or I say or do or believe about China's treatment of the Uyghurs can have even the tiniest material impact on the conditions Uyghur people face. If China is in fact committing genocide in Xianjiang, I doubt even the power of the United States fully mobilized could stop it, and the potential for even greater catastrophe is rife if they try.

Probably correct there, sadly. China will just shrug their shoulders and continue their actions, much like Tibet.

I can do one better than borrow from Neocon thinking, I can borrow from John Birch Society thinking: if the US is being transparent, none of the fruits of my labor are being appropriationed and given freely to China, or are being used to manufacture weapons sold legally and directly to China. It's simply irrational to be more concerned with the corrupt practices of a local business you can choose to patronize, versus the corrupt practices of a local business you're required to patronize, is it not? So assuming you're not insane, it's easy to ascertain that you're acting in bad faith (generally speaking, not you specifically).

As long as we live under global capitalism, rational self-interest from involuntary monetary interaction takes precedence. It's simply the way things are.

Off topic, I've been reading Liar's Poker and Family of Secrets lately for my non-fics, really intriguing stuff.

God, you are just a fucking asshole. It’s amazing how you’re still allowed to post on this forum when people have been banned for 10x less. Making excuses for genocide, advocating violence & anti-Semitic bullshit. Fuck off! You’re just as brainwashed as those whom you seek to overthrow. “Whoever fights monsters”.

You're right, but our inability to stop it does not justify denial of its existence and defense of the horrible government performing it. We can't go back in time and stop the holocaust either, but that doesn't mean the ways people talk about it and view it don't matter.

The very same party program that you posted here, right after being relatively politely asked not to, seems to disagree heavily, unless read through the most rose-tinted filters ever and with a true believer's conviction of the righteousness of its purpose. And you specifically wrote yourself that it is not allowed to disagree with it at any point, IIRC.

Given perfect global coordination, sanctions until they stop doing it.

That's unlikely, so the honest answer is "nothing, in particular." But there are tons of shitty things we should be vocal about even if we don't have the means to actually combat them at the moment. Believe what is true, and act from there. I don't think anyone can, at this point, factually dispute that China's doing some deeply fucked-up things to their ethnic minorities.

Refusing to acknowledge shitty things China is doing because the US is shittier is both dishonest and a losing rhetorical tactic, and I think your party has done a really stupid thing by adopting it, to be honest.

Re-reading some of the previous conversations. Sorry, I can't let blatant falsehoods be repeated without some rebuttal:



https://edition.cnn.com/2015/09/15/asia/china-south-china-sea-airstrip/index.html




Tibet

oh and this (one of many examples): https://amti.csis.org/fishing-while-the-water-is-muddy-chinas-newly-announced-administrative-districts-in-the-south-china-sea/




https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/02/01/is-china-backing-myanmar-coup-biden-united-states/ (Admittedly, this is uncertain, but pretty possible I think).




Not yet, admittedly, but that is very much a 'yet': https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/26/international-home/china-military-india-taiwan.html




https://africacenter.org/spotlight/implications-for-africa-china-one-belt-one-road-strategy/

Quoted from the linked article: "One Belt One Road has troubling implications for debt sustainability. According to the Johns Hopkins China Africa Research Initiative, East African countries borrowed about $29 billion from China for infrastructure, energy, and construction projects. Beijing appears in some cases to have attached more importance to acquiring strategic assets than debt repayment from its partners. In 2017, Sri Lanka handed over Hambantota port to Chinese state-owned companies on a 99-year lease after defaulting on an infrastructure loan. Pakistan handed over Gwadar port on a 40-year lease in an arrangement where the Chinese partner also retained 90 percent of its revenues.

These developments set off alarm bells in East Africa, where speculation is rife that Djibouti and Kenya, both highly indebted to China, could lose their ports in a similar fashion. In January 2019, Uganda’s auditor general warned of the country’s ballooning debt and the risk that conditions placed on its loans were a threat to its sovereign assets. The following month, the Kenyan parliament opened a probe into the circumstances under which the strategic Indian Ocean port of Mombasa was used as collateral for the loan the government secured from China’s Exim Bank to build the Mombasa-Nairobi railway."

She actually has been banned probably a dozen times from here over the years under different accounts.

On the subject of potential future Presidential candidates, what about Mitch Landrieu for the Democrats? I'm not from the States so only know a bit about him, although I don't think he's shown any substantial interest in running so far.

I don't know, I guess Harris is gonna run. And given her position she will be hard to primary if she does. Though I guess if the racists lost their mind so much that they hooked on the teats of Donald Trump, I can't imagine the absolute horror that they would support after a FEMALE president of Asian/Jamaican descent. The rotting carcass of Mitch McConnell? An unholy, body-horror type amalgamation of Taylor-Greene, Boebert and Donald Trump Junior? Tucker Carson with Charlie Kirk as VP? The MyPillow Guy? Bison Q Shaman?

I'm not familiar with Landrieu tbh.

Maybe they'll get some mad scientists to create a mix of McConnell, Greene, Boebert, Trump, Carson, MyPillow Guy, AND Q Shaman to form the ultimate MAGA supporter in an attempt to take down Harris when she runs for office.

May god help us all if that happens.

Democrats will nominate Don Jr. for president before they nominate Mitch Landrieu. Not that he's a bad guy, he did a great job as mayor of New Orleans, but there's a couple dozen other prospective candidates with more to offer and a stronger national profile than Landrieu, who hasn't even shown any interest in running for national office anyway. Not sure why anybody would bring him up as a 2024 potential.

Assuming Biden doesn't run for reelection (and there aren't any weird scandals or disasters during her vice presidency) Harris will be the Democratic nominee in 2024.

Are you seriously comparing China building a handful of tiny installations in what are arguably its own territorial waters to the vast network of military fortresses the United States has built around the globe?



China liberated Tibet from its feudal overlords 70 years ago. It has since poured tens of billions of dollars into development in Tibet, once among the most inconceivably impoverished places on the planet. Its ordinary people are incontestably and incomparably better off under Chinese governance than they ever were under the theocratic slaveocracy of the Lamas. In the last 20 years alone, American military adventurism has directly resulted in the deaths of upward of a million people, indirectly resulted in the deaths of millions more as a consequence of destabilizing a third of the globe, and displaced nearly 40 million more people. There is no universe existing outside of the fever dream of imagination where China is even remotely in the same league as the United States when it comes to militarism and aggression.

I'll even throw you a bone and point out that China attempted an invasion of Vietnam in 1979, a catastrophic error that cost the People's Liberation Army a hell of a butcher's bill. Unlike the United States—which has doubled down time and again on its failed policies of war and military aggression—China appears to have actually learned something from the experience, and they haven't so much as dropped a single bomb on another country in the 40 years since.



Again, arguably in Chinese territorial waters (hence "disputed territory").



China has quite possibly been the Suu Kyi government's most important backer, so this is wild speculation bordering on the outright conspiratorial.



More absolute fantasy shit, man. China doesn't possess the means for significant force projection beyond its own borders, and it hasn't really even sought to develop those means. What it has sought to develop are the means to make it more difficult for the US to effectively leverage Taiwan as a base for military operations against China's vital coastal belt, but given the iron ring of US bases along the periphery of the South China Sea, that can hardly be seen as anything other than the prudent defensive measure that it is. The Chinese government would likewise be criminally negligent if it wasn't beefing up its capacity to protect its border regions from the fascist Modi government in nuclear-armed India. What it doesn't have and hasn't sought are the kind of capabilities that would allow it to wage a major war of aggression beyond its own borders. The People's Liberation Army is extremely powerful within the ambit of its own territory, but it lacks the logistical capacity, the strategic mobility, and the kind of force mix necessary to operate in force outside of China itself.



https://www.theatlantic.com/internation ... cy/617953/

https://www.scmp.com/news/china/diploma ... or-nations

https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-inter ... -diplomacy

https://asia.nikkei.com/Opinion/The-myt ... -diplomacy