351–360 of 538 posts
“Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. History has stopped...." Orwell's '1984'
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The USA has been losing all war games where it defends Tawain against China. https://nypost.com/2021/03/11/us-war-games-over-china-threat... It is not okay to assume USA supremacy against adversaries anymore. Why Americans still do business with China is astounding to me.
Wargames are designed to be lost. It's not as useful to say "welp we stomped all over them" as it is to push the forces being tested further and further until they break, then fixing or compensating where it broke and pushing even further. Wargames aren't constrained by reality, and the game's opposing force may be more powerful than in reality. Just hearing that the US lost a wargame doesn't mean anything without kn…
Wasn't there a pretty famous case, in a wargame meant to simulate conflict with Iran, where the red team general actually played to win but the game leaders reset things with new constraints that played to US advantages?
There are also pretty significant intrinsic problems with a Taiwan strait conflict: it's literally in China's backyard and the PLA is modernizing so the US can no longer rely on having an overwhelming technological advantage. IIRC, Taiwan's military strategy also assumes that they'll have a technological over the PRC, so they haven't embraced asymmetric tactics as much as they should.
From my armchair, it seems to me that Taiwan needs to adopt something like the Israeli model, where pretty much their whole population is in the reserves and can be mobilized quickly for a conflict. The US needs to figure out a way to reinforce and resupply it, and disentangle its supply chains from China to make that workable.
However, I'm not hopeful with the kind of leadership we have now. It's thinking is too short term and it's unwilling to make any really costly commitments.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We won Afghanistan fairly easily (a few months), and held it fairly easily for 19 years. And not to trivialize 4000 dead, but if it had mattered, that would have been a pretty small sacrifice. Where we failed miserably was at turning the result into a stable country, but Taiwan is already a country.
Once upon a time Afghanistan was also a country.
Heartbreaking. I can't even talk about Tiananmen with Chinese -born friends under 40 in the US or Europe. TikTok and WeChat has achieved their goals of driving historical memory from their brains. And if I even mention Taiwan within seconds I am hearing the term "renegade province." It seems for now possible to create a true virtual totalitarian state in the 21st century. It's chains are forged out of "Xi thought" ap…
The Chinese Government is speeding up their efforts to swallow Hong Kong and Macau into the Mainland. Closing the media outlets, museums, websites that speak against them. And a few key people get abducted here and there to scare more people and force them to accept the Beijing Regime. But... The people from Hong Kong still demonstrates and tries to fight for their lost rights.
its sad. when Sun Yat-sen the father of modern China take on the Qing dynasty. Hong Kong was the base. It wasn't part of China and a lot of Chinese who is educated under the British rule understand what Sun try to achieve. a modern and free country. Hong Kong have been a base for a lot of progressive Chinese. Now that Hong Kong is fully back into China and the 50 years of no changes (for Hong Kong) promised by Deng X…
Let's just assume for a moment that the US will fight off attacks by China to take Taiwan. And that US successfully ward off an attack. What next? What is there to prevent China from trying again and again and again? Will the US be prepared to ward off attacks after attacks after attacks? This is unlikely to happen.
With this, lets again assume that China eventually successfully takes Taiwan. What next? They would have taken over an island with a large number of people who resents their rule. There will be a persistent resistance group as long as Beijing continues her ways and Beijing is aware of this and is trying to shape the education of the younger generations so that the resentment does not cross generations.
Even if all these were to take place and all hope seems to be lost. There is a glimmer of hope. A totalitarian state has one major fault. There is no effective feedback mechanism and to assume that this one man can make the right call, the right decision all the time is a stretch. At some point, be it internal infighting, or a policy misstep creating intense misery amongst the people, there will be discontent and if the history of China is any indication, the discontent can trigger uprisings and eventually a change of regime.
The only way the regime can be changed is from the inside.
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Even putting the proliferation issue aside, a Taiwan nuke program just won't deter China, will merely justify an invasion. This may have worked - in the sense of deterring PRC - 30 or more likely 40 years ago, when their army was much weaker. It's far too late to think about that now.
I agree. The biggest issue for Taiwan would be war head delivery. They can nuke a few cities in fujian, but the communist party has never fully trusted Fujian anyways and wouldn’t see it as a great loss, let alone a deter it from turning the island into a waste land rock.
The Chinese Government is speeding up their efforts to swallow Hong Kong and Macau into the Mainland. Closing the media outlets, museums, websites that speak against them. And a few key people get abducted here and there to scare more people and force them to accept the Beijing Regime. But... The people from Hong Kong still demonstrates and tries to fight for their lost rights.
its sad. when Sun Yat-sen the father of modern China take on the Qing dynasty. Hong Kong was the base. It wasn't part of China and a lot of Chinese who is educated under the British rule understand what Sun try to achieve. a modern and free country. Hong Kong have been a base for a lot of progressive Chinese. Now that Hong Kong is fully back into China and the 50 years of no changes (for Hong Kong) promised by Deng X…
HK was sold to Britain as part of the corrupted and weak China's humiliation.
What do you want to say?
Are you trying to depict the image that HK has been forcefully claimed by China?
Please stop this type of propaganda behavior. I don't like CCP, but that does not make HK not part of China.
We Chinese eventually will get rid of CCP, but we don't want the great nation get split. Just like any patriot in US would not want this great nation get split.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Possession counts for a lot more than theoretical legal legitimacy. Who is physically in control of the bulk of Chinese territory?
Might does not make right in questions of rule of law. Unless it's barbarism then. At that point I'm pretty sure the biggest functional nuclear stockpile wins though.
Genuine, non-inflammatory question: Who's behind this, in China? I know that "Winnie the Pooh" gets the public blame, but this seems to be a very... public, provocative thing to do. Is the person ordering it aware of that, and how provocative it is? Is it Carrie Lam? Their chief of police? Orders from someone higher up in the party, maybe at the ministerial level? Or does the order really from the top? Frankly, I wou…