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Showing posts with the label Geopolitics

Why Has China Not Gone To War Yet?

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  Year after year, the US cries wolf about China’s impending military aggression. The familiar refrain from the White House, Congress, Pentagon, CIA, and retired generals comes in invariably alarming tone: China’s invasion of Taiwan is imminent; President Xi Jinping has ordered his military to be ready for invading Taiwan by a certain year; and rising tensions in the South China Sea will trigger WWIII. Year after year, the wolf fails to show up. Yet, the US Empire’s mass media keeps amplifying this false narrative, day in day out. These tired tropes never die. For good reasons. They vilify China as America’s greatest enemy. They advance the National Security Council’s bellicose agenda. They prompt Congress to boost ever greater defense budgets. They serve to rally American allies. The sweeping China military threat narrative brushes aside a major question: Why has China not gone to war yet, despite enjoying 40 years of dizzying economic boom and rapid military modernization? The U

War Will Do China Good

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  The US Empire has spoken: China poses an existential threat to American global hegemony and must be subjugated at all costs.  The wrath of the world overlord, which has descended on China since 2017, continues unabated. With bipartisan congressional support, the White House under Trump and Biden has waged trade wars, wielded an avalanche of sanctions, rallied its allies in Europe, Asia, and Oceania, and conducted relentless smearing campaigns worldwide, with no end in sight. Taking it up a notch, Biden has been actively preparing for war against China. He crafted the AUKUS security pact with Australia, which will receive eight nuclear powered submarines, gained access to military bases in the Philippines, and promoted military cooperation between Japan and South Korea. Rather than cower in fear, China should embrace military confrontations with the US and its allies, under the right circumstances. Undoubtedly, the costs and risks associated with the use of force are high, but the pot

China Is a Geopolitical Dwarf

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Vector Vectors by Vecteezy China has the numbers on its side. The second largest economy in the world, it is poised to surpass the US economy in 2030. An industrial giant, it accounts for almost one-third of the world's manufacturing output, leading the US by over 10 percentage points. A global trade powerhouse, China is the largest partner of two-thirds of countries (128 out of 190), overtaking the long-standing US.  Yet, despite its phenomenal transformation from a peasant-based to an industrial society in merely 44 years, China has remained a geopolitical dwarf, unable to project its military power beyond its territory in East Asia, let alone in the Pacific or Southeast Asia. Its geopolitical situation looks dire especially in East Asia, where the US has put in place the containment policy with its Asian allies.  China's major geopolitical weakness is its inability to reclaim the island of Taiwan, a renegade province that lies 100 miles from the mainland. The island, now und

Sanctions and Bans Are Making China Stronger

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Imagine a world where the West and China live in harmony.  At its annual military parades, Beijing shows off its M1 Abrams tanks, M777 howitzers, and the world's most advanced fighter jets, F-35 --- all made in America. Soldiers march in lockstep, holding German HK416 assault rifles, while French H160M military helicopters sweep through the clear sky of the Chinese capital.  In low Earth orbit, the International Space Station welcomes Chinese astronauts, who conduct research with their US colleagues and maintain equipment provided by China, Japan, Canada, and other nations.  Knowing its place in the world supply chains, China, the world factory, churns out loads of consumer goods destined for Costco, Walmart, and the like while importing hi-tech products from the advanced industrialized countries.  This would be a China dreamed by Western liberals and neoconservatives: A Chinese client state subservient to the US, fully integrated into the so-called rules-based world order, entirel

The Liberal Dictatorship

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  Welcome to the age of the Liberal dictatorship. Liberalism stands for freedom and tolerance, whereas dictatorship cannot stand dissent. They do not and cannot go hand in hand, so we are led to believe. As the words "Liberal" and "dictatorship" are antonyms, putting them together amounts to an oxymoron. And yet, since February 2022, we have been witnessing the rise of the Liberal dictatorship, consisting of the US and its allies banding together to violently squash any attempts to challenge their vision of the world and upend the liberal world order.  When Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine on February 24, 2022, the US and 36 other industrial democracies unleashed an unprecedented package of economic sanctions against Russia.  In a span of ten days, among other things, they froze Russian's central bank reserves, expelled its banks from the global financial system, shut it off from the debt market, and cut off high-tech exports. In one stroke, the Libera

China: What Kind of Superpower in 2030?

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The year 2030 will be a historic year. China, the second largest economy in terms of GDP,  will overtake the US, the uncontested economic juggernaut since 1890. In their heydays, either the Soviet Union, Germany, or Japan came in second, but neither one of them ever came close to dethrone the American powerhouse. That China, a once backward country with 70% of its workforce in agriculture in 1978, will succeed where other nations failed is an impressive feat.  China's ascension as an economic superpower carries great significance to the word. The center of world economy will shift from the US and Europe to China and parts of Asia. Many countries depend on importing from and exporting to China. With 30% of the world manufacturing output, China has risen as the world's factory, producing Made in China goods to meet rising global demand.  In 2030, will China replace the US as the hegemonic superpower? The answer is a resounding no. Nor will it be a hegemonic superpower in 2050, bu

Enough With Moral Imperialism

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The US is not only the dominant economic and military superpower but also the self-proclaimed beacon of freedom, denouncing human rights violations throughout the world.  Intensifying its criticisms of China's mass internment of Uighurs in Xinjiang, the US government has called it a genocide. This is another case of US moral imperialism. What has happened in Xinjiang is not genocide, and if it is, then there is not a doubt whatsoever that the US committed genocide against Native Americans.  According to the UN Genocide Convention in 1948, the definition of genocide must meet at least two criteria. The first one is physical extermination. In Xinjiang, the Chinese government incarcerated about a million Uighurs in reeducation camps. No evidence of mass killings has been unearthed. The US and its allies themselves have not produced any incriminating pictures or credible witnesses of mass killings. And, most importantly, the Chinese government does not aim at physically destroying th