What Tasks Does Xi Jin Ping Have for China's Military?

[The Chinese did NOT drive the USA out of Korea. Kim did not take over the whole peninsula, which was the goal of the entire war the Communists started. That intervention cost the PLA almost 1 million casualties. Sure, MacArthur was way too cocky and did not heed their warning, but the actual war aim of the United Nations and the USA was achieved.

The USA lost Vietnam when Congress refused to allow our treaty commitment to South Vietnam be applied when the North broke the Paris Peace Accords treaty in 1974, and we should have punished them, but were too wrapped up in ruining Republican President Nixon, to even care. Again, shoulda, woulda, coulda.]

The point is that China achieved its limited war objectives, which were to keep US troops away from the Chinese border. Would Mao have preferred to drive US troops off the Korean peninsula? Probably. But, in addition to maintaining a buffer state between US troops and the Chinese border, it was sufficient for him that the war killed off the Nationalist remnants of doubtful loyalty who surrendered to his armies near the end of the Chinese Civil War.

Note that France’s objectives were far broader - it was fighting Britain for control of the Americas and, later, Europe. That’s not remotely similar to Xi’s likely objectives, which are far less expansive.

dam

Your point that China had limited objectives is suspect with me.

China was in it’s very early days of being a Communist nation. In their eyes, the Party was China and China was the Party. There was enormous solidarity with global communism, the Soviets and yes, especially Kim Il-Sung.

The overall Communist goal was to defeat the Bourgeois nations and impose a global Soviet. I do believe the Chinese communists became more Chinese as time went on, meaning more like the Middle Kingdom of old, where the world naturally came to see them as the center of the Earth, but not that early in their rise to power.

The greater goal of that WAR was Kim would take over all of Korea. That failed. Many Chinese died trying. They failed.

My example of Britain and France was to point out how much changed in 50 years, and it has now been even longer since 1950.

[Your point that China had limited objectives is suspect with me.

China was in it’s very early days of being a Communist nation. In their eyes, the Party was China and China was the Party. There was enormous solidarity with global communism, the Soviets and yes, especially Kim Il-Sung.

The overall Communist goal was to defeat the Bourgeois nations and impose a global Soviet. I do believe the Chinese communists became more Chinese as time went on, meaning more like the Middle Kingdom of old, where the world naturally came to see them as the center of the Earth, but not that early in their rise to power.

The greater goal of that WAR was Kim would take over all of Korea. That failed. Many Chinese died trying. They failed.

My example of Britain and France was to point out how much changed in 50 years, and it has now been even longer since 1950.]

“China” isn’t making decisions. Xi Jinping is. All this stuff re national/ideological consciousness is just noise. Ultimately, Xi is the emperor of China. He makes the decisions, not anyone else. The reason his objectives are likely bounded is because Chinese conquerors have sought to matched ends to means. With a handful of exceptions, they have never sought to conquer large territories all at once, because pacification and assimilation takes time.

Europe conquered big chunks of the known world, but most of the acquired lands spun off from the metropole - in some cases, after wars of secession, as in the Americas. Chinese rulers have always been jealous of the resources of the imperial treasury for faraway ventures, because they could never be sure that the territory acquired at heavy expense would not simply benefit the commander to whom they had assigned the task. Trieu Da, the Chinese general tasked with the conquest of Vietnam, simply made himself King of Vietnam after the Chinese dynasty that had given him the resources to accomplish this objective was toppled.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhao_Tuo

The ideology is just prattle to justify absolute monarchy without the historical baggage of absolute monarchy. The issue with China, as with Russia, isn’t absolute monarchy - it’s the desire of both polities to rule the world. If the the Chinese and Soviets had sealed themselves off from the world like Albania and were only interested in Communism in one country, nobody would care about them. It was when they used Communism as a trojan horse for their dreams of world conquest that the Free World became concerned.

The threat from China today is less ideological and more along the lines of straightforward power politics, where we try to form alliances against it, and it tries to pry these alliances apart and get its neighbors to remain neutral. In many ways, it’s similar to the ructions that occurred in the hundreds of years before the unification of China.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warring_States_period

We also need to fairly quickly equip our ships with laser AA weapons. We are on the verge (2-4 years) of being able to shoot down cruise and anti-ship missiles from a couple miles away, for about $1 worth of electricity. https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2019/08/us-navy-and-missile-defense-agency-megawatt-lasers-by-2023-2024.html#more-158619.

I’ve always been curious if we’ve ever developed “Glider bombs”. Stealthy extreme long range glider cruise missiles. Low radar signature, zero heat signature, zero noise signature. A glide missile dropped from 40,000 feet would have quite the range.