Posted on 05/19/2016 6:13:15 PM PDT by Celerity
BEIJING — China's attempts to claim a nearly 1.4-million-square-mile swathe of open ocean are without precedent and probably without legal merit, but Beijing continues to assert its right to the economically critical zone — and increasingly puts its claims in military terms.
Speaking to a small group of reporters in Beijing on Thursday, a high-ranking Chinese official made his warning clear: The United States should not provoke China in the South China Sea without expecting retaliation.
(Excerpt) Read more at cnbc.com ...
We were on the topic of the Chinese. An isolationists country that is transforming into aggressive interventionist. What does the US have to do with that ?
I was addressing your concerns about aggressive interventionism.
Does this concern apply to any country or is it only a concern in the hypothetical case that China might do so, even though it hasn’t actually done so in nearly six decades?
If we are adhering to a consistent standard here, there’s one country that is far and away the most aggressively interventionist in the world - perhaps more so than all other nations combined. If that is your concern, I most assuredly share it.
If we ever go to war with china...
They would never get off their boats!
What we are talking about here is the Chinese building a fleet of new aircraft carriers. The US is waning and collapsing internationally and immaterial to the discussion at hand. Thought we were talking about what will happen in the future, not the past.
China’s main concern, in the past and in the future, has always been and will always be to stave off the perpetual threat of internal disintegration while maintaining independence from foreign domination.
Japan’s navy alone is superior to the Chinese navy, carriers or not. Carriers are a horrible investment anyway and it has almost no experience operating them.
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan could go nuclear any time they wish; India and Russia already possess a nuclear deterrent; and China is surrounded by populous nations who all have common cause in not being dominated by them.
The only foreign territory which China can credibly be said to have designs on is the Russian Far East, and that’s the Russians’ problem, not ours. It has no amphibious capability to speak of.
China is only our problem if we make it so, and there’s really no good reason to make it so.
Worrying about China is a waste of time and energy.
They do have advanced sunburn missiles capable of hitting our ships. For this reason, we've moved surface vessels further out away from the Taiwan strait. They have submarines capable of launching strikes. They've been working anti-satellite technology for years. They've gained stealth technology.
I think it's a mistake to underestimate them. WWII Japan...very formidable. We fried them in the end, but Japanese forces were no push over.
“...hypothetical case that China might do so, even though it hasn’t actually done so in nearly six decades?”
Invasion of Tibet (1950)
Korean War (1950–53)
Vietnam War (1959–75)
Sino-Indian War (1962)
Sino-Soviet border conflict (1969)
Sino-Vietnamese War (1979)
They’re still in Tibet. They control N. Korea and they still retain Indian territory.
Psst, building islands as the pretext to claim other nations’ territorial waters is aggression. The islands they’ve built represent China’s invasion and conquest of other nations territory.
It is only because of America’s and Russia’s military stance and treaties they have not been more aggressive.
This may be news to you but the Korean War was started by the Norks, not China; the Vietnam War was started by the French; and the Sino-Indian War was started by India. The 1969 conflict with the USSR barely met the threshold of a skirmish and both sides were probably equally at fault.
And none of those things are on this side of 37 years ago.
Compare to the US, which right at this very moment is engaged in genuinely aggressive war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Libya, and is threatening additional wars above and beyond all that, and is perpetually engaged in overthrowing foreign governments it doesn’t like, all around the globe.
A neutral observer, faced with an American accusing China of aggression, would be taken aback by the outrageous level of hypocrisy and lack of self-awareness it takes to make such an accusation.
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