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Some time in the last year or so, I saw a video of them doing a dog-and-pony show with their carrier operations, and they were using nylon straps like the ones used for luggage racks on cars to secure the planes to the pad eyes on the deck.

Unbelievable. Not chains. Nylon straps. Now, I could be wrong, but I don’t think those straps have what it takes over time to secure a plane in anything less than a calm sea (which is what it was in the video)

I don’t get on their case for crashing a plane...carrier operations are more difficult than people in general think they are. We crash planes too.

There is something completely off about their military operations I have seen that makes me want to discount them, but I don’t...simply because of the technology and industry they have stolen from us, and the money they have to throw at their military. Money and quantity have a quality all of their own, and we have handed that to them.

But I do believe there is something fundamentally unsound about Communist China, and it is a cultural thing. They build things that are simply bad, and there appears to be a lack of individual desire to maintain anything collectively as would be done in a military unit.

I saw a video about a British guy who lived in Communist China for something like five years teaching English, and he traveled all over the country and said it was lacking everywhere he went, that collective responsibility for maintaining things.

He said he lived in an apartment building that was a reasonably nice building by Chinese construction standards, and looked from the outside like something you might see in New Orleans, white stucco with wrought iron railing areas outside each apartment that you might be able to step out on with three people, about that size.

He said the stucco was all cracked and broken, and there were long streaks of brown rust running down from each wrought iron balcony. And not a single person would even think of maintaining it, scraping the rust and painting the wrought iron, or patching the cracked stucco and whitewashing it.

Inside, they had an elevator with one light in it. The light never worked, ever. So whenever he got on, it was pitch black up to his floor. It was apparently something wrong with the fixture not the bulb, so he tried to collect some money from his fellow renters to buy a new light fixture for the light-less elevator.

Not a single person-nobody-offered to help pay for it. Not one. And he said this attitude was EVERYWHERE in Communist China.

Now, I don’t know. I have never been there. But this guy had, and the way he described it had the ring of truth to me. The concept of mowing a lawn? Not even that.

So when I see their military, I think they may have some equipment that is good for them and dangerous to us, and a lot of it, but...that attitude they have culturally I think works against them.

I am not discounting them. But they aren’t supermen either, I don’t think.

“Unbelievable. Not chains. Nylon straps. Now, I could be wrong, but I don’t think those straps have what it takes over time to secure a plane in anything less than a calm sea (which is what it was in the video)”

Just FYI, materials science has advanced to the point that synthetic textile straps can exceed chain strength, to the point where even in civilian life in the US, tow “chains” have been replaced with tow straps. The only thing a strap doesn’t do better is spool on a winch, but there are now synthetic ‘ropes’ used to replace steel chain and steel cable in many winch applications.

The US military has slowly started to replace chains with straps where applicable - the in-plane cargo tie down chains have been replaced in part by the CGU-1/B strap system, for example: https://www.skygeek.com/military-specification-cgu-1-b-tie-down-cargo-aircraft.html

https://www.wbparts.com/rfq/1670-00-725-1437.html

https://www.army.mil/article/96140/helicopter_loading_system_lightens_burden_on_soldiers

I would agree. If you look at the 500 year long military dominance of the West (and it still applies today) you can see that the Western form of civic spiritedness created armies of comrades willing to die for another. It came out of the early modern period, but it gave Western militaries a tremendous advantage even when they were grossly outnumbered or even when (as sometimes happened) their enemies were better armed. Now non-Western peoples can form units with cohesion, but that takes the creation of an institution that with social norms that differ from the main society and forms its own society. In the past, this was often done by Western imperial powers training and providing officers for non-Western armies.

With the exception of a small number of better trained and equipped units this is still true of most non-Western militaries. It also explains why when Western militaries intervene they still kick the locals' asses. It also means any non-Western force tries to avoid anything like conventional warfare.

The Chinese are trying to buildup a large, conventional force. But I suspect many of their weapons programs are greatly hampered by corruption and defects that are covered up so party poobahs can save face. Plus I seriously doubt they have been able to inculcate the same degree of cohesion and flexibility.

I'm afraid this will create the illusion for Xi (especially since he's surrounded by yes-men) that they are stronger than they really are, and this might provoke them into trying something stupid. This is compounded by the fact that they simply don't understand us. We look weak and disorganized to them because they do not comprehend that this amorphousness is a reflection of the fact that Americans in particular are self-organizing- we don't need a great leader to plan our societies and that, in fact, through centuries of trial and error we devised this way of living as the best. This amorphousness hides the fact that in the face of outside threat the plastic bodies of our societies can suddenly become very, very hard indeed.

Plus China's military is still far from capable of compensating for China's geostrategic weakness: except for a few areas it is completely dependent on imports of material by sea, exporting by sea and importing food by sea. They would need a navy large enough and powerful enough to avoid any chance of blockade, including chokepoints at Malacca, the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. They are clearly trying to secure these with bases and proxies like the Iranians. But it is doubtful they can succeed unless we just roll over.

British guy who lived in Communist China

—
Serpentza - a South African. The reason for all the disrepair is that, by law, you can only lease an apartment for 7 years and then must move out. The other reasons are that builders only use cheap materials often using paper mache as concrete filler, looks nice for a while then crumbles. Investors use building projects to shelter their money, knowing that the government will buy them out in 7 years at original value.

He, like many others, were forced to flee China for their lives when the Deng “golden years” ended and Xi took over

His YouTube videos can be found here
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCl7mAGnY4jh4Ps8rhhh8XZg