Any hostile action by China would completely devastate it's economy. The more integrated it's economy becomes in the world the more difficult, if not impossible, it will become for China to solve any problems militarily.
China will be conquered by Freedom before it even knows it, to the benefit of it's citizens and the world.
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China's interests are to keep getting all those orders from Wal-Mart. I agree and don't think that is bad for us. The other fear expressed on this thread is they're "preparing for war with the US" which is a scare tactic promoted by whoever wrote the article we are responding to- and those who believe it or want others to believe it on this thread. To believe it you must assume the Chinese, even their communist leadership, are both stoopid and suicidal. I do not, so you and I agree
yea I haven't been reading the rest of the thread, but I do think most reasonable people would discount a war between us and China that was deliberately sought after by the Chinese. It may still be possible that a confrontation over Tawian may escalate to dangerous proportions, but even this I think is unprobable.
However, what China will probably continue to do is proliferate weapons all over the world to rouge nations and use it's superior military as a negotiating point to get trade concessions and territorial concessions. The United States needs to have the strongest possible military to thwart these efforts and have leverage with China.
Once China is completely under the spell of capitalism (and it is close now) I think that China will become more and more similar to us - in that our best interests (selfishly) are seeing other countries prosper and remain peaceful in order to enrich ourselves from the increased trade.
The more capitalist China becomes the more it will be in it's interest to keep the world safe to keep the prosperity of the it's citizens at what they are used to. Businessmen are already proliferating throughout the Communist party structure and they will (again, selfishly) try to leverage the party to gain profit for themselves, which requires the country remain at peace.
With Freedom, everyone pursues their own self interst to the benefit of all. Pretty neat if you ask me!
Obviously China still has a ways to go in this - terrible human rights violation are still a problem. It remains unclear whether this economic freedom will lead to social freedom (such as expression, press etc...). Previous theorists may have thought so, but with Russia and China growing so rapidly... doubt is being cast on this.
A little discussed possibility is that right wing type dictatorships, which are able to supress leftism and therefore encourage economic growth more than democracies (which fall prey to leftism), may become the 'new' world powers.
How this might play out I don't know... If we keep up the rightward shift in this country we don't need to worry about it. :)