Peter Zeihan has said a lot about China over the years, particularly the demographic challenges it faces. He thinks those challenges are coming to a head, and will become very visible over the next few years. In this brief video clip, he gives reasons.
With pressures like that staring China's leadership in the face, they may well choose to redirect internal attention to an external problem like Taiwan, or relations with the West. This adds to the global uncertainty discussed in the previous blog post.
Food for thought . . .
Peter
Yes. The Chinese isn't what they would have us believe it is. But it's still a damn sight better than ours. Depending on whose numbers you use the US now spends from 76% to 93% of tax revenue to pay interest on our debt. That is simply unsustainable. Realistically we are past the point of saving the economy. Collapse in some form is inevitable. Anyone not prepared for the end of the current paradigm is on deep kimchi.
ReplyDeleteChina doing anything to Taiwan will go nuclear in a hurry if the rumors are true that Taiwan bought a dozen nukes from Pakistan in the 1990s. The nukes are fairly primitive and weigh 10 ??? tons each so delivery is a serious problem. But, not far to go.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that Zeihan never mentions the elite supported illegal immigration in US or Europe causing instability but slanders anyone to the right of the Democrats as Nazis.
ReplyDeleteBread and circuses ver 2.0.
ReplyDeleteAs Zeihan ends his piece about the Chinese's difficulties, "and the people are beginning to notice."
ReplyDeleteWho will rid us of this homosexual peddler of copeium to midwits?
ReplyDeleteIf the PRC have any brains at all, they'll be subsidising influencers like Zeihan (Who speaks and reads just how much Chinese and has lived how many years in China?), the embittered failed English teacher Serpentza fellow, or Gordon Chang who has been consistently wrong about everything since at least the early 1990s. But in truth they don't need to. The capacity of the American Barcalounger Boomerwaffen for endless complacent bovine self-delusion is so immense that all they (Chinkyboo) have to do is sit back and wait.
Read Musk, Ray Dallio, David Goldman for a dose of reality and a basis upon which to project future outcomes with a little more likelihood that they won't be utterly wrong.
China could collapse tomorrow or this afternoon at 2pm while I'm on the high speed rail to Guangzhou South. Or it might just muddle on for the next three thousand years with ups and downs like it did for the last ditto.
What it's not going to do is conveniently @#$% itself up demographically or politically or metaphysically or whateverly just so that fat ass American peon property of Larry Fink can feel good about themselves. Ain't gonna happen.
Also do I need to list side-by-side the number of countries the USA has invaded and bombed and otherwise effed up (usually for strategically and politically incoherent reasons) cf. the PRC? It might be embarrassing. So much of Muh China Threat is.... wait for it... PROJECTION. The USA is the greatest meddler, invader, and troublemaker upon the face of this shitty ball of rock. You people actually huff your own posterior emanations and believe that you're a 'force for good' in the world. It is to laugh.
Usual disclaimer applies. Yep they got problems. And yep, you all should be so lucky as to have the same set of problems. Western civilisational rot and dysfunction runs far deeper.
That was a lot of words to say "I can't actually refute anything this guy says, so I'm going to engage in a lot of personal attacks."
DeleteBeijing can't afford to invade Taiwan, they have an entire aging generation that only had one child (usually a son) that would be destitute if that child died in a military expedition. Invading Taiwan over the ocean would only work if the PLAAF could entirely neutralize the air defenses and shore batteries already in place. There are some speculations those nukes are sitting out in the Strait as command-detonated mines to destroy an entire invasion flotilla in one go.
ReplyDeleteI'd be surprised if Taiwan got nukes from Pakistan. They have the knowledge and material to build them in-house like another Eastern island nation (cough Japan cough) has. Given that they shut down a reactor a few years ago and have their own radioactive dump site, they could make some nice small plutonium weapons instead.
ReplyDeleteRight now, China is taking Taiwan over slowly via economic means, which is much less risky.
Pakistan is a long term China ally and actually was the back door communication Nixon used to China.
ReplyDeletePlus China provided nuke blue prints to Pakistan, and earlier the Uranium chiba used for its first nukes came from Pakistan.
The current Presidents party in Taiwan, green, is anti nuke, which is why a nuclear power plant was shut down. I think they still have another. Shortsighted decision, just like banning plastic straws (widely ignored).
The Federal government lies to us as a matter of course; as was revealed yet again when the census figures had to be "corrected" recently.
ReplyDeleteThe Politburo of the USSR had no idea about the economic status of the Soviet Union; the system was designed to promote falsification of information from the shop floor all the way up.
Unless someone provides a convincing argument otherwise, I assume China does both. And if the Party has no idea what's really going on, I doubt some gwailo on another continent, on the other side of the Great Firewall, have any idea either. They're all just guessing on known-bad data.
--TRX
Been hearing similar things from the China Fact Check guys.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWl7njLlXLU