(Preferably with sources)
I've overcorrected from "China bad" to "China is infallible." I know that's incorrect, but it's hard to decipher US propaganda from actual issues.
In discussions in the past, providing a positive counterpoint is plenty, but since more folks are already realizing the narrative about China is incorrect I would like to have more nuanced discussions where I can present both praise and criticism. I think it's also important that we don't end up in a USSR situation where Communism is synonymous with the actions of a single country.
- I know they're trading with the genocidal zionist entity. Even if their policy is to be apolitical, that's very bad.
- I'm unsure of what the internal restrictions look like in general
- I saw that the "social credit score" was a small experiment in one province that got way overblown
- Great firewall...? I know it's a thing, iiuc you can use a VPN to get around it, but only ones provided by the state (which could easily backdoor them)?
- Limitations on speech? Do people get disappeared?
- Are they monitoring everyone? "You can't monitor 1.5 billion people" idk computers are pretty fast. Also you can def use big data to find the people you do need to monitor more closely
- Dengism? Reintroducing capitalism looks like a retreat at face value and has the obvious problems of capitalism, but I saw someone on here talking about it being a genius way of deindustrializing capitalist nations while building China's own capacity
Are there others? I'm happy if you also include justification for their policies, but I do want to know where you genuinely think they're making mistakes.
Thank you for your attention to this matter!
The timing for this lines up, but I'm doubtful that it is that simple, replacing a high ranking government official would probably take months if not years of proper investigation into them and any potential replacement, to make sure the changeover is smooth and doesn't cause more problems and that the replacement is able to do a more effective job. This was likely something that has been in the works for a while, one thing you certainly can't accuse Xi's administration of, is being too hasty.
And I mean no offence by this, but this sounds a little like insisting the allies need to build bigger battleships to match the Bismark and the Yamato in WW2. While I agree that China will need to shift their industrial base to a more military footing since the US is almost certainly going to attack them, it does seem like they are focusing more on capabilities that focus on their own strengths, rather than just trying to outmatch their enemies on their strongest front. While we don't know what 1000 white-water gunboats can do to an aircraft carrier yet, China does seem confident that they would be more useful for their military goals, rather than building more carriers, which are expensive and costly to maintain and only really good if you like indiscriminately bombing countries on the other side of the world (or "power projection" if you're writing about it in western newspapers).
Though I do think China is watching this war with Iran very closely and examining US tactics and strategy as best as they can in order to counter it, the US strategy of attacking, then pulling back and stalling for time, before attacking again is certainly one that they would need to be wary of, especially if the US views a war with China as an existential one, and even if they don't, relying on their enemies to have basic human decency and to respect ceasefires is something that I imagine a lot of war room talks in China are discussing right now.
Yes, it's complete speculation on my part. The perhaps coincidental timing is what really sticks out.
IMHO, the biggest strength of the US are its hundreds of military bases that blight the globe. The PRC cannot hope to compete in this arena with hundreds of Chinese military bases because those US bases only exist because of US imperialism. Therefore, the PLA has to make up this disadvantage somehow with their own trump card. Right now, the main advantages the PLA has over the US military are its progression in 6th generation fighters, drone warfare and production, ship production, and the general fitness of its troops. As for aircraft carriers themselves, I guess it's an agree to disagree type of thing. I certainly don't think it's a huge priority relative to other things.
Yeah, no disagreements here, my thoughts on carriers are more "They might be obsolete, they might still have some kind of niche, or they might still be the backbone of any navy." I just don't have enough info to know for sure, most US bombing operations happen through mid-air refueling these days already, but like you said, they only have the power to do that thanks to their numerous military bases around the world. Personally I'm not really a fan of using "trump card" to describe anything relating to wars, a bit too close to "wunderwaffen" for my tastes, it's logistics and production that win wars, not having some superweapon (not that I mean to imply that's what you were saying, you literally listed off multiple aspects of China's industrial strength in your examples there.)
My biggest worry with the whole thing is the US just recognising that they can't win a war with China and just nuking them, and relying on China's patience and hesitation so that they won't be attacked in retaliation.
They did, the Iowa class was larger. I don't get why the Bismark/Tirpitz get the reputation as some kind of super-battleship, when it was a tad bigger than Britain's big battleships and smaller than America's big battleships.
The Yamato ofc was like 30% larger than the next largest battleship.
Nazi propaganda mostly, which is why it is so funny that it got sunk by an old, outdated WW1 Biplane.
I guess. It's just funny that it gets built up while it was never able to leave port without knowing the British surface fleet was away, meanwhile the actual biggest ship, with the biggest guns, had an actual strategic use and is right there. Also getting sunk on a mission to beach yourself is somehow funnier than getting sunk by biplanes.