Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => Politics => Topic started by: MillCreek on May 26, 2022, 07:55:43 AM
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https://www.19fortyfive.com/2022/05/the-chinese-economy-is-in-a-death-spiral/
https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/china-is-risk-self-inflicted-recession-2022-04-13/
https://www.cnn.com/2022/05/05/economy/china-economy-services-decline-covid-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2022/apr/28/risk-of-recession-in-europe-us-and-china-is-rising-by-the-day
If economic problems cause internal unrest in the PRC or collapse their economy, that can't be good for the rest of the world.
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As long as they don't pull that "war is good for the economy" bullbleep.
And Taiwan would be good for distracting the populace.
The problem is that whenever any politician(s) of any stripe or checkerboard pattern get in trouble, they bring little old thee and me into it.
I often speculate on whether any of those 50,000 dead on the Viet Nam Memorial wall might have come up with a cold fusion solution had they lived. Just spitballing, mind you, but I still wonder about it.
Terry
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The Chinese economy has been an obvious house of cards for a long time for anyone willing to look critically at it. Factor in the demographic bomb of being the fastest aging population in history and the end result isn’t hard to predict.
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Kind of makes sense if you control the birth rate the average age must go up.
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The PRC population demographics currently has about 105 males for every 100 females and that ratio has been higher in past years. I have read some commentary suggesting that can contribute to political unrest and one way of bringing down that ratio is a war.
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https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/china-is-risk-self-inflicted-recession-2022-04-13/
China is at risk of self-inflicted recession
They aren't the only ones.
I really think the world is heading for a pretty solid war, both for the economic facets as well as the "less people to feed" facet.
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www.youtube.com/c/GEOPOP20 has a lot of good videos on this subject.
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I really think the world is heading for a pretty solid war, both for the economic facets as well as the "less people to feed" facet.
It's definitely not looking pretty right now. Even if the USA did "everything right", we're still going to be sucked into something. Even if not participating in war, then affected by economic, energy, supply, and food issues.
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https://www.reuters.com/breakingviews/china-is-risk-self-inflicted-recession-2022-04-13/
They aren't the only ones.
I really think the world is heading for a pretty solid war, both for the economic facets as well as the "less people to feed" facet.
Kinda been feeling that myself, as of late. But I'm trying to remind myself that I'm prone to pessimism, and hoping that it's more my perception than reality.
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The PRC population demographics currently has about 105 males for every 100 females and that ratio has been higher in past years. I have read some commentary suggesting that can contribute to political unrest and one way of bringing down that ratio is a war.
Overall, I’d be very surprised if gender ratio was that close to parity. It’s like 102:100 at birth normally. Boys have higher infant mortality and men die at higher rates than women up to at least 30, so there has to be a slight bias in favor of boys at birth to keep things roughly balanced. The cohort born since the 1 child policy is probably more like 135:100 IIRC. Maybe it was “only” 120:100. Whatever. It’s a huge imbalance.
India outlawed pre-natal gender determination to stop a similar imbalance.
The “problem” with the idea of China using a war to restore the gender balance is that they don’t have enough boys to spare. They counted on the current fighting age generation to power the spending necessary to maintain their economy. If they wipe enough of them out to get gender balance back to parity they’ll be be even worse off economically than now. Assuming a fast war which they won they’d still have most of their elderly population but they wouldn’t have enough consumers/producers to afford the costs of such an elderly population.
In addition, if they get belligerent all it would take is for Japan, or Australia, or India, to put a couple destroyers or subs or even frigates/cruisers in the Indian Ocean to stop the flow of oil and coal into China. They import 85% of their energy needs, mostly oil from the Persian gulf plus coal from Indonesia, Australia (at least pre-Covid) and Russia. Within a month or two at most they’d lose their ability to project any kind of military power and within 6 months they’d cease to function as a nation on any level, likely losing a third to half of their population to famine within a year. That would solve their aging population issue pretty thoroughly, but would also leave them a fractured nation incapable of participating in a global economy for years if not decades.
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Even if China has birth rate problems, their population is about 4x ours. That is a lot of people to start with.
And our birth rate is pretty terrible also.
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More people doesn't help as much militarily when you have bodies of water to cross. You still need to transport them and their supplies. More people also doesn't mean they are all top quality soldiers or workers. May also make you more vulnerable to internal infrastructure disruptions.
I like what sumpnz posted. It is a lot more complicated then just China attacking Taiwan to quell internal disruption. The international reaction to that could cause them a whole lot more problems than they would solve. And what if they failed? Then the all those problems exist plus their internal problems get worse. And that is a possibility even if we didn't send our fleet in.
I would add to sumpnz post that everyone who owes money to China would get an excuse to declare the debt null and void. Chinese interests own all sort of assets and business interests overseas all over their world. Those would get seized or ended in a lot of places and they likely wouldn't get it back. Diplomatically, a lot of the waffling over China policy here and elsewhere would suddenly get more clear.
They might still decide to do it, but there are a lot of negatives to consider.
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China does not have a true blue water navy. Very few of their combat vessels have the capacity for anything beyond 1000 miles from port so projecting their force beyond their territorial waters is highly limited. If they want to invade Taiwan they’ll likely commandeer a lot of their commercial fleet and other non-combat vessels and as a result will probably lose 1mil men before they even land on the beach. Taiwan has been preparing on some level for an invasion since independence in the 50’s. They’ll see any massing of troops and matériel on the Chinese coast before we do. Not to mention Taiwan surely has spies on mainland China that would tell them about any plans to mobilize before those plans even are initiated. It’ll be enormously costly for the Chinese even to cross the Taiwan Straight. Not like Xi gives a crap about the cost in lives, but he still has to win if he starts the fight. Not only that he has to win it so rapidly that the rest of the world basically shrugs and decides it’s not worth retaliating, even with sanctions let alone militarily. Because a protracted fight like Russia is experiencing in Ukraine right now would probably lead to sanctions and the aforementioned blockade of energy imports. And as soon as one country with the means to do decides to cut China off from energy imports it’s game over. No need to blast off and nuke the site from orbit.
The worry there of course becomes, like with Russia, would they start lobbing nukes in retaliation/desperation? Impossible to say, but not totally unthinkable either.
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https://www.maritime-executive.com/editorials/a-guide-to-china-s-unprecedented-naval-shipbuilding-drive
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2022/03/chinese-navy-growth-massive-expansion-of-important-shipyard/
https://www.navalnews.com/naval-news/2021/11/chinas-4th-type-055-destroyer-anshan-%E9%9E%8D%E5%B1%B1-commissioned-with-plan/
I follow some naval FB sites, and China has been cranking out blue-water warships at a tremendous pace over the past several years. The PLAN 055 destroyer is considered on par or better than the Burke-class destroyer. Aircraft carriers and amphibious big-deck ships are afloat or in the builder's yards. The PRC is very much into blue-water force projection now.