In response to these aggressive moves, China is building up its military, including hypersonic missiles. Another response is Chinese President Xi Jinping's recent speech marking the 100th anniversary of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Xi said
"The Chinese people will never allow foreign forces to bully, oppress or enslave us. Whoever nurses delusions of doing that will crack their heads and spill blood on the Great Wall of steel built from the flesh and blood of 1.4 billion Chinese people."
In Xi Jinping's Words of Warning Echo China's Youthful Nationalism, Andrew Browne, of Bloomberg, says that President Xi Jinping's jingoistic anti-Western speech resonates with the attitudes of most Chinese people, including young people who have been propagandized into hating the West.
The fact that U.S. bases and weapons surround China is another reason they may hate and fear us, don't you think?
Browne writes:
Far more significant than Xi's barbed comments was the roar they elicited from the packed crowds on Tiananmen Square. They were the loudest cheers, in fact, of his entire speech. If such accolades were sincere and representative of what most Chinese citizens feel, Xi's words may augur a very dangerous era indeed.
...Plenty of Western skeptics predicted Chinese scientists and engineers inculcated with CCP dogma would never produce breakthrough innovations, and that state banks and industrial enterprises would hold back growth. They were dead wrong on both counts of course.
China has caught up with the U.S. in several advanced technologies, and its economy is streaking ahead. Those same observers were also wrong to assume that China's growing middle classes and Western-educated youth would demand democratic reform.
If anything, public sentiment is pushing China in the opposite direction. At age 100, the Party is both stoking nationalism and being led by its most vociferous proponents - the country's youth. The West should take note, before it takes any steps that cannot be recalled.
Many people in Congress and the U.S. military say they want to deter China without having actual war with China. Others in the self-licking ice cream cone are less reasonable: they actually want war. (As China Declares War with US Inevitable, Army General Highlights Need for Fighting Vehicles. Risk of military conflict between US and China higher than ever, experts say)
What do you think are the chances of war happening with China? 1 in 3? 1 in 2? 2 in 3? Sounds pretty dismal.
For seven decades China has been saying that Taiwan is a breakaway province. That is unfortunate, as are China's treatment of Muslim minorities and Hong Kong, and its territorial aggressions. But it's suicidal to fight China over this. China is not threatening us directly. Nixon agreed to a One China policy (though the wording left some ambiguity). There are many bad governments in the world, many of them supported by the U.S., and the U.S. can't afford to be world policeman.
Besides, such wars usually turn out poorly. The U.S. got its ass whooped in wars with third world countries Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq, killing millions of people and wasting trillions of dollars. The resulting refugee crisis destabilized European politics. According to Brown University's Cost of Wars project, "37 million people have been displaced by the post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Somalia and the Philippines."
The U.S. made a similar mess by overthrowing governments in Central America and installing repressive regimes. Refugees have been streaming north from Central American and have destabilized American politics as well.
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
3
2
1
