Quote (Black XistenZ @ Jun 20 2024 06:44pm)
There is already growing pushback against China gobbling up Africa, just like Chinese development programs in Africa have largely turned out to be a dud. Their Belt and Road Initiative hasn't been a thumping success story either. Furthermore, the Western bloc is still lightyears ahead of the China/Russia bloc when it comes to naval warfare and intercontinental logistics. In a true war-like scenario, we still unequivocally control the seas and could easily cut off China from the resources of Africa.
The New Axis can let its Houthi attack dogs spite us in the Red Sea right now because we aren't willing to strike back properly; because we don't want the optics of even more dead brown people. But if the West wanted to, it could bomb the Houthis back to the stone age in two weeks max. (It won't take all that much to get them there anyway.) Conversely, the New Axis doesn't have the means to control the seas beyond the South China sea. Yes, China is inching closer to the point where they could break a US-led blockade of the South China Sea with land-based anti-ship missiles, but at worst, that'll allow them to capture Taiwan. They aren't any close to being able to go any further than that.
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The true achilles heel of China is their demography. The one-child policy bolstered China's rapid rise since the 1980s, but it also created a tremendously unbalanced population pyramid. As many pundits describe it: "China might be the first country in history which gets old before it gets wealthy." China's GDP per capita in international dollar and adjusted for purchasing power is still less than one third as high as in the US and less than half as high as in the EU. (Keep in mind that the EU contains a lot of economic wasteland in eastern and southeastern Europe).
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locations=US-CN-EUSo over the coming decades, China will have to keep up its growth without demographic headwinds like in the past, while having to provide for a rapidly escalating number of pensioners, and while struggling with the classic "middle income trap". Furthermore, their one-party rule is very prone to policy mistakes which take far too long to get corrected. As a textbook example, see their zero-covid strategy which caused half the country to sit in super strict lockdowns in late 2022 while the rest of the world had, by that point, already moved on for 8-16 months. And even then, it took multiple huge cities being on the verge of open revolt before the CCP finally gave this policy up.
But this is the point I was getting at, we've been saying for years that China's age bubble and internal fracturing points could balkanize them or otherwise degrade them like how Japan was seen as our big competitor just a few decades ago. But as I was pointing out, the CCP is very cognizant of that potential and has been actively working to secure their future. That's a big reason
why they're expanding into Africa and Asia with the belt and road initiative, why they're actively suppressing their minorities and repopulating all the fringes with Han citizenry, why they're pushing their national unity messaging. They want to be ready to expand to use external labor to prop up an empire and stake claim to global resources.
And when the world comes down to this scramble for resources, what could possibly be worse for the west than losing our petrodollar hegemony, and losing access to critical resources in ukraine and africa and asia to being outmaneuvered both militarily and diplomatically,
and putting all the major world players into a confederacy against us?