Quote:
Originally Posted by 95th Rifleman
How is China the "wrong" side exactly?
There are allot of assumptions in play here, the biggest (and oldest) is that America are the good guys and people should always take their side.
America is on the way out, her economy is shot and she is being bled white by stupid conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. China is an up and coming power that is playing the empire game the same way the British used to, they are buying their empire. Look at their interests in Africa, they are following the classic british model for economic domination.
If things go hot it would be better for nations in the pacific area to either openly side with China or to quietly side with them.
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Well I wouldn't quite agree with all that. America has been involved in bigger overseas wars since 1945; Korea and Vietnam, and also had to contend with a far more militarly and technologically powerful competitor than China; the Soviet Union. America's economy is not doing so great at the moment, but neither is anyone else in the developed world with the exception of Australia which is making a lot of money selling commodities to China.
Chinese military power to all intensive purposes is absent outside of the Far East, whereas America's is global. China's involvement in Africa or anywhere else is all about giving money to the local regimes and securing resources for export to China. Third World governements obviously prefer Chinese money as there are no strings attached, such as human rights and democratic reform linked with development aid.
China produces a huge amount of consumables, but much of what is exported is produced by non-Chinese corporations who located their factories to China to take advantage of China's low coast labour, non-existant labour laws and the artifically low value of the Yuan for export. In most high technology industries; pharmaceuticals, aircraft and spacecraft, medical, precision and optical instruments, communication equipment, high end weaponry, business and computing machinery, indigenous Chinese companies are either absent in these industries or not considered major competitors to the main focal areas of these technologies; North America, Europe and Japan. In medium technology industries; electrical machinery, motor vehicles, ship building, transport equipment, chemicals and chemical products, metalurgy, machinery and equipment, most of what China produces goes into the Chinese market or produced for mass export to developed countries by either foreign owned companies or by Chinese companies who produce it for foreign owned companies.