OT: Chinese Battleship

[Legbreaker]

Originally Posted by RN7

That logic is probably seriously flawed for a number of reasons, but don't tell China that!!

My guess is they're banking on the lack of political will from most of the world to do anything effective in stopping their expansion.
Militarily they could be given at least a bloody nose in relatively short order, but in today's environment of virtue signalling and "feelings" trumping facts, that's just not very likely.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

And there's already a precedent, China's annexation of Tibet. It was 70 or so years ago but the Chinese government has a long memory and long term goals.
More recently there was Russia's annexation of Crimea where the rest of the world did little more than say "We don't recognise your claim on Crimea". All we really saw in response was a UN resolution of recognition of Ukraine's claim to Crimea and even then, 58 countries decided to abstain from voting.
I think China sees those results as "encouraging", they don't give tacit approval but they certainly don't offer any resistance to one nation's claims on another nation.

[Targan]

China is very patient.

[bash]

Originally Posted by Targan

China is very patient.

That's just China's marketing talking. They're not "patient" the party just knows they've set themselves up to be immune to regime change. They ruling portion of the party can't be removed unless individuals get purged for "corruption".

Their "patience" is not a virtue but instead a symptom of the fact the the government rules without the consent of the governed.

[StainlessSteelCynic]

That may be the case but they certainly have a longer term vision than many other nations. For example, China is the primary source of rare earth elements (REE) in the world, they dominate the market and basically set the prices.
What they have been doing over the last three or so decades is buying REE supplies from other countries and selling them while leaving many of their own deposits untapped. This exhausts the resources from other nations while leaving their own resources largely unused, leaving them in the dominant supplier position ensuring they continue to make big bucks.

I'm not saying this makes the Chinese government better at military planning or projection, just that they do tend to think in terms of decades rather than the three or four years that many Western governments think in (i.e. the time until the next election). That may not be patience, but it does demand some forethought.

[Targan]

Originally Posted by bash

That's just China's marketing talking. They're not "patient" the party just knows they've set themselves up to be immune to regime change. They ruling portion of the party can't be removed unless individuals get purged for "corruption".

Their "patience" is not a virtue but instead a symptom of the fact the the government rules without the consent of the governed.

China is not the CCP. China is the monolithic bureaucracy that has been running things there for 2,200 years. Ruling dynasties have come and gone, modes of government have risen and fallen, but the heart of China's governance has just carried on.

China is patient.

[bash]

Originally Posted by Targan

China is not the CCP. China is the monolithic bureaucracy that has been running things there for 2,200 years. Ruling dynasties have come and gone, modes of government have risen and fallen, but the heart of China's governance has just carried on.

China is patient.

Yeah...no. The imperial bureaucracy is long gone. When the Qing dynasty was fully overthrown in 1911 after the Xinhai revolution the bureaucracy was replaced by the Republican government. What bureaucrats that might have survived the fall of the Qing certainly didn't survive the warlord era, Second World War, and Chinese civil war. The CPC didn't oust the K T until 1949, or 38 years after the fall of the Qing. There was simply no continuity of the bureaucracy during that period.

The CPC has made itself into "China". While they love to trot out the image of some sort of millennial continuity when it makes them look good it's just not true. The members of the standing committee, essentially the CPC nobility, are all descendants of cliques of Mao loyalists (or extended family thereof). The CPC defines Chinese patriotism as loyalty to the CPC, not to an independent civil government. The CPC is also in charge of the PLA so even military service isn't service to the country but to the CPC.

The heart of modern China's governance is the CPC and even ten it's really only the opinions of the standing committee that actually matter. There's no deep state of imperial bureaucrats secretly controlling China, just the CPC.

[rcaf_777]

Don't know what to say but

[Legbreaker]

Speaking as someone with intimate knowledge of Chinese government (ex was Chinese and her father in the government), there's almost nothing left of the pre-communist organisation. The various purges, cultural revolution, etc put paid to all that!