China's nationalism mutating into aggression

[Creed of Heresy]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3687/c...ationalism

The choice quotes for anyone wanting to just skim follow. Bolding is mine, to highlight the biggest points.

Last April, China's ships surrounded Scarborough Shoal in the South China Sea. By July, the Chinese had erected a barrier to the reef's entrance, denying access to all but their own vessels. The swift action was taken despite mutual promises by Beijing and Manila to leave the area, which up until then had been controlled by the Philippines. Chinese state media gloated over the deception.

After gobbling up Scarborough, Chinese vessels and aircraft stepped up their intrusion into Japanese territorial waters and airspace around the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea, in an effort to wrest them from Tokyo. In a display of massive force, eight Chinese ships entered the waters around the uninhabited outcroppings on the 23rd of this month. On Friday, China's Foreign Ministry said the islands were a "core interest," meaning that Beijing will not stop until it has taken control of them. Some analysts think China will try to land forces on the Senkakus soon.

Beijing's aggression on the seas is being matched by its aggression on land. During the night of April 15, a Chinese platoon-strength force advanced 10 kilometers south of the Line of Actual Control, the de facto border between China and India in the Himalayas, and established a tented camp in the Daulat Beg Oldi sector of eastern Ladakh. In recent days, Chinese troops advanced another 10 kilometers into India, one more bold attempt to take ground from a neighboring country.

...

The policy of engagement of China was enlightened, far-sighted, and generous.

It was also a mistake. ... Now, however, they believe they no longer need others and are therefore trying to change the world for the worse. China is not only claiming territories of others but also trying to close off international waters and airspace; proliferating nuclear weapons technology to Iran; supplying equipment to North Korea's ballistic missile program; supporting rogue elements around the globe; launching cyberattacks on free societies; undermining human rights norms, and engaging in predatory trade tactics that helped tip the global economy over the edge in 2008.

...

In early 2010 China's flag officers and senior colonels made a point of publicly talking about fighting a war -- a "hand-to-hand fight with the U.S." as one put it -- in the near future. China, as Robert Sutter of George Washington University points out, is the only major power actively planning to kill Americans, and, judging from public comments, China's senior officers are relishing the prospect of doing so.

...

The implications of these internal changes are, obviously, large: China's flag officers want to use their new-found power. "China's military spending is growing so fast that it has overtaken strategy," said Huang Jing of Singapore's Lee Kwan Yew School of Public Policy. "The young officers are taking control of strategy and it is like young officers in Japan in the 1930s. They are thinking what they can do, not what they should do."

...

The risk of getting China wrong, as we are now doing, is that an aggressive regime can undermine the institutions of free societies and take down the multilateral framework built after the Second World War. The Chinese have learned all the wrong lessons in recent years, but we have yet to adjust our approach. We have, with the best of intentions, created the conditions for the rise of a militantly hostile state.

This is something that I've been paying attention to fairly closely for a while, ever since I was in high school, in fact, and one that spiked shortly before the Olympics [and become something I focused on even more during and after them].

I remember hearing people talk endlessly about China being the "next superpower." I dismissed these statements then as a teenager and I dismiss them now. China is not a superpower. It will not be a superpower. It lacks the strong foundations necessary to become one.

However, that is not going to stop them, of this I am very sure. They realize, as this article points out, that their economy has largely peaked. They're hitting a plateau of development, and there's nothing on the horizon for them to look forward to to give them that next boost. So, what happens when any swelling nation starts to realize its resources are going to soon become insufficient for its growth and prosperity?

Well, to quote Arthur Koestler...

The most persistent sound which reverberates through man's history is the beating of war drums.

Quite, Mr. Koestler...quite.

Well, the European Union wants to pretend nothing bad is happening with China. They want to sit on the sidelines and just pretend everything will be hunky-dory. So, they're useless in this regard, and probably will remain useless up until and maybe even past the point where China starts to directly encroach on more than just east Asia. So, we have an increasingly belligerent China, with a population numbering 1.5 billion...with nuclear weaponry, too. We have their ships encroaching on international waters, intruding upon sovereign territory openly and with every intention of outright claiming it as their own, to the point that even the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Indians are petitioning the US to intervene. We also have the matter of North Korea.

A quick tangent on N. Korea. It's worth noting that Kim Jung Il died of a very sudden surprise heart attack, while on a train between cities, at the moment where he was furthest from any medical facility that he could possibly be. Il, for better or worse, had been RELATIVELY stable. He had been erratic in his actions but predictably so. His son, however, was strangely very pro-American there initially...only to suddenly switch mindsets and immediately become even more aggressive and overtly hostile than North Korea has been since the Korean War, to the point that the US actually had justification for sending more units of troops and more equipment to South Korea.

My suspicions, my hypotheses? Kim Jung Il was assassinated by the CIA and his son is a CIA puppet dictator who is acting so as to give the US an internationally valid reason for increasing its presence in east Asia without outright provoking the increasingly-belligerent nation of China. My suspicions deepen when I notice Chinese militant belligerence and Il's death are very close together chronologically-speaking. VERY close together. Now, this just a conspiracy theory, I might be wrong, but still, it's an uncomfortable suspicion that I can't very easily dismiss.

So we have North Korea rattling sabres. China is rattling sabres too, but it's not rattling them over North Korea. It's rattling them over zones of interest, zones where if they get a foothold, they will be able to project their largely land-based military [their navy is laughably small and under-equipped compared to the overall might of the US Navy and they know this] far more effectively. They are developing weapons that are meant to be cheap throw-away one-trick ponies that nevertheless are meant to be just good enough to kill what needs to be killed, such as their new "stealth" jet. Something that is just stealthy enough to get it in closer than non-stealth jets to, say, aircraft carriers, without costing so much that they can't build hundreds of them on the cheap, making them expendable...but capable.

So...once again, the drums of war are beating. Once again, optimistic naivete on our part has led to us creating a monster and once again we're gonna end up having to square off with the Chinese Dragon.

WWIII might be closer than you think. The question is...will THEY come into play as we all fear? And if you really don't know what I mean, well...

Yeah...just remember. China has 'em...and so does India. And the US. And Pakistan [who hates India and vice versa], who happens to be an ally of China, has them. And so does North Korea, who may or may not be our newest puppet.

Gotta admit. The ramifications of this are...unpleasant, to say the least.

[FifthElement]

Dunno, I always been suspicious about them, they have a very steady approach, on all fronts, thought that in a 30 years we will be so dependent on Chinese economically that they will assimilate us peacefully does not seam so far fetched IMO ...

In a world war they, despite all the men power, would not stand a chance, Russia would not allow it, Russians tend to unite in the spite of the great danger and to be side by side with the rest of the globe

I do not believe that Chinese citizens would go crazy about it ether

[Minimalist]

We can't worry about China. The republicunts are too busy pouring troops to the Mexican border so that we won't be overrun by burritos and tacos.

[Creed of Heresy]

Dunno, I always been suspicious about them, they have a very steady approach, on all fronts, thought that in a 30 years we will be so dependent on Chinese economically that they will assimilate us peacefully does not seam so far fetched IMO ...

In a world war they, despite all the men power, would not stand a chance, Russia would not allow it, Russians tend to unite in the spite of the great danger and to be side by side with the rest of the globe

I do not believe that Chinese citizens would go crazy about it ether

Actually that is one of the most specific problems with China. They THOUGHT they could economically outmaneuver us but the problem is that they have stagnated. Sure we still outsource our labor to them but the thing is they aren't getting quite as good of a deal as they thought. We all grumble about cheap shit being made in China but that's exactly the problem is that it's cheap shit. Our current problems aside, we are NOT a third-world nation; it's impossible to control a developed nation by grabbing up its cheapest and most expendable of production needs. Discard the Chinese, and companies in the US will send production to India, or Cambodia, or any of the other dozens of east Asian nations that will gladly produce cheap shit for us for pennies on the dollar without much of an interruption in the flow of production at all. We've more or less reached the maximum threshold of what we can outsource. What can be outsourced largely has been outsourced; there's no more growth there, and in fact some companies are turning elsewhere because, get this, the cost of living in China has gone up because their standard of living is going up...meaning shit's getting more expensive. They built themselves a bubble of making cheap shit. Now they have to start paying out more, which means shit ain't so cheap. Suddenly the biggest factor in their economy is slipping away.

That's the problem with being a cheapskate in a global economy; everyone else is willing to do what you're doing at the same cost if you dare raise your shit by a cent. So you can either wallow in pig shit or you can try to improve your standard of living, and when your nation numbers in the billions...well, a citizen's revolt is the LAST fucking thing you want...so saying no to them when they start demanding higher pay as they are exposed more to the world you've willingly let in in your attempt to get some modicum of control over it? Not an option.

War is their only viable solution. Both the US and China have been walking this road. The fact that so many people have been blissfully unaware and naively assuming that China would just peacefully rise to superpower status through nothing more than building cheap shit only speaks of how ignorant people tend to be when it comes to affairs outside their own little world.

Oh my yes, even the supposedly worldly English have been blathering for years about how China is a fine example of "peaceful power."

Out of touch. The entire friggin' world is out of touch with reality. Fucking hell. How's that old saying go? Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it?

So we didn't learn our lesson with Japan and Germany and Russia...so we make the same fucking mistakes while everyone keeps chirping about how this is gonna be different when it's going the exact same fucking way. Just think about it; they take a plunge and start struggling [WWII was a horrible time for China and the preceding decades hadn't been kind to them, either]. They rise to prominence through nationalistic claims of supremacy, using propaganda and indoctrination to fool the masses into believing in their nation's innate superiority [Mao and the rise of the communist party in China, and the subsequent isolationism]. They gain power through introspective focus and self-improvement, claiming peaceful intentions while building up a military force all the same that is clearly much bigger than for mere self-defense. At a critical moment they petition to have the Olympics hosted in their home country. A grand display is provided and the athletes are groomed by the government to be the best of the best, regardless of whether or not they cheat to do it, followed by deceiving their trade partners and their intended targets and what they consider to be their threats, and then begin annexing other countries while the US tries to pretend like it can just ignore the rest of the world and focus on itself, until it gets a knife in the back [in this case I refer more to Japan than Germany or Russia but Russia can still sort of count itself in on this considering the whole thing involving post WWII...but we kind of expected it from them to be honest, and Germany was something we were trying to ignore until, well, we couldn't] and HAS to act, thus leading to war.

We've been down this fucking road before in the last century. The rest of the world keeps getting hopped up and drags us into their shit and then they bitch about it when we start manipulating affairs in an attempt to prevent it from happening again, and worse is our attempts to prevent it this time have done nothing, if they haven't outright made it worse. This time, at least, they're being open about their future intents. The question is, how will we respond? We're still reeling economically, our military is just getting itself sorted back out after the drawdowns, and American confidence in the military is at an all-time low, not to mention our own nationalism is dimmed because we're now a LOT more wary of what our leaders claim to tell us. Getting us to turn out in droves to volunteer in the military to attack China is out of the question, and conscription...well, conscription doesn't go over very well. Conscription only works for numbers, and we don't have numbers on our side. Militarily, our advantage is professionalism, resources, and technology. Militarily, the Chinese advantage is dumb, blind ultranationalistic zeal, sheer weight of numbers, and the ability to churn out an assload of crap. So conscription won't do very much.

As Min pointed out, our own leadership is fucking us over. While the dumb-shit republicunts force us to quibble over silly, stupid shit like how many Mexicans are pouring into this country [pouring is such a strong word; trickling is more accurate given that most Mexicans have realized this country's economy is in the tank] or whether or not rape can result in pregnancy or how we should totally privatize social security because, fuck, if it ain't broken, then break it so you can claim to fix it while in truth you just fuck it up even more in your favor, the world around us is changing. The European Union isn't as stable as everyone thought it was [another thing I called back in high school on the debate team] and seems like it's going to end up drifting apart here in another ten years at most. China's NOT rising peacefully, it's beating the war drums. The middle-east is turning out to NOT pay out in much AND it's also turning out that ignoring it seems to actually be working out because the people there are taking care of getting their shit together themselves [Arab Spring; didn't call that though]. Russia ISN'T returning to its status as world superpower, its gas reserves proving to not really be as big of a boon as everyone thought, Pakistan is NOT our ally, Afghanistan does NOT love us, Iraq doesn't love us, Africa's still a shithole [the only thing that nobody is surprised by], and Canada's taking the US's place as Batshit Central over in this hemisphere.

The world's changing, the Republicunts are terrified of it, so they're dithering over stupid, silly shit in an attempt to bury their heads in the sand and pretend like the world isn't spinning, and their inability to get the fuck with the program is going to rail us headfirst into fucking national suicide if they don't shut the fuck up and get with the fucking program already. China's a looming threat but it's not immediate, we still have some time if we can get shit in this country back on track...and, we ARE, but it's happening too fucking slowly, and, as Min pointed out, you can thank the republitards for that.

Will 2014 see a change? I sure as fuck hope so. Cuz shit beyond our borders is starting to look a little ugly.

[Something completely different]

They are just desperatly trying to get public support through such actions. (My guess)
China would never risk ending the stability of the Pacific region.
After all, when listing up all the neighbouring countries ne can only conclude that they are isolated.
Only Pakistan and Russia stand by them, the rest would side with the defendor if China should chose to be aggressive.

[cratehorus]

the gatestone institute (where this article comes from) is wildly biased right wing american hate group devoted to anti muslim hate speech and pro america propaganda one look at their homepage will show you its about 80% articles denouncing islam and flaming conspiracy theories about them and another 10% devoted to complaining that white fascism doesn't exist and the real problem these days are all the anti fascist groups because everyone knows that they are far worse, and another 10% anti communist bullshit thrown in for good measure which is where this bullshit article came from.........


........ it was founded by Nina Rosenwald

here's an article that pretty much sums her up

The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate
http://www.thenation.com/article/168374/...uslim-hate#

An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald spreads her millions through the William Rosenwald Family Fund, a nonprofit foundation named for her father, a famed Jewish philanthropist who created the United Jewish Appeal in 1939. His daughter’s focus is more explicitly political. According to a report by the Center for American Progress titled “Fear Inc.,” Rosenwald and her sister Elizabeth Varet, who also directs the family foundation, have donated more than $2.8 million since 2000 to “organizations that fan the flames of Islamophobia.”

Besides funding a Who’s Who of anti-Muslim outfits, Rosenwald has served on the board of AIPAC, the central arm of America’s Israel lobby, and holds leadership roles in a host of mainstream pro-Israel organizations. As groups like AIPAC lead the charge for a US military strike on the Islamic Republic of Iran, threatening to turn apocalyptic visions of civilizational warfare into catastrophic reality, Rosenwald’s wealth has fueled a rapidly emerging alliance between the pro-Israel mainstream and the Islamophobic fringe. (In 2003 alone the Rosenwald Family Fund donated well over half of its $1.6 million in total contributions to pro-Israel and Islamophobic organizations.) This alliance serves to sanitize and legitimize professional anti-Muslim bigots like Wilders, allowing their ideas to mingle easily with those of neoconservative foreign policy heavyweights intent on promoting the appearance of a convergence between US and Israeli interests by invoking the specter of a common “Islamofascist” enemy. With Gatestone—which publicizes the writings of figures ranging from pro-Israel super-lawyer Alan Dershowitz to “counter-jihad” propagandist Robert Spencer, and boasts Harold Rhode, a neoconservative former Pentagon official credited, as a senior fellow, with helping to try to push the Bush administration to invade Iraq—Rosenwald has attempted to shift the alliance into overdrive.

Conspiracies, Witch Hunts and “Moderate Muslims”

Over the past decade, Rosenwald’s generosity has helped sustain the pet projects of “Islamofascism Awareness Week” organizer and Stalinist apostate David Horowitz. Her largesse has also supported former Lebanese Maronite TV anchor Brigitte Gabriel, who told an evangelical audience in 2006 that Muslims “have no souls—they are dead set on killing and destruction.” The Center for Security Policy (CSP), a Washington-based think tank directed by neoconservative former Pentagon official Frank Gaffney, has also thrived as a result of Rosenwald’s beneficence. The $437,000 in donations Gaffney reaped from the Rosenwald family enabled him to churn out conspiratorial pamphlets like his 2010 “Shariah: The Threat to America,” in which he warned that American Muslims were engaged in a “stealth jihad” to place the country under the control of Sharia, or Islamic law. At the Conservative Political Action Conference the following year, Gaffney sent his cadres to distribute fliers accusing top Republican anti-tax activists Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan of organizing a secret campaign dedicated to “the replacement of our constitutional republic…with a theocratic Islamic caliphate governing according to Shari’ah.” (David Steinmann, president of the Fund, sits on the board of Gaffney’s CSP.) Norquist is married to an Arab-American, and Khan, a former Republican Party official, is a fellow for Muslim-Christian Understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement. The American Conservative Union investigated Gaffney’s charges and declared them “reprehensible.”

Rosenwald has also used her money to support a seemingly sober set of self-proclaimed “dissident” Muslims who have seized the post-9/11 media spotlight to defend pro-Israel positions, Western military intervention in the Arab world and police spying on Muslim Americans. These beneficiaries include Irshad Manji, an openly gay Canadian TV personality and self-described “Muslim refusenik” who argued in her 2005 book, The Trouble With Islam Today, that “desert Arabs” and “Arab cultural imperialists” were imposing an anti-democratic, sexist and endemically anti-Semitic mindset on the rest of the world’s Muslims. In 2007 Rosenwald provided $10,000 in seed money for Manji’s new nonprofit, Project Ijtihad, which she founded to “help build the world’s most inclusive network of reform-minded Muslims and non-Muslim allies.”

Two years later Rosenwald pumped $10,000 into a similar but markedly more aggressive venture called the American Islamic Forum for Democracy. The group was founded by Zuhdi Jasser, an Arizona physician hailed by Glenn Beck as “the one Muslim we were all searching for after 9/11.” Despite his lack of academic or theological credentials, Jasser provided expert testimony last year before the Congressional hearing on Muslim American radicalization conducted by Representative Peter King of New York, widely criticized as a witch hunt. In early March, after the Associated Press exposed a secret NYPD unit monitoring Muslims throughout New York City and far beyond, Jasser issued a press release declaring, “We thank God every day for the NYPD.” That same day, he surfaced at a pro-NYPD rally in New York with King by his side. Then, only days later, over vehement objections from a coalition of Muslim groups, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell installed Jasser as a member of the Commission on International Religious Freedom.

But no single anti-Muslim activist has benefited more from his relationship with Rosenwald than Middle East Forum founder Daniel Pipes, bankrolled to the tune of $2.3 million over the past ten years by the Rosenwald family’s philanthropies. Pipes thanked Rosenwald for “[taking] on a leadership role when the [Middle East] Forum was yet fledgling, helping us through some tough spots.” A former scholar at the Rosenwald-backed pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), Pipes has made a career of advocating aggressive US and Israeli military action in the Middle East, including the razing of entire Palestinian villages.

here's another article about one of their most published authors a leading anti-mulsim propagandanist that helped convince americans to attack Iraq


Islamophobe With Militarist Name Attacks Muslims For Militarist Names

http://www.loonwatch.com/tag/harold-rhode/

Harold Rhode’s Muslim problem may have just turned into a Harold Rhode problem.

Rhode, thankfully, no longer serves in the Pentagon, where he once headed up an in-house think-tank that played a role in cherry-picking and over-emphasizing shoddy intelligence in favor of attacking Iraq. These days, Rhode is relegated the Gatestone Institute, a spin-off of the Hudson Institute where right-wingers (along with Alan Dershowitz) champion hawkish, often “pro-Israel” policies and, not infrequently, rattle off Islamophobic blogposts. (Rhode also serves as a board member of the Islamophobic film production group, Clarion Fund.) In his latest Gatestone posting, Rhode goes on at length about what he thinks is a quirk more or less unique to Islamic cultures, and one that proves how violent they are. Here’s a long excerpt, with my emphasis:




Would we name our children Warrior, Conqueror, Sword, or Holy War? These are the meanings of personal names commonly used in the Muslim world, and may give some insight into Muslim values, especially regarding violence. Violence has been endemic to Muslim society from its inception more than 1,400 years ago. [...]

Western societies almost never give their children names which denote violence. The Protestants who settled America often gave their children names indicative of their values, such as Felicity, Charity, Prudence, Hope, Faith, Joy or Chastity. Other Christians gave their children names that reflect similar values, or names from the Old or New Testaments: Miriam, Mary, David, Luke. As names can be an indicator of how a civilization views itself and the outside world, names parents choose to give their children are at least something of a guide to what they hold in high regard and what they wish for their children. And as Muslims often choose names related to war and violence, could those possibly be indicative of their values?




Got that? Parents give their children violent names because they come from inherently violent societies. Well, Mr. and Mrs. Rhode got some ‘splainin’ to do, as the kids say. According to one baby name site, “Harold” means “leader of an army“;

[FlyingNarwhal]

Cratehorus beat me to it. Yeah the Gatestone Institute is wildly neo-con. I'm too lazy to do the legwork right now because I am very hungover, but I'm sure someone could go through the article with a fine toothed comb and pick out the exaggerations and falsities.

[Anomalocaris]

http://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/3687/c...ationalism

The article is a fairly strident partisan screech rather than an impartial analysis of the cause and implications of the events.

Basically it make no concession to the fact that China actually has fairly substantial and reasonable claims to some of the territory in dispute, especially in the case with Japan. In fact, China's claim to Japanese occupied Sankaku islands is built on much the same basis as Philipine's claim to Chinese occupied Scarsborgh islands. The Chinese can't be in the wrong on both.

The article also ignored the fact that these disputes are of long standing, some dating back to 17th century, and it seem to have no clue why these disputes so happen to suddenly flare up immediately AFTER Obama's "strategic pivot" to pacific, and attribute the timing solely to internal Chinese causes.

It basically defines wrong to be whatever china does, and concludes that since everything china does is wrong, china is therefore evil.

This is something that I've been paying attention to fairly closely for a while, ever since I was in high school, in fact, and one that spiked shortly before the Olympics [and become something I focused on even more during and after them].

When I was in high school it was still the height of the cold war, and the caliber of the childish jingoistic propaganda that appealed to the sort of high school students who showed up at class with copies of "Soldiers of Fortune" magazine and talks on and on about how the Soviets are gassing every one who owns private property and about the imminent invasion of the Canada by the Soviet Union back then seem to of about the same as what still appeals to you now.

I remember hearing people talk endlessly about China being the "next superpower." I dismissed these statements then as a teenager and I dismiss them now. China is not a superpower. It will not be a superpower. It lacks the strong foundations necessary to become one.

Appearently you imagine because it is YOUR dismissal, therefore this dismissal must be of some non-zero value despite the lack of support from valid and coherent arguments.

However, that is not going to stop them, of this I am very sure. They realize, as this article points out, that their economy has largely peaked. They're hitting a plateau of development, and there's nothing on the horizon for them to look forward to to give them that next boost. So, what happens when any swelling nation starts to realize its resources are going to soon become insufficient for its growth and prosperity?

Peaked out? In what sense? Just because their economy is growing at 7.8% a year instead of 10% a year? Ours are growing at 1.5% a year.

To say they have peaked is like saying just because Bill Gates wealth increased by only $10 billion this year compared to $15 billion last year, therefore his wealth has peaked.

It seems there is unversal agreement that their economy will overtake ours in total size by 2016. No one seem to suggest any plausible dramatic reversal in the growth of their economy before that date to feasibly defer it by any significant length. They can halve their growth rate and still beat us by 2022.

In the long run, productive power, and total size of economy, are the dominant driver of the country's influence in the world. In both, they are expected to surpass us before by 2020 in the base case and is expected to surpass the combined productivity and size of the US and EU by 2030 and in the worst case surpass by 2025 and the US and EU combined by 2050. How is that not a superpower?

[Creed of Heresy]

I wanna reply more to ya in detail, Chuck, but at the moment I've only got time to read a couple posts. I'll respond later today, but you bring up some excellent points about their economy. That said, you sidestepped the actual main thrust of the article which is that China is becoming militaristic. Whether or not I am wrong about their REASONS for becoming militaristic doesn't change the fact they are becoming very openly hostile and aggressive, and that's more what I would be interested in seeing addressed in this discussion. This ought to be fun, I haven't actually had a good discussion on this area in a while, so when I saw this article, I thought it'd be a good way to start one up. Clearly I wasn't wrong.

[Something completely different]

craterhorus has been watching to much fascist iranian TV lately.