Time to pull the Hafthohlladung out and donate two each to every Chinese fishing vessel.
China ChiCom News Thread
- Thread starter LordsFire
- Start date
VicSage
Carpenter, Cobbler, Chirugeon, Dataminer.
It's less a Horse than it is a series of collectable Matryoshka Dolls, complete with spy camera accessories.
I wonder how well the chinese army will do in Afghanistan.
Points at any invading Army that is not led by Genghis Khan.
Eh, China is descended from Genghis Khan, and they did a "good" job with Tibet. Additionally, they aren't bound by things like "PR" or "human rights" or other stuff.
bintananth
behind a desk
It won't end well for China just as it didn't end well for the British Empire, the Soviet Union, and the United States.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
Or Alexander the Great, or any of the various Empires in the region after that...
The British got what they wanted out of that war actually. They just wanted a secure Indian border there and they got exactly that.
The Soviet's did actually fail.
America's failure had at least as much to do with policy being bad(same problem as Vietnam, what even counts as a victory?).
bintananth
behind a desk
He did not reach Afghanistan and his conquests fractured into multiple sides fighting over who got what after he died.
If the US had actually listened to Ho Chi Minh when he said "we want the French to leave" way back when there never would have been a US-Vietnamese conflict.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
...He was literally about to go to India when his men were like "dude, we've conquered a lot, can we take a break please?", he did, in fact, conquer what would become Afghanistan.
bintananth
behind a desk
That's not the history I was taught. He may have gone through there, but he did not conquer and subjugate it.
Neither were the Soviets and look how that turned out.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
The place is literally part of the successor kingdom for at least two generations, yes he did.
King Arts
Well-known member
The history you were taught was wrong. Alexander conqured everythin he came accross. After he died it split apart into civil war. But even Afghanistan known as Bactria back then retained alot of Greek culture. So yes great men like Alexander can do what idiots like modern American leaders can't.
In Alexander's time the Mongol's hadn't raised and salted A-stan's lands, and they were far more fertile than they are now.
A-stan was nice before the Mongol's came through; after that, it's been a shithole that has never really recovered, no matter how much modern tech has moved through with one army or another.
King Arts
Well-known member
Blaming the Mongols seems a bit too easy. After all Bactria was not well known for having many cities or great farm land. It was still mountain country which isn't good farm land. Also the Mongols themselves ironically did not manage to occupy Afghanistan. But yeah no Afghanistan's issues are diffrent from Baghdad which you could lay on the Mongols. The fault lies with the occupies who can't administrate it properly.
ShadowsOfParadox
Well-known member
If you are going to blame any single factor for the decline of the economy of the area, blame Portugal finding a sea route that cut the land route that used to go through the area out.
They had enough to sustain themselves without needing a lot of outside trade, and I believe they had some terraced rice-paddie like growing set-ups to utilize more mountainous growing areas.
I think the terraces went with the Mongols, and nobody rebuilt them because they so utterly fucked the land in their brief stay in the area. The Mongols left because what they did in A-stan was more a punitive expedition than conquest meant to hold it.
...Hmm, now that is an interesting take, one I had not considered.
I guess that was why trade dried up and A-stan was barely cared about by the surrounding world, till the Russians and Brit's went to war there because Russia realized they might be able to get to India via that overland route.
History Learner
Well-known member
US didn’t ‘engage’ China to make it rich and free; it profited off it
In a sense, what happened to the Hong Kong economy was repeated in the US, only on a much greater scale: in the 1980s and ’90s, our city moved its entire manufacturing base to mainland China, and refocused on services, finance and of course, real estate.
The US did something similar, though driven by different if comparable socio-economic forces. By the 1980s, the US was having second thoughts about its trade with, and foreign investment in Japan, which was emerging to become the world’s second-largest economy and naturally becoming less beholden to Washington. To counter Japan’s manufacturing might, US corporations were encouraged to offshore practically their entire manufacturing base to developing countries with low labour costs, chief of which was, of course, China.
This turned out to be extremely lucrative for American multinationals. Take Apple, arguably the most profitable company in the world. On an iPhone 7, it’s been calculated it left just 3.6 per cent of its cost as profit margin to its numerous mainland Chinese manufacturing partners to fight over. It presumably left a few more crumbs on the table for Foxconn, but not much more.
Much of the profits made from the sweat and blood of Chinese workers were recycled through the US treasury market. China was loaning to Americans so they could keep buying Chinese goods.
Meanwhile, American capitalism was being financialised. Why make things when you can make much more money much faster by just moving money around? In this, China helped too. If you want to leverage, borrowing costs have to be kept low. By lending massively to the US, China helped keep interest rates and inflation low. This role was played by Japan in the last century; China took over at the beginning of this century. How else could the US have carried out its expensive “war on terror” if borrowing costs had been high?
What Karl Marx has called the logic of capitalism compelled the US to partner with China, just as it did previously with Japan. The Nichibei economy was replaced by Chimerica. Yesterday, it was Toyota, Honda, Sega, Nintendo, Sony, Canon, Toshiba and JVC. Today, it’s Huawei Technologies, ZTE, ByteDance with its TikTok app, Alibaba, Tencent, Xiaomi, Didi Chuxing, DJI and Baidu.
There is, also, a historical dimension to this whole story. At least since the first Opium War and actually well before that, all major Western powers had wanted to take over the Chinese market with its vast profit potentials. When Chinese communists opened up, of course Americans and others jumped right in. The problem is that this communist party, it turns out, isn’t a tinpot dictatorship but a rather competent one. It has learned from its mistakes and those of others. It prefers its own “Beijing consensus” rather than “the Washington consensus”.
This is looking after your own interests, but in Washington, it’s called not following or challenging a rules-based international system; never mind the US is the one that sets up most of the rules and breaches them when it finds suitable. The logic of global capitalism dictated the US partner with China; the logic of empire now compels it to fight this “monster” because it didn’t turn out to be the plaything America had wanted.
Aw sad...
They're like everyone else.
They're like everyone else.