Is it better to have a strong Russia or a weak Russia on your northern boder?
Is it better to run the risk of being tied to Russia as a pariah nation or to make common cause with those nations who make up your largest markets?
He Misread The Room Before The Room Even Arrived
28 minutes ago
4 comments:
Why wouldn't China want Russia and the DPRK as vassal states? The horses are on the race track...
Russia claims Siberia. Russia doesn't control Siberia.
I'd say that's a peripheral question to China (literally, yes, but also the figurative sense). China has always seen itself as the center of the world and looked inward. The central issue/fear is keeping all its balls in the air with both a marginally functional/largely dysfunctional juggler and a huge number of gnarly balls. China knows that straight peasant communism is disastrous (witness Mao's Great Leap Froward) but is both desirous of and scared spitless by the dynamism of free market capitalism...so it lurched back and forth between the two. Likewise with dead hand of authoritarian control...they've extinguished Hong Kong as an economic powerhouse because they feared its freedom. And like a bad genetics experiment, their hybrid Rube Goldberg economy/governance has reached overgrown senescence witness their crashing real estate and managed capitalism bubbles.
What's needed is a containment (as Kennan with the Soviets) until the whole mess of China comes crashing down, then further containment. The risk then is another deluded Putin-like strongman.
We live in interesting times.
That is a good way to look at things.
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