Food for thought.
China in recent years has increased its economic and security ties with Central Asian nations, which have abundant mineral resources and lie on ancient trade routes between east and west.
China's leader, Xi Jinping, has called a meeting of former-Soviet Central Asian countries, in an audacious power play in Russia's backyard the week of his summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
I've wondered how long the Russians would let China take advantage of them. One model has Russia as a vassal state.
This was the response:
That is where I think things are heading. China has copied all of the Russian military tech worth stealing. What was said in the "Lord of War" has turned out to be true:
I can't think of anything the Russians make or do that someone else doesn't make or do better (the West) or cheaper (the Chinese). Thanks to the Russo-Ukraine War, Roscosmos is out of the international launching business. Their airplanes suck, their computer industry is nonexistent, their weapons have failed the battlefield test.
All they have that anyone wants to buy is oil, coal, gas, minerals and possibly steel. They are, essentially, another Saudi Arabia, but with ice instead of sand and much more corruption.
The Chinese going after far East Russian assets, after a near-total boycott of Chinese goods following an international incident, is the basis for Tom Clancy's book "The Bear and the Dragon". Of course, that story in his imaginary universe where the major powers have eliminated their ICBMs, holding only gravity bombs as a nuclear threat.
ReplyDeleteFair's fair. Currently this is true with the dead hand of internecine paranoia and authoritarian insanities, but the history of Russian creative imagination in arts and technology is rich. Just not now, when everything is impossible other than survival.
ReplyDeleteStewart, the problem is that destruction of an intellectual discipline can be almost irreversible. As far as I know, it took the creation of CERN to revive physics in Germany and no German physicist who was educated and worked in Germany has won a Nobel since.
ReplyDeleteThis would be an opportune time for the Chinese to take back the Northern part of Manchuria Russia took at the end of the Opium Wars. A tune-up for the PLA before they go after Taiwan.
ReplyDeleteCM, true that. In my grandfather's time, Germany was the center of medicine and science, with German its language. Grandfather studied EENT surgery in Vienna and returned to Kentuckiana to practice...to which *his* grandfather had emigrated from Bavaria to NOLA in the mid 1800s.
ReplyDeleteWWII was Germany's self-inflicted disaster. OTOH, Germany is perhaps the only country to have substantially confronted its guilt. The English never did over its crimes against Ireland and Scotland, nor America over slavery and it genocide of the indigenous populations.
I've reblogged this quote of mine a few times in the past week:
ReplyDelete“Putinka is Xi’s bitch now. And Xi has his eyes on Central Asia…and Siberia.
The population of the Russian Federation is barely 40% Russian. The rest are the various ethnic minorities that Imperial Russia conquered. The Russian Federation is the ‘rump state’ of the Soviet Union, which in turn was the inheritor of the old Russian Imperial State.
Putin is correct in seeing a vibrant and independent Ukraine as a threat. It serves as a model for all those conquered ethnic minorities. He had to try and crush that. But he has failed, thereby accelerating the final collapse of the remains of the leftover Russian Imperial State, as well as his own certainly fatal fall from power.
One great irony is that Ukraine’s pernicious corruption was drowning Zelenskyy. His approval rating was in the 20’s just before 2/24/22. But Putin has not only made him a hero, but given him the power to root out corruption with a ruthlessness he could not have previously gotten away with.”
There is one thing Putin and Winnie the C-word (and saying that as part C-word myself) will never understand
ReplyDeletePICARD: If he really is an imposter then you have nothing to worry about.
GOWRON: Kahless has been dead for a thousand years, but the idea of Kahless is still alive. Have you ever fought an idea, Picard? It has no weapon to destroy, no body to kill. The idea of Kahless' return must be stopped here, now, or it will travel through the Empire like a wave and leave nothing but destruction behind.
ST:TNG Rightful Heir
“Winnie”? Explain, please.
ReplyDeleteA Tubby little cubby all stuffed with fluff.
ReplyDeleteYou had to make me work for it, didn't you?
ReplyDeleteI've been sayin' it for a while now: Russia claims Siberia, it doesn't control it.
ReplyDeleteI've also been since the turn of the century and I was teaching leading edge technology saying that China will lead an Asian sphere of economic co-influence ~ the Asians are the powerhouse of the twenty-first century, doesn't matter whether we like it or not. What Russia has done by exposing itself thus is change the world order as we've known it: China in position to reclaim Siberia, Japan set to reclaim as many a thousand islands in the north, Korea, Hong Kong are so 21st century it makes us look like 20.
India is in a position to second that. We Westerners really need to rethink things ...
India is covering itself in ignominy, though they act as it is glory. It's gone deep in religious persecution and sectarian violence. It's leveraging the West's problems with China seeking domination to be the relocation for Foxcomm's manufacturing shift (good luck with that Apple, you should have reshored production here). And it's happily buying cheap Russian resources embargoed elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteLike a pig in shit with all the corruption and amorality. Good luck with your future, India; you're faithless and there's always a price for that. As they say, the first betrayal is of one's self.
India is having it's coming out party
ReplyDeleteChinese challenge bringing India, US closer
The US wants to pull India to its side to reduce the adverse impact of the Ukraine war on the global economy and deepen its policy of ‘friend-shoring’ the supply chains away from undependable China. The latter is using its trade surpluses for rapid military modernisation and threaten its weaker neighbours, many of whom are America’s allies. India has emerged as a good candidate for friend-shoring with its rapid economic growth.
https://www.tribuneindia.com/news/comment/chinese-challenge-bringing-india-us-closer-490981
China has around an estimated 350 nuclear warheads and now a falling population.
ReplyDeleteIndian has around 160 nuclear warheads and a still rising population that already exceeds that of China.
China’s population density is about 153 per sqkm.
India’s population density is about 464 per sqkm.
China has serious minority population problems that far exceed India’s…where will India go for resources…especially when the current Chinese government is looking a bit wobbly, as seen by their crackdowns and lockdowns. If the Chinese government cracks, Nepal will be snuggled up to India quicker than you can say “what happened”.
Xinjiang is very close to Pakistan, and Muslin…much closer to Pakistan than any of the major Chinese population centers, and culturally very different. It’s ripe for independence if the central government struggles.
The next World War will be fought in the Far East, and will involve China or some fragment of it, what remains of the Russian Far East, and India…it will perhaps go nuclear, but regardless will end with literal human wave attacks with sticks and swords.