No, the arms manufacturers just don’t have the same level of influence over the government and armed forces that they do in America, and the people in the government who decide whether to drop bombs won’t personally get rich if they buy more bombs.
That isn’t something unique to China btw but basically almost every country except USA and a few others.
I mean- yeah, the birdcage model has been supplanted by majority public ownership at this point, the same incentives that create the military industrial complex don’t exist- if you’d like, i would recommend reading “Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism” which can be a handy reference point for the US military complex.
Saying that China doesn’t have a MIC is a non-sequitur. The incentive is power. If acquiring or maintaining power in China requires military expansion, it will happen.
Except imperialism is actually incredibly inefficient in the long term. There is a reason why China’s foreign policy is centered around mutual advancement.
If you want power over another country, attacking them is a very inefficient path. You will take losses, and you won’t be able to take their resources intact. The easier and cheaper method is to just bribe their leaders into selling you whatever you want.
The US starts wars even when it doesn’t need to, because there are a handful of companies that stand to make a lot of money selling weapons. No other country has such a large and influential military lobby, so other countries tend not to start wars for private profit.
My point is that the real hard-to-swallow pill for people like OP is that China is not a magical place where everyone just sings kumbaya all day. China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could. The only reason this meme is in any way accurate is that China can’t realistically drop bombs like that, otherwise they would. Tankies like OP will defend imperialism all day long, as long as the imperialists say “Death To America!”. If the US poofed out of existence today, there would be a power vacuum quickly filled by exactly the same sort of people that are dropping those bombs in the meme.
So I guess my question is “What’s the point of pretending that China is any different?”
China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could.
Yeah, except they’re different countries, made up of different people, with a different culture, with a pretty much fundamentally different kind of organizational structure governing them. I don’t think “well, they’d probably do it too, if the US were gone” is a super convincing argument in favor of the US dropping bombs on people.
To be clear, I’m not in favor of dropping bombs on people. My argument is that saying “China isn’t dropping any bombs” is silly. They would if they could and it would achieve a goal.
Human nature doesn’t change just because you go over to the other side of the globe. History shows us that the wars over there haven’t been any less bloody. Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?
Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?
Because I don’t think it’s human nature that people just inevitably drop bombs on on another as soon as they’re given the opportunity to do so, and I think that’s an extremely oversimplified view of both human nature and history, to think that’s the case. I think, broadly, it depends on a lot of factors. Economic factors, normal economic realities, and the ability of the economic systems to self-regulate and feed information from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, as a result of their political structures. Cultural factors, like the base level of xenophobia present in a culture for other cultures, you know, to what degree that xenophobia shapes the economic realities or is shaped by the economic reality.
I think saying, oh, well, if china was the world hegemon tomorrow, they’d drop bombs as soon as they could, I don’t even really think that passes the smell test. They’d still have to deal with the EU, with Russia, with the militaries of basically every force they’d want to contend with, and with their lack of as nearly of a well-funded military industrial complex. They’ve shown a much higher tendency to approach geopolitical situations with their huge amounts of economic leverage as a result of their manufacturing base rather than just using a big stick to get everything they want.
I don’t see any reason why that would majorly change if the US were gone. If they were to pivot to military industrial capacity, there’s a certain cost-opportunity there in terms of what it would take out of their economic capacity, and it wouldn’t really be the same cost-opportunity that we have (or, mostly, used to have histrorically) in the US, since their public and private sectors are more fused than ours, so they’re not benefiting from the natural efficiency of a large government organization in terms of overall savings, when that’s basically what every corporation over there is, or, is more than over here. Why would they risk their position bombing the shit out of other nations when they could basically just not?
The belt and road initiative has already showcased their geopolitical approach. It’s still something they use a military to protect in terms of infrastructural investments, but those infrastructural investments seem to me to be more significant than those of most western occupying forces, and seem to take a different fundamental stance in terms of technology. China’s economy doesn’t revolve, to the same extent as the US, around the extraction, control, and importation of cheap, sour, heavy, crude oil, from other nations, which can then be refined into much more valuable petroleum products in terms of shipping while the US positions itself as a middle-man between this extractive base and the rest of the world’s energy market. China’s built like 50 nuclear plants since like 2014-ish, we’ve built 2 new plants since the year 2000. That’s obviously shaped by necessity, but that’s also just a vastly different approach.
First off, thanks for the substantive response. I appreciate these sorts of discussions over people just trying to dunk on each other like it’s twitter.
I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.
China is super xenophobic, like many Asian countries. They won’t even try to hide it behind a facade like the West does.
They don’t bother using bombs right now, because it would give the US an excuse to get involved, and the US currently outspends the next 11 countries combined. That would be a total shitshow for them no matter what happened. Nobody bothers trying to outspend the US, because you’d wreck your economy and get nothing. If the US went poof though, you’d get a game theoretic situation where everybody invests in the military because everyone else is investing in their military and you don’t want to be left out. If China then decided that they want to finish the job on making the Korean peninsula Chinese, who would realistically stop them?
The belt and road initiative is a great extension of soft power, but that says nothing about how they’d use hard power if given the opportunity.
That’s not projection, that’s basic human behavior. Do you think modern China just magically poofed into existence, or were there maybe a few bloody imperalist wars involved? Why would things be different now?
I have depicted you in mixed case text. Your argument is over :sneer:
Do better.
Imperialism is human nature, yes. Imperialism is not otherwise known as monopoly capitalism, which is where your whole chain of thought breaks down. Are you really trying to argue that Communists can’t be imperialist?
What is your idea that they “can’t get away with dropping bombs” based on? They absolutely could, and they still don’t do it. What it’s based on is that you assume they would if they could, that’s projection, because clearly you like the idea of bombing people for profit.
this also, yeah, there’s plenty of people china could drop bombs on, or, opposition groups they could fund in proxy wars or civil wars, probably to their strategic advantage, and they mostly don’t do it. they’ve taken a much softer strain in terms of geopolitics, I think.
Right now, it would be strategically unwise. They would get a lot of international blowback, sanctions, etc. As a country, it’s currently better to achieve your goals with diplomacy and hostile actions that have plausible deniability. That can easily change, though. If it does, prepare to live in interesting times.
To be blunt, have you read a history book? People have been killing the outgroup in brutal struggles for power since time began. Are you aware of the phrase “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”? It comes from the Siege of Melos in 416 B.C.
I don’t like it, but that’s the way the world works, and has worked forever. Criticizing people in power for their actions is good. Saying “if only this other country was in power, things would be different” is foolish.
To be blunt, have you? If you had you would know that even among empires not every one behaved with the same level of bloodthirstiness every time. The leap from “people have been violent forever” to “therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities” is totally unsubstantiated.
Sure, what they can get away with to achieve their goals is one factor in how countries behave. But it is totally absurd to suggest that a country’s culture would have no impact on the approach they take to foreign affairs. It has dramatic impacts on all their other laws and ways of doing things, by what possible crazy coincidence would foreign policy always be totally identical regardless of culture?
So yeah, things would be different. Way back in this discussion you snarkily characterised a straw man arguing that things would be perfect and people singing kumbaya, but nobody (here arguing against you in this thread) thinks that. This meme is about dropping bombs. We have substantial real world evidence that China does not prefer to take that approach. The USA absolutely does prefer to take that approach, even when other options would be more successful.
I’m not saying “therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities”. Can you point to any period in history in which empires were just chill and sung kumbaya all day long, though?
We have substantial real world evidence that China does not prefer to take that approach.
We have zero evidence that China would not take that approach in a world without Pax Americana (as much as I think the term is silly, it’s a convenient shorthand). We do have a lot of evidence that China is a normal country like everywhere else and pushes their interests where possible:
What do you mean that mechanic doesn’t exist in the same way for China? Are you talking like China has achieved a classless utopia situation?
No, the arms manufacturers just don’t have the same level of influence over the government and armed forces that they do in America, and the people in the government who decide whether to drop bombs won’t personally get rich if they buy more bombs.
That isn’t something unique to China btw but basically almost every country except USA and a few others.
Do you think that dynamic wouldn’t exist for any country, including China, that had as much world influence as the US does now?
I mean- yeah, the birdcage model has been supplanted by majority public ownership at this point, the same incentives that create the military industrial complex don’t exist- if you’d like, i would recommend reading “Economy and Class Structure of German Fascism” which can be a handy reference point for the US military complex.
Saying that China doesn’t have a MIC is a non-sequitur. The incentive is power. If acquiring or maintaining power in China requires military expansion, it will happen.
Except imperialism is actually incredibly inefficient in the long term. There is a reason why China’s foreign policy is centered around mutual advancement.
If you want power over another country, attacking them is a very inefficient path. You will take losses, and you won’t be able to take their resources intact. The easier and cheaper method is to just bribe their leaders into selling you whatever you want.
The US starts wars even when it doesn’t need to, because there are a handful of companies that stand to make a lot of money selling weapons. No other country has such a large and influential military lobby, so other countries tend not to start wars for private profit.
Can you be more clear in your question?
My point is that the real hard-to-swallow pill for people like OP is that China is not a magical place where everyone just sings kumbaya all day. China is just like any other country comprised of humans that has existed ever, and would do the same things the US is doing now if they could. The only reason this meme is in any way accurate is that China can’t realistically drop bombs like that, otherwise they would. Tankies like OP will defend imperialism all day long, as long as the imperialists say “Death To America!”. If the US poofed out of existence today, there would be a power vacuum quickly filled by exactly the same sort of people that are dropping those bombs in the meme.
So I guess my question is “What’s the point of pretending that China is any different?”
Yeah, except they’re different countries, made up of different people, with a different culture, with a pretty much fundamentally different kind of organizational structure governing them. I don’t think “well, they’d probably do it too, if the US were gone” is a super convincing argument in favor of the US dropping bombs on people.
To be clear, I’m not in favor of dropping bombs on people. My argument is that saying “China isn’t dropping any bombs” is silly. They would if they could and it would achieve a goal.
Human nature doesn’t change just because you go over to the other side of the globe. History shows us that the wars over there haven’t been any less bloody. Why are you proposing that human nature is fundamentally different now?
Because I don’t think it’s human nature that people just inevitably drop bombs on on another as soon as they’re given the opportunity to do so, and I think that’s an extremely oversimplified view of both human nature and history, to think that’s the case. I think, broadly, it depends on a lot of factors. Economic factors, normal economic realities, and the ability of the economic systems to self-regulate and feed information from the bottom to the top, and vice versa, as a result of their political structures. Cultural factors, like the base level of xenophobia present in a culture for other cultures, you know, to what degree that xenophobia shapes the economic realities or is shaped by the economic reality.
I think saying, oh, well, if china was the world hegemon tomorrow, they’d drop bombs as soon as they could, I don’t even really think that passes the smell test. They’d still have to deal with the EU, with Russia, with the militaries of basically every force they’d want to contend with, and with their lack of as nearly of a well-funded military industrial complex. They’ve shown a much higher tendency to approach geopolitical situations with their huge amounts of economic leverage as a result of their manufacturing base rather than just using a big stick to get everything they want.
I don’t see any reason why that would majorly change if the US were gone. If they were to pivot to military industrial capacity, there’s a certain cost-opportunity there in terms of what it would take out of their economic capacity, and it wouldn’t really be the same cost-opportunity that we have (or, mostly, used to have histrorically) in the US, since their public and private sectors are more fused than ours, so they’re not benefiting from the natural efficiency of a large government organization in terms of overall savings, when that’s basically what every corporation over there is, or, is more than over here. Why would they risk their position bombing the shit out of other nations when they could basically just not?
The belt and road initiative has already showcased their geopolitical approach. It’s still something they use a military to protect in terms of infrastructural investments, but those infrastructural investments seem to me to be more significant than those of most western occupying forces, and seem to take a different fundamental stance in terms of technology. China’s economy doesn’t revolve, to the same extent as the US, around the extraction, control, and importation of cheap, sour, heavy, crude oil, from other nations, which can then be refined into much more valuable petroleum products in terms of shipping while the US positions itself as a middle-man between this extractive base and the rest of the world’s energy market. China’s built like 50 nuclear plants since like 2014-ish, we’ve built 2 new plants since the year 2000. That’s obviously shaped by necessity, but that’s also just a vastly different approach.
First off, thanks for the substantive response. I appreciate these sorts of discussions over people just trying to dunk on each other like it’s twitter.
I don’t think China would drop bombs as soon as possible. I think they’ll start dropping bombs as soon as that is the best or easiest way of achieving some goal.
China is super xenophobic, like many Asian countries. They won’t even try to hide it behind a facade like the West does.
They don’t bother using bombs right now, because it would give the US an excuse to get involved, and the US currently outspends the next 11 countries combined. That would be a total shitshow for them no matter what happened. Nobody bothers trying to outspend the US, because you’d wreck your economy and get nothing. If the US went poof though, you’d get a game theoretic situation where everybody invests in the military because everyone else is investing in their military and you don’t want to be left out. If China then decided that they want to finish the job on making the Korean peninsula Chinese, who would realistically stop them?
The belt and road initiative is a great extension of soft power, but that says nothing about how they’d use hard power if given the opportunity.
Your kind reasoning is called “projection”. You are actually choking on that pill.
That’s not projection, that’s basic human behavior. Do you think modern China just magically poofed into existence, or were there maybe a few bloody imperalist wars involved? Why would things be different now?
It’s has nothing to do with the material conditions, iT’s JUsT hUmAN NAtUre.
The problem is not human nature, it is imperialism, otherwise known as monopoly capitalism, otherwise known as the highest stage of capitalism. In the time of British hegemony it took the form of colonialism, and in the current time of American hegemony it has taken the form of neocolonialism.
Do better.
Imperialism is human nature, yes. Imperialism is not otherwise known as monopoly capitalism, which is where your whole chain of thought breaks down. Are you really trying to argue that Communists can’t be imperialist?
What is your idea that they “can’t get away with dropping bombs” based on? They absolutely could, and they still don’t do it. What it’s based on is that you assume they would if they could, that’s projection, because clearly you like the idea of bombing people for profit.
this also, yeah, there’s plenty of people china could drop bombs on, or, opposition groups they could fund in proxy wars or civil wars, probably to their strategic advantage, and they mostly don’t do it. they’ve taken a much softer strain in terms of geopolitics, I think.
Right now, it would be strategically unwise. They would get a lot of international blowback, sanctions, etc. As a country, it’s currently better to achieve your goals with diplomacy and hostile actions that have plausible deniability. That can easily change, though. If it does, prepare to live in interesting times.
That’s just a thing you made up to justify not feeling bad, there is no reason to believe that anyone else would act the same way.
To be blunt, have you read a history book? People have been killing the outgroup in brutal struggles for power since time began. Are you aware of the phrase “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”? It comes from the Siege of Melos in 416 B.C.
I don’t like it, but that’s the way the world works, and has worked forever. Criticizing people in power for their actions is good. Saying “if only this other country was in power, things would be different” is foolish.
To be blunt, have you? If you had you would know that even among empires not every one behaved with the same level of bloodthirstiness every time. The leap from “people have been violent forever” to “therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities” is totally unsubstantiated.
Sure, what they can get away with to achieve their goals is one factor in how countries behave. But it is totally absurd to suggest that a country’s culture would have no impact on the approach they take to foreign affairs. It has dramatic impacts on all their other laws and ways of doing things, by what possible crazy coincidence would foreign policy always be totally identical regardless of culture?
So yeah, things would be different. Way back in this discussion you snarkily characterised a straw man arguing that things would be perfect and people singing kumbaya, but nobody (here arguing against you in this thread) thinks that. This meme is about dropping bombs. We have substantial real world evidence that China does not prefer to take that approach. The USA absolutely does prefer to take that approach, even when other options would be more successful.
I’m not saying “therefore they must be the maximum amount of violent at all opportunities”. Can you point to any period in history in which empires were just chill and sung kumbaya all day long, though?
We have zero evidence that China would not take that approach in a world without Pax Americana (as much as I think the term is silly, it’s a convenient shorthand). We do have a lot of evidence that China is a normal country like everywhere else and pushes their interests where possible:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_salami_slicing_strategy
When you’re seriously engaging with what another person is saying