But Taiwan is tiny and overpopulated, while Ukraine, if you leave them alone, can be self-sufficient forever. A total sea and air blockade of Taiwan, I would assume would be unavoidably catastrophic in a year or so. Just googled it and Taiwan has roughly 10x the population density.
China is like the US in that geography largely protects it from any real foreign threats actually invading them anymore as long as they have a stable central government. But for the same reason, they don’t have a lot they can just invade across their land borders. So any war they start they need to make sure they can support via naval routes, which complicates the whole affair. Taiwan is a small enough island to make victory plausible, but I have a hard time seeing many other invasions they could hope to actually win.
It’s one of the reasons I always struggle with the suggestion of the US military pivoting towards a force set up for fighting China. Outside of defending Taiwan, what does a war with China even look like? It’s obviously an air/naval affair like the Pacific in WW2, but what territory would it actually be fighting over? Said another way, outside of Taiwan, what objective would China plausibly try for that would lead to war? It seems to be they’ll bully in the SCS as much as they can, but at some point all of their neighbors come together to stand up to them and get them to stop. Maybe that has some small skirmishes but I don’t see it escalating to full blown war where the US would get involved.
Or more to my thought, not what but why? A year ago that was my stance on Russia, why do we need to keep thinking about fighting them? That one didn’t age well.
Other than that, only comment is that China has Russia, we have Canada, I know which one I would pick for a northern neighbor.
I dunno, I’ve had some pretty nasty poutine.
I doubt Russia trying to fight in the far east would end any better than last time they went to war out that way. They’ve had enough logistics problems around Ukraine where the infrastructure is infinitely more built up. I have a hard time believing China perceives any real threat to their north.
But I think your question of “why” is tied to my “what”. I do sure think we ought to equip Taiwan, and leaving open a legitimate path to the US actually coming to their defense is probably a huge deterrent all by itself with the strategic ambiguity policy.
Beyond that, we certainly need to be wary of being overly provocative and giving the Chinese all the more reason to build up and push even more. But it’s always a balance between that and risking appeasement. Xi’s increasing grip on power certainly makes the threats seem more real.
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I don’t think China could do this militarily for long- Taiwan has a good Navy/AF.
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Taiwan’s importance to the global economy would force the US to do something, at least in a limited fashion.
If anyone’s interested in a quick update, here you go. Like I predicted, I started showing signs of COVID on Christmas and was bedridden the next few days. Turns out that COVID really sucks! I am back in the office finally today after my government-recommended five days of rest (and self-quarantine).
Pretty much everyone I know here has been sick during the past two weeks and it is kind of a weird shared experience. A lot of people in our office are still coughing and congested (including myself).
I think it is really weird how few news stories I have seen about this. It seems to me that if a whole country gets sick all of a sudden, there should be more news stories about that. For the past two years, we have been told to fear COVID so much that thousands of people were put into quarantine daily to prevent its spread, and now practically everyone got infected with it near simultaneously. I can’t even imagine how it feels for people in mainland China who had to live with even stricter policies.
Glad you’re feeling better @cpugeek13!!
Is that a Macao rule? Just wondering as I’ve been reading news articles that say mainland doctors are being told to go to work whether or not they have Covid. Here’s an article claiming some provincial government are telling public sectors employees to go to work, sick or not:
https://www.cnn.com/2022/12/21/business/china-covid-return-to-work-intl-hnk-mic/index.html
I think so, though I have no idea where that number came from. The government here even has an online registry where we can print out a document that we can use as a doctors note to apply for sick leave.
Yeah, a lot of doctors and nurses are getting sick, not just from their patients but also from their family members. For about a week, one of the hospitals here were reporting only about 40% of their normal manpower and I’m sure it’s similar in other places.
For the COVID paid leave, mainland China do have similar policies, and it seems that because of the reality that almost everyone is getting COVID, the actual implementation becomes more relaxed. Sometimes you don’t need to have docter notes or positive test results, for my case, just self-reporting is enough for my employer for some paid leave. I’m not in the party controlled public sector jobs, so what if they are sick but the government needs people to work? Tough luck. Party member has to go, and also whoever the boss designates, too.
About the lack of news reporting on the whole nation getting sick, my theory is that, first, the Chinese government does not know how to report this to its own people. The predicted end of “zero-covid” comes so fast and crumbled so easily that almost no one expected so. So the Chinese are just in the moment, dealing with it right now, with little government voices on the matter. And yet, the current variant seems really as mild as advertised, that even if everyone is sick, there are not a lot of stories of catastrophes to report on as of now. From what I’ve heard, and experienced, most people do come back to work after about 1 week of sickness. Maybe it will change later this winter, but it seem like as long as the death toll is not alarmingly high, not a lot of people want to accuse China for forcing herd immunity on its own people. Maybe because China at least picked the least lethal variant to do so?
There’s really no evidence if this though. Most people got sick and recovered within a week of the original variant, for instance. The problem has always been one of scale, and demographics (elderly people have a much worse time of it).
China did rollout a vaccine, so that’s going to help.
To be fair, the China media never reports on catastrophes related to official policy and any social media posts are quickly censored. If you look at the official death rates of COVID from the Chinese government, there was never any risk of a great number of fatalities and they could have opened up a year ago. However, to emphasize how ridiculous the official figures are, there have been some days where the reported number of COVID-related deaths in Macau (population 600K) have been higher than those reported for ALL of mainland China.
That’s the part that China really got right, and it’s the reason why on a per-capita basis, they’re going to have a lot fewer deaths than the US. They kept things under control until they had a vaccine.
But then they sat there and wasted the next two years. They didn’t give a solid enough push for vaccinations. They didn’t pile up supplies and then gradually loosen restrictions attempting to flatten the curve enough to let the medical system keep working. Also Omicron has been the main virus strain since January, so if they’re loosing things up because “Omicron isn’t that dangerous” that means everything they’ve done for the last year has been a waste of time — they could have loosened things up last January and gotten the same result.
I also really don’t understand the vaccine situation. You’d think if they are happy enough to lock people into apartment buildings because someone in the building tested positive and are happy to drag people off to Covid holding camps when they test positive, they would be able to make everyone get their three vaccination shots in — I really don’t understand why under the Chinese government system breaking into someone’s apartment, even bashing their way through a locked door then dragging them off to Covid containment and killing their dog is okay, but requiring someone to get a vaccine shot is apparently a bridge to far.
Maybe. Vaccine rates amongst the most vulnerable (elderly) are reportedly quite low. But I’m not sure how the demographics compare to the US for elderly in general, and especially in care-homes. Those things massively determine the headline statistics.
Well a lot of our deaths happened before a vaccine existed. I seem to recall that they learned quite a bit about Covid patient care too that could improve outcomes, even before the vaccine came out. That should help the Chinese out.
As you say, a large percentage of their elderly population have not had three vaccination shots (which is considered recommended minimum for Sinovac and Sinopharm). “Only 42.3% of those aged 80 and over in China have received a third dose of vaccine, according to a CNN calculation of new figures released by the NHC on December 14.” (source). And of course they won’t import more effective mRNA vaccines because of “reasons.”
But all things being equal, they’ll still be better off with 1 or 2 shots of Sinovac then a patient in New York with no vaccine in early 2020 when we also understood disease treatment a lot less.
I think there’s also a lot of concern about what happens when this thing hits rural settings, where health care support is much more limited though. The Chinese government deciding to let the whole thing loose right before Lunar New Year, when a lot of people are going travel back to rural areas, seems incredibly shortsighted.
Is that irony I smell?
By Associated Press
The Chinese government blasted Covid-19 testing requirements imposed on passengers from China and threatened countermeasures against countries involved, which include the U.S. and several European nations.
“We believe that the entry restrictions adopted by some countries targeting China lack scientific basis, and some excessive practices are even more unacceptable,” Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning said at a daily briefing Tuesday.
“We are firmly opposed to attempts to manipulate the Covid measures for political purposes and will take countermeasures based on the principle of reciprocity,” she said.
The comments were China’s sharpest to date on the issue.
Disguising.
I read somewhere that 80-90% of sex dolls sold globally are made in China, where copyright regulations are very rarely enforced. I think mostly are for OEM. So this manufactor probably just randomly select pictures of hot woman on the internet to model their products from.
Oh, Wow!
Olathe Esther Melenchon is my favorite plastic supermodel!!