Grand wrote on Jan 29
th, 2015 at 8:09pm:
Good point about the cyber-warfare, and I see China's viewpoint there: if you have no hope of catching up in conventional arms, why try? shift the board. Hopefully we can catch up there, we do have a significant advantage when we are aware enough to use it.
Now what's interesting is there is no specific "leash" for China to pull on the US debt, it's really all of nothing in a way and china is cleaved to us until there is such a significant paradigm sift in the world economic mechanics.
Until then if China does anything to "pull the leash" they run the risk of damaging the US ecomomy, which in turn guts the value of the bonds they hold, and will domino into a world wide crisis.
Of course the same is true for the states, the US has turned blind eyes to the extensive bullshit China pulls inside it's sphere of influence because it is not worth the trouble it would cause the US economy to engage as adversaries.
Many predominant thinkers now see the US and China economies as symbiotic in a way that would have been unthinkable just 20 years ago with Japan.
The thing that I would ask you to consider is this, the current build up of the Chinese military still spends a quarter of what the US spends, and is less in terms of percentage of GDP by a large margin. So consider that the military that China is building today is not meant for the USA, or even the USA's defense agreement with Taiwan, consider that it is in fact meant to project the power of China in Asia, specifically South-east Asia and Oceania. As a extension of China's will in regards to those neighbors and as a economic bulwark to the main Chinese economic interest as personified by the extensive PLA business and resource development projects.
You are correct, and the entanglement of economies such that most nations are caught up in a web of economic dependence on other countries is a purposeful attempt to stop global war.
The reality is that military might is a protective last resort among the heavily armed nations, all of which now control nuclear weapons. Every developed nation could produce a nuclear weapon - I've been at a conference where the Japanese ambassador to England stated "we could build a nuclear weapon in 24 hours." So no one is going to launch these or any outright military attack without understanding they face serious consequences - though it makes you wonder wtf Putin is doing.
China, along with Russia, Brazil and India, together have slightly less than 1/3rd the world's GDP and own a substantial portion of American foreign currency and debt. China has been trying for some time now to circumvent the power of the American dollar. I don't personally think they'll succeed immediately, but China plans for the long term. Owning American debt isn't going to help them much, though, since debt devalues over time. And America has been pursuing international policies of isolating China - China's response is to start it's own development strategy, to make developing nations indebted to them while bolstering it's own international economic web.
As already mentioned, the major issue for the rest of the world is China's population. If they can get 33% of their population to middle class status, that creates unparalleled economic power. Their biggest problem to reaching that is industrial pollution and environmental collapse - they've already killed massive parts of the ocean near their cities, destroyed entire riverine ecosystems and local ecologies all over the country. But they're also the world's largest investor and user of green technologies. So it's not like they don't understand what to do or what's going on.
War isn't going to happen. Economic war, certainly. Cyber war is absolutely ongoing. A friend of mine is a security head for a large US based multinational energy and defense contractor. He's told me that China employs warehouses of hackers and, because of their numbers, come up with solutions to security that Westerners don't realize - the Chinese have hacked his system in ways that he didn't think was possible. But I think Western gov'ts will respond.
And stealing tech alone isn't going to do much for you. You have to invest in your own research or you're always going to lag - it's just that they have more people, so the potential for more scientists and more research.
So it's an interesting world we live in. But one thing is certain. Unless the US can get its shit together, build up the satellite economies that depend on it, and invest in its population in terms of education and health care, and address the gap between the rich and poor, China will overtake it economically and then militarily.
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