More of this will happen if the west doesn’t support Philippines or Ukraine Enough
this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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So an act of war, right?
Yeah, attacking a military unit seems like an act of war to me. Pretty blatant. Demonstrates that China only behaves as a bad actor with its neighbors, and can't be trusted to be anything other than a bully.
This is basically China daring the US to do something about it. We shouldn't take the dare, but we should respond with a show of support for the Philippines. China is flexing because they think the US is too busy with Ukraine, Israel, and the upcoming election.
Yeah, attacking a military unit seems like an act of war to me.
Civ 6 agrees with you.
My ships are merely passing through (your hull)
Well, according to China, those waters are their territory, which means that the presence of foreign military vessels is an invasion.
Practically speaking, I think you could call that area a contested region, so minor skirmishes like this are expected and could escalate to war (like Crimea eventually did).
I think that the Philippines approach has been something like, 'You can claim those waters if you want, but you can't possibly keep us from entering them, so we're just going to ignore you until you start killing our people, and then we're gonna call in big brother America.'
I was wondering how they "punctured" this military vessel, then I watched the video... They're fighting it out on freaking zodiacs.
The Chinese are pursuing a very weird passive aggressive strategy here that I do not at all understand.
"Surely if we spray water at the other boats and run our boats into them and jump on board the opposing ships with poking weapons like some kind of Maori tribesmen the rest of the world will get sick of it and go away and give us what we want i.e. full control of the South China Sea, without us having to actually start a war about it"
I really don't understand. I can't even say for sure it is a bad idea, because like I say I just don't understand, but it seems unlikely that it's going to produce the impact that they seem like they want it to produce.
imo, I think they're playing the plausible deniability card.
They can always say they don't know what is happening in the lower ranks. Once the other side raises arms, suddenly they're going to play the self-defense card.
On the other side, they preach about how asians should support each other against the power and influences of the west.
Ah yes, we're all Asians and Chinese, one whole family so we should support each other! Except if you disagree with us, fuck you then.
Also conveniently forgetting thousands of years of Chinese imperialism and Han chauvinism.
I only have two ideas:
They're seeing what they can get away with. Or, and more likely, normalizing more and more aggression in pursuit of seeing what they can get away with.
The tried and true Russia strategy. China learning well from neighbor.
Have you seen videos of the skirmishes at the Kashmiri border? It's absurd, like something out of a bad alternate history movie.
The impact as of right now is that everyone thinks they're being absolute assholes about it.
It reminds me of this tradition. Especially this quote from a modern incident "Successfully counting coup disgraces your opponent. It’s a way of publicly shaming them. We believe that if you are shamed, you must admit defeat." It makes me wonder how much of the motivation for the incidents is internal consumption. Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.
Acting aggresively, but in a carefully crafted way to avoid an escalated response. The message sent internally that the other side restrains themselaee not out of reason, but fear.
That actually might be it. We can't look to people in our own government / own country like we're anything other than the boss and everyone knows it, but also, we definitely don't want to pick a massive fight with another nuclear armed power and our biggest trading partner for literally no reason at all. And so, let's play this stupid fighter-plane-chicken game with them and spin it at home like we're out there telling them what's what.
IDK if I buy it. It sorta makes sense.
It's hard to square that, though, with actually fucking up the sailors on Filipino ships in a way that seems like it should demand some kind of response. Maybe the orders were to just be pushy in a non-escalational way and things got out of hand on the ground in a way that for-real wasn't intended?
Right, they’re pushing the boundaries as much as they can with plausible deniability, because they want the west to make the first move so they can point at it and go, “we were never hostile, they started it”
It's the "I'm not touching you" of international geopolitics. They're doing everything they can think of, short of actual war.
Just waiting for them to try this with a US Navy Ship gonna be a bad day for the Chinese 😂
But they do this shit with the US too. Their fighter planes play the "I'm not touching you I'm not touching you" game with US aircraft right up until the point it turns into the "oh no I did touch you and now I'm dead and my airplane is falling apart in fiery chunks and your airplane is crippled what an exercise in futility that whole thing was" game.
Like I say, I won't even say that that didn't impact US policy in some way similar to what they wanted. I don't know that it did but I don't know that it didn't. Overall my main reaction is just wtf are you guys doing why is your strategy like this.
(I do of course suspect that they will not try to play the firehoses and spear wielding game with the US Navy. Just some similar version of the same type of tactics.)
Somehow this factors into taking over Taiwan.
It factors into China's ambitions to control the entire South China Sea:
Straight-up imperialism. All your ocean are belong to us.
That "China/Taiwan" is just kinda thrown in there without even an asterisk or anything
(Actually I guess leaving Taiwan out of the legend entirely would have looked like an accident or something, and having a separate color for it would have been a huge deal and they'd have started to get phone calls, and so they just shrugged and put that down and said you know what it's not a perfect world let's move on)
There's also that both PRC and ROC claim the area. IIRC, Taiwan actually claims three extra dashes.
Bloody hell, you are right (well, sort of; apparently it's complex.) That's convenient for the map makers, I guess, although best of luck to them in enforcing any of it (and according to that article they've sort of clarified that that doesn't mean they're actually claiming the sea, as best as I can understand it.)
Anything China wants becomes "disputed" so they have an excuse to act like bullies.