Following the US' hegemonic meme-machine into war for profits

Laudably, but also inevitably given the more limited options now available to China due to the geopolitics of the US and her allies, there have been numerous very recent attempts by research bodies and institutes to volunteer diplomatic and strategic resources to prevent war in the South China Sea:

There has also been a lot of much less helpful military-industrial-funded punditry, posing as research, coming from 'think' tanks and 'researchers' in Australia and The US, in relation to Taiwan.

Recently, after I pointed out in a social media feed that war with China over Taiwan is not only a bad idea, but would not even be a necessary option if the US had stayed out of China's handling of Taiwan's secession: Australian faux-intellectual propagandati caught on to the theme and began to spin memetic narratives apace.

Notable among these was Johnny-come lately to the idea stream: Adam Ni.

My observations of 11th February:

Although I had not seen it at the time, ANU scholar Ian Henry had, at least (and half a day earlier) already called bullshit in relation to the slippery-slopist tendencies of military-industrial mouthpieces for war-money at ASPI:

Like most commentators, however, Henry omits, in his brief social media response to Malcolm Davis (who has been dubbed 'space man' by Chinese wumao) any assertion that the US created the problem to begin with, or that the US is perpetuating the problem for profit and hegemonic dominance.

Ni et. al. feel that the whole problem is somehow a problem that resides only in the future, which is an astonishing example of academic and intellectual aporia and blindness to facts.

Ni catching up:

What political pundits like Ni (and Gareth Evans) seem to be rarely capable of, is anything resembling true objectivity. Evans is infamously good at using rhetoric to give the appearance of a balanced view, while really relying upon what is largely sophistry with some occasional handwaving at data. Ni and Evans are both better at these rhetorical and discursive gymnastics than the Zenz-fuelled, ham-fisted propagandist meme-shovelers of ASPI. However, that is no badge of honour, and not saying much from a scholarly standpoint (It is rather a kind of default, minimum quality measure to ignore and reject the Zenz-er-ific nonsense of pretend-objective researchers like Vicky Xu and Malcolm Davis).

It is clear that while China has been undeniably, and understandably, bullish on the issue of late: China's redressing Taiwan's secession would not constitute a risk for war except for prior, long-term US agitation and interference.

The US military industrial complex is evidently quite happy to have their grant-funded political allies foment war. For those who don't quite get it, here it is again:

FACT: "While China has been undeniably, and understandably, bullish on Taiwan recently: China's redressing Taiwan's secession would not constitute a risk for war except for prior, long-term US agitation and interference."

Ni and his fellow re-researchers are certainly not obviously bloodthirsty like 'researchers' from military-industrial funded propagandist brink tank ASPI (In case you missed Henry's deft attack on it above, here again is this gem of a call to the SCS Crusades courtesy of ASPI propagandist Dr Malcolm 'space man' Davis):

However, what Ni and his ideological, propagandist conspecifics lack in terms of the ability (or brazenness?) to peddle bare-faced, bloodthirsty, misinformation for war-profit, they more than make up for with heaping helpings of duplicitous, narrative sophistry. Not to mention - not a little ignorance of political-narrative memetics, group psychology, and both soft and geostrategic warfare.

In accordance with the practice of all memetic propagandists, and as with all good illusionists: their faux-academic sleight-of-hand is hidden in plain sight. It is embodied in the idea that China shares significant, or even equal, blame with the US and her allies over Taiwan, and that war with Taiwan is somehow only a future risk. It is also embodied in the idea that the CCP somehow outguns the US and Western media with respect to memetic and grand-narratological garbage. This fiction is deployed in the service of more CCP-bashing on an ideological and political basis, and belies Ni and Jiang's near-fanatical, fantastical conception of both the superiority of Western secular culture, and of the affinity of Chinese corporate and intellectual elites for that culture.

First to the 'future risk only' delusion, then on to the more abstract nonsense.

Practicalities

I am in furious agreement with Henry that, contrary to the memetic-narrative nonsense propounded by ASPI's military-industrial crusaders, abdicating some kind of imaginary duty to defend Taiwan would in fact be the opposite of failure. ANZUS, as Henry asserts, does not require it of us. It is a dangerous time to have a delusional mental patient like Scott Morrison - with his metaphysical certitude and imaginary, omniscient, apocalyptic friend - at the helm of anything at all.

Participating in the US' (and ASPI's) nutty - and not altogether unreligious - crusade, will make the situation worse for no good reason. Conflict at this point (not in future, but since at least two years ago) is only good for arms manufacturers and for the politicians and 'researchers' getting research grants and kickbacks from them. To be honest, even Lockheed Martin and Raytheon might end up molten blobs on the sidewalk despite themselves.

Henry is almost right on point, bar ommissions about the real cause (which he may well address in other sources). However, the wavering, panegyrical (to the broad US cultural narrative) incoherency of Ni and Yun Jiang seems very much to be grounded in something other than objectivity or sound analysis. In fact, I suggest it doesn't just seem that way.

Ni and Yun Jiang at least understand that war over Taiwan is a bad idea:

Some may argue that this course of action leaves hanging 24 million Taiwanese. Yes, sadly it does. But then how many lives are on the line when China and the US go to war over Taiwan? (Source: https://www.neican.org/p/china-neican-taiwan-debt-diplomacy )

Yet, they somehow are only able to regard this as a future, and bilaterally induced, problem. They don't seem to grasp that it is already a (largely unilaterally) US-induced lost cause. That is if indeed the cause (qua mission) is to avoid collateral damage and huge numbers of military and civilian casualties. China doesn't automatically share blame equally, or at all, just because it is big and powerful, and defending its interests. That's a non-sequitur, and a silly one. It is like trying to claim China is responsible for trying to redress what Great Britain did in Hong Kong around the time of the Opium Wars. It is kind of dumb to suggest it, to be frank.

Perhaps there is good reason to consider that China should reconsider on Taiwan, but - let us be honest - no one in the US State Department or military community has been the least bit interested in giving them any real chance to do so. The US approach to Taiwan as been one of effective economically and politically enacted annexation, with military-industrial assistance to Taiwan thrown in. This seems quite close to being militarily aggressive, if only passive aggressive. Not even that. Maybe China should fund and arm First Nations people in the US to support their secession from US rule?

What about the SCS? The US is the good guy, right? The idea that the US' interest in the South China Sea is some kind of exercise in selfless internationalist statecraft, and responsible regional stabilisation, is beyond ludicrous. It is clearly about US economic and geopolitical hegemony. As is almost always the case, the US presence will certainly look like a security action in the short term. However, as always, it is a geostrategically asymmetric and (despite some paid marketing to the contrary) largely uninvited interference, the primary and most obvious outcome of which is a direly increased risk of unecessary war with China. There will always be someone small available to voice discontent about a large neighbour. Panama, for example. Cuba. Venezuela.

The prevailing geostrategic problem is that the US is - as of at least ten years hence - not militarily superior enough to prevent catastrophic damage from any hot conflict with China. There are too many variables, and there would be too much modern AI-based weaponry unleashed, for anyone to feel confident of the capacity for timely bilateral curtailment after the first shots. That's not even to mention momentum, and the sheer technologically-buoyed rapidity of escalation. Do hypersonic missiles have a kill switch? Would it make much difference? (We will talk more, and more seriously, about hypersonic missiles below.)

There is a swathe of geopolitical and defence-analysis data to account for here. However, just a few facts are enough to undo the basis of Ni and Jiang's implied panegyrical to US military-industrial power. No one is foolhardy enough to doubt the US' military capabilities. Yet, when this question of the dangers and wisdom of war with China in the SCS arises, then one must not avoid getting down to brass tacks (as the respective brass themselves, I am sure, would agree).

Three points out of many are enough for the purposes of this post.

1) Hypersonic Missiles and Aircraft Carriers

Aircraft carriers are probably already (finally) redundant. Why? Because of hypersonic missiles, which China probably has far more of than can be knocked out by US interdiction in time. Even with onboard supercomputers for mapping and managing a networked battlefield envelope: there is just too much incoming too fast, from too many directions, for carrier survivability.

The CSBA report warned that the new missiles would significantly lower or negate the effectiveness of U.S. air defenses even if the carrier strike group were operating as far as 1,000 nautical miles from the launch site. Anti-ship weapons may be able to speed past interceptors, while their flight paths could exploit seams between current high- and low-altitude U.S. air-and-missile defense systems, it explained (Source: National Defense and CSBA)

Taiwan's coast is about 130 km from China's coast at the narrowest part of the Taiwan Strait.

The topic of countermeasures against hypersonic missiles for aircraft carriers is, understandably, top secret. However, it is far from clear, given the fundamental capabilities of highly precise hypersonic and scramjet weapons, what could possibly work to bring them down. (It's interesting that Australia - a nation with an even more immense coastline than China - has recently invested in hypersonic missile research.)

Try thinking of this heuristically and intuitively in basic information-theoretic terms. Each and every drone, missile, aircraft, naval vessel, fishing trawler, goose, and duck inside a vast battlefield envelope has to be tracked in real time (impossible) by sensor arrays (limited bandwidth, and thus accompanying bottlenecks). Each of these moving things can be modelled as a dynamic information source (can be modelled as a stochastic process) and - in computer science terms - as an object in code (and the military has very fast code indeed). They can be modelled in other ways, but let's settle for information sources and objects represented in computer memory.

Aircraft carriers are bound to have pretty fancy supercomputers on board, and pretty robust links to fancy satellites for mapping battlefield envelopes (battlespaces) and the war theatre. It is a networked battlefield, and a networked command and control scenario. That's all pretty impressive. However, now keep in mind that 1. There is a physical upper limit to the number of moving information source objects that any finite computer and network can track. 2. The more objects, the slower the processing and response, and the longer the kill chain. 3. Some of the objects are going very, very fast indeed. 4. With inevitable drone swarms, there are huge numbers of objects, with a lot of them being decoys just to soak up precious processing time in the information systems

The more very fast objects there are to track, the more danger, and less chance of success.

5. It only takes 1 hypersonic ordinance to destroy a carrier.

There is a very real sense in which carriers are no longer meaningful as military appliances because Joe and Xi can literally take hypersonic pot shots at each other from their offices, and barely have time to make it to the basement. The only countermeasure vulnerability seems to be that hypersonics tend to have to fly in a very straight line, and so if they can be detected early in their flight, may be 'dodged'. If they can be detected, that is. However, their sheer velocity makes the best of them hard to stop even if one can see them coming. They're the definition of the new M.A.D.

One of the two main hypersonic prototypes now under development in the United States is meant to fly at speeds between Mach 15 and Mach 20, or more than 11,400 miles per hour (New York Times)

Military-secrecy fudge factors and possible intentional deterrent-misinformation notwithstanding - that's 5096.256 metres per second, or just under 5.1 kilometres per second. That means they can travel about 55 kilometres in 10 seconds, and thus make it from the Chinese mainland to Taiwan in under 30 seconds. This is all in Earth's atmosphere, and so they're also going to be quite hot by the time they arrive. This would be an infrared and heat-seeking vulnerability if anything could catch them.

(Putting the pieces together - an infrared-plus-radar positioned blocking-exploding drone placed in their path is one possible countermeasure, but it would likely have to be positioned some distance from a target, otherwise the very-fast-mover debris would still be a ship killer.)

330 kilometres in 1 minute.

By comparison, the fastest (publicly known) artillery and tank sabot rounds - which literally liquefy and atomise their human targets - travel at a maximum of about 1700-1800 metres per second (and decelerate in their entire trajectory). Targetting systems are, apparently, very accurate.

2) China's Geographic Size and Coastline - Relative to that of Taiwan

China...has “literally thousands of conventional strike assets capable of traveling thousands of kilometers and impacting precisely,” and that threat might call for new measures to deter China (Source: Defense News)

Historically, military expeditions into mainland China were considered ill advised due to the massive geographical size and huge population of The Middle Kingdom. Although modern aircraft have changed these dynamics somewhat, China's coastline constitutes a major - possibly insurmountable - problem for an opponent like Taiwan or Japan, given contemporary weapons technology.

Both sides having advanced weaponry does not make the problem somehow 'cancel out' precisely due to the nature of said weaponry. In many ways, it comes down to a simple matter of size. The Chinese coastline provides a massive mathematical and geo-strategic advantage to China. Taiwan, like Japan, is a comparatively small and densely populated target.

Consider an analogy to the artillery arrayed by North Korea against Seoul across the Korean DMZ. It is understood that, should it be activated, even if it were subsequently destroyed by South Korean and allied artillery and missiles, it would first achieve total destruction of Seoul. Vast KPA artillery would have already been loosed onto a relatively small target area. The strike time, or 'kill chain' is less than one minute along the DMZ.

A huge proportion of the KPA's approximately 14000 (albeit ageing) artillery appliances are aimed at Seoul, and the range of possible vectors, population density, and speed of response variables all mean that Seould would be largely destroyed in well under an hour (more like a few minutes, in fact). Sure, North Korea would suffer withering retaliation, but by then the unwanted damage is done. It is probably as close to mutually assured destruction by conventional weapons as is possible.

China, Like North Korea, has had more than enough time to prepare for war in the SCS. In the event of hostilities, Taiwan would have to deal with immense incoming ordinance from mobile and fixed battlefield appliances along the entire Chinese coastline (although only Chinese missiles could reach Taiwan outside of 350 km range). It is simple math that one can appraise intuitively and heuristically from one's armchair (although there is plenty of fairly reliable data - even given military security and secrecy - available to those willing to look).

China can fit an enormous number of missiles and rocket launchers along its much longer coastline, and they all have a comparatively small target area (even though Taiwan is by no means small in these terms). Notwithstanding over-sea aircraft, China would not have to defend against nearly the same spread of possible incoming vectors. Although radar clutter could potentially be more of a challenge - sorting out what from Tawian was going where exactly - this is a problem for Taiwan too.

There is an enormous advantage to China in terms of ratio of unleashed energy to target area. Aircraft carriers cannot really redress this imbalance, and, as mentioned already, are increasingly considered not much more than target practice for hypersonic missiles. China can keep Chengdu J-20 stealth fighters over mainland territory, and covered by bristling ground to air defences, and yet still place them in lethal range of large parts of the SCS.

China, he said, has “literally thousands of conventional strike assets capable of traveling thousands of kilometers and impacting precisely,” and that threat might call for new measures to deter China. (Defense News)

3) Drone Swarms and Robots

While it is certainly not impossible that Taiwan and the US could deliver plane loads of Boston Dynamics combat robots to China's doorstep, not only are these very new and untested technology, but they would have to get to the Chinese mainland. Any airborne or waterborne vessel capable of delivering them in meaningful numbers would not be fast or stealthy in most cases. It is a typical military logistics-cum-tactics problem.

Such delivery mechanisms would have to run the gauntlet of not only conventional artillery and airborne defence with enormous room to move around, but the latter would be comprised significantly of drone swarms. All of the evidence is that China has achieved a capability in terms of military drone technology that would be more than enough to make anything resembling beach landings and inland incursions all but impossible for attackers.

An overarching problem with the entire current China-Taiwan hot-conflict narrative is that, once carriers are taken out of the picture (which does not seem unlikely) the only kind of war left is either or both of 1. trading hypersonic, conventional, and bomber launched ICBMs between US and China's mainland - which outcome is highly volatile and globally dangerous, (especially with Russia as landlocked neighbour of China) 2. Large scale multiple Blitzkreig style (Desert Storm) incursions into the Chinese mainland in an effort to knock out enough infrastructure and incur enough shock and awe to stop China's resistance.

The Chinese mainland is nothing - at all - like the Kuwaiti-Iraqi battlefield of Desert Storm. Not geographically. Not topographically. Not in strategic or tactical terms. China's topography is more often like Afghanistan than Iraq. Its infrastructure is so vast that even bringing down key targets in all provinces would soak up so much momentum and resources as to stymie any such approach. Thus, invasion would likely result in, or else be precluded by, the mainland hypersonic exchange outcome.

These are genuine post apocalypse scenarios that would likely set the whole of humanity back - possibly centuries - just based on the likely gross damage to the environment, and corresponding economic chaos.

Another problem. Russia has still got even more battlefield appliances than China. Although Russia is now - at least nominally - an Eastern Orthodox nation, tensions between Russia and NATO in Eastern Europe indicate that Russia would likely not miss a chance to back China militarily on a geostrategic basis, just as Soviet Russia did against Japan in Manchuria in WW2.

Would the Real Memetic Narratives Please Stand Up?

At the end of their article, Ni and Jiang offer a quite bizarre attack on the narratives of the 中国共产党 in relation to the Communist Youth League. There's little doubt that the CCP have their own replicating memetic narratives, but according to Ni and Jiang:

Like Mao, Xi will likely find himself disappointed by China’s youth. This is because the CCP is no longer able to impose its narratives on the youth. China’s youth today are being influenced by many sources, including foreign culture and entertainment.

The CCP will have a hard time competing. That is why it has turned to powerful ethno-nationalist narratives. The risk of relying on such narratives is that younger generations will be more nationalistic than their parents, with effects felt decades in the future. This may in the end constrain CCP’s scope of actions. To illustrate, the effects of the Patriotic Education Campaign that started in the 1990s has wide-reaching and consequential for China’s foreign policy, including on China-Japan relations and cross-strait relations.

This is handwaving, based upon biased assumptions, at best. At worst, it is delusional, and induced by the very same kind of pathological, memetic narratives that led to Donald Trump waving Bibles at fundamentalist megacult bigots, and culminated in the recent invasion of US Congress by a group of seditionists led by a half-naked man wearing horns, fur, and tattoos (who later blamed Trump for deceiving him).

With those kinds of exemplars to go by - there's rather the opposite of evidence that the CCP will have a hard time competing memetically, culturally, or narratologically with what are - lets face it - oceans of insane, Western, memetic idiocy. I have met atheist Chinese non-CCP, and they have little kind to say about either Falun Gong, Buddhist, or Baptist megacults. I can but agree with them.

(I haven't space to share the anecdote of my non-CCP, trained-doctor, Chinese ex-wife's response to a Buddhist Priest in Lijiang, in Yunnan province, in 2016. Suffice to say: she was far from impressed. My Chinese ex girlfriend - a brilliant scholar by all accounts - when faced with Australian Falun Gong practitioners on the street in the Melbourne suburb of Box Hill in 2017, asked derisively in reference to earlier events in China: "Are they going to set themselves on fire"?)

There's a lot of evidence that the effect of much contemporary Western media and popular narrative - especially the kind familiar from the tenure of the ranting and mentally ill delusional fundamentalist Michael Pompeo - would have the very opposite effect on Chinese youth from what Ni and Jiang suppose. Ni and Jiang betray a tendency to offer an overarching, romanticised, panegyric of US political and cultural narratives, many of which narratives embody mainstream ideas that are, frankly, completely idiotic by any standard:

Hard to see how the Communist Youth League can possibly have any better options than that. Ahem. How about:

Had enough yet? No? Here are some more wholesome US mental health narratives, or perhaps I should say 'cautionary tales':

No dear reader. It isn't that you're missing something and that these people are somehow normal. Your intuitions were right: they're clinically sick in the head. Whatever the CCP Youth League are, they're geniuses in comparison to these folks.

Remember that the undeniable insanities captured so deftly in a social media stream by @RightWingWatch are very much mainstream views in both the United States and Australia. And we're not just talking about the unschooled here, dear reader. Oh no. Don't let anyone deceive you that Kevin Rudd's beliefs are very different to those of Scott Morrison. That's nonsense. There is very little difference from an objective perspective. Want to argue about it? It's not a hard argument for an atheist to win. It is just that, regrettably, most people don't effort it. At all. Moreover, I have demonstrated on a number of occasions that these mental afflictions obviously do affect people like Morrison in their ability to execute official duties.

The litany of barely-functioning idiocy exhibited in the decision making (and often total lack thereof) of both Scott Morrison and Michael Pompeo is undeniable, and there for all to see. (Starting with the inappropriate attacks by Morrison on a Chinese artist who provided a more than fair visual critique of Australian war crimes in Afghanistan.)

The kind of mind-numbing political vapidity demonstrated by Morrison and Pompeo is not something that one would see being validated in much-maligned CCP-run China (which fact, to be honest, is enough to make me want to move to China immediately.) To be frank - it is little wonder that the CCP want to keep the kind of abject mainstream lunacy reported by @RightWingWatch away from Chinese youth. So much for Ni and Jiang's biased, and groundless, handwaving bashing of CCP youth brigades on the basis of replicating CCP memes. The CCP kids are, arguably, both alright, and better off. They really are. That being said - I think that @RightWingWatch should probably be channeled to all CCP youth in a dedicated smartphone app, if only for the cheap entertainment and educational value.

Ni and Jiang don't seem to have noticed that hyper-religionised Western culture has long since begun to betray clear signs that the US populous' tendency to be in thrall to megacult narratives can only indicate serious group mental pathology.

Ni and Jiang might be well served to remember, in their obvious enamourment with Western para-religious, liberal-secular elites, that not only is 'liberal' a big (and a polysemous) word, but that both Marx and Mao were from the class of intellectuals and scholars. As a political absurdist, I am no burning Red Marxist-Leninist. However, it is noteworthy that - although there are many contemporary Western liberal commentators that have attacked Marx as some kind of malign layabout: Marx changed the world. No one will ever remember who the vast majority of his recent pop-culture/biz-culture detractors are (if anyone even knows who they are now.)

Assuming that Western memes will infiltrate and overwhelm the minds of educated Chinese youth, who will rush to avidly internalise them, belies, at best, scholarly immaturity. Five minutes of @RightWingWatch would keep CCP youth appropriately immuned to toxic Western faux-secular delusions, and give them a hearty laugh. Sure, on paper, the CCP requires citizens to avoid offending religious sensibilities. At the same time however, the CCP would absolutely not take any fool covered by @RightWingWatch seriously except as a candidate for psychiatric treatment in a Xinjiang style education centre. One of the things most to be admired about the CCP is that they know when not to let delusional megacultists build a church and movement: most of the time.

More (Geopolitical and Geostrategic) Practicalities

China is almost certain to move on redressing Taiwan's Western-abetted secession, and now, because of the ambitions and warmongering of the US MIC, Xi Jinping has far more limited options to prevent damage and potential casualties should a hot war transpire. The best strategy is to let China proceed unopposed: at least five years ago. It's still the best strategy.

China is nothing like the Soviet Union was. As Henry has pointed out: they will not move on to Japan, or The Philippines, or Micronesia-Polynesia. Every serious researcher knows that such ideas are, well, evidently quite stupid.

One doesn't even have to sensibly read between the lines in commentary about the US response to China-Taiwan reunification to see that US agitation has a completely economic-hegemonic basis. I refer readers to these very carefully worded statements by General David Petraeus to Michael Fullilove of the Lowy Institute (16:20 to 17:30):

...Focus on deterring possible conflict with a peer competitor...deterrence is founded on an adversary's assessment of your capabilities, and your will to employ those capabilities...I don't like the cold war analogy because it harkens back to a time when again you had a faceoff between the Warsaw pact and NATO and there was very little economic interaction between the two blocs. There was particularly very little between, say, the US and the Soviet Union. And, in contrast, needless to say, there is enormous economic activity between the US and China...between our allies...

When it comes to China the US clearly cares very little about democracy, or true religious or political freedom. It is no secret that both narratives are increasingly recognised as almost carnival sideshow fare now within the US itself. It is abundantly clear that the US has other agendas regarding Taiwan. Economic and geopolitical hegemony are the objectives. They care about the freedom of their economic and geopolitical hegemony, retaining defacto control of (effectively stealing?) the massive tech-manufacturing village that is Taiwan, and blocking Xi's Belt and Road initiative in Xinjiang.

Auxiliary soft power narratives are plentiful. Many accusations have been levelled at China in relation to IP theft. However, the geo-political effective annexation of Taiwan, in diplomatic, military-industrial, and trade terms by the US and her allies could fairly be regarded as a huge attempted heist of Chinese-Taiwanese technology, manufacturing resources, and property. Moreover, even if China had been using espionage to acquire an edge due to cold-war style pressures placed upon it by the US and allies: they're hardly pioneers. This practice was mastered by the US during their cold war with the Soviets. Not to mention the fact that the US space program was built from the ground up by Nazi Wernher Von Braun.

The correct term to use for what the US State Department and ASPI style 'think' tank apparatus are doing?: 'lying'. The terms 'propagandist misinformation' and 'pseudo-informational memetic narratives' also apply.

This misinformational propagandist approach is blatantly obvious in other recently hard-pumped pro-US memetic narratives. The US' conception of freedom of religion - as propounded ad-nauseum by mentally ill propaganda mouthpiece Michael Pompeo - is, for want of a more serviceable term: fake. It is really about freedom of religious bigotry, and about using a duplicitous conception of religious freedom as a memetic weapon qua soft warfare. See the above links to @RightWingWatch exposés. This approach is subsumed under the US' ongoing hegemonic economic and geopolitical mission. They're behaving as paradigm, entitled Western colonisers, just like the UK has done regarding Hong Kong since the Opium Wars. This isn't really overstatement. It is the absurd reality (hyperreality?)

There's plenty of memetic soft-warfare to go around. Yet, far from desiring to abandon China, most nations - and certainly most nations' business communities - prefer continued engagement. Judging by the reticence of their business community to withdraw from Hong Kong and China, Japan is not clearly fooled. The Japanese hierarchy knows a prosperous China is simply a good trading partner and good for regional security:

The only reason China would ever have hot-war conflict with Japan is if the US bullied Japan into being a staging platform for war (this might include cyber-warfare). Said bullying appears to be well and truly 'in process', but is likely to be ineffectual. It's just more warmongering behaviour from the US and from the contemporary embodiment of what Dwight D. Eisenhower called the military industrial complex.

What is clear to anyone that is willing to do some proper, unbiased research, is that the US should have stayed out of Taiwan's secession. Had the US done so, it is likely that military disparity, and geopolitical and social dynamics, between Taiwan and China would mean that appropriate diplomacy by China would preclude war. We are reaching the point - because of duplicitous US military industrial-motivated brinkmanship - where this has become nearly impossible.

Here's a simple equation to drive the point home:

(Risk of War over Taiwan) - (Prior US interference/agitation) = (Very diminished risk of war)

Correspondingly, while I agree that the following poll from Adam Ni is a worthwhile exercise, it is missing a '0' option, and only mentions Beijing as aggressor. This means that while Ni and colleagues are not suffering the usual MIC-funding related dementia that is typical of organisations like ASPI: they're still far from on point.

This, and the existence of the ASPI and its Zenzian un-researchers, just goes to prove, yet again, that tenure and grants are not a guarantee of originality, nor of intellectual agility. Certainly not of scholarly integrity. A good professional network and the ability to recycle ideas fluidly - if haphazardly and misinformationally - are apparently the new intelligence (in toto). Actual analytical ability, qualitative intuition, and inductive acumen are all a little passe, apparently.

War in the SCS and between China and Taiwan would be bad. In the language of generations Y and millenial: 'Well - Duh'. The US military industrial business complex and its pay-per-no-clue 'brink' tanks, like ASPI, are dangerous, irresponsible, misinformation sources. For all of their bizarre rhetoric about opposing evil and fighting for freedom: they're the ones making the geostrategic risk and problems far worse. That they're able to so easily do so, for profit and hegemonic power, is grounded in the same dismal, Western, memetic vomit that keeps @RightWingWatch busy in the land of the spree and the home of the corporate slave. The narratives of the CCP Youth League are, I would suggest, far from being the real problem.