geikei

While Russia-China trade reached a record US$240 billion (A$360 billion) in 2023, it has slowed so far this year

1. Russia-China trade absolutely exploded in 2021-2023. Some plateauing is expected considering Russian domestic consumption and non military manufacturing arent too conductive for huge trade growth and Chinese EV and renewables craze reduces their needs for foreign energy imputs, much of which came and comes from Russia.
2. China seems to have started using the STANs as middle men in some of their trade with Russia to circumvent some sanctions. Europe jumped to it early on but China basicaly ignored it for the first 2 years of the war and traded with Russia like nothing happened. But over the last 4-5 months the YoY export growth to Kazakhstan, Kyrgizstan, Armenia, Ajerbaijan etc has been >35%. With some months hitting 80-100% for some of these countries. Its fishy as shit and its obvious that a lot of it is trade with Russia

As for the rest of the comment this seems like half baked Pekingology to me. Psychoanalysing Xi's tone and word choice. Finding some lib professors and analysts from Shanghai saying their own shit and doing the "they werent cencored by the ever cencoring no freeze peach 1984 CCP so that indicates a change in attitude state wide". Like, there are probably hundreds of thousands of west loving libs both in the CPC and in chinese univercities and commentators, there are thousands of talks, forums and articles every week across China and China always had reasonable tolerance for these people saying their minds no matter the actual shifts and trends in domestic and foreign policy. We all know these things. Gathering 5, 10 or even 50 quotes from them to make any point isnt too hard. Im 100% sure they could have written the same article last year, and the year before. Hell im sure someone else did.

Weird for someone as knowledgable as you to continue posting low quality stuff like this along with "ohhhh its so over" commentary. On your 4th account in 5 months no less

The USSR coming closer to nuking China than arguably any other country has since WW2 didnt help

Also

why post colonial bourgeois nationalism flared up in border struggles with Vietnam and China, and now regrettably we have a china that continues many of these trends.

China has diplomaticaly resolved the large majority of the border and maritime disputes it found itself in with the establishment of the PRC due to the massive changes from decolonial movements in the region, constantly changing and uncertain borders for China in the previous period, lack of border treaties with its neighbors before 1949. Often by surrendering the majority of the disputed ereas to the neighbouring country. Since its inception the PRC resolved border disputes with Vietnam, Myanmar, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, North Korea, Pakistan, Tajikistan, and Russia without maximalist demands, without domination through coercion and without lasting negative impact on their relations (from that aspect at least).

The question usualy isnt "why don't the vietnamese like the chinese very much?" but "why do the vietnamese like the US that much more". Negative public opinion towards China is understandable. Negative public opinion towards China along with very positive public opinion towards the US much less so

I dont read chinese but google translate is surprisingly competent nowadays so the article is perfectly understandable.

Its an interesting and coherent perspective but im not gonna lie, you have basicaly repeated or paraphrased almost every single part of this article multiple times in your comments in the last few months. So if i thought that these general opinions and analysis you hold cover me and are convincing enough to substansiate these conclusions you throw around over this particular round of specific Chinese financial policies i wouldnt have asked what i asked in my previous comment. Either way i think i have been pretty specific in my comments in the last few days on the particular motivations and context of these measures and how at the end of the day they are much less concerned with foreign capital and investments and much more so reactive countermeasures to a delicate economic balance of domestic financial investment, consumption and prices during a period of dangerous deleveraging and restructuring that would have happened no matter US posture and strategies.

The connection of the article to all that boils down to: "Does the obvious 50 year constant that Wall street and western finance wants China to open up its capital markets and finance (a lot) more mean that China can never ever use even mild QE or take any measures that have that as a secondary superficial effect without it being "China falling into the trap and strategy of the US and its over" ? Can it never just be the arguably correct temporary tool in the hand of the Central bank and chinese regulators given a partciular domestic situation? Even if it helps China better navigate a period and challenge the US would wish it wouldnt

Could you link me of any commentary on the recent QE and chinese moves by said chinese Marxist academia or anyone that shares your influences and views that even remotely reaches a conclusion of "this is China opening up its capital market to invite foreign investors to save its economy" .Official CN gov or central bank statements of anything related to finance and any market move or intervention they make has literally been the exact same language and buzzwords wise for the last 30 years. It means less than nothing on its own and has basicaly no correlation to the actual goals, motivatiions, trends and dynamics in Chinese politics, regulations and finance

China is opening up its capital market to invite foreign investors to save its economy

You are getting a bit too comfortable with your own doomerism and you end up commenting straight up anti-china clickbait YT video thumbnails.

Over the most meek QE of all time thats just designed to make financial actors and the upper quintile a bit more comfortable temporarily and numberinos to further up by like +0.5% YoY in 2024 Q3 and 2025 Q1 and Q2 . In order absorb some of the negative side effects of the economic restructuring and deleveraging.

If they didnt do nothing and GDP growth came at like 4.2% instead of 5% and consumption growth was meek for a couple of years (because consumption in China is still heavily affected by the sentiment and economic activity of the property owning and market investing upper ~15%, and that will a while to change) you would also doom. Idk you are Michael Pettis pilled and you want the CPC to just throw people money in direct stimulus which will have horrible multipliers that will largely go directly into savings in the current enviromernt

You ignored 95% of my comment. I would like you to re-read it instead of repackaging your other, usualy credible, arguments about the need for Chinese economic and trade reoriantation to try and support an immaginary scenario. China may be in danger for all shorts of things, but not from what you are saying. I listed like 8 seperate angles on why the US trying to strangle and significantly disrupt Chinese sea trade roots following a Chinese action against Taiwan is logisticaly nearly impossible, extremely porous, self defeating and apocalyptic to pretty much everyone before it is for China and its plausible stretegic advantages cant come remoetly quickly enough to matter in timescale of a conflict in SCS. And that was on the asumption that the US would attempt an actual cut off and blockade of a sea route. If your hypothetical also has that the US will be achieving that chocking and rerouting of global maritime trade while actively engaged militarily with China in the pacific theater and SCS with like 2 available US subs scouring an erea larger than Europe and doing indiscriminate terrorism (because monitoring and intelligence isnt actualy there) to 1 or 2 out of 500 passing containers per day then this adds more layers of implausibility that drops it bellow r/worldnews tier.

It cant happen, it wont happen and no one on the military or civilian command of either country considers it seriously

Since Russia's new icbm tests seem to be a bit hit and miss lately and with China's test recently its important to note that while the general public in the west seem to be under the impression that Russia’s ICBMs are the faulty and unreliable ones, it is the US that actualy fields almost exclusively positively ancient barely working missiles .

The Minuteman III is by far the world's oldest ICBM still in active use as part of a nation's nuclear triad. It was originally deployed in 1970 and only had a planned service life of 10 years. It's only still operational over 50 years later because of life extension programmes but at some point, a thing is so old that there's no life left to extend. The electronic components of that era basically don't exist anymore. So you'd not just be re-engineering the missile's design, you'd be re-enginering and remaking components from the very birth of the chip industry. It's an impossible task. Which basically means as these things break down there's no fixing them.

The former STRATCOM Chief had this to say about the situation:

“Let me be very clear: You cannot life-extend the Minuteman III [any longer],” he said of the 400 ICBMs that sit in underground silos across five states in the upper Midwest. “We can’t do it at all. ... That thing is so old that, in some cases, the drawings don’t exist anymore [to guide upgrades],” Richard said in a Zoom conference sponsored by the Defense Writers Group. Where the drawings do exist, “they’re like six generations behind the industry standard,” he said, adding that there are also no technicians who fully understand them. “They’re not alive anymore.”

People joke about questionable operational readiness of Russian ICBMs but in reality, Russia has significantly more modern ICBMs in service than the US and im not even gonna mention China's buildup in quantity and quality. It's the US that should be worried about the operational readiness of its ICBMs. This is especially prominent after the highly publicising failure of 2 of the US' Minuteman III tests last November. Sure, two missile tests worked in June (one barely) but given the recency of the previous failure, another failure would have spelled absolute disaster for the US' nuclear credibility so I'm sure extra care and attention to detail was taken in ensuring that failure was not even a possibility. Problem is its douptfull that the US even has the domestic capability to replace the land portion of its nuclear triad completely without it costing like 2 trillion dollars and taking 20 years. Sure the subs will always be there and they work quite well but its interesting to see what the US will done with its land based nukes. I highly doubt either the Democrats nor the Republicans will want to be seen as the party that says "our nukes dont work and we need 1 quintillion dollars to replace them " or just completely drop one leg of the US' nuclear triad, however unnecessary that leg may be.

One thing’s for certain and its quite funny, and that is if the US does not find significantly more money for its military, it will have to cut back on many aspects of its military it has up until this point taken for granted. Already, we are seeing budget constraints affecting every branch of the military in very significant ways. With the USAF being forced to rethink what it wants with quite literally one of its most important next-generation projects due to budget constraints. The state of the USAF tanker fleet is also less than optimal with them significantly cutting back on the number of tankers they planned on ordering this decade by half. Instead, the USAF wants to pursue a gold-plated stealth tanker solution called NGAS to enter service in the 2030s at the same time as all of their other commitments. God knows where they’re going to get the money for this.

The USN is also being forced to cut back on its own next-generation projects that are not limited to just F/A-XX as DDG(X) has also been running into issues. This is all in addition to F-35C procurement that is far less expedited than it should be. There is no money to expand shipyards and increase production in any significant way and submarine production is progressing at a glacial pace, with the US being unable to produce SSNs and SSBNs at the rate it needs to let alone produce surplus SSNs for Australia.

The US Army has also been forced to consistently delay replacements for aging platforms like the Bradley, Abrams, Apache, Chinook and so on. But, given that I highly doubt the US is going to be seeing any large land war with a major power any time in the near future, the US Army can get away with it much more than the other branches can.

This problem is exacerbated by the fact there is a complete disconnect between what the actual state of the USN is and what the general public think the state of the USN is.

The general public are convinced the USN is still by far the most powerful navy in the world with no one even able to compete and so they are not really cognisant of the very real issues facing the USN today. If the public don't really know about these issues then they're not going to vote for politicians who know or care about these issues which exacerbates things even more.

The public will hear the USN has 11 aircraft carriers and assume the USN can send all 11 out to pummel whatever poor country is on the other end of the barrel when in reality the USN doesn't even have 11 carrier air wings due to budgetary conditions and is currently undergoing a severe carrier shortage and quite literally had to divert an entire carrier strike group whose original mission was to perform FONOPs in the South China Sea over to the Red Sea to deal with the Houthis last year because there was literally nothing else available to send. That's how bad things have gotten.

The public has no idea about how there will be a severe cruiser shortage in the coming years once the Ticonderoga-class is forced to retire without any replacement due to CG(X) falling flat on its face years ago. The USN's stop-gap "replacement" for these cruisers is the Flight III Arleigh Burke-class destroyer but even then it's less capable in terms of VLS complement. The Arleigh Burke-class destroyer is at the very limit of its original design and yet the USN has no replacement for it yet with DDG(X) delayed as it is.

Meanwhile, the PLAN's actual capabilities are increasing at a blistering rate, with destroyers like the Type 052D being very capable in their own right and cruisers like the Type 055 having practically no proper equal in the USN's inventory aside from their own cruisers that are about to be retired. And yet the public perception of the PLAN is simply a big navy that comprises of hundreds upon hundreds of useless and tiny patrol vessels with no big capital ships equivalent to those in the USN's inventory. Meanwhile the Chinese naval industry is nowhere close to sprinting. If anything, it’s moving at a rather conservative pace. They’re producing single carriers and single-digit submarines out of yards which could churn out many times that, but then again the PLAN loves its steady iterative cycles. After they’ve settled on a mature design, then you’ll start seeing mass production the way they printed frigates and destroyers. But they are in no hurry to produce large numbers of subpar vessels. It’s much more of a jog than a sprint.

This massive overestimation of American capabilities and a serious underestimation of Chinese capabilities is what is worsening the issue so badly in the US. The public is convinced the USN alone could steamroll the entirety of China's military in an engagement over Taiwan when in actuality the combined efforts of the USN + USMC + USAF would arguably barely even be able to hold the Chinese off at this rate. If there is no sense of concern or urgency in the public's eyes, there will never be a sense of concern or urgency in Congress which is why for the past few decades the USN has been raising alarm bell after alarm bell only for Congress to basically completely dismiss them.

If this does not change soon, by the 2030s you are likely going to see a PLAN that overmatches the USN in both capability, quantity and tonnage. If that happens, it'll be too late for a course correction. The US will be forced to relinquish the Western Pacific to China since they will simply lack the capability to challenge them. Or provoke a Chinese invasion of Taiwan in order to start a nuclear war

This harkens very closely back to the attitude and position of the RN with respect to the USN back during the pre-WW2 era. The RN still held the advantage in most areas, tonnage especially, but the USN was catching up fast. Now, the USN is where the RN was and the PLAN is where the USN was

i replied to the wrong comment lol, reposted it above

submarines can disrupt shipping lanes vital for Chinese exports. Blowing up a few container ships and the global trade gets stunted to a halt. This will significantly damage both the US and China’s economies. The US has food and fuel, China needs to import food and fuel (and a lot of them came from America too), so the question is: who can survive longer?

Sorry but this a reddit tier analysis.

To begin with such an attempt by the US would come after some PRC blockade or kinetic action on Taiwan and as a result even if we assume what you say is credible as an anti-China strategy the answer to the question of "who can survive longer?" is by and far "not Taiwan". If the US doesnt attempt to actively break a Chinese blockade in a scale that matters or engage invading Chinese forces, so actualy engage in war in that theater, then Taiwan will capitulate in weeks and then its over. US cant get it back and them continuing to destroy the most important shipping lanes in the world after China already takes Taiwan is silly. For the effects of a blockade to even be felt by China, Taiwan would have to hold for over a year due to the size of China's stockpiles, which in and of itself is a highly questionable assumption given that unlike Ukraine, Taiwan is extremely reliant on trade for basically everything from food to fuel. If Taiwan falls in a few months which is a good case scenario for them, the blockade will likely not force China to relinquish control. If Taiwan doesn't fall in a few months, it won't be because of the blockade. A blockade cant be done with some subs striking rando ships. Its a completely lopsided resource drain for little to no immediate battlefield benefit which is what Taiwan needs. If Taiwan is successfully cut off from world trade, they have virtually no chance of lasting for very long and given deteriorating domestic conditions, they could probably be convinced to capitulate.

Lets talk self sufficency tho because you overstate chinese food and fuel dependance.

China produces 4.3m bpd, imports 11.4m bpd crude but exports 1.1m bpd refined. They can get abt 2-3m bpd from Russia. 400k bpd from Myanmar & Kazakhstan thru pipeline. Getting 6.5m bpd during an emergency is easily do-able.

Stopping half the flights, shipping & gas cars can cut abt 5-6m bpd of usage and in general gasoline/diesel usage can be reduced to minimal levels in such situation since NEVs are everywhere and they will be even more so everywhere with each coming year. Petrochem usage can be reduced through higher utilization in coal-to-chem plants + more imports over land. Food, Crude & refined products can be transported in over land through trains & trucks. North Sea Routes add additional shipping capacity - US would bring Russia into conflict if Russian tankers are targeted in their own water. China also has the option to increase the capacity from Russia but chose to not do it currently. If China bellived this was a problem they would have approved power of the Siberia 2 and other pipelines.

There is basically no way you can actually choke off Chinese economy through sea blockades of energy imports once its this far along in electrification of is transportation sector. And that's assuming you can choke off its energy routes to Middle East, which is dubious since any such effort would actually destroy Japan & SK + most of southeast Asia, who do not have the option of turning to EVs or coal chemical plants or importing via pipeline/shipping from Russia & Central Asia. Any real blockade would blockade ASEAN countries as well as Eastern Asian ones from the necessary energy imputs to have their economies functioning. You will be facing off against a southeast Asia who would also be eager to break off any blockade and work with china to get around it in any way possible in order to not collapse economicaly before even China feels the heat. You basicaly surrender the entire region to China and even make sure Japan and SK cant and dont join you in any action

There is also the feasibility of such blockade in the first place. Striking a couple of ingoing and outgoing comersial ships to China wont do shit to make the roots stop, which in the first place would collapse the economies of every signle country in the erea before china even feels it. To actually be effective you would have to manage an actual blockade of Malacca and likely more than just that since there are alternative, albeit slightly longer, routes due to the fact Indonesia is an archipelago. There exists the Sunda Strait just to the south next to Java and the Lombok Strait further east. If the Strait of Malacca is blockaded, it would be trivial for ships to divert towards the Sunda Strait or the Lombok Strait and completely circumvent the American blockade so for an effective blockade, the USN would have to blockade all three straits. That's a lot of resources the USN needs to divert away from the actual battle happening in the Pacific towards a blockade that won't have much of an immediate impact on the actual battle happening.

The USN will have to question if implementing three blockades in Southeast Asia is an effective use of their very limited resources against an opponent which will have a massive local superiority in forces.. The US needs as many assets in the fight to even stand a chance as is, there is little point crippling the world economy even more and putting South Korea and Japan on ticking time bombs by blockading three straits in and around Indonesia.

You also cant trivialize the amount of resources required to screen tens of thousands of ships carrying trillions worth of trade. Not as in "please report your manifest so we can carry out mutually beneficial peacetime commerce" but "physically verify every ship is carrying what it says and going where it says because they have a huge profit motive to lie." And that's not even counting all the ships who actually do dock in SEA, but whose cargos go to China by rail. The ships have no control over what happens to their cargos after they offload. The other option is what . Striking ships that may or may not be going to any random port or country in the erea. A logistical impossibility. Never mind that the US cant actualy track most container ships either in port or out in the sea if they dont want to be tracked. Let alone know which are china bound. Ship-tracking satellites do not exist. This is a fantasy. Its difficult it is to keep track of even just a ship in the vast open ocean, let alone thousands of them.

The US also just cant sink the ships when they are close to dock in China or leave china. The USN will be lucky to even have a few ships survive within stand-off ranges from the Chinese coastline. South China Se is pretty much a complete no-go for the USN considering the shallow waters reduces the effectiveness of submarine stealth, and the thousands of air and see sensors China has littered the erea with. The entire sea is well within range of China's absolutely gargantuan stockpile of AShMs and is close enough to Chinese air bases that the PLARF will have a massive numerical superiority to any potential USAF/USN aerial assets in the region. I highly doubt the USN will have any SSNs to spare for patrols of the straits around Indonesia to begin with when they will be desperately needed in the Pacific. The USN is already dealing with a serious hull shortage even during peacetime. I don't understand how people can expect the USN to have multiple SSNs available for something like a blockade when they'll need every little bit of help they can get in the Pacific. A very limited number of American SSNs who will already be tasked with the monumental job of surviving China's massive and extensive ASW network of ships, helicopters, submarines, aircraft and land-based sensors whilst at the same time finding, targeting and engaging Chinese warships will now also be tasked with implementing a blockade and attacking any and all vessels in the region, exhausting their already limited torpedo and Tomahawk supplies. This does not seem like a very useful way to utilise the only USN assets that have a higher degree of survivability within 1,000 km of Chinese shores given that these assets will likely have an actual amphibious invasion that they will need to stop.

Cause again sea trade in the erea wont stop just because the US randomly strikes 2,5 or even 20 containers they can fet their sights on out of the 1000 per day heading from and to China, never mind that it would be a completely self defeating endeavor in the first place.