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China's Peaceful Rise


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6 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

There's a discussion on drone warfare ongoing elsewhere.  One useful possibility for drone swarms is solving the at-sea targeting problem against carrier and other task forces.  Picture missiles delivering several hundred drones into a 1,000 mile uncertainty area (or whatever), and these commence the hunt for the carrier and escorts.  Drones that find ships go for the sensors and radars, systematically knocking out all defenses.  For the carrier itself, once the defenses are down, the drones simply swarm nearby to guide the hypersonics in for the kill, and judging from the Armenian war results, there won't be anything to be done about it.  Before that, one assumes the carrier would be given the chance to strike its colors such that if a massacre occurs, its on the captain of the carrier.

Here is a man that doesn't realise the size of the sea.

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Just now, RETAC21 said:

Neither, it's China that is the aggressor, the US has no territorial ambitions, but the PRC has put a number of lines in the sands regarding Taiwan and the SCS. Despite the advances they have made in some military items, the PRC cannot militarily contest either if the US is involved.

The global economy is not going to fold without Chinese products, even though it may hit some hard times until they are replaced, particularly for resource exporting countries.

You indicated that not only could the USN tap Chinese sea trade, (itself a massively alarming thing to anyone in Beijing), but that they might attack targets in China.  I agree that global trade will not collapse if Chinese trade were removed, but that's not what I was talking about.   Western logistics are too vulnerable to risk attacking targets in China or Russia.  I think as a planning assumption, that would be off the table.

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Just now, glenn239 said:

You indicated that not only could the USN tap Chinese sea trade, (itself a massively alarming thing to anyone in Beijing), but that they might attack targets in China.  I agree that global trade will not collapse if Chinese trade were removed, but that's not what I was talking about.   Western logistics are too vulnerable to risk attacking targets in China or Russia.  I think as a planning assumption, that would be off the table.

They are? how? in the below graphic, most of the big green blob is the Chinese trade, that goes away and leaves Japan, Korea, etc,  all of which are capable of protecting their own trade, assuming they are combatants. For all ther other blobs, the Chinese can do nothing about. 

What does Russia have to do with anything?

trade routes

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I think if China hit targets in the US, specifically Guam, or US bases in allied countries, like Japan or Korea, then at least limited PRC mainland targets would be on the table at that point. I also think all of their artificial islands qualify as non sovereign territory by international law and US policy, and I expect they would be treated as tactical targets akin to aircraft carriers in a conflict.

I can't think of a situation where the US would actively start engaging unarmed PRC merchant traffic. If the US desired to blockade the PRC, the mere statement that it was blockading would probably suffice without actually sinking things.

Russia is outside the scope of this discussion.

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14 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

Here is a man that doesn't realize the size of the sea.

Not talking about the size of the Pacific Ocean.  We're talking about aircraft carriers and missile cruisers operating in a war theatre where there are plenty of enemy scouting platforms sniffing about for radar and radio communications.  Once the location of the carrier is nailed down to some doctrinally pre-determined box, then they'll send in the drones to knock down the defenses, and we know from Armenia what happens when big hulking air defense systems go up against large numbers of drones.

Once the drones can be nearby the ships without air systems taking them out, they become the homing beacons for the hypersonic missile shots.  The missile can tell where the carrier is because as it approaches there 50 drones flying around the carrier telling it where the carrier is.  At that point, one would hope that the carrier captain might get the chance to strike their colors and abandon ship.

Edited by glenn239
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1 minute ago, glenn239 said:

Not talking about the size of the Pacific Ocean.  We're talking about aircraft carriers and missile cruisers operating in a war theatre where there are plenty of enemy scouting platforms sniffing about for radar and radio communications.  Once the location of the carrier is nailed down to some doctrinally pre-determined box, then they'll send in the drones to knock down the defenses, and we know from Armenia what happens when big hulking air defense systems go up against large numbers of drones.

What is a doctrinally pre-determined box? you think ships only move in specific boxes of water and do not deviate from there at all? Do you know what size the ocean reconnaissance drones are?

The MQ-4C

الصورة

The BKZ-005

Trung Quốc đưa UAV trinh sát BZK-005 ra đảo Phú Lâm - Báo Người Đưa Tin

These are the most basic unarmed drones, you are not going to swarm anything with them. if you are thinking of Harop lookalikes, then think again because they don't have the range, much less the survivability vs naval systems.

 

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There is a trade off in drone size/detectability and range/sensor radius. A Harop is hardly going to be useful for scouting; a Reaper size drone is simple to engage with a moderately effective air defense system, especially over featureless terrain. It seems like the best platform for the Chinese would be something along the size and endurance of the X47B with similar low RCS features. But if we're talking about detecting ship's emissions, that seems like a job best left to satellites and indeed the PRC has at least several constellations dedicated to that purpose.

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2 hours ago, RETAC21 said:

What is a doctrinally pre-determined box? you think ships only move in specific boxes of water and do not deviate from there at all? Do you know what size the ocean reconnaissance drones are?

A target box is not going to be a fixed point in the ocean, but rather a zone of a certain size where the shore based attack complex has some pre-determined probability for detecting the carrier to a weapons grade track.  These parameters will no doubt be set by AI schooled in millions of simulated engagements at all ranges an in all conceivable engagement profiles.   Picture it like a sniper's scope - they're trying to narrow the search for the carrier to a smaller and smaller area, and at some point, the area of uncertainty is so small the carrier - not yet tracked directly -  is already inside the no escape zone. 

The carrier can be anywhere to start with, but anything the carrier does helps the complex narrow down where it might be.  Once the zone of uncertainty where the carrier must be becomes small enough, then presumably they flood this area with resources, find the carrier, then engage it.  The carrier can only move at 35kt tops, so its practically standing still at the tempo of engagement we are talking about.

Drones of the size you picture can be found and shot down either by the carrier's escorts, carrier aircraft, or land based elements, sure.  But it is a bit like the flaming datum from WW2 in that this type of cat and mouse game helps locate the general position of the carrier.  (The drones that are not near a carrier all search their ocean area without incident and return to base, while the one that is near a carrier radios its being locked onto by an Aegis radar then goes silent.  Guess which drone was closest to the Aegis cruiser?)

 

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These are the most basic unarmed drones, you are not going to swarm anything with them. if you are thinking of Harop lookalikes, then think again because they don't have the range, much less the survivability vs naval systems.

That's true....unless the drone swarm is the warhead aboard a ballistic missile.  In which case the ballistic missile gets the drone swarm to the battle zone and then the swarm does its thing.  

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2 hours ago, RETAC21 said:

They are? how? in the below graphic, most of the big green blob is the Chinese trade, that goes away and leaves Japan, Korea, etc,  all of which are capable of protecting their own trade, assuming they are combatants. For all there other blobs, the Chinese can do nothing about. 

 

We import containers from overseas via Vancouver, overland to Ontario.  The system is already heavily strained.  Ships are lined up off port waiting for their turn to unload.  This can be for a week or more.  The logistics are already sketchy and its peacetime.  I've got a container - not on rail yet - that is already over 2 weeks overdue from its ETA at embarkation in Shanghai.   And it ain't here yet - it's crossing over hundreds of rail bridges, all of which have been mapped and assessed by the enemy.

We're not talking shipping on the oceans of the world.  We're talking fixed port and rail infastructure at a few key points, and we're in serious trouble.  

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I realise you are just dropping buzz words without thinking what they mean, which is why you don't realise how absurd your plan is.

Ler's see, you AI developped (why??) area of uncertainty could be right or wrong, because (surprise, surprise) your oppnent may not behave like your wargames like him to do (remember Midway?), but going further, a sniper has an observer precisely because his field of view is so narrow. In this case, that would be satellites, MPA or big drones, of which the first are hard to reach but predictable and the second are not discrete enough to detect and tract a carrier group undetected.

So you think shooting them down provides a flaming datum? well, think again, since give a typical combat radius for a F-18E of 417 nm, that gives you an area of 723446 sq miles to search, good luck with that...

Going now into the specifics of this wunderwaffe, you pack your drones into a missile warhead, how many? 1, 3, 10? not many more are going to fit, and the shoot it into your AI determined target box, and up, and uo goes the missile and down, down comes at 16.000 miles per hour, then it has to slow A LOT! (there goes the space for the drones as it's occupied by parachutes..) and deploy it's short range killer drones. Given the area mentioned above and the 1000 sq miles you intend to cover they have a 0.13% chance of coming across the carrier groups, and then they have to get past this:

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/...

Which is going to have a field day against slow drones...

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5 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

We import containers from overseas via Vancouver, overland to Ontario.  The system is already heavily strained.  Ships are lined up off port waiting for their turn to unload.  This can be for a week or more.  The logistics are already sketchy and its peacetime.  I've got a container - not on rail yet - that is already over 2 weeks overdue from its ETA at embarkation in Shanghai.   And it ain't here yet - it's crossing over hundreds of rail bridges, all of which have been mapped and assessed by the enemy.

We're not talking shipping on the oceans of the world.  We're talking fixed port and rail infastructure at a few key points, and we're in serious trouble.  

And how exactly are this bridges going to be destroyed in such a way that the system collapses? and who is going to do it and with what? just go back to the effort put into isolating the Normandy battlefield and you will notice that it's neither easy nor doable with a few attacks. Not to speak about revolutionary methods like using... trucks! to move cargo.

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Hypothetically the Chinese could send cruise missiles to Long Beach and trash the container terminals there in fairly catastrophic way. But it would likely be a one way trip for whichever platform got that job and such a move surely takes the gloves off as far as bombing the mainland is concerned. The US probably has ~150 cruise missiles sitting within range of the Chinese coast at any given moment. That would be a pretty Pearl Harbor-ish moment for Dalian. It seems unlikely that either side would choose to prosecute a conflict that way, and more unlikely that the PRC would end up on top when it lacks strategic bombers and a significant nuclear submarine force. Despite China's rather amazing military growth in both numbers and technical ability, they still have some rather large capability gaps.

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23 hours ago, RETAC21 said:

I realise you are just dropping buzz words without thinking what they mean, which is why you don't realise how absurd your plan is.

Right, the Pentagon is openly talking about reducing its carrier fleet, or even getting ride of it, because of how wonderful the prospects of carriers in a future war against a pier rival.  

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Ler's see, you AI developed (why??) area of uncertainty could be right or wrong, because (surprise, surprise) your opponent may not behave like your wargames like him to do (remember Midway?), but going further, a sniper has an observer precisely because his field of view is so narrow. In this case, that would be satellites, MPA or big drones, of which the first are hard to reach but predictable and the second are not discrete enough to detect and tract a carrier group undetected.

I'd assumed that enemy satellites would be taken out before a carrier would enter the hot zone or else it wouldn't enter the hot zone.

At Midway, the Americans behaved exactly like Nagumo's sparring opponent (Red Team) in the pre-battle wargame, so what Nimitz did was one of the things the IJN actually expected he might.  This was because they'd gamed it.  Not a million times like AI can, but once or twice.   When AI played Go it even apparently evolved strategies that had never been seen before.  In fact, it seems in pretty much all games, AI is now better than humans.  Chess.  Jeapardy.  Go.  Everything.  Why would the game of hunting carriers be any different?

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So you think shooting them down provides a flaming datum? well, think again, since give a typical combat radius for a F-18E of 417 nm, that gives you an area of 723446 sq miles to search, good luck with that.

For a guy that literally just told me that I don't understand the size of the Pacific Ocean, it's 60 million square miles. If the location of the carrier is drilled down to 725,000 square miles as per your number, then the flaming data point has eliminated 99% of the Pacific Ocean as the location of the carrier, leaving a 1% zone of 725,000 square miles. 

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Going now into the specifics of this wunderwaffe, you pack your drones into a missile warhead, how many? 1, 3, 10? not many more are going to fit, and the shoot it into your AI determined target box, and up, and uo goes the missile and down, down comes at 16.000 miles per hour, then it has to slow A LOT! (there goes the space for the drones as it's occupied by parachutes..) and deploy it's short range killer drones. Given the area mentioned above and the 1000 sq miles you intend to cover they have a 0.13% chance of coming across the carrier groups, 

So, first thing to note is that I'm glad that we've figured out that it's probably possible to deploy a shorter range drone  by putting it on a long range delivery missile.  No need to fetch the obvious.

The second point would be that 725,000 square miles seems still too big to deploy a drone swarm.  I'm guessing the zone of uncertainty has to be knocked down by an order of magnitude, to something more like 70,000 square miles.  So, the next step isn't a drone swarm, its the deployment of recce assets into the 725,000 square mile zone to whittle it down.  

The third - number of drones per missile depends on the weight and volume of the drones and whatever is required to slow them down to flight speed.  Something between 10-30 might be a guess?

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and then they have to get past this:  Which is going to have a field day against slow drones...

Anyways, as a general assumption, I was thinking that different drones might operate at different speeds.  Some of them might wander around searching and be slow.  Others might exploit the speed of the delivery system to move a bit faster than what you might be supposing.

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7 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

Lots of nonsense

Typically, you didn't get the point and are handwaving inconvenient facts, setting up staw men or making facts up, but I don't have Rich's patience.

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On 11/17/2020 at 2:27 PM, RETAC21 said:

And how exactly are this bridges going to be destroyed in such a way that the system collapses? and who is going to do it and with what? just go back to the effort put into isolating the Normandy battlefield and you will notice that it's neither easy nor doable with a few attacks. Not to speak about revolutionary methods like using... trucks! to move cargo.

You were talking some crazy shit about bombing inside China, because somebody called somebody's wife fat in the Spratleys or something.   At the start of Tom Cruise's War of the Worlds, Tom is the best crane jockey at the port.  Watch what he's doing in the movie.  You see how much shit he's moving with that really delicate, really vulnerable crane?  You think he can do that after a drone swarm kills him and knocks that and every other crane in the port down?  Maybe not?  Then what are you talking about, that the Chinese are too stupid not to know what to attack so that the system collapses?

You mention Normandy.  The average consumption for a US servicemen in the European theatre was about 60 lbs per man per day.  North America won't be that intense, but it might be 20lbs.  370 million people at 20lbs per day is 3.7 million tons of supply per day.  The Normandy beachheads were doing well at 20,000 tons per day, or 1/185th the requirement.  Toronto - 3 million people - might have all in maybe 20 days of food on the shelf.  That's it.  After 20 days, we start to starve.  Do you understand what happens if 3 million people all run out of food at once?

If half the 3.7 million tons is imported or exported, and every container has 12 tons in it, then that's about 150,000 containers that need to be offloaded or onloaded to ships every day.  And if they are not, then we collapse.   That's all there is to it.  If you want to start talking about bombing China, at least try to understand what I see as the potential implications of what could happen if it escalates.

Re - rail bridges.  The easiest way to take down a rail bridge would be when it has a freight train on it.  But what are the odds that anyone could hack the train schedules and know when that would be, eh?

Re - Trucks.  The easiest way to interdict the trucking fleet might be to take out the refineries to choke the gas supply.

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30 minutes ago, RETAC21 said:

Typically, you didn't get the point and are handwaving inconvenient facts, setting up staw men or making facts up, but I don't have Rich's patience.

My favorite part was when you're all in my face about not knowing how big the Pacific Ocean is, and then you type 725,000 square miles as if you had no clue the Pacific Ocean is 60,000,000 square miles or that even Nagumo's search plan at Midway intended to cover 140,000 square miles.  (Nimitz's I think was more like 500,000+ square miles with the PBY's).  Nimitz can cover 500,000 or 600,000 square miles with 1941 seaplanes but the Chinese can't cover 750,000 square miles with stealth aircraft? 

Drilling down from 60,000,000 square miles to 725,000 square miles is like knowing a piece is in 1 square and not the other 63 squares of the chess board.  

Edited by glenn239
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1 minute ago, glenn239 said:

My favorite part was when you're all in my face about not knowing how big the Pacific Ocean is, and then you type 725,000 square miles as if you had no clue the Pacific Ocean is 60,000,000 square miles or that even Nagumo's search plan at Midway intended to cover 140,000 square miles.  (Nimitz's I think was more like 500,000+ square miles with the PBY's).  Drilling down from 60,000,000 square miles to 725,000 square miles is like knowing a piece is in 1 square and not the other 63 squares of the chess board.  

How the size of the Pacific is relevant at all? much less what Nagumo and Nimitz did in 1942 (and even that shows you struggle with the numbers...)? It's not that I don't "know", it's that it's irrelevant. Which is the same as the strawmen on your other posts, irrelevant, all building up a non-sensical argument in which you seem to specialise.

I sudder to think you actually have a day job, given your logical abilities...

 

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A fixed set of targets between the United States and China may have already been declared off limits by mutual agreement to tamp down the not inconsequential risk of triggering nukes.

If not, perhaps they should be.

 

 

 

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On 11/17/2020 at 10:56 AM, RETAC21 said:

Neither, it's China that is the aggressor, the US has no territorial ambitions, but the PRC has put a number of lines in the sands regarding Taiwan and the SCS.

After the wildly successful 2012 nationalization of the Senkakus by Japan, the Chinese would have been stupid not to, frankly.

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19 hours ago, Nobu said:

A fixed set of targets between the United States and China may have already been declared off limits by mutual agreement to tamp down the not inconsequential risk of triggering nukes.

If not, perhaps they should be.

There's no simmetry between the capabilities of the US and the PRC. One arm of the US triad (the missile subnmarines) is impervious to any Chinese weapon, while the same cannot be said for the few Chinese SSBN (based as they are in the shallow South China Sea...). The Chinese don't have an equivalent to the B-2 (yet...), so any agreement would be voided by the simple fact that the US can hit any point of China, multiple times if needed and the Chinese cannot do the same with the US.

Re the point on the dashed lines, well, the Chinese kicked this off in 1947, even if they were of another flavor...

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20 hours ago, Nobu said:

A fixed set of targets between the United States and China may have already been declared off limits by mutual agreement to tamp down the not inconsequential risk of triggering nukes.

There will be no such agreement and no such rules.   As RETAC21 says, the US currently has the preponderance of strategic systems now, but this will not be the case in future years.  

 

 

 

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China-Australia relations: PM Scott Morrison responds to Beijing’s list of 14 grievances

  • Beijing complained about Canberra’s involvement in domestic affairs like Hong Kong, Xinjiang and Taiwan, spy accusations, and its coronavirus inquiry call
  • But Morrison said Australia acted in its own interests and would not compromise its values or policies on issues like investment, 5G and interference

Bloomberg

Published: 11:46am, 19 Nov, 2020

Prime Minister Scott Morrison said he would not compromise Australia’s national security and sovereignty, as Beijing ramped up its criticism of his government and warned it against making China an enemy.

“Australia will always be ourselves,” Morrison said in a television interview with the Nine Network on Thursday. “We will always set our own laws and our own rules according to our national interests – not at the behest of any other nation, whether that’s the US or China or anyone else.”

A Chinese diplomat in Canberra gave a document to Australian media outlets outlining 14 grievances and accusing the nation of “poisoning bilateral relations”, largely echoing complaints aired by the Foreign Ministry in Beijing in recent days that Australia needs to “take concrete actions to correct their mistakes”. A Chinese government official said in a briefing with a reporter that the country was angry, and would become an enemy if it was made the enemy, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.

Morrison said he had seen the “unofficial document that’s come out of the Chinese embassy”. He added that Australia’s values, democracy and sovereignty “are not up for trade”. His government has labelled Chinese trade reprisals launched this year as “economic coercion”.

“We won’t be compromising on the fact that we’ll set what our foreign investment laws are, or how we build our 5G telecommunications networks, or how we run our systems to protect that are protecting against any interference,” Morrison said.

“Having a free media, having parliamentarians elected and able to speak their minds is a cause for concern, as well as speaking up on human rights in concert with other countries like Canada, New Zealand, the UK and others in international forums, if this is the cause for tension in that relationship, then it would seem that the tension is that Australia is just being Australia,” Morrison told Seven Network’s Sunrise programme.

China is placing increased pressure on Australia through trade sanctions and reprisals as it criticises a raft of Australian policies. While ministerial ties with the US ally have been in a deep freeze since April, when Morrison’s government called for independent investigators to enter Wuhan to investigate the origins of the coronavirus, the prime minister’s visit to strategic partner Japan this week to sign a new defence pact has exacerbated tensions.

[...]

https://www.scmp.com/news/asia/australasia/article/3110462/china-australia-relations-pm-scott-morrison-responds-beijings

 

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Date 25.11.2020

Author Clifford Coonan

China bares teeth in 'Wolf Warrior' trade diplomacy

China is positioning itself as a champion of free trade while taking an aggressive stance against countries seen as challenging its interests, such as Australia. But this could affect China's image.

Fresh from signing a mammoth free trade deal, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), Chinese President Xi Jinping has hailed China as a champion of free trade policies and the "forerunner in driving global growth." 

Since US President Donald Trump withdrew the US from global trade agreements as part of his "America First" policy, China has positioned itself as a champion of free trade.

In a speech to Southeast Asian nations, Xi took aim at protectionism, a thinly veiled attack on the US. "Openness enables a country to move forward while seclusion holds it back," the Chinese president said.

As the largest trading partner for nearly two-thirds of the world's countries, China's free trade message has gone down well as the pandemic shatters economies around the globe, leaving nations desperate for economic impetus.

But the flip side of this free trade talk is an increasingly aggressive stance against countries perceived as challenging China's interests.

China's policy of coercive diplomacy is spearheaded by so-called Wolf Warrior diplomats. They derive their name from the Wolf Warrior action blockbuster that highlights agents of Chinese special operation forces. "Wolf Warrior" diplomacy describes offensives by Chinese diplomats to defend their country's national interests, often in confrontational ways. 

Australia not first

Just as Xi was banging the drum of free trade, China was enacting a punishing array of protectionist measures on Australia after Canberra called for an investigation into the origin of COVID-19. 

"China is sending a message to Australia: 'We are a big country; you are a small country.' China is more assertive because it feels it is under attack. They are bullies," Fraser Howie, a China market analyst and co-author of the book Red Capitalism, told DW.

China, Australia's most important trading partner, has introduced a host of protectionist measures such as trade sanctions, investment restrictions, tourism bans and boycotts. Beijing has imposed embargoes in seven key sectors, including wine, barley, timber, coal, cotton and rock lobsters.

A whopping $6 billion in goods has been targeted. Around one-third of Australia's total exports go to China and the market is estimated to be worth €94 billion ($105 billion) in the 2018-2019 financial year.

However, crucially, the seven categories of goods blacklisted by China doesn't cover materials like iron ore or natural gas. 

"The largest and nearest big country that wants Australian stuff is China. China has iron ore plans that are built to specifications to take Australian iron ore grade. This is a co-dependency situation. The Chinese want their stuff. Where will they find their beef and their iron ore?" Howie said.

[...]

Not winning hearts and minds

Fergus Hanson at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) thinks China has won no friends in Australia and public opinion has "turned sharply" against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), as it has started to act "increasingly assertively."

"While the CCP's coercive measures are concerning to parts of the business community, there is a widespread realization things are different now and the CCP is acting this way with many other countries around the world," he told DW.

The Australian business community is feeling the pain but for now is backing the government. Alister Purbrick, CEO of Tahbilk Wines believes the Australian government is right "from a sovereignty perspective."

"We can't be bullied — that is just not the Australian way — and there is no doubt that China is looking to exert more influence in the Asia and Pacific regions by a number of different methodologies," he told The Australian newspaper.

Countries are increasingly standing up to the "wolf warrior" diplomats and registering their opposition to the reeducation camps for the Muslim minority in Xinjiang province and the crackdown on freedom in Hong Kong. There are even growing calls to boycott the 2022 Winter Olympic Games in Beijing. The election of Joe Biden as president is also widely expected to see the US resume a more prominent role in global trade policy as he seeks to kickstart the world's biggest economy in a post-COVID world.

The failure to win hearts and minds in Australia and elsewhere may yet affect Beijing.

https://www.dw.com/en/china-bares-teeth-in-wolf-warrior-trade-diplomacy/a-55720212

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Australia's stance was a predictable outcome given the fact that Biden is coming in.  For China, the bigger questions are the Philippines and Indonesia.   I was surprised when they rebuffed Duterte's initiatives a few years back.  That seems more and more an error, albeit, one that can be rectified.

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Date 31.12.2020

Author Shamil Shams

Chinese court sentences 29 Taiwanese deported from Spain

In recent years, hundreds of Taiwanese nationals, suspected of committing telecoms fraud overseas, have been deported to China instead of their home territory.

A court in Beijing on Thursday sentenced 29 Taiwanese nationals, who had been deported from Spain, to up to 14 years in jail for their part in a telecoms racket, according to Chinese state media.

The punishment comes amid a rising number of cases of people being repatriated — sometimes forcibly — to China instead of their home territory, Taiwan, from countries including Kenya, Cambodia and Armenia.

Taiwanese authorities decry these deportations as an abuse of human rights.

Beijing maintains that the Taiwanese nationals are accused of defrauding Chinese people and should be tried in its courts.

Most countries in the world follow the "one-China" policy under which they only maintain formal diplomatic ties with Beijing. That means governments have no legal option but to deport Taiwanese suspects to China instead of Taiwan.

Concerns about legal irregularities

In the latest ruling, a Beijing court said that the suspects had defrauded people living in China by calling them from Spain and claiming to be Chinese law enforcement officials.

A total of 14 Chinese citizens were defrauded more than 6.17 million yuan (€766,507, $941,985), the Beijing News said.

Taiwan complains that its citizens are not given due legal process in China and is concerned about the mistreatment of its people in Chinese jails.

Beijing says it has incurred huge financial losses as a result of telecom fraud, with callers often impersonating law enforcement officials and preying on the elderly, students or the unemployed.

[...]

https://www.dw.com/en/chinese-court-sentences-29-taiwanese-deported-from-spain/a-56103248

The obvious problems with recognition of sovereignty and standards of legal protection aside, I gotta say there's some sort of justice in people posing as officials of an authoritarian regime for financial gain being surrendered to the tender mercy of said regime.

In other news, we can't allow a bounty gap.

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Date 31.12.2020

Author Shamil Shams

China offered Afghan militants bounties to attack US soldiers: reports

Media reports claim that Donald Trump was briefed on alleged Chinese bounties earlier this month. In the past, Russia was also accused of offering money to Afghan militants to attack US troops.

US intelligence officials briefed President Donald Trump on alleged findings that China has offered money to non-state actors in Afghanistan to attack US troops, news site Axios and TV network CNN reported Wednesday.

According to Axios, the president was told about the Chinese bounty issue on December 17, and that officials were working to corroborate the claims.

Earlier this year, reports of Russian bounties on US soldiers in Afghanistan had drawn criticism by Washington.

Trump, however, has always dismissed these reports as "fake news."

It was initially unclear whether US President-elect Joe Biden was also briefed on the China findings.

China 'wants US out of Afghanistan'

China shares a short border with Afghanistan to its far-western region of Xinjiang. Beijing has long been worried about links between militant groups operating in Xinjiang, home to the Turkic-speaking Muslim Uighur people.

China is part of a Quadrilateral Coordination Group – comprising Afghanistan, China, Pakistan and the United States – which aims to end the 19-year-long Afghan conflict. The grouping has not achieved any significant breakthrough so far, with Islamabad and Kabul at loggerheads over the militancy issue, and Beijing and Washington lacking trust.

Jawid Kohistani, an Afghan security analyst in Kabul, told DW that China wants NATO and US forces out of Afghanistan so it could expand its economic influence in the region.

In November, the Pentagon announced the US will withdraw 2,000 troops from Afghanistan by January 15.

NATO has warned against a hasty troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, saying "the price for leaving too soon or in an uncoordinated way could be very high."

https://www.dw.com/en/china-offered-afghan-militants-bounties-to-attack-us-soldiers-reports/a-56103735

Edited by BansheeOne
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