Painting itself into yet another corner, Beijing goes ape-shit threatening to go ape-shit about being provoked into being forced to go utterly ape-shit if a woman visits an island. Child psychologists tell us that the best thing to do when faced with such tantrums is to ignore them and carry on with your life (just as Beijing could have shrugged off the prospect of Pelosi going to Taipei). But there’s no fun or clicks in that. So an anxious world is on tenterhooks watching with bated breath on a knife-edge to see whether Nancy turns up.
The Spectator warns of a Chinese blockade of Taiwan someday…
If a naval blockade gave Beijing control of the export of the island’s semiconductor industry, then western leaders would find themselves beholden to China to keep their economies going.
The US must have played this scenario over and over in the last 10 or 20 years, complete with the PLA threatening to attack the hundreds of foreign ships and aircraft that enter or leave Taiwan every day. Two things: China needs Taiwan’s tech exports as much as anyone; it also relies on the rest of the world for food and energy.
Meanwhile, Xi Jinping urges the CCP to ‘win the hearts and minds of Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan people and overseas Chinese, and help more foreigners understand and become friendly to China’.
CCPChina: Going ape-shit.
Rest of World: Noted. Have a nice day. Wankers.
The ‘China is a superpower” meme is a complete joke. The CCP’s global political influence and military capabilities are puny. China has zero cultural power.
Even China’s vaunted economic weight is grossly exaggerated. It’s a gangster economy based on imported technology and the exploitation of long-suffering, hardworking people. The reason the country doesn’t have a convertible currency is because the Party would lose power in about six months otherwise.
Sensible Western leaders know this and presumably the realists amongst the CCP leadership know it, too.
The fey West plays along with this inanity because it is profitable to do so and makes life easier for the government and business apparatchiks who must deal with the prickly Chinese on a regular basis. To them, insincere flattery is cost-free.
The problem is, the more these greasers appease China, the more the stupid people, in China and around the world, believe the myth. The result is an emboldened CCP and a cowardly West.
The antidote is to shove a bit of reality into the CCP’s face once in a while, as the U.S. did when it knowingly sent a guided bomb down the chimney of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and then offered the CCP a tissue-thin, face-saving way out by claiming it was a mapping error. It never was an error and everyone knows it.
Given the strategic importance of Taiwan’s chip manufacturing prowess to the global economy generally and to advanced military weapons platforms in particular, this is no time for the West go wobbly. Indeed, a message of rude defiance in the face of the billion-footed paper tiger is long, long overdue.
@stanley … ‘fey’ – I had to look that one up.
I just don’t understand why Beijing has such a big problem with a member of the US Congress visiting a Chinese province: they do it every couple of years and there’s never been any fuss before.
And it can’t be a beef with US citizens: Bernard Chan was a US citizen up until 2004 when he started to help govern a special administrative region of China and now he’s a Chinese National People’s Congress delegate too.
It’s almost as if Beijing doesn’t actually believe in it’s own One China Policy.
@Stanley Lieber: Brah-VO. Your rant (and I say that with respect) reads like someone that’s finally blown his stack at all the tiptoeing around the sensitive little twats bullshit and is calling it out for what it is. Cheers.
I personally would never go to Ukraine to fight Russians but I’d more than likely consider taking up arms (considering my limited 4 years of military service 30+ years ago) to kill a bunch of self entitled little Han pricks that think they’re the rightful heirs to the universe, which they invented 50 trillion years ago. Plus, I have a special affinity for Taiwan style stinky tofu.
@Stanley Lieber curious what you think of the fifth column which the PRC has got around the world through coercion and software spying.
However, I would say that considering the previous US administration was so ‘tough on China’ the current US administration is incentivised to also be ‘tough on China’ (which is to say, they will want the Pelosi visit to Taiwan to go forward) or lose face- seems like a misstep by the mainland government.
O/T: Recipe for success
Organisers insist on no eating at Food Expo
@Trip – remember 12 people from Hong Kong got arrested for trying to sail to that particular Chinese province a couple of years ago. Their apparent crime: trying to go from one part of China to another. Don’t expect logic from the CCP.
By the way, the BBC’s quiz at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-62373093 asks “…the US and Chinese leaders exchanged warnings over which country?”, then lists that same province as a country. Cue another panda rant against the Western media?