ResoluteRaven
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User ID: 867
ResoluteRaven
9d ago
First of all, China must be realizing around now that they have no meaningful way of communicating their military capability to the world, but especially to US and regional allies, in a way they will respect and find authentic. Simply because China's military basically doesn't get used for anything and hasn't for decades (and no, building artificial reefs in the SCS doesn't count). So no proof of concept demonstrations.
If China wanted to demonstrate their military prowess, they could simply march over their border with Burma and put an end to the civil war there. No one would care enough to stop them and they have a reasonable enough humanitarian justification for intervening. For whatever reason, they seem content to operate through proxies and occasional arms sales for now.
ResoluteRaven
25d ago
Sinosphere in common parlance includes Korea, Japan, and Vietnam i.e. anywhere that Literary Chinese was at one time the language of high culture.
Restricting it to areas that speak Chinese today would indeed only leave Mainland China, Hong Kong and Macau, Taiwan, Singapore, and parts of Malaysia and Burma.
Beggars can't be choosers. In the face of extinction, it seems to me that any part of the population reproducing, whether that's teenagers, religious fanatics, or perimenopausal women with frozen eggs, is preferable. Being able to carry a pregnancy to term at an advanced age is also a pretty good indicator of maternal health, which may be attenuating the negative effects somewhat. From what I've seen, the children of older parents almost always strike me as kind of autistic (though people in glass houses shouldn't throw stones), but the parents have tended to be odd or socially maldajusted too, so it's hard to disentangle correlation from causation here.
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