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It's interesting to me that you pretty much blame the herky-jerky USA on the basis of cui bono; but absolve the opaque and determined PRC despite seeing it benefit as well.
The ChiComs are historically capable of extended operations, their collective founding mythology of themselves is based on extended organized effort across difficult to impossible circumstances to achieve long term historically inevitable goals. It's right in their wheelhouse to execute a 30 year plan.
The USA is historically incompetent at the long con. The short attention span of the electorate leaves policy areas ignored for decades, then brought back into focus by a clever charlatan, then lost again just as quickly. Rapprochement becomes heightening tensions becomes Reset Button becomes spooky accusations of pseudo-alliance becomes violent enmity. It's tough to draw a through line across the Clinton, Bush II, Obama, Trump, and Biden admins; it's impossible, really, you have to pin this one on the deep state to expect it to get done. The USA is simply not competent to that kind of process, there's too many possible swerves.
If only a deep state can do it, doesn't that raise the odds that the country that is basically deep-state-only did it?
At any rate, unless you really believe the idea that Putin is in on it, the plan would have fallen apart had Putin simply decided against the invasion. Even assuming that everyone else in power in Russia wanted to invade, Putin had the power to prevent the invasion; and that leaves the whole operation in that category of fictional plots that depend on the protagonist knowing exactly what his opponent will do.
I am not so sure that Chinese mythology is a meaningful source for assessing tendencies of the CCP, and in general this American story about ChiComs planning decades ahead has always struck me as «pure ideology», in the Zizekian sense of wanton mythmaking. Americans also have long-term plans – Project 2049, for example; and when they do not put a label on it, they still carry on the intention, in the form of fluid human networks coalescing from time to time into advisory councils and think tanks (Project for the New American Century is gone, but Kagan has simply moved on to Foreign Policy Initiative to Brookings...). Objectively speaking, American policies both foreign and domestic between Bush Jr. and Biden have changed much less than Chinese ones between Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping. American Presidents can only help respond to urgent matters and reshuffle some priorities; they don't have the power to systemically override the bureaucracy often derisively referred to as the «deep state». Even when they push on some axes, it proves ephemeral. We've seen Trump test this live and we are seeing his iconoclastic ideas wither away while the deep-state-approved moves are furthered like never before by Biden admin.
Mythology is a tool for conjuring some reality by means of deceit which influences human actions. It's worthwhile to study it here, but rather strange to embrace being its subject.
I agree that the idea that the CCP planning decades ahead is not what they are doing (see: disastrous one child policy), but:
I don’t see any myths straight out of any of the three links given? From your response I was expecting a story about Yu the Great or something, not a lecture by Mao, a wiki article about the Long March, and a bunch of quotations about communism. All of those seem, uh, relevant to the CCP.
Am I missing something here?
It's a problem I seem to be having a lot of lately around here lately. I used the term founding mythology in an off-hand sort of way to refer to The Long March and the concept of People's War; in the same way that Lexington and Concord form a founding mythology of warfare in the USA. I agree with Dase that The Long March is a myth in the sense both that (Like L and C) it didn't really happen that way, and in the sense that it doesn't reflect some deep seated tendency in the national ethnos.
Deng said of one of the climactic moments of the March:
Many have claimed Chiang Kai-Shek made a deal with Mao and more or less escorted the Long March as a kind of Kabuki civil war, which would itself have been a fascinating kind of spiritual Long March for Mao to engage in to preserve ChiCom forces until the eventual success of the revolution. But regardless it does mean something that generations of chinese were taught from the time they could read:
I was mostly just pointing to China as an alternative suspect under the cui bono investigative method, to demonstrate the hollowness of the theory that "The US benefits, so the US probably did it." Conspiratorial traps that require your opponent to make an active move to fall into it, as the culmination of a multi-year plan involving numerous unreliable moving parts, don't seem credible.
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