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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31656 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 5, 2022

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Strategic nuclear balance between US and China has apparently changed, and this has been publicly acknowledged by elected US representatives.

Apart from it making a US led escalation of a Taiwan war somewhat less likely, I'm not sure what this means. A ploy to get more money for defense ?

It's a big deal as scholars on twitter whom I follow were reduced from their usual verbosity to posting just .. "what the hell".

I've been seeing rumors from nuclear experts about a Chinese nuclear build-up, but now US house & senate claim it's real.

Would welcome some discussion of this, as I'm sure this is going to have real world implications.

/images/16703763204140296.webp

both sides have enough nukes to annihilate the world multiple times over anyways - is this about first strike capability?

This may not be the case, Chinese nuclear arsenal is shrouded in mystery and nobody knows how many they have. The estimates range from just couple dozens to high hundreds. Another factor here is that Chinese army is famously corrupt and inept. You have a lot of nepotism - like Mao's grandson who is clearly borderline mentally challenged holding position of Major General and being in charge of thousands of soldiers. Chinese general Guo Boxiong who was sentenced for corruption was charged with openly selling promotions inside army en masse. If somebody thinks that Russian Army is corrupt, Russians are playing child's game next to the status of PLA. So who knows how many of the nuclear weapons are actually functional. Nukes require very sophisticated and expensive maintenance and calibration. And these are exactly ideal targets of corruption as they are existing only on paper with low chance of them ever being used. Similar situation as when Russian suddenly realized that supposed 1.5 million uniforms in warehouses actually do not exist. It is similar situation as when within weeks of declared inspection of grain reserves in China many grain silos mysteriously caught on fire.

Another factor here is that Chinese army is famously corrupt and inept.

It's believed by military analysts Xi clamped down on that and mostly fixed it. And they also appear to now hold adversarial military exercises.

Xi did not clamp on anything. China runs on corruption - there is 100 million members of CCP who suck the blood out of Chinese people. Corruption is how things are done. The whole thing has analogy of Medvedev´s anti-corruption campaign in 2009, the only purpose for it was to eliminate political enemies like it was done with Khodorkovsky in 2003.

I am not saying that corrupt officials should not be arrested. But it would be as if gang leader turned political leader did a campaign to eliminate murderers, thieves and drug dealers. The only thing that would result is domination of his gang and corrupt and ineffective police force under his thumb.

I am reminded of the story of that Russian military minister(?) who did manage to legit reform Russia's military (allowing them to win in Georgia), only to be eventually sacked because, of course, he was rocking the boat too much for Putin's friends.

Which is indeed the ambiguity: has Xi, as the big cheese of China, managed to genuinely clean the rot out from the CCP and orient the PRC into a worthy competitor to the US in all matters political, economic, and military, or is this more like Saudi Arabia where "anti-corruption" efforts were just a fig-leaf for getting his political opponents out of the way? Even if the former is true, can he remain in power, or has he shaken things up too much and painted a target on his back? If the latter is true, should we even worry about the Thucydides Trap?

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