MERGED: CHINA: Next Superpower?

[wikki]

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The situation is different. South Ossetia was a defacto-independent state since 1990. Georgia took the bait and was defeated.

The situation in Spratlys is different. If China will take the bait and engage with our force, Uncle Sam will use the excuse of "freedom of navigation" to come back in the area which we kicked them out in the 90s.

China doesnt want the Yankees to give more control in the area as they are surrounded already.

Na bali nimo og sabot, It's China thats fishing for the PH and no there wont be a US in the picture if the PH fires the first shot and the US wont lend a hand to idiots that goes into a suicidal war.

[flanker]

Na bali nimo og sabot, It's China thats fishing for the PH and no there wont be a US in the picture if the PH fires the first shot and the US wont lend a hand to idiots that goes into a suicidal war.

If you know the strategy of US which to contain China, you will understand what i mean.

As much as possible, China would not do anything stupid that will provide an "EXCUSE" for the US to return its base in the Philippines.

The US already courting the countries around China to host military bases. Recently the US is providing India with military weapons, which has no ties between them and a cold war foe.

Currently China's navy is still far away to match the USN and they cant flex their muscles for now.

[voldemort]

IMO, the US will not go to war with China just because of the PH. China practically bailed out the US economy from the 2008 crisis. Now, would you go to war against your banker?

[flanker]

IMO, the US will not go to war with China just because of the PH. China practically bailed out the US economy from the 2008 crisis. Now, would you go to war against your banker?

I agree, there is no war. As long as the country has stockpiles of NUKES as deterrent. Just ask KIM JONG IL.

The US just wanted to choke China since its an emerging power.

This is just a chess match.. kung kinsa lang maka una sa position.

[jumper_stage]

"god made mankind, but everything else in this world is - MADE IN CHINA -"

[johnnygomezzz]

dili ta ready i hatag nalang na sa china ang spratlys oy sure ko d ghapon na maximized ug maayu ang spratlys kng kita mo da

[reptoid]

I hope our leaders are busy trying to resolve this issue behind the scenes because once China has gained a significant foothold it will be virtually impossible to retake this territory in the future. We need two things:

1. A significant military deterrent.

2. Political will ie strong leadership.

For a glimpse of what it takes to retake an invaded distant territory the Falklands War may be a good example.

YouTube - ‪20th Century Battlefields - 1982 Falklands‬‏

YouTube - ‪20th Century Battlefields: Falklands 1982 (Parte 2)‬‏

YouTube - ‪20th Century Battlefields: Falklands Part 3/6‬‏

YouTube - ‪20th Century Battlefields: Falklands Part 4/6‬‏

YouTube - ‪20th Century Battlefields: Falklands Part 5/6‬‏

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-bQA...eature=related

[wikki]

@reptoid - btw that territory isn't brittains, they took it because of oil (lots of it) everything else floating around is propaganda.

atong situation more or less is the same, ang story ani ron kung mu paak gani atong buloy na government, ma pariha gyud ang story ana... Go China gyud ta ani, Pero i think unya na ang China mu ngita bikil if ready na ang refurbished aircraft carrier nila subra na kaayo na nga firepower para sa pinas.

[reptoid]

@reptoid - btw that territory isn't brittains, they took it because of oil (lots of it) everything else floating around is propaganda.

atong situation more or less is the same, ang story ani ron kung mu paak gani atong buloy na government, ma pariha gyud ang story ana... Go China gyud ta ani, Pero i think unya na ang China mu ngita bikil if ready na ang refurbished aircraft carrier nila subra na kaayo na nga firepower para sa pinas.

No dude you're completely wrong. The British settled on the Falkland Isles long before Argentina even existed as a state and way before oil exploration was dreamed up. The British retook the islands because it was their duty to do so. The population requested rescue and that place was a British overseas territory same as Bermuda, The Pitcairn Islands, Saint Helena & Gibraltar.

Argentina's claim to The Falklands is based on it being 4-500 miles from their coast. Well, too bad for them the Brits got there first. The population have been asked time and again about what they wish for the future and the answer is always the same.... British protection. By the way any oil that may be discovered in that area (nothing significant yet) belongs to the Falkland Islanders themselves and not the UK government.

[Faeries]

Bring Back the US Bases and Nukes - Philippines Free Press

Bring Back the US Bases
and Nukes
The situation has changed: Communist nuclear powers are no longer a counterweight to imperial capitalism in a Cold War world but the main threat to our national existence

By Teodoro L. Locsin Jr.
VIEW Published in July 2, 2011 Issue

In the wake of the Spratlys brouhaha—with stress on the “ha-ha” yet equally on the “brou-brou” for its simian sound (I will explain the monkey connection later)—the Noynoy administration has proposed a P40 billion ($700 million) increase in the military budget. That is the prize of one jet fighter of some vintage.

But first, let’s get one thing straight: we admire and laud without reservation the Noynoy administration’s intransigent and even belligerent stance on the Chinese challenge in the Spratlys.

We particularly admire his pulling up the Chinese markers and flinging them into the sea surrounding whichever island they were planted on and changing the name of that sea.

We think that his redesignation—we hope on all official maps—of the disputed waters as the West Philippine Sea is an inspired move, probably suggested by Mar Roxas, who is a teetotaler. This move is certainly smarter than our immediate surrender to some inconsequential international body’s unilateral removal of the initials “RP” from the oldest republic in Asia and assigning it to Poland, a country that has only fitfully existed in the past 500 years. For a time, Poland had to import members of the Valois dynasty in France for its government. The Philippines was assigned the initials of a chemical used to measure the acidity in private swimming pools—“PH”—as a houseboy will tell you of any family that has never been without a pool of its own.

Noynoy’s have been the right responses to the Chinese challenge. His critics are nitpicking if not betraying the national interest.

We have long been sick and tired of the moderated response of past administrations since the Chinese started crossing thousands of miles of what British mapmakers called the South China Sea and was only vaguely referred to by the lucky Chinese character for water by ancient Chinese geographers or geomancers. The only, and I cannot stress only enough, interest the Chinese have had in water is having it flow or pour inside their houses for good luck.

Indeed, in contrast to, say, the United States, the Chinese have proudly pointed to an unbroken history of inward attention and outward contempt. It has focused entirely on external defense and internal—Wittfogel called it hydraulic—control; except for a brief if impressive dalliance with oceanic exploration during the Ming Dynasty, which, however, skipped the Spratlys and the Philippines altogether, on the way to visiting—with a view to impressing but never staking a sovereign claim on—Madagascar and Brunei. The first is proved by the gift of an elephant and the second by the offer of a princely hostage whose ancient grave still exists. The Chinese did not want a surrender of sovereignty from their neighbors but marks of respect like tribute. We can send them bagoong or little puppy inasal.

The wrong if not treasonous reactions to the Chinese challenge were the words of caution and cravenness offered by the usual cowards in the government and the media, such as “let’s negotiate,” “don’t provoke” (those who are provoking us), “we are sure to lose” (not that winning is an option but rather how we lose: credibly with casualties or supinely without a war or whimper).

Machiavelli said that in the face of a serious threat, a friend who urges patience, negotiation or neutrality, is an enemy. A friend should just stand by one, as the United States has said again and again it will do by us.

Yet despite the sagacity of Machiavelli, which none of them has read because reading ability is rudimentary in apes, the swarthy pundits of a protoplasmic press, gibbered like they had just dropped from the Tree of Life that the US-Philippines Mutual Defense Treaty is not worth the paper it is written on. Really? Yet the Philippines did not become a province of Communist China and never became a communist satellite.

The US ambassador’s swift statement that the United States would stand by the Philippines in a territorial dispute dampened the Chinese strutting.

To be sure, there was the inevitable static around the US ambassador’s statement but he reaffirmed that the United States would stand by us, which was underscored by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s casual remark that US naval power would always treat the South China Sea, now the West Philippine Sea, as international waters for commerce and US defense purposes.

One of several good things that Stalinism taught is that one can be guilty of treason subjectively or objectively, intentionally or inadvertently, as proved by the consequences of one’s words and actions, such as the cravenness of pundits and politicians.

To be sure, fifth column pundits will do hack work even for the Chinese if the price is right, even the price of their country’s sovereignty. But some will do it for free to show a specious intellectual sophistication by a cynical disregard of international rights on the part of countries, like their own, too weak to enforce them. The more one reads some of our officials and newspaper columnists the more clearly one discerns the outline of the Tree of Life from whence they so recently descended.

Why do I stress the simian sibling similarity of our native media? Because there are some things no evolved being does, even in pursuit of the constitutional freedom of poor speech and worse writing. One is to shout fire in a crowded theater, even if there is a fire, because it will cause a fatal panic. The other is to urge surrender before a fight because one has looked only into oneself for the courage that may not be lacking in other Filipinos.

Are we really cowards by nature? To be sure, we will never know if a single shot fired at EDSA would have resulted in a vanishing act that would have put David Copperfield (the magician not the Dickens hero) to shame, rather than in the jaw-dropping bravery under automatic fire of the people of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya (add air strikes) and Syria (add mass arrests and executions).

There people power went on, goes on regardless of massive casualties because people power is not about the nonviolent resolution of conflict and the bloodless attainment of liberty. People power is about the persistence of nonviolent resistance to the most sanguinary oppression until a victory drenched with the blood of the peaceful is achieved.

This did not happen here in 1986. On the other hand, it is something we do not want to attempt against a Chinese invasion because Tiananmen Square shows how China responds to resistance. Somebody said that Gandhi would have been run over by the trains on whose tracks he and his followers lay if it was the Deutschland Express.

It seems to have escaped, because it was never learned by the ignorant in the government and in the media that deterrence works by not questioning it: those who need to shelter behind a mutual defense treaty should be the last to question its unfailing robustness.

In short, we should keep saying that the Americans will retaliate against any power that attacks us, period. No other comment is expected except from traitors.

Supposing the Americans do not come to our aid in that event.

First, they always have. They said they would return and kick out the Japanese and they did. Yes, although it took them three years during which most Filipinos happily collaborated with the Japanese, say old-timers like the small Negros resistance that regularly sampled landlord and peasant alike for lack of enthusiasm in the anti-Japanese struggle.

But three years is how long it took Americans to die in the tens of thousands, fighting beachhead to interior, interior up and through mountain caves to the peak of Iwo Jima, and on to the next South Pacific island, and the one after that, until the A-bomb spared them the carnage of having to do it inside the Japanese archipelago.

Second, so what if the Americans do not come to our aid? It wouldn’t change the supine resolution of facing the Chinese challenge on our own.

It is not as though we would be holding down the left flank in a grand military movement to encircle the enemy and the failure of our ally to appear on the right caused our defeat.

We do not hold the left or the center or any other part of the battlefield. We hide behind the American line and if that line fails to materialize, the outcome will be the same: our swift surrender without a fight. What we do have is our geography. Aside from Taiwan, we were the only US unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Pacific when we had US bases here. We can be again.

In the Spratlys dispute, we have the first test of the Noynoy presidency after the botched Luneta crisis (also involving Chinese but we fired the first shot) and it has passed that test with flying colors despite the confusion of statements coming from his infantile, not to say intrauterine, communications group.

But this must be followed up with more concrete actions.

Noynoy has proposed a P40 billion increase in the military budget. But for what?

We have no air force, not only to speak of but also in any sense. We have no jet fighters. Well, we shouldn’t. We train fighter pilots for free and they work for Emirates. So **** them. If we had jet fighters, they would be shot down in the first two seconds of a war with a modern military power.

To be sure, we need at least one fighter plane that will fly: to buzz the enemy within our territory—and then get shot down and prove that the Chinese have crossed our border. That will be the trigger demanded by deterrence theory to set off the treaty response of all-out war between an alliance of liberty and a totalitarian enemy.

We have no navy to speak of. We should not. It will only be used for smuggling, as the air force was used to smuggle bihon into the country during martial law.

China has submarine pens in nearby Hainan and a warship of any tonnage will be sunk in the instant of hostilities. But it may be good to have at least one decent frigate—to be shot and sunk with all hands within our waters to trigger the treaty.

What we do not need is an additional P40 billion for more weaponry against the Filipino communist insurgency and even the Muslim secession, which President Estrada—the boldest and brightest commander in chief since Marcos—showed can be contained and crushed with such redoubtable troops and shabby weaponry as we possess. Note his swift capture of Camp Abu Bakar and the devastation of the rebel camps on the way there. I followed the army and there wasn’t a living thing in its wake.

What we do not need is more experience for our armed forces in suppressing Filipinos, even if they happen to hold Marxist beliefs, not least because Marxism gives the best explanation of the crisis and crash of capitalism. Such experience will only prepare our armed forces better to collaborate with an invader to suppress their own people, like the Vichy French and the Filipino Makapili.

We need to reaffirm in the clearest terms our alliance with the United States. This can be most emphatically emphasized and best articulated by amending the Constitution.

No, not for the removal of the nationalist economic provisions; that will only leave our economy wide open to foreign and organized crime investment (but not American business, which is cash-strapped). President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo pointedly ignored a House proposal to hand over one million hectares of public agricultural land to China for development. (What if the Chinese raised their flag in the middle of the concession? What could we do about it? The Americans will not help us under the Mutual Defense Treaty because we were not invaded; we invited the Chinese in.)

We need to drop the constitutional provision against the presence of nuclear weapons in the country, which has prevented the best elements of our only military ally from deploying nearer to the country the ultimate wherewithal to protect it.

We need to drop the constitutional provision against foreign military bases because the situation has changed. Communist nuclear powers are no longer a counterweight to imperial capitalism in a Cold War world but the main threat to our national existence. We need to fight alongside America in her wars to keep the balance of power everywhere and the forces of Islamic fascism at bay to assure the free flow of oil without which we will die.

We need to embed our military with US forces in Iraq, not because they will make a military difference but because we can learn from the war over there how a brutal and discredited regime, annihilated on the surface by the US invasion, can yet carry on beneath the surface a resistance that is forcing the United States to withdraw. We need to embed military observers with US troops in Afghanistan for the same reason. The malcontents there are doing something right albeit for the wrong reason. They are fighting the greatest superpower to a standstill. We might learn to do the same over here with another superpower.

Of course, we are neither Afghan nor Iraqi; we are Filipinos of whom, one distinguished old Congress colleague said, it took only one platoon of Japanese to pacify and control Northern Luzon.

But, who knows, there may be gun clubs with members who combine the mindless pursuit of taking potshots in cork-lined tunnels with patriotism.

We need a military alliance with Communist Vietnam, which shares a border with China and defeated a massive Chinese invasion right after defeating the United States in the Vietnam War—a feat unprecedented since Carnot crushed a cartel of European reactionaries in the time of the Directory.

We need to take care of the traitors in our midst. And then we need to prepare a stalwart and nonwaffling team to argue the case against Chinese aggression before the United Nations even if China’s seat in the Security Council guarantees a veto of a friendly resolution.

We need the Chinese Chamber of Commerce to issue a forthright and grammatically correct condemnation of the Chinese incursion or we are looking at a pogrom over here. Mestizo groups, like Casino Español, are sure to issue theirs in Spanish naturally because it is the tongue that created the Filipino national consciousness.

And then we can get on with our lives.