(12-02-2021 09:46 AM)Owl 69/70/75 Wrote:  

(11-18-2021 11:37 PM)BigTigerMike Wrote:  

China has a much healthier economy that the Soviets did, at least on the surface. But there are huge problems underneath. Historically, China has seldom been a unified country because it's basically a bunch of people who don't like each other. The warlike Han in the north don't get along well with the commercial/industrial Shanghai and the Yangtze Valley, and neither of them like or are liked by the secessionist south, not to mention Tibet and the Uyghurs in the west. So what they do is export a lot of cheap consumer goods and use the cash flow to finance a bunch of make-work projects with little or no economic utility (remember the empty cities) to keep the peons too busy to revolt. So their banks have massive loans out to deals that will never generate a nickel of revenue. And the whole thing depends on imported oil from the Mideast, that has to come by sea through Malacca/Sunda, and PLAN (the Chinese navy) may be huge in numbers, but it is not a blue-water navy that can protect that shipping. We do that for them now. Pull the USN out of the Indian Ocean, and let pirates start hijacking tankers bound for China, and the whole thing collapses--their economy dies and their people starve to death. We hold all the cards, but we refuse to play them.

The problem there is that pirates don't tend to discriminate about who they attack. Other nations (including some allies) would be subject to having their shipping disrupted as well.