A basic precondition for change is reunification with Taiwan. Reunification with Taiwan means the first island chain has been breached and China is no longer encircled by sea. Once China is no longer encircled by land (via the BRI) nor by sea (via reunification with Taiwan), that's when China can start to make offensive plays.
this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2025
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I don't think offensive play is necessary, and as with the other "plays"/economics and tech, I think PRC leadership is showing a steady hand with the long game/goal towards completing peaceful unification without firing a single shot. The process of dedollarization and erosion of western hegemony towards multipolarity means they aren't in any rush, on the contrary, it would be foolish to do so. If anything, I think we (as observers) and obviously the Chinese should be on the lookout for false-flag attempts.
The policy will not change. It does not need to. The Chinese will intervene when it is needed they have already done so a few times. They are pragmatic, and biding their time. Building mutually beneficial relationships. But look to Korea to see what happens when they feel the need to get involved directly.
In China the Japnese invasion and atrocities are still freshly remembered. They know the pain of being brutalized by imperialism. If the US plays around and strikes China they will wake a sleeping dragon. China will not start a conflict, but once one begins they will not hesitate to meet the challenge.
China isnt isolationist. They are pragmatic. Soft power is more effective at the current time. Do not let their pragmatism fool you though. The dragon may be resting, but it has not lost its teeth.
They are specifically designing a new medium range bomber/fighter to strike US airbases in the pacific. They have the undeniable best destroyer in the world. No ship can match it. They are an entire generation ahead in cyber warfare. They have more industrial capacity, better infrastructure, better self sufficiency, more manpower, etc. It is not a question of IF the US will fuck around and find out but WHEN.
The Dragon isn't even resting. It's exercising. China has a pretty impressive build up of weapons in preparation for the looming threat of WW3.
No, and they have nothing to gain from interfering in other countries. That'll sow distrust in minor nations that so far relied on them specifically due to their non-interference (compare it to the IMF), and invite destructive attacks from major countries and imperialist nations.
The most they should do is try to block reactionary interventions through institutional means like the UN security council, and retaliate only against those who attack them. Look to China as inspiration and an example, but do not wait for them to export revolution anytime soon.
I wouldn't call their policy passive. It's respectful of self determination and mutually beneficial whenever it can be, but they're still willing to be defensive and retaliate in tariffs against the US, and they still work on R&D for things like weapon tech. I'd argue it just looks passive in relation to the standard set by colonizers as active violence and intimidation being the only means to achieve anything.
That said, even from a cynical power standpoint, most countries in history don't benefit from active war. Look at the losses the USSR suffered from WWII and how poor of a position that put it in. Meanwhile, the US has never had to deal with a major war on its soil from a foreign adversary (unless I guess you count the original "revolutionary" war formation of it?) and it has been able to dodge a lot of the direct damage from a war by using proxies whenever possible. This is one reason an alternative like BRICS is so important. It links China up with other countries in an interdependent relationship, so that China cannot be isolated and sniped at so easily. As long as China is able to continue to build on this form of interdependent power, they should be able to avoid most need for hot war, by shifting the balance toward sovereignty, against imperialism, and by extension make it all the more difficult and complicated for the empire to keep its hold. The empire won't want to go down without a fight, but the more it loses its logistical hold on all the various tendrils, the harder it will be for it to do that fight without serious damage to its core. So then you see stuff like Trump admin and Biden admin before him trying to reaffirm the tendrils, whether more subtly or through threats and intimidation, and some of it appears to work for a time at least. But the anti-imperialists of the world, well they will have to make sure that doesn't last.
It will have to. China's policy of self development and economic diplomacy has worked amazingly but it isn't unstoppable. As it is quite obvious the us and europe have gotten wise to China's game and are working to find a counter. I doubt China will be the one to initiate the change in policy but the change will come. As much as capitalists would love to sell the rope that will hang them the imperialists wont let that happen. Eventually the west will do what it has to to disrupt the rise of China and they will have to change tack.
I have to agree. There will come a point where the US navy will do something like throw up a blockade and just steal any Chinese ships that attempt to approach Africa to buy raw minerals and China can either try and construct the most elaborate smuggling scheme in the world or they have to confront NATO with force, maybe sink some ships, maybe just escort their own and start providing military assistance to friendly African or other states who risk being couped or attacked by western forces. It'll likely be very low confrontation and framed as defensive and limited in nature to start as I don't see China wanting to war with the west even if the west takes off both gauntlets and slaps them repeatedly across the face. It then becomes a question of whether Chinese assistance can overcome centuries of western expertise and experience couping, dividing and conquering, creating proxy forces, sectarian strife fostering, blackmail, and destabilizing regions for profit and imperialism. It tends to be easier to destroy than to build so it's going to be rough.
Blockades only work against small countries, China is just huge, there is no way the US + lackeys could ever blockade current China.
Sadly it is not as impossible as it seems. Panama channel, Greenland to seal the arctic route and the strait of Malacca. Some military on these points effectively seals the pacific. Going around these points is prohibitively expensive.
The US is reining in Panama, wants to pute more troops in Greenland and is heavily pushing for regime change in Myanmar and Thailand...
Leaves the land routes: Pakistan is instable and a US removed, Afghanistan still not peaceful, Syria regime changed, Iran very much in the crosshairs of US hawks, The border area between Russia and Ukraine is in flames already, regime change operations in Georgia, Azerbaijan openly supported by the west, Isn'treal being Isn'treal.
Also not rosy.
Eh they have the island chains which help a lot. I'm not saying they can strangle them like Cuba and stop everything in and out. I'm saying they can make it uneconomical, painful, expensive, economically hard on China by trying to intercept most boats. They can't stop China from running some small boats, speed boats, etc or doing stuff over land but they can stop the big cargo ships which make up the bulk of Chinese trade and shipping, those are easy to spot using satellites and drone fleets and can be tracked out from port.
China would likely intervene against this which is why I think the US is planning on using autonomous robot death drones IF and I repeat IF they actually want to go the physical blockade route (economic may be all they try). Basically advanced sea-faring, self-propelled mines. Their special forces top leadership have talked of creating such a minefield to deny the PRC Taiwan in a battle and buy time to land US forces, I think though they'd try and use traditional naval ships to enforce it that their plan is as soon as those start getting sunk they get the angry public behind creating masses of kind of AI or autonomous/semi-autonomous self-propelled and seeking drones and just litter international waterways that access China with them.
I'm not saying the plan would work but it would escalate things in the way they want towards the ends they want which is buying time, driving up anger at China and trying to make things painful and costly and a drag on them. And more importantly towards making China hit them, they've been trying to get China to strike them, to give them an excuse, etc for some time and the Chinese keep ducking it and proceeding calmly with the plan. So if their plan is to use "rules based order cordon" around China and China uses military force to disrupt it then they've succeeded in their long-time goal there of getting to claim their actions are merely retaliation for "aggression".
The bigger issue is still US sanctions. Once they slap those on a lot of countries significantly reduce trade with China because they refuse to confront the US or make an enemy of them because whoever does that first gets the US navy and marines in their face to make an example of them and no one wants to go first. If not the direct force then at least devastating sanctions against industry that torpedo a given country's economy.
This policy has earned them the trust of many political actors world wide, so I doubt they would change, as it could result in diplomatic disruptions in many countries. This could be used by the US in attempts to isolate the country. But only time will tell.
I remember reading from a Xinhua article a long time ago (I think roughly a year or more) that China’s non-interference policy isn’t permanent, and that one day they will begin to strike back and truly stand up against the U.S. empire, and that time was approaching. But it probably won’t be for years, at best.
I don't have the article on-hand, unfortunately. But I appreciate that China seems to be weighing the costs and benefits of the policy.
No and they shouldn't. Milei said it best "China es un socio comercial muy interesante porque no exigen nada, solo que no los molesten." = "China is a very interesting partner because they do not demand anything other than letting them do business."
I remember reading from a Xinhua article a long time ago (I think roughly a year or more) that China’s non-interference policy isn’t permanent, and that one day they will begin to strike back and truly stand up against the U.S. empire, and that time was approaching. But it probably won’t be for years, at best.
Why are you spamming this as a reply to everyone in the thread?
It's the root of their success. I don't expect them ever to change while the American empire exists (even in a diminished state).
I remember reading from a Xinhua article a long time ago (I think roughly a year or more) that China’s non-interference policy isn’t permanent, and that one day they will begin to strike back and truly stand up against the U.S. empire, and that time was approaching. But it probably won’t be for years, at best.
No
I remember reading from a Xinhua article a long time ago (I think roughly a year or more) that China’s non-interference policy isn’t permanent, and that one day they will begin to strike back and truly stand up against the U.S. empire, and that time was approaching. But it probably won’t be for years, at best.
Why are you spamming this as a reply to everyone in the thread?
I completely understand this policy of non-interference. But personally it is so frustrating to me that for example Rojava has no allies. Ofc thats just venting frustration, not serious critique. Because for serious critique I'd need to actually have a good understanding of chinas foreign policy from a dialectical materialist standpoint.
China saw that overthrow of the USSR, and I read a few years back that Chinese universities offer a whole master's program in that subject too. They learned from it, and I think it's no coincidence that reform and opening up happened around the time the USSR was overthrown too (I'd wager to say Deng must have even directly wrote about it but it would be conjecture on my part).
The end of the USSR had two repercussions, one inside and one outside. It destroyed the country inside, but, it destroyed the communist movement outside. The Union was a huge supporter of communist movements and parties. Tons of parties in Europe received funding from the USSR, it's how they were able to afford buildings and stuff. When the union fell, all these parties either dissolved and integrated into social democrat parties, or turned to eurocommunism because the funding dried up, and they had not built a system in which they could depend only on themselves.
This is what China is trying to avoid. It's also not catering to our privileged first world lifestyle. China prefers to rally the imperialized periphery and they understand that very well, because BRI is pretty much only helping the Global South. By that I mean they know which part of the world is imperialized and which part is doing the imperialism. So in that way it's not incorrect to say China has a policy of non-interference if we think of it militarily (and I also use the term myself), but in another way they're also interfering, right? They're interfering in imperialist plans for Africa and South America. It's a "softer" form of interference (but with the same results) that the US knows how to do very well with the NED, CIA and USAID.
We could say yes, but they should be more open about it. But I think their system works very well and we can see that because every year it's growing. More countries are turning to China willingly, and it's exactly because they don't tell the world what to do. They don't presume to know the local material conditions better than those on the ground. African countries are now moving towards China precisely because they don't impose debt-trap loans and don't ask for concessions in return.
Regarding Rojava they have an ally, the US military lol. It is my understanding that Kurds were doing pretty well in Syria under Assad. Certainly much better than they're gonna do under ISIS. They chose to secede instead of joining forces with Assad, and this move weakened the resistance. Now they steal Syrian oil to sell to the US. Liberation doesn't necessarily mean sovereignty, it means autonomy. Living in dignity. Uyghurs have autonomy in the PRC. Rojava chose instead to do ethnic cleansing - they're not after liberation, they're after being the oppressors. Explains why they allowed the US military so easily.
Thanks this actually makes lots of sense :3
I remember reading from a Xinhua article a long time ago (I think roughly a year or more) that China's non-interference policy isn't permanent, and that one day they will begin to strike back and truly stand up against the U.S. empire, and that time was approaching. But it probably won't be for years, at best.