Considering China's disrespect of IP laws, I'd love to see bootleg pandas.

AHHHHHRRRROOOOOOOOOO!

Is there any other way to picture Nixon other than Nixon from Futurama?

Except it’s pushing it’s boundaries and trying to steal its neighbours land/ocean.

It is retreating socially, but only because they’re further entrenching themselves on their nationalistic path to WW3 and you can’t dehumanise your enemy while having nice things with them.

I think they're increasingly frustrated that nothing is working in their coastal efforts - the rest of the south pacific nations don't want further encroaching '9-line' bullshit fucking with their fisheries and building temporary sand islands in wacky places (that appear to be washing away quickly). Their only real friend is North Korea, and that's like having the dumbest, poorest, most backward simp always hanging around and picking fights with the enormous economies that surround the South China Sea... Aus, Japan, SK, they're not gonna let China do what it wants... fuck, Vietnam, Cambodia and Indonesia don't even want to play with China much and have actively pushed back on their encroachments.

So what's left?

Well.... There's a tremendous amount of land and resources, both known and unexplored, to the north. Also, I think China still wants Vladivostok back. And you know who happens to be tremendously vulnerable at the moment? It's funny when we think of the middle kingdom as old, when the bear is wheezing and needs a new liver stat.

This is a false narrative people keep pushing in order to ignore the reason pandas became threatened. Their population decline has one and one reason only, that is: habitat loss. In other words, as usual, it's human fault.

Pandas mate and pump out healthy babies perfectly fine in the wild. They only refuse to mate in captive environments filled with onlookers. This is a very common behavior among captive animals of many different species, not just pandas. Probably most humans too.