Heading into Dark
Spreadin ‘ out her arms tomorrow
She got you soaring off the board.
And going into a frenzied state.
Bridge to the hazard zone
I’ll lead you straight into the risk area.
– Kenny Loggins
In a good fictional scene in the 2000 traditional movie” Thirteen Days” on the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara figure berated a US admiral conducting the naval blockade from a Pentagon war room, saying:
You don’t know a point, do you captain? Hardly a siege, this! This is terminology – a fresh vocabulary the likes of which the world has never seen. This is President John Kennedy speaking with Secretary Nikita Khrushchev!
China flew two apparently 6th-generation warplanes ( fighters, bombers, both ) unfreakably on December 26 on Mao Zedong’s 131st birthday. Who knows? ). It also launched its new Type 076 amphibious assault ship with little fanfare and a huge AWAC aircraft. The PLA even flew a strange-looking large surveillance drone for public viewing as an anti-climactic wrapping topper.
Expectedly, social press went crazy. US military fans were giddily trolled by PLA fanboys. US military aficionados put up a brave face in opposition to the customary pabulum of stolen systems and declared,” We presently quietly flew the NGAD.” American government Online ran the spectrum from hallucination to despair. It was a lot of fun for everyone involved.
However, the intended audience wasn’t the social media fans. These were neither arms tests nor military marches. This is a speech with a long-forgotten vocabulary that is rapidly being relearned, much like the US naval blockade of Cuba in 1962. Secretary Xi Jinping is speaking with President-elect Donald Trump with fatal severity.
What does this mean? What is being shared? What, if any, response does the US have?
In agencies throughout the Pentagon and Langley, pizza containers are stacking up late into the night as researchers pour over every last image of videos posted on social media, managers theorize on what information is being delivered and designers seconded from Lockheed Martin and Northrup Grumman go through their Presentation slides deciphering just what these planes may be capable of and when.
Although all of this could quickly get us all killed, the political psychodramas does at least never be boring. We live in exciting times.
None of us peons are aware of everything and are not the participants in any way like in most things of this character. But little prevents us from joining in on the excitement with idle speculation, couch experience, disturbed conspiracy theories, and perhaps even calm research.
What does Han Feizi believe is taking place? There are many options, none of which are mutually exclusive. The politics of and between says may get just as if no more convoluted, multi-dimensional, and intrigue-laden as junior high school restaurant seating arrangements.
Let’s pose a problem to both China and the US to make things simpler. They either have intelligence or sanity. Two countries and two possible solutions for each offer us a 2×2 generator of four possible situations. Sending a message to a US that is neither wise or stupid, China might be wise or ridiculous.
Let’s go over the possible combinations in more information:
China is bright and the US is intelligent
If China is bright and the US is intelligent, then China would know not to try to pull a fast one on its intelligent opponent. China would not fly mock-up planes to bamboozle the United States whose analysts and intelligence services would surely be able to determine how genuine China’s 6th gen planes are from the public flights.
A smart China would also not be showcasing its 6th generation planes ( on Mao’s birthday, no less ) if it did not also have good reason to believe that America’s engineering capacity was in a degraded state with
If a wise China believed that the US could quickly resurrect its engineering and industrial base with” Sputnik time” plans, China would not heedlessly provoke its adversary with demonstrations of advanced weapons.
An intelligent China will recognize that its professional and executive capacities are unsustainable in the medium name, and that reestablishing those capacities does require a period of restraint, relaxation, and loneliness.  ,  ,  ,
The US is terrible, China is wise, and China is foolish.
If The US is terrible, China is wise, and China is foolish., then China’s weapons demonstrations are designed to flatfoot America and force a fumble. A smart China would know that a stupid US would have little intelligence on the progress of its weapons program and would be flummoxed by the demonstrations.
In this situation, China could very well be sling a quick one at the US by flying embryonic technology demonstrators decades away from deployment. In this case, a wise China would be aware that the military-industrial complex in the United States has been systematically damaged by decades of corruption and underage education.
The stupid American response desired by an intelligent China would be to double down on defense spending, wasting national resources in a vain attempt to tread water.
The defense industrial complex of a country is a parasite that perches on top of its commercial industrial complex. Defense spending overall in the US accounts for 25 % of industrial output overall. In China, it is ~4 %. Now that the military-industrial complex only robs from the commercial sector, which eventually leads to a death spiral, it is even more important to allocate even more resources to it. This kind of fumble was imposed on the Soviet Union by Ronald Reagan.
China is stupid and the US is smart
If China is stupid and the US is smart, then the demonstrations of weapons are at best a chest-thumping exercise that showcases advanced technology that the US has long had, all under the watchful eye of the CIA and NSA.
American strategists and analysts would chuckle and assure President-elect Trump that he has no concerns. These demonstrations only strengthen America’s negotiating position as the opponent has chosen to reveal a few lousy cards that they hold in a poor hand.
The smart American strategy to stoke a stupid China would be to use casually 6th-gen fighters and other weapons systems to increase US security pressure in the Asian theater and observe China’s inability to react.
Both China and the US are foolish.
If China is stupid and the US is also stupid, then we are in for much fun and games. A US response to China’s jumbled demonstration of embryonic technology, such as a premature test flight of a cocked-up prototype, would undoubtedly be met by a US response.
The two sides will confront off against one another like drunken meatheads before a bar fight, both denying the other’s abilities and intentions.
Except, of course, we are not exactly dealing with biceps, knives and brass knuckles. The last standoff that will take place in human history will be between two stupid nuclear-armed superpowers with erroneous understandings of each other’s intentions and capabilities. But at least we’ll see a lot of interesting weapons on display.
So what is the most likely scenario? Han Feizi dismisses that possibility because China has managed to grow its economy by 45-fold in real terms since its last hostilities ( the Sino-Vietnamese war in 1979 ), which is fun as it may be to both sides being stupid. It is unusual to follow that kind of turbulent growth without engaging in wars in human history. China is clearly not run by imbeciles.
Jake Sullivan wrote in Foreign Affairs that the Middle East is “quirkyer than it has been in decades” five days before Hamas launched an attack on Israel. Jake Sullivan is the same person presiding the conflict in Ukraine. Given his questionable senile state, it would be unfair to pin the blame on President Joe Biden. Of course, blaming it all on Jake Sullivan is also unfair. Similar stupidity was experienced by Anthony Blinken and numerous others.
And, of course, blaming the imbeciles of the Biden administration is also unfair. The US has fought in conflict for more than 95 % of its history, but it has only experienced minor setbacks in the last 50 to 60 years as a result of an overarching global empire. Given a few centuries of successful expansion, old habits die hard, and the knee-jerk habits of empire may be inevitable stupidity.
While the likelihood of the US being stupid is high, China would probably prefer a smart America. In the nuclear age, forcing a stupid US into a downward spiral in the Soviet style is a dangerous idea. Who knows what might happen in aging empires? The world got lucky when the Soviet Union, in its death throes, either refrained from or did not have the energy to lash out.
A smart China should want a smart US that acknowledges that its military cannot compete militarily in Asia and that its institutions and industries have grown too obliterated and underdeveloped to bear the costs of empire. The US is the world’s most secure nation, nestled in North America, and perfectly placed to circle wagons, lick wounds, rebuild, and bide time.
The discussion is already underway. At the heart of the H1B controversy is a debate over whether the US wants to compete with China and how to proceed if so. If conducted in good faith, this debate is worthwhile. Unfortunately, America’s polarization and social media do not make it easy. Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are just another type of globalists that the Heritage MAGA crowd despised.
Elon Musk has repeatedly warned H1B opponents to “FK YOURSELF in the face” and that he will “go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.” His capitalizations. Despite rumors from the MAGA crowd, which we believe indicate a not-so-feign threat of being primaried given Elon’s endless war chest, no congressman or senator has yet made a statement against H1B.  ,
China has already made a decision while the US sorts through what MAGA represents and what kind of society it wants to be. The J-20, China’s fifth-generation fighter ( 4th generation in PLA nomenclature ), was introduced fifteen years ago, marking a turning point in the Industrial Party’s consciousness.
Upon seeing the J-20, Wang Xiaodong, a leading Industrial Party intellectual, dismissed the Sentimental Party and their precious left/right obsession as hopelessly ineffectual, writing:  ,
I didn’t cry or sob when I saw the fourth-generation fighter take off like some young people did, but a tear did dove in my eye. That is emotion, but it is also the Industrial Party’s emotion.
A young person summed it up quite well:
The rightists contend that constitutionalism would prevent the development of a fourth-generation fighter. The leftists claim that it could not be developed without the four freedoms that were promoted during the Cultural Revolution but removed from the country’s Constitution after Deng Xiaoping came to power. But we have a fourth-generation fighter! How are those things explained?
Fourteen years later, China’s Industrial Party is vindicated for the flight of two 6th generation planes, which renders the handwringing angst of the Sentimental Party inconsequential. Wang Xiaodong’s dismissal of the Sentimental Party 14 years ago has proven prescient:  ,  ,
The Industrial Party and the Sentimental Party differ from one another in this regard. Sentimental Party only discusses their feelings, not facts. China has so many excellent engineers and scientists, toiling unknown to the public, and making great contributions to the nation and humanity. In addition, the intellectuals who skim along the surface of things have a limited understanding of these contributions, some of whom even reject them. The pointless Sentimental Party treats others badly. We need to figure out why.
While the Sentimental Party’s right and left wing divides, China’s industrialization has secretly reached a higher level and has a wider scope than they realize. Will any other nation in the world be able to surpass our own? I believe they cannot stand in our way. Some people might think it’s possible, but I don’t. Some nations might have been able to unite ten years ago to contain China, but that is now impossible, even with all of their forces combined.  ,  ,  ,