…in 2007, President Hu Jintao had told the 17th Congress of the Communist Party that China needed to invest more in its soft, or attractive, power.
From the point of view of a country that was making enormous strides in economic and military power, this was a smart strategy.
By accompanying the rise of its hard economic and military power with efforts to make itself more attractive, China aimed to reduce the fear and tendencies to balance Chinese power that might otherwise grow among its neighbours.
But China’s performance has been just the opposite, and China has had a bad year and a half in foreign policy.
A Chinese leader about 10 years ago remarked rather casually that someday American would need to decide whether Taiwan was worth Los Angeles or San Francisco. (Throw in Berkley, and it is a deal!) Combine this with the fact that Chinese equivalents of Command and Staff, and War Colleges, have taught for the last 25 years ago that around 2020, China would fight a war to eject the US from the western Pacific. About the only good news is that China historically tends to badly misunderstand what they would call “The correlation of forces.”
APB: What is the source of your claim that “Chinese equivalents of Command and Staff, and War Colleges, have taught for the last 25 years ago that around 2020, China would fight a war to eject the US from the western Pacific”?
China doesn’t need to fight a war with us to win Taiwan. China only needs to call in the enormous debt we owe them.
No great empire lasts forever. Like the Chinese government, I also think the US empire is on its downhill slide. Not sure that I would characterize 2000 as the USA’s high point; I think it was earlier, perhaps during the Vietnam War, or when the Soviet Union imploded.