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Comment by burlesona | Hacker News Reader

I don’t think the US alone has any appetite for a land war in China, nor does the rest of the world. They have such a huge population, it would be very, very hard to win a war like that.

If they were to confront China directly, I would guess the US and the west are much more likely to take a containment approach like they did with the USSR.

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1)From the historical perspective internal conflict within China would be the deciding factor.

2)India isn't dovish or shy about confronting China.

3)The PLA is comprised of mostly only-sons and hasn't been deployed in a real conflict.

> PLA is comprised of mostly only-sons and hasn't been deployed in a real conflict.

Sorry, did you forget the Korean war? Sure, Sino-Indian and Sino-Vietnamese wars were much smaller by comparison, but also very real conflicts.

Fighting an adversary like the PLA in occupied areas like Tibet, Xinjiang, HK and maybe Taiwan someday plays to the strengths of the US armed forces. It would be an embarrassing disaster for the PRC that would very likely lead to a collapse of the party and force them into some type of hermit kingdom, like NK.

The US has been in near constant war for almost 100 years, having big parades with uniforms doesn't make up for that.

A thing of note - this "near constant war" has always been fought against weaker nations, which the US military industrial complex has been able to outproduce utterly. China is a completely different kind of adversary and has historically proved that it can match the US - again I refer you to the Korean war, where China was able to check and drive back the US forces.

Yea war is a terrible idea. Even if we “won” it would come at great cost. The best strategy is to contain them and wait for the inevitable communist collapse. Also, breaking the great firewall would do wonders in encouraging Chinese citizens to stand up for themselves. Hopefully Elon doesn’t kowtow to the CCP with Starlink.

You are aware that most people know perfectly well how to use VPNs?

Well, the Great Firewall recognizes VPN packets and can decide to drop them, so you might not even be able to complete a login with the VPN server...

Perhaps it can, but it doesn't. Lot of people use VPNs in China.

"It depends". Last year in September they had the 70th anniversary of Communist Rule, and a few weeks before that connecting to VPN was a pain. For some reason there's also less restrictions e.g. if you're close to an airport, WhatsApp would work.

> breaking the great firewall would do wonders in encouraging Chinese citizens to stand up for themselves.

Not too sure. There are obvious fake negative news about China and racism comments from Fox News/YouTube. For Chinese people, it’ll be quite a mixed feeling to see toxic content on China, e.g. Wuhan virus, China must pay, etc. I’d say those content might come first to hurt their feelings.

As a native Chinese, it’s still emotionally tough for me to browse China related topic even on HN which is a much more principled forum. Let alone other media

Regardless of what Elon Musk does, very few SpaceX Starlink ground terminals will ever make it into China. Dissidents might smuggle in a few but that isn't going to crack open the Great Firewall on any widespread basis.

I’m taking part in this discussion from inside China. I teach 16 year olds who have Astrill subscriptions (It’s a VPN). The point of the GFW isn’t to stop information getting in or out. It’s to maintain control over what gets discussed and to ensure that all Chinese language cultural interchange of any importance is controlled by the CPC.

Yea you are probably right. But it makes it so that the CCP can’t actively control the ISP directly. Perhaps people will hack together ground terminals or something? Where there is a will, there is a way. In any event, just standing up to China and telling them that we won’t block out service to those who can access it is better than nothing.

You don't have to have any appetite for a land war to say you gotta free your concentration camps within 18 months or we have to come invade. It's a million people.

If it isn't a credible threat it won't be very effective. Gathering a coalition to embargo China would be a more credible threat, but even that requires some legwork to develop an alternative set of trading partners.

And you will be in the first wave of the invasion force? The one that takes 90+ % casualties?

The US had no problem with dead 500,000 Iraqi Children, why should they care for a million uighurs? What if China says they will release them if we take them in? Then suddenly there wouldn't be any uighurs but only Muslims and we "know" they are all "terrorists".

This statement smelled fishy to me as there are only 40M or so people in Iraq to begin with, so I Googled around a bit.

Despite politicians and talking heads claiming for years that either Desert Storm, UN sanctions, or both caused half a million child deaths, evidently most studies found that the child mortality rate in Iraq was unchanged throughout the 1990s.

https://psmag.com/news/the-iraq-sanctions-myth-56433

https://cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/Iraqi-death-toll-doe...

While this apparently fake statistic has mostly been used to criticize the US and UN, it seems Tony Blair used it to justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq, claiming the dead kids were Saddam's fault.

I guess this is why I don't read the papers much anymore.

Whether or not there really were so many dead children or not does not change anything in Albright's statement. If it serves the goals of the USA, they are willing to let 500.000 children die.

OK. But if you believed that lie, how many other lies do you believe?

Which lie? I refer only to her statement, which illustrates her character and that of the USA. The correct answer from her would have been, "it's not 500,000, but every dead child is one too many". They didn't care about 500.000 dead Iraqi children, period. If the children really died, is important to the children and their families not for the characterization.

Problem is, the concentration camps are just as real as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

You are correct but not in the way you think. WMD were found in Iraq and the concentration camps are real.

https://www.wired.com/2010/10/wikileaks-show-wmd-hunt-contin...

If you insist on calling something resembling juvenile detention centers a "concentration camps", then indeed, they do exist.

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