What China Wants and Why | Hacker News Reader

What China Wants and Why

unchartedterritories.tomaspueyo.com

94 pointscolinprince46 comments

> But I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point in the future, the Han started a systematic Han-ization of Tibet.

Well, practically speaking, it already started a long time ago, although the colonization wasn't as intensive (after all, not many people would find the Himalayan conditions agreeable). Also, even Tibetans themselves speak less and less Tibetan, everything is in Chinese, your school, your job, everything except the language your grandfather spoke, so you basically become a Chinese.

I lived in Lhasa with my ex girlfriend for a while (2016~2017). In a strange occasion via a Tibetan friend of mine I met a British photographer in his 60s/70s who was one of the few foreigners granted permanent residency in Tibet. (He showed me his residency ID and it was a yellow-ish paper issued in the 1980s.)

Anyway long story short, he jokingly told me that my friend (who's a doctor in a Tibetan hospital) is one of the few remaining good men in Lhasa as most local (middle-age) men just drink and play ཤོ (Sho, a Tibetan gambling dice game) everyday.

This reminded me of the theory that the increase in opium addiction during Qing dynasty was partly due to how deteriorating and none-spiritually-inspiring the late Chinese imperial system was. People were not motiviated in the first place so a regular activity that relieves stress became more of a coping mechanism.

Social-economically, Lhasa does become more and more like another modern Chinese city. Less and less spiritualism can be found in the local's acitivties. Everything is more and more money-oriented. (You can still see Tibetan pilgrimages near Potala Palace but these are not the local Lhasa population).

As a programmer and someone who studies Buddhism, I'm actually surprised how few Tibetan programmers there are. I have always seen coding as a form of meditation.

Since Tibet is under Chinese ruling now (whether we like it or not), I do hope there are more Chinese/Tibetan intuitives to introduce programming to meditation practitioners.

>Anyway long story short, he jokingly told me that my friend (who's a doctor in a Tibetan hospital) is one of the few remaining good men in Lhasa as most local (middle-age) men just drink and play ཤོ (Sho, a Tibetan gambling dice game) everyday.

This is spot on. Along with lots of other benefits and money directly or indirectly flowing into their hands. Keep them entertained, well fed.

This is a way over simplistic view. It's not a CIV game where someone decides what "China/Han" should do for all these thousands of years. People's minds change, sometimes the people themselves change, accidents happen. You don't have to find some hidden "truth" that goes back 3000 years to explain what China today does.

This same over simplistic view is used to explain why Russia expanded so aggressively to the west and east, and holds its client states so tightly.

There is a nice grassy plain from Poland all the way through to the Caucasus (with the Urals as a somewhat permeable barrier). Armies on the move love grassy plains.

If your objective is to protect Moscow, you need to control that grassy plain.

Edit: ref: Prisoners of Geography: Ten Maps That Tell You Everything You Need To Know About Global Politics by Tim Marshall.

"Geography is destiny" can be a useful lens through which to view global politics.

> There is a nice grassy plain from Poland all the way through to the Caucasus

That would be the Pripyat Marshes? That is notoriously inhospitable terrain for armies.

Pripyat Marshes are not a big stretch of the North European Plain. You can move massive armies through the northern route along the Baltic coast, or the southern route through Ukraine.

They're not really a big obstacle, given the two land invasions that came from the West in the 20th century.

> given the two land invasions

Both unsuccessful. But I note your observation that the Pripyat is not as large as my crap geography led me to think.

Last I checked, the Germans crushed the Russians in WW1 while treating that front as a defensive action while the real war was fought on the Western front.

The Polish invasion in 1920 was pretty effective too until it wasn't, same for Napoleon, etc. Point being its a big corridor for large troop movements.

Came for a similar sentiment: China is a billion people with a billion wishes. There are many clusters that conspire to achieve many different things, often opposites

> But I wouldn’t be surprised if, at some point in the future, the Han started a systematic Han-ization of Tibet.

The systematic "Han-ization" of Tibet has been ongoing since its annexation in 1950. The main cities like Lhasa are already majority Han.

Also, calling the Han "uniform" when they speak several dozen mutually incomprehensible languages and in general display the same breadth of geographical and cultural diversity as (say) Europe seems a bit of a stretch.

This is apologetic nonsense. China is a nation with nuclear armament and a population 1.4 billion. Nobody can realistically attack and control them, let alone their direct neighbors.

What China does is what CCP wants: to stay in power.

China is incredibly strong, but in the last century it suffered from terrible invasions. Yes, it probably can overcome any attack but it makes sense for a strategic thinker to worry that another power would try to attack it again.

Think about the US.. Is the US really under threat of invasion? No. But there is a realistic historical concern about a surprise attack that animates US defense policy.

Getting attacked and winning is not that great if the attack has terrible costs. China suffered incredibly in the twentieth century.

[edited for grammar]

> China is incredibly strong

yeah, as Ming,Urss,Plc were strong. Lets wait the post covid era and the burst of real estate bubble

The US being "invaded" is far less likely. Canada is its ally / vassal. Mexico itself isn't terribly strong.

If anyone attempts to springboard via either would serves as early warning for the US and they'd take the battle there.

There are also not a lot of coastal countries, other than Cuba, so last time someone parked some nukes there in response to the US parking nukes in Turkey, the world wondered if it's all over for 13 days.

Contrast that with China, there are more than enough American bases from SK, Japan, Philippines, Indonesia, Guam. Just from the coast alone.

I think that literally the last thing the PRC needs to worry about is a land invasion. The US is their strongest rival, but it has 1/5 the population, and its technological edge is not what it once was. In some other thread, someone mentioned that US military doctrine is to not attack any defended position unless they have at least a 3 to 1 advantage. As long as the PRC stays militarily cohesive, any invading army is going to get annihilated. Plus the PRC has nukes, which is a further deterrent.

IMHO, the PRC's (really the CCP's) biggest strategic threat is domestic, and they're starting to transition into a more imperialistic/expansionist mode to make good on revanchist sentiment.

Mexico is also a close ally, although one the US has treated very badly at times

There is no realistic historical concern of the US being invaded since WW1, arguably some time before as well.

> China is surrounded by foes on its coast. This is why it works so hard to expand its territorial waters.

I would argue the exact opposite. China works so hard to expand its territorial waters. This is why China is surrounded by foes on its coast.

That’s true too. As you expand your buffer, somewhere else becomes the frontier that needs a buffer of its own.

Silly to ignore the hundreds of billions of dollars worth of fish and oil that everyone in the region is staking a claim to in the South China Sea.

Absolutely no one cared in the slightest about it up until vast tracts of oil were discovered and fishing rights in the region started to actually be enforced by militaries.

Or maybe it's the other way? "Oil" is thrown around to get Western "intellectuals" interested..? Maybe China wasn't strong all these years and they were biding their time?

"The threat came from this direction last time. We need to secure this frontier" is convincing enough for me.

https://cimsec.org/chinas-claim-spratly-islands-just-mistake...

South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Philipines and other were already firmly under the American umbrella before China expanded it's territorial waters.

The policy of containment of Communism, against Soviet Union, and China, has been around a lot longer than China's territorial waters activity.

Let's conveniently forget the 100 years of the Yuan dynasty ruled by Mongols and the 300 years of the Quing dynasty ruled by the Manchu and pretends that the history of China is the history of the Han. Why would anyone question that?

It's really hard to take the article seriously given how much it oversimplifies its premises.

The article does mention both of these facts.

In a way, yes, the article alludes to it in order to prove that China was threatened by the nothern tribes but that's a weird way to qualify 400 years of history.

> "The heartland has always been threatened by the nomadic tribes that live in the north. These tribes weren’t just small groups on sporadic raids. Some were dangerous enough to conquer and rule China: the Mongols ruled for a century, starting in the 1280s, and the Manchus for nearly 250 years, starting around 1650."

Especially considering this comes after this - "Another way to put it: China is the Han, and the only thing they care about is protecting the Han" - which it direcly contradicts.

Ok, I'm replying a second time because I kept being downvoted. I guess my first answer is not clear enough.

The article doesn't address these points. It mentions both facts as an exemple of invasions like if they were footnotes. That's four hundred years of history, more than the whole USA history. So yes, it does indeed conveniently forget them. Both periods had a significant impact on China which the article sweeps under the rug because it would go against the wrong story it is trying to sell.

Did China become ethnically Mongol or Manchurian in those 400 years? They're still Han.

The plate tectonics part of this article is a stretch. But other than that, this article seems well researched.

Whether one agrees with it or not is decided by one's position on "geographic determinism".

This article talks an awful lot about this hypothetical line, but for the Chinese themselves, the key distinction is between North and South.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_and_southern_China

Can't take this serious. The "Hu Line" is massively inconsistent in the various maps used here!

In the topographical one, Sichuan is west of the Hu-Line, while in others it is east of it. Make up your mind.

Don't fuddle with the line just to tell a story.

Hu Huanyong, the man behind the concept, never defined the boundary as a straight line. Rather, a chain of city network of which Chinese culture divided east-west demographically due to availability of fertile plain that support population growth.

In your mentioned region, Sichuan, lies Chengdu plain which border the mountain range. Making the demographic line also meander along from Beichuang to Songpan to Chengdu. There's another meander along Hanzong further north, and Yunnan in the south.

Then there is Gansu, that projection westward of the "line", which has had its moment in Chinese economic history (long ago).

Few things in that article make any sense. Buffer regions? Who exactly is going to start a land invasion of China? And a land invasion through Tibet, the roof of the world?

Don't think about it as an invasion, think about it as a front.

There have been historical times when the US-- essentially strategically secure-- has had a front to fight with Canada (1812) or Mexico (1849). Most recently, the civil war in Mexico (1917) had a large number of US troops fighting along the border right before the start of the US entry in the First World War.

(the Germans realized this was the strategic weakness of the US, which prompted the Zimmerman telegram.)

In a similar way China can be dragged down by wars in Vietnam, Burma, Korea, or India / Himalayas. Will it lose? No. But like the US and Mexico, a war at your border can make projection of power infeasible.

What I was trying to say was that the author completely misses the point about crackdowns in Tibet and Xinjiang. This has nothing to do with external threats to the Han population. And everything to do with internal threats to the integrity of the empire instead. Runaway provinces must be kept in order. That's how it has been for centuries.

I am not expert but I read that there were Ughyur uprisings. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinjiang_conflict

Also, I read that the US/China competition includes a US containment strategy. https://cejiss.org/the-united-states-china-containment-strat...

> I am not expert but I read that there were Ughyur uprisings.

They must have said that pork is haram!

The US didn't have a standing army in the war of 1812, there's no comparison to today

Germany didn't realize anything.

WW1 Germany were extremely foolish wrt the Zimmermann telegram. Mexico had absolutely no hope of seriously fighting America at that point and the only thing the Telegram did or could do was to bring America into the war against Germany. And then when British spies leaked it Germany admitted it and America declared war on Germany

These matter, I think. WWI started in large part because European empire nations all had a game of chess in mind, about who could gain what (and who could lose o it FOMO style) if there’s a conflict without them in it. Never mind they castrated themselves in the process and set up for another disaster 20 years on.

In any bureaucracy there’s a kernel that focuses on O(50y) strategies and I find it likely this is how they see the world. Whether that’s genius or self-propelling war mongering, I’m not sure.

The thing is, if India were to start threatening China in 20 years time, the time to prepare for it is now. Responding to threats is best done before they appear. You cannot magic out firefighters and their infrastructure as a fire starts.

And if anyone is long-term-focused, surely that’s China.

The only thing that makes sense is a view through geography.

Author neglects to think what might happen with climate change. Let's assume that the rising sea levels don't necessarily push back the coast, but it could start salinating the land and cause a lot of issues with food supply.

TL;DR Everything China does, like semi-genocide of Uyghurs, is only to protect its agriculturally rich heartland.

No is to keep the CCP afloat, they could care shit about heartland

That's not a TL;DR of the article.

More sinophobic Western-media fueled propaganda, ignorant of historical and political context beyond what you might read in a US tabloid.

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