Hacker News Reader

Comment by giorgosts | Hacker News Reader

US-centric approach. How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves. How about if eg. COSCO buys out the port operators around the globe. How about if they decide to protect their shipping routes with their military so that they carry on with providing goods to the globe. Globalization is still in the best interests of China, even if the US decides to abandon it.

View on HN

> How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves.

Zeihan argues that this is impossible on demographic grounds. The after-effects of the One Child Policy and the mass migration from farms to cities ensures a lack of soldiers, a greying population, and economic/military decline. Throw in Xi's unprecedented cult of personality that prevents anyone reporting bad news as the icing on the cake.

The US has nothing to fear from China, so Zeihan says.

Yeah he also predicted China and Germany were going to collapse a decade ago. He makes a lot of strong claims but does not show his work. So he's about as accurate as astrology, when he's right he's not necessarily right because of any great internal understanding.

This arguement is questionable because the amount of bodies and resources it takes to cultivate and maintain modern tier1 military is not substantial at PRC scale. Even PRC with South Korea TFR (worlds worst) will be generating millions of new births, more than US generates via births + immigration. Or that current PLA budget is ~2% and major powers including PRC has gone up to 7%+ during periods of "peaceful" competition. There isn't a credible scenario within this century where PRC will lack bodies or resources to field a military that is rapidly closing gap and will likely contest US for global interests within short/medium term.

China's navy can't go further than 1,000 miles from the shore. They can't protect shipping anywhere outside of their coast.

Currently.

China imports over 80% of its oil — it does not have the resources to be a deep-water navigation power.

That seems like a compelling reason for China to become a deep-water power (if it is not already): protect its oil-shipping interests.

https://www.worldometers.info/oil/china-oil/#oil-reserves https://www.worldometers.info/oil/us-oil/#oil-reserves

Looks like the US and China import about the same quantity of oil. That doesn't contradict what you said, but I think it does diminish its significance.

Importing oil doesn't necessarily say anything about use. The US imports a lot of oil to refine and then export as petroleum products. Countries don't just burn crude oil in a giant bucket to keep warm.

Soon enough though

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-china-launches...

1,000 miles from the nearest naval base.

The Chinese base in Djibouti for example, is larger than the US base there.

What the US misses is that China doesn't necessarily want a fleet of expensive (and very vulnerable) carriers floating around. It would much rather have islands and coastal bases around important choke points. Sure, the price you pay is force projection, but the benefit is that it's a much more sustainable military.

PLANs has conducting antipiracy missions in gulf of Aden for over a decade now. Their bread and butter frigate type 54 has done port visits across the world. Most 2016 modernization has massively increased UNREP / auxillary fleet. PLAN has enough hulls and capabilities to protect at least her shipping, there's simply no reason to while uncle Sam foots the bill.

And 80% of their oil imports from ME go through a lot of countries that could stop the flow.

> US-centric approach. How about if China decides to fill the power vacuum that the isolationist US leaves. How about if they decide to protect their shipping routes with their military so that they carry on with providing goods to the globe.

That already covered by option 2 in the op ("2 The Rise Of China"). It's not a very interesting option to discuss when it comes to shipping (e.g. everything stays the same, except Chinese warships substituted for American).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com