Jeff, Your academy mind needed...

[TheSage]

How smart is it to keep enabling China's immoral slave labor practices as they're using those trade dollars to grow their military for use against us?

Most people are probably too stupid get a grasp on this situation. Maybe you can help us out?

[Hobbit]

It's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind.' Few people actually pay attention to where their stuff comes from or where the money goes after they buy it, which is why they don't really care.

Remember, the first crucial step William Wilberforce took towards the abolition of slavery in the UK was to make sure people actually knew what kind of conditions existed aboard slave ships.

[OCA]

Isolationism is the new saviour of America!

[TheSage]

Isolationism is the new saviour of America!

Actually, I'm not a strict isolationist. I just believe in limiting trade to partners with a similar basic morality, so the inhumanity of slave or prison labor is not rewarded, and our workers are not put out of business due to the "cost" of humane treatment.

I also believe security consideration should play a role, and we shouldn't allow our trade dollars to fund armies against us.

Our china relationship is stupid on so many levels. Do you have anything besides false characterizations of my position or hackneyed neocon tropes?

[TheSage]

It's a case of 'out of sight, out of mind.' Few people actually pay attention to where their stuff comes from or where the money goes after they buy it, which is why they don't really care.

Remember, the first crucial step William Wilberforce took towards the abolition of slavery in the UK was to make sure people actually knew what kind of conditions existed aboard slave ships.

Yes. But blaming the people is a copout. Historically trade policy has always been set at the federal level. We saw fit to impose restrictions over Elephant Ivory, South African Apartheid, Saddam Husseins actions. But on china, now it's all the people's fault? I call bullshit. Though I fully support educating people, something other than full support of the chinese totalitarians from our government might also be helpful.

[OCA]

Actually, I'm not a strict isolationist. I just believe in limiting trade to partners with a similar basic morality, so the inhumanity of slave or prison labor is not rewarded, and our workers are not put out of business due to the "cost" of humane treatment.

I also believe security consideration should play a role, and we shouldn't allow our trade dollars to fund armies against us.

Our china relationship is stupid on so many levels. Do you have anything besides false characterizations of my position or hackneyed neocon tropes?

You have any proof that China is gearing up yheir military specifically for war with America?

[TheSage]

You have any proof that China is gearing up yheir military specifically for war with America?

You saying their intentions are pure?

[TheSage]

Boy, that shut you right the fuck up, didn't it, senor douchebag?

[OCA]

You saying their intentions are pure?

Could be? You saying they aren't?

Still waiting on the proof of specific military buildup for war with America.

[OCA]

Boy, that shut you right the fuck up, didn't it, senor douchebag?

Busy beating the fuck out of you in Cosa Nostra.

[TheSage]

Busy beating the fuck out of you in Cosa Nostra.

Not really. You're just a misguided semi-socialized criminal, trying to justify your disease.

[darin]

Boy, that shut you right the fuck up, didn't it, senor douchebag?

This is not the cage - any more outbursts like that close the thread.

[TheSage]

This is not the cage - any more outbursts like that close the thread.

ok.

[Baron Von Esslingen]

Could be? You saying they aren't?

Still waiting on the proof of specific military buildup for war with America.

Here's one:

BEIJING, March 4 — China announced its biggest increase in defense spending in five years on Sunday, a development that quickly prompted the United States to renew its calls for more transparency from the Chinese military about the scope and intent of its continuing, rapid arms buildup.

Jiang Enzhu, a spokesman for the National People’s Congress, the Communist Party-controlled national legislature, said China’s military budget would rise this year by 17.8 percent to roughly 350 billion yuan, or just under $45 billion.

“We must increase our military budget, as it is important to national security,” Mr. Jiang said at a news conference. “China’s military must modernize. Our overall defenses are weak.”

But China’s military modernization efforts, particularly its drive to develop advanced weaponry, have been raising concern from Washington to Tokyo to New Delhi, where officials are worried that the buildup could be as much offensive as defensive. In January, China set off fears of an arms race in space when it successfully tested an antisatellite missile that destroyed one its own aging weather satellites. A month earlier, the People’s Liberation Army began deploying the country’s first state-of-the-art jet fighter, the J-10.

And this from a few years ago:

BEIJING – Shi Jin wears a jean jacket, has razor-cropped hair, and seems gravely earnest. An officer in the People's Liberation Army, he was wooed from a Beijing vocational college three years ago by recruiters who talked up his technical aptitude - and his patriotism.

In the past decade, China has undergone two military high-tech reforms designed to give the country a modern fighting force. To sustain that progress, it must attract many more gung-ho young engineers like Shi, who spends most of his time working on an "informational" revolution that planners hope will one day allow them to "see" a battlefield with the same depth as the US military. "I will not do any direct fighting if there is a war, but I am contributing on the technical side," he says. "We are all needed in the new Army."

China's desire, often stated, is to be a great nation. Many in Beijing feel that the country's natural right is to be the major power in Asia. But China has rarely been given high marks in global military annals. It has a "brown water" Navy that doesn't navigate open seas. It can't project power by sending forces abroad. It has relied on states like Russia for jet fighters, cruise missiles, and other advanced weapons.

Yet it now appears China is methodically changing this equation.

In a surprisingly short time, China has accomplished two feats. One, it has focused its energy and wealth on creating an army within an army. It has devoted huge amounts of capital to create a small high-tech army within its old 2.2 million-member rifle and shoe-leather force.

The specialty of this modern force, about 15 percent of the PLA, is to conduct lightning attacks on smaller foes, using an all-out missile attack designed to paralyze, and a modern sea and air attack coordinated by high-tech communications. In other words, this new modern force is designed to attack Taiwan.

Second, China has taken painful but successful steps to create a "defense industrial base," or weapons-building capability. The PLA has improved its factory quality control and its ability to adapt foreign technology. It is bringing an indigenous small-wing F-10 fighter off the production line, and it is moving rapidly toward a "blue water" Navy with ships built in China.

Indeed, the past three years have yielded the impressive fruits of a modernization campaign started in the late 1990s: A nuclear attack submarine, the 093, launches in months; presumably it will be capable one day of firing satellite-guided cruise missiles that can blast a cruiser or carrier. China now has more accurate ICBMS, a host of land- and sea-based cruise missiles, and about 400 Su-27 and Su-30 Russian fighter jets it didn't have before.

"Do the old shibboleths still apply - that the Chinese defense industry is backward, poor, and low-quality?" asks Evan Medeiros, an analyst with the RAND Corp. in Washington, D.C.

"No," he says. "It seems China has turned the corner.... For the first time in 20 years, the PLA has adopted reforms that make sense. They adopted, and implemented, and are really learning quickly." Medeiros is lead author of a 300-page RAND study, "New Directions for China's Defense Industry," released this month.

"The PLA has undergone a revolution in communications," says James Mulvenon, of the Center for Intelligence Research and Analysis in Washington, D.C. "They have gone from dirt to wireless in a generation."

Taking China's power seriously

Such progress is catching attention, respect, and concern in the Pentagon. At Honolulu's US Pacific Command, and in military circles in Taiwan, Guam, and Tokyo, it is universally accepted that China is on its way to becoming a military challenge in Asia. US planners no longer talk dismissively of China's power or, potentially, its reach. In a key shift, US ability to quickly and easily defend Taiwan in an attack is no longer a given. Chinese cruise missiles are creating a more lethal environment in the Taiwan Straits.

This summer, Gen. Zhu Chenghu, dean of China's National Defense University, raised the subject of weapons of mass destruction, which China rarely mentions, in connection with Taiwan. Should US forces aid Taiwan in a war, he told bewildered US visitors, "Americans will have to be prepared that hundreds ... of cities will be destroyed by Chinese" nuclear weapons.

Ignore the Chinese, with their influx of American manufacturing money, at your own peril. They are still communists despite the changes in their economy.

[TheSage]

Thanks for getting involved, baron. these neocons now believe totalitarianism is cool, as long their positions in the STS (service to self) hierarchy are secure. So sad.