As Economy Falters, China Looks to Army for Answers | Hacker News Reader

As Economy Falters, China Looks to Army for Answers

foreignpolicy.com

10 pointsjseliger11 comments

Huge risks in shunting surplus energy into the forces. 20% youth unemployment drives hard but once bullets start flying at the Taiwan straights or the spratleys you have to distinguish between the Potemkin village solders and the ones who actually can do the job. Most of the risk is seaborne, and the navy can't handle that many more recruits, so you have army boys and girls and nothing to do with them: Vietnam is not a good idea, it's a corgi with sharp teeth. Dont pet the dog if you want to keep all your fingers. India well sure you CAN stop fighting with rakes and shovels but it's a long way west and for what? To sell internet to Bhutan?

And, bodybags are a bad look for the government. Serious numbers of Chinese now have family permanently overseas in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada and they don't only read qq.com and taobao and wechat. So, the whole "we own the story" dynamic here is weak too: people may not talk about tienanmen but they are talking about how Xi is missing his half of the social contract.

He governs at the will of the people. If cheap housing, jobs, food and android phones dry up, the will of the people dries up too. There are plenty of populists a few decades younger than Xi who can rally popular support and people discount how strong the provinces are: if they block the roads and food trucks into Beijing stop coming, the PLA has to fight its own grandma and cousins. Nobody likes this. Driving tanks over anonymous students in the square is one thing, but provincial troops beating up aunty and uncle another. Central government usually caves in to provincial backlash.

In any case it only buys you so much time: the people come out of their time in the PLA and then what?

Repurposing the forces for domestic construction projects might pay off, mass rural electrification, conversion out from coal, better roads and more rail. So WPA but on steroids.

Building out airstrips along the nine dash line won't soak up enough labour.

I was always under the impression that when they attack Taiwan, DPRK will move on South Korea (with Chinese Army as support). It's not just going to be a Naval War, it will be all out. The Chinese are almost encircled, they won't let it close on them. There will be war....that's a guarantee.

I suspect it’ll be Russia moving on old Soviet states, Iran on Israel and Iraq, North Korea on south, and China on Taiwan to create a global war on so many fronts the west can’t contain any of it. The goal will be less about defeating the west and more about breaking the image of unassailability and forcefully assert a multipolar world order.

God help us all. Although, it's been perpetual war in the middle east since forever, Africa is a shit show, and at least one of the nations you mention is independently nuclear armed so the outcome will be interesting to say the least.

Two of your proposed engagements would echo the iran-iraq conflict for body count because they will be contested on sea and land, and at great cost to the aggressor. The last time Korea was fought over approximately 5m troops were committed. I guess that soaks up a lot of china's unemployed youth but I doubt they will be happy about it.

There are no cheap victories here. Once the more modern stocks of weapons runs out, it's slings and arrows.

Henry Kissinger will fix it. Don't worry.

>I suspect it’ll be Russia moving on old Soviet states.

Russia doesn't want to rebuild the Soviet Union. They want to rebuild the Russian Empire. The Baltic countries, Finland, and (all of) Ukraine were parts of the Russian Empire and are more likely to be invaded that ex-USSR states like Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Putin sees himself as Peter the Great and not a "dirty little Georgian peasant" like Stalin.

The Chinese are no more encircled than any 1b population nation holding trillions of dollars in trade, debt and assets internationally. This is specious. They haven't conducted a war outside their immediate borders for a very long time, and they aren't massing troops at the edges. Daily ritualised flights over TW and sending ships to the islands down by the Phillipines is totally different to conducting invasive offensive warfare across land borders.

There are hundreds of satellites in orbit worldwide, Leo and geo. You think they could hide the materiel to conduct this kind of warfare?

Ukraine was warned by the US leading up to the invasion. They just refused to believe it.

When the US declares there is risk and brings people home from Korea and Taiwan, and moves the fleet into region for more than freedom of the seas and wargames manoeuvres i will believe there is sonething here.

If you want a canary in the coalmine, look at Vietnam. There's no love lost. If they muscle up, something is happening.

The Russian military buildup on Ukraine's borders was obvious and believable, no one had a hard time seeing the Russians were going to invade. What really had the Ukrainian regime on the precipice, and was a harder sell in the lead-up to Z-day, was the internal coup attempt that would be coupled with it.

>shunting surplus energy into the forces

The thesis of article is retarded because the opposite is happening considering PLA modernization under Xi dramatically reduced military personel (~10%) to trade quantity for quality needed to man modern platforms. Is there going to be more surplus technical talent flowing into PLA due to youth unemployment? Yes, which is good considering one of the primary impediments to PLA modernization since 2010s has been LACK of technical talent. Finally redirecting relevant tertiary overproduction that would prefer to go to civilian industry to PLA is good side effect. But we're talking about growing active personel from current 2M to 2.3-2.5M of 00s-10s under most aggressive expansion, not 3-4M of 80s-90s. Even absorbing 2M youth barely dents at the youth unemployment problem, absorbing a few 100k is rounding error. Meanwhile defense as % of GDP Is still ~2%, security states where defense drives substantial portion of economy is 10%+.

As you said the only human capita redirection that makes sense is DURING WAR, but it would mostly be drafting a few million youths who don't want to work in factories to finally crank out 100,000s of drones, missiles etc, while a few 100,000s drone operators and technicians bomb remote targets in their mainland bases. The primary media diet are going to be missile/gun cams of autonomous weapons blowing up TW wedding parties or Japanese LNG terminals interspliced with footage of PLA youths in their air conditioned drone booths. Ultimately, there simply isn't enough platforms to man/crew during modern war to meaningfully attrite PRC youth/population.

I remember an article stating that the best predictor or war for a country is the percentage of men of conscription age [these persons being most likely to be a social problem unless drafted and a social problem should they survive a war and return to a poor economy].

China today fits the bill perfectly: lots of young men of fighting age and a possible war (with Taiwan) in which to burn them up. Even if China lost a war with Taiwan it would be in better economic condition afterwards, especially if the war was limited to Taiwan and no nukes used. Reason is, afterwards China's unemployment rate would be significantly lower (b/c so many soldiers died) but their population nonetheless sufficient for growth with a male/female ratio more conducive to the formation of new families.

That seems like a really poorly thought out armchair logic, a war over Taiwan will not generate 10’s of millions of soldier dead. The worst would maybe be in the low hundred thousand and the net effect on a population of 1.3bn will be nil. The temptation for China’s leadership to use war to rally its population under nationalism is a far more likely reason for them to go to war, but looking at how Russia’s botched Ukraine invasion is going it could be quite risky.

It's a stupid argument because PRC unemployment is 5%, meaning youth get jobs eventually. There's just mismatch between jobs they want/think they deserve but they still eventually work. In mean time, high home ownership rate, high % of kids live at home, low student debt means youth can just chill / fuck around / be unemployed for a bit to explore options.

In terms of attrition, at PRC scale, even with shit TFR generate way too many bodies to burn for modern war, hence arguments that demographic crisis would eat away at PRC war making potential even more retarded. And most of the wars on PRC horizon are air/naval, requires very technical personel that are expensive to train. Which is why PLA modernization had dramatic personal reductions over the last few years. This piece is extra stupid because is it assumes increase in defense spending, which btw is still modest ~2%, is correlated to increased personel, when most of the money is going into hardware/acquisitions. A country with actual serious security delimma would spend much higher % of GDP on defense. PRC in the 80s was spending over 6%, or US/USSR during cold war was 6-10% for US, and 10-20% for USSR.

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