Army University Press
Published 29 Jul 2022This film examines the Chinese military. Subject matter experts discuss Chinese history, current affairs, and military doctrine. Topics range from Mao, to the PLA, to current advances in military technologies. “Near Peer: China” is the first film in a four-part series exploring America’s global competitors.
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November 28, 2022
Near Peer: China (Understanding the Chinese Military)
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November 25, 2022
Our old, comfortable geopolitical certainties are becoming less comfortable and less certain
In The Line, Matt Gurney discusses a few of the things he heard at the recent Halifax International Security Forum:
First, though, I wanted to explore that grim feeling that swept over me as Forum president Peter Van Praagh stepped up to the lectern and opened the formal proceedings with a review of the geopolitical situation, and how we got here.
From his prepared remarks (slightly trimmed):
Last year … we marked the 20th anniversary of 9/11. It was not an auspicious anniversary. Just months earlier, the United States and its allies withdrew their troops from Afghanistan and discarded the hopes and dreams of so many Afghans … [it] was a low point for Afghanistan and indeed, for all of us. … It was the culmination of 20 years of good intentions. And bad results:
The decisions made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, North Korea going nuclear, Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the Great Recession, Iran, the Arab Spring and the Syrian civil war, the surge of refugees — more than at any time in human history, the successful rise of populist politics, the higher than necessary death toll from coronavirus, Hong Kong losing its freedoms, January 6 and its wake, climate-change disasters, and our withdrawal from Afghanistan …
It was a tragic end to a 20-year tragic era.
That’s a pretty depressing list. Right?
As a student of history, I always strive to avoid too much recency bias. Most of the things you hear described as “unprecedented” aren’t anything remotely close to that. The general public has a memory of a few years — maybe a generation. We definitely do face some novel challenges today, but we are still better off than most generations in human history, and it’s not even close.
Still. Van Praagh offered a bleak if concise catalogue of tragedy and struggle. And there are some notable absences. The Iraq War, for instance, is probably worth noting as a specific event, not just part of the Sept. 11th fallout. Perhaps the Libyan intervention as well. Some of China’s more aggressive actions, especially at home, also come to mind.
But as I mulled over that terse version of early-21st-century history, something else jumped out at me: most of those threats were things that happened far away and to other people.
I mentioned recency bias above, so it’s only fair to note a different bias: “far away” and “other people” depends on the vantage point, doesn’t it? Every event listed above was a direct and local tragedy for the people caught in the middle of it, who don’t have the luxury of viewing these events at a comfortable remove, the way the West generally has.
The pandemic, of course, did not spare the West. Nor did the Great Recession, the toll of a changing climate and the populist upheavals roiling the democracies. Those are local problems for us all.
The military challenges, though, are getting more and more local, aren’t they? North Korea seemed far away once; today it’s using the Pacific Ocean’s vital sealanes for target practice and providing some of the munitions being used against civilians in Europe. Libya, Syria and the other migration crises posed real societal and political challenges for Europe, but nothing like what the continent has been bracing for in the event of either crippling energy shortages or an outright escalation into a military conflict, potentially nuclear conflict, with Russia. China’s growing ambitions and willingness to use force pose direct challenges to the West and its prosperity; American financier Ken Griffin recently made the headlines when he observed that if Chinese military action were to cut off or disrupt American access to Taiwanese semiconductor chips, the immediate impact on the U.S. economy would be between five and 10 per cent of GDP. That would be a Great Depression-sized bodyblow, and it could happen almost instantly and without much warning.
Pondering Van Praagh’s list later on, it occurred to me that the more remote threats to core Western security and economic interests were also more remote in time. The closer Van Praagh’s summation of crises came to the present, the more immediate and near to us they became.
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November 20, 2022
Printing books in China is economical, but also allows China to censor what you print
In the latest SHuSH newsletter, Kenneth Whyte explains why some of Sutherland House’s books are now being printed in China … and illustrates some of the risks of having them printed there:
We decided last spring to offshore some of our book printing to China (see “The Crisis in Book Publishing”, SHuSH 138). It was not a difficult decision. The difference in price is enormous.
For instance. Next week we’re releasing a book called The Prison Lady: True Stories and Life Lessons from Both Sides of the Bars by Phyllis Taylor. Presales have been strong. We need to print more copies. We can’t go back to the original Chinese printer, which charged us $2.08/copy, because it takes months to get books from Guangzhou to Toronto. We need the books now. So we shopped around. The best North American price we could find is $4.39/copy.
Why is that a problem? The book is a paperback priced at $22.95. The retailer takes half that, leaving us $11.50. After our distributor and sales agent take their fees and we pay the author her royalty, we’re left with $6.32 out of which we pay for editing, cover art, design, overhead, and shipping. And printing. If the printing bill comes to $4.39 a copy, we make no money.
Those of the economics of a straightforward paperback. A friend of mine recently called about a quote from a Canadian printer for a full-color illustrated book that came in at $15.31/copy. It seemed steep, so I sent the exact same specs to a Chinese printer who quoted $5.27/copy.
[…]
Our initial plan was to print four of our spring books in China (we’re also using printers in Turkey and India). The files for the first two of the four were delivered last month. On Nov. 7, we received the following email from the printer:
After more detailed review of some of the written content of these two books, there are some significant censorship concerns related to certain references to Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China.
As you may be aware, China vehemently enforces a “one China” principle in which Hong Kong and Taiwan are part of the “one China”. Therefore, China censorship will not allow any reference to either Hong Kong or Taiwan as its own country.
With this in mind, there is some “sensitive wording” on page 46 of The Big Exit that would not be possible to print in China due to it implying that Hong Kong and Taiwan are “countries”.
The Big Exit isn’t about politics. It’s a book about end-of-life choices or, more particularly, how we can dispose of the remains of a billion boomers over the next several decades without wrecking the planet (conventional burial and cremation are both environmentally reckless). The censorship issue arose in this paragraph, which the printer helpfully circled in bright red:
I grant that while Hong Kong still shows up in a lot of data as its own country, it is technically an administrative region of China. Taiwan’s independence is also disputed by China. Against China’s claims, we have the Frank Zappa rules of diplomacy which recognize as “a real country” any place with its own beer and its own airline. Taiwan and Hong Kong both qualify.
In any event, we are now printing The Big Exit in India.
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October 1, 2022
American Empire, question mark
An interview with Niall Ferguson in the Dartmouth Review by Lintaro Donovan revisits Ferguson’s 2005 book Colossus in light of what has happened during the nearly two decades since it was published:
TDR: In your 2005 book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire, you advance the thesis that the United States is an empire in denial and that such denial will be our undoing, both domestically and abroad. Does that thesis still hold in the world of 2022?
NF: I think it has withstood quite well the test of nearly 20 years. If you recall, the analysis was that the United States was trying essentially an imperial enterprise in Afghanistan and Iraq and that there were three deficits that were going to make it fail. There was the manpower deficit, because people really did not want to spend that much time in Afghanistan and Iraq – hence the short tours of duty. There was the fiscal deficit, which was already obviously a problem and has only gotten worse. And then there was the attention deficit. The prediction was that the US [BREAK] public would become disillusioned with these endeavors just as it became disillusioned with Vietnam. And if anything, the surprising thing is how long it took to get out of Afghanistan.
I wouldn’t have predicted it would be 2021. I expected it sooner than that. But I think that the overall framing of the US as an empire-in-denial works because it’s so deeply rooted in the way Americans think about themselves and the language that their leaders use. What was odd was that some neo-conservatives back then really were willing to say, “We’re an empire now”.
Of course, it kind of blew them up politically so that they’re now an irrelevant bunch of never-Trumpers. So I feel that book stood up remarkably well to the test of time. I’d stick by it.
TDR: What I’m hearing from your answer is that our denial is sort of endemic to what Americans are and that there were issues that were already present before the invasion of Iraq. Do you think that there’s any personality in American public life today who might be able to get us out of our denial and fix these issues that you’re talking about?
NF: No, because I think, if anything, the kind of aversion to empire has grown on both the left and the right. And so you have different versions of it.
Those wings, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party and the Trumpian wing of the Republican Party, are much stronger than they were then. I don’t think we are going to see any revival until the US suffers the kind of attack that it suffered at Pearl Harbor or 9/11.
Until there’s a punch landed, what will happen is that the US will try to exercise power through indirect means like sanctions or getting Ukrainians to fight Russians or arming the Taiwanese. And, in that sense, I think we’ve reverted to a Cold War playbook without calling it a cold war.
The problem is that we aren’t as far ahead [of China] economically and technologically as we were relative to the Soviet Union. If you’re doing a cold war with China, you have to reckon with quite a formidable antagonist, but that I think is where we are.
It’s amazing how far there is now a bipartisan consensus that China’s the problem. The continuities from the Trump to Biden Administration are very striking in that respect. I don’t see that changing until something bad happens, whether it’s a showdown over Taiwan that the US actually loses, or the collapse of Ukraine, which I guess is a conceivable if now unlikely scenario, or another terrorist attack, though I think that’s not especially likely these days.
The other thing to watch out for is the Middle East. Basically, as in the Cold War, you’ve got the potential for a crisis to happen. The problem for the US is that it’s quite overstretched. If there’s a crisis in Eastern Europe and a crisis in the Far East, say Taiwan, and one in the Middle East, then the US is going to be completely unable to respond to all of those.
It’s already in the position that it can’t give Stinger and Javelin missiles to the Taiwanese, because they’ve already been given to the Ukrainians and we can’t actually make that many new ones. It feels like we are doing Cold War but with quite a bit more overstretch than was true certainly in the 1980s.
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August 6, 2022
Britain’s woke Stasi | The spiked podcast
spiked
Published 5 Aug 2022The spiked team discusses the rise of Britain’s thoughtpolice, Nancy Pelosi’s Taiwan trip and Beyoncé’s act of self-censorship.
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July 5, 2022
The Republic of China’s “Porcupine strategy”
Originally published in the New York Sun and reposted by the New English Review, Conrad Black believes any attempted amphibious invasion of Taiwan will become the worst invasion outcome since the Athenians assaulted Syracuse in 414-413 BC:
Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.
There has for some time been a good deal of flippant talk about a Communist Chinese invasion of the Republic of China on Taiwan, as if that would be a simple military undertaking. It seems to be inadequately appreciated that Taiwan has thought of little else for many years, and is, unlike Ukraine, a very prosperous and technologically sophisticated country that is armed to the teeth with the most advanced American weaponry, and has plotted out a defense in depth that is called its “porcupine strategy”.
Though it is probably accidental, “porcupine” is the word applied to Switzerland by Adolf Hitler in 1941, when, after careful analysis by the German General Staff, he concluded Swiss defenders would inflict a much larger number of casualties on a German invasion force than could possibly be justified by the occupation of the country. (It can be lamented that more recent Western strategists did not apply the same test to Afghanistan.)
Comparisons with Ukraine are inapplicable, other than the fanatical determination of the defenders. Most obviously, Taiwan is not only an island but the Formosa Straits are three to four times as wide as the English Channel from the southern British ports to the beaches of Normandy. The People’s Republic of China would have no choice but to attack amphibiously as they could not possibly imagine success with fewer than 500,000 combat soldiers and no force remotely as large could be parachuted onto Taiwan.
A strike force of 500,000 would probably have to be supplemented by a follow-up force at least as large, all conveyed in a huge armada of slow and vulnerable craft. Taiwan has been supplied with the precise ground and air-launched missiles that the Ukrainians have used to such deadly effect in the Black Sea, including the sinking of the Russian flagship, the heavy missile cruiser Moskva.
Taiwan has a front-line Air Force of about 300 of the latest fully equipped fighter and interceptor aircraft that along with shore batteries could rain a dense and prolonged fire of missiles upon any invasion fleet. Such a fleet, even in the best of weather, would plod through open water for at least ten hours. They would be sitting, or at least slowly moving, ducks throughout that journey. It brings to mind the conclusion of one of Churchill’s Demosthenean addresses in the autumn of 1940: “We are still awaiting the long-promised invasion; so are the fishes.”
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February 27, 2022
“Putin finally called our bluff. The question to me is when and if Xi will decide to do the same”
Andrew Sullivan on what Winston Churchill referred to as “the historic life-interests of Russia”, the inability (and unwillingness) of the western nations to do more than send hopes and prayers to Ukraine, and the parallels between the Russia-Ukraine situation and the China-Taiwan potential conflict:
Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.
… in one crucial sense, Putin has already won a victory. A nuclear-armed great power has invaded and occupied a neighboring country in Europe, and there is nothing anyone else has been able to do to stop it. Many in the West assumed Putin wouldn’t go that far — surmising that international law, universal condemnation, economic sanctions, and the lack of any serious threat from Ukraine to Russia would restrain him. But he has called our bluff. He has even hinted at Russia’s nuclear capacity to intimidate other states from intervening. And so we have a precedent. Ukraine is a Russian possession. A fact on the ground. All we have been able to do is watch.
All of which brings us to what seems to me to be the larger dimension of this clash: how it will resonate in Beijing and Taiwan. With apologies to Mitt Romney, China is easily the greater geostrategic challenge. And the parallels with Russia are as striking as they are unnerving. China sees Taiwan as part of its national identity in a similar way to how Russia sees Ukraine as part of its. And we are committed to the defense of Taiwan the way we have committed to the defense of Ukraine: kinda, but not really. In the face of this underlying Western ambiguity, the fall of Kiev is news that Xi will be watching closely.
The parallels are not exact, but nonetheless striking. Taiwan is next door to and deeply entangled with China in its history and culture, just as Ukraine is uniquely entangled with Russia. Seeing Taiwan and China (like Ukraine and Russia) as simply random sovereign states with a right to self-determination under international law is correct, so far as it goes. It’s also moral — as majorities of both Ukrainians and especially Taiwanese want independence and have constructed nascent democracies in the wake of autocracy.
But the nationalist passion Russia feels about Ukraine and China feels about Taiwan is real, visceral, and hard for outsiders to understand intuitively. The sense of a rogue region that somehow got away from the homeland is vivid among Russian and Chinese nationalists. This kind of understanding — claiming a “sphere of influence” — is now deemed reactionary by the West’s foreign policy elites, as, perhaps, it should be. But that doesn’t mean that everyone, especially China and Russia, have actually moved past it. Even Americans have very different emotional responses to perceived threats in our own hemisphere compared with the rest of the world. So this is also a culture clash of sorts — globalism and the nation state vs nationalism and spheres of influence.
I’m not saying that this belief in a sphere of influence is a universal view in Russia or China — or that it is justifiable. I’m just saying it is real. And I’m not excusing Putin or Xi from taking a particularly zealous view of this irredentist nationalism, which they both do, for their own personal and political advantage. I’m just noting how national pride deeply informs them, that resentment of the West consumes them, that a sense of historical grievance spurs them on — and that they are not outliers among their compatriots. It is crazy to underestimate the power of this kind of revanchist nationalism — among rulers and ruled. And I fear we underestimated it in the case of Putin.
This means, as Barack Obama once insisted, that Russia will always care much more about Ukraine than we do; and China will always care much more about Taiwan than we do. In those cases, the last thing we should do is promise support that we do not seriously — truly seriously — intend to provide. The vague pledge by the Western powers not to rule out future NATO membership for Ukraine was the worst of all worlds: poking the bear, with no serious intention of fighting it.
The fall of Afghanistan was a margin call … and Ukraine is the point where airy western “guarantees” will have to be backed up with actual force. But western leaders have grown very comfortable in a world where gestures were taken seriously and few if any such gestures actually had to be followed-through with meaningful action. And now, the geopolitical pantomime is over and we’re back in a world where gestures are seen as signs of weakness and do nothing to deter adventurism.
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October 12, 2021
Richard Overy looks at the “Great Imperial War” of 1931-1945
I missed Rana Mitter‘s review of Richard Overy’s latest book when it was published in The Critic last week:
Imagine there’s no Hitler. It’s not that easy, even if you try, at least if you’re a westerner thinking about the Second World War. But for millions of Asians, those years of conflict had little to do with the horrors of Nazi invasion and genocide, and it is their experience that frames Richard Overy’s account of a seemingly familiar conflict. For most non-Europeans, the war was not a struggle for democracy, but a conflict between empires, and in this book, that imperial struggle begins not with the invasion of Poland by Germany in 1939 but the occupation of Manchuria by the Japanese in 1931.
Blood and Ruins is really two books in one. The first is perhaps the single most comprehensive account of the Second World War yet to appear in one volume. You might think that by reading extensively, you could construct a book like this one. You could not — unless you have Overy’s control over a staggering range of World War II scholarship, much of it drawn from his own decades of research on the economics of total warfare, the development of technology, from radar to aerial bombing, and the idea of the “emotional geography” of war, encompassing morale, hope, and despair. Then you’d need to go back and cover all those categories for each of the major Allied and Axis belligerents: Britain, the US, Japan, Germany, France, Italy and China among them.
The second book is an argument about what kind of conflict the Second World War really was. Overy is clear: on a global as opposed to European scale, it was not (just) a war about democracy, but about empires and their fate, although “the starting point in explaining the pursuit of territorial empire is, paradoxically, the nation.”
Overy points out what is generally lost to view when the European war is placed at the centre of the historiography: both Britain and France were undertaking an “awkward double standard” in their defence of democratic values, as their Asian and African possessions “rested on a denial of those liberties and the repression of any protest against the undemocratic nature of colonial rule”. While this argument has been made before (not least by figures such as Nehru and Gandhi in India at the time), Overy does something unusual and revealing: he compares the western empires with Japan’s justification for its own imperial project in the early twentieth century.
The book is scrupulously careful not to endorse or excuse the worldview of Tokyo’s imperialists, and gives full weight to the voices of the Chinese nationalists and communists who were bitterly opposed to Japan’s expansion on the Asian mainland. Still, the comparison of Japan’s pre-war and wartime empire to those of the western powers provides an important and original broadening of a contemporary debate.
There is ongoing public British (and to some extent French) argument about whether empire was a “good” or “bad” thing. Yet neither attackers nor defenders of the British empire tend to analyse it alongside the Japanese equivalent that lasted nearly half a century. Britain committed colonial massacres (Amritsar) and deadly repression (Mau Mau). So did Japan (the rape of Nanjing, invasion of Manchuria).
Britain’s empire also created an aspirational middle class full of cosmopolitan nationalists, and drew on ideas of loyalty to recruit its subjects to fight in world wars. All these things are also true of Japan, which like Britain was a multi-party democracy for much of its period as an overseas empire (between 1898 and 1932), and whose capital city was an intellectual hub for political activists from across Asia.
As a colony of Japan between 1895-1945, Taiwan developed a middle class that was Japanese-speaking and keen to draw on new economic opportunities brought by empire: Lee Teng-hui, the first democratically elected president of the Republic of China on Taiwan, always thought of Japanese as his mother tongue. Park Chung-hee, the American-sponsored dictator of Cold War South Korea, learned his political craft as an army officer in the Japanese Manchukuo Army that occupied Manchuria.
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October 8, 2021
The case for defending Taiwan
Roberto White explains why the west should help protect the Republic of China from the People’s Republic of China:
Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.
The past few days have seen Taiwan subjected to another wave of continuous harassment by China. Of course this is nothing new; China has violated Taiwan’s airspace since at least 2014. But, on Monday, a record 34 fighter jets were dispatched to Taiwan. Beijing’s increasingly erratic behaviour towards Taiwan brings to the fore why the West must defend them.
Taiwan is a free-market democracy that, despite its overbearing northern neighbour, has managed to create a vibrant economy that ranks as the sixth freest economy in the world. Crucially, it is a major producer of semiconductors (a device that helps power everything from cars to satellites), accounting for 92 per cent of all production of the world’s most sophisticated and important chips. Thus, from both an ideological and strategic standpoint, defending Taiwan is a mutually beneficial move.
The case for Taiwan’s defence is further strengthened when we look at what could happen in Asia should China take Taiwan by force.
With Taiwan’s ports and air bases, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) could extend its maritime militia northwards through the Ryukyu (the chain of islands between Taiwan and Japan) and the Senkaku Islands (disputed by China and Japan). This would give China increased leverage over Japan in a time of crisis by, for example, restricting its maritime commerce.
The CCP could further use Taiwan as a base for tighter control of the South China Sea by blocking the Luzon Strait (between Taiwan and the Philippines) and the Balintang channel, which would cut off the traditional route used by the US Navy to navigate regional waters. In essence, China would immediately become the foremost power in the Indo-Pacific that could eventually kick the US and its allies out of the region. Unfortunately, the threat of a Chinese invasion is not a distant reality. In March of this year Admiral Philip Davidson, the United States’ top military officer in the Asia-Pacific, warned that China could invade Taiwan by 2027.
Given the perilous scenario that would emerge from a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, it is vital that, should an invasion happen, the West comes to Taiwan’s defence. However, until such a time, Western allies should aim to help Taiwan by promoting its participation in international forums. The first step would be to allow diplomats and other officials with Taiwanese passports to enter UN buildings, which they currently cannot do. This would most likely provoke a backlash from China, yet it would also confer Taiwan the dignity and respect that officials from every other state have.
The West should also stand firm against Chinese attempts to exclude Taiwan from international organisations. Between 2008-2016, Taiwan was invited to be an observer at the World Health Organization (WHO) under the name “Chinese Taipei”. In 2016, after Tsai Ing-Wen was elected Taiwan’s President, Beijing rescinded the invitation and Taiwan has not been allowed to participate since.
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July 3, 2021
Taiwan, 2021
Admiral Gary Roughead considers the regional situation of Taiwan in 2021:
Taiwan relief map.
Library of Congress Geography & Map Division via Wikimedia Commons.
There has been a spate of recent articles proffering when the People’s Republic of China (PRC) will likely be capable of invading Taiwan. The prognostications are interesting but unhelpful as they distract from the reality of the range of coercive actions the PRC may impose on Taiwan and what could happen now as a result of the PRC increasing pressure and a related military accident or misstep in the vicinity of Taiwan.
The current American penchant to jump to military options to address thorny global problems often casts the Taiwan dilemma in a superficial bilateral or trilateral military context. That aperture must be opened more fully to consider the realities, attributes, and interests of Taiwan, and how those factors will influence the methods and timing of Beijing’s reunification objective. Moreover, those realities, some inconvenient, must underpin new and broader thinking about how to ensure Taiwan’s existence as a vibrant democracy.
[…]
Changing defense strategy to adjust to new circumstances can’t simply discount the realities of today. The interaction of the Air Forces of Taiwan and the PRC in 2020 was extraordinarily high and costly for Taiwan, and maritime and naval considerations will also continue to loom large for Taiwan’s security.
PRC naval force structure both in terms of capacity (numbers) and capability (effectiveness and quality) has grown impressively in the past two decades and some comparisons are worth noting. There are over 330 ships in the PLA Navy and construction continues at an impressive pace. The Chinese Coast Guard numbers 255 ships. The PLA Navy, except for short episodic out of area deployments of small numbers of ships, is concentrated within the First Island Chain. Taiwan’s navy has 86 ships in service, more than half are coastal patrol craft. Its small Coast Guard of 23 ships is not close to being on par in numbers, ship size, or capability as that of the PRC. The U.S Navy stands at 296 ships. The American fleet enjoys a qualitative advantage, but only approximately 60 percent of the U.S. Fleet is assigned to the Pacific, with 11 of those forward deployed to Japan. The remainder are thousands of miles away.
PLA Air Force and Taiwan Air Force aircraft inventories are similarly imbalanced with fighter numbers 600 (Eastern Theater) and 400 respectively. The PLA Air Force’s fighter total is 1,500 and would inevitably backfill shortages and combat losses. The U.S. Air Force combat coded fighters number 1,011. The PRC’s Air Force and Navy regional concentration is reinforced by a Rocket Force of nearly 1,000 intermediate and lesser range ballistic missiles and 300 ground launched cruise missiles.
China’s focus on “informationized” warfare integrates cyber operations into the PRC’s anti-access area denial strategy and architecture. The BeiDou satellite network enables full autonomy in positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) information for PLA ground, sea, and air forces and is the essential factor in precision weapon employment. Another contributor to precision engagements and overall situational awareness is China’s 120 reconnaissance and remote sensing satellites. A robust People’s Armed Forces Maritime Militia also provides close-in maritime locating information and has and will interfere with U.S., Taiwanese, and other nations’ naval and maritime operations.
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April 23, 2021
Taiwan Under Occupation, Axis Solidarity, and U-Boats in the Med – WW2 – OOTF 022
World War Two
Published 22 Apr 2021Ever wonder what life was like in Taiwan during the Second World War? Or if German U-Boats were active in the Mediterranean? You can find out the answers in this episode of Out of the Foxholes!
Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory
Or join The TimeGhost Army directly at: https://timeghost.tvFollow WW2 day by day on Instagram @ww2_day_by_day – https://www.instagram.com/ww2_day_by_day
Between 2 Wars: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list…
Source list: http://bit.ly/WW2sourcesHosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Ian Sowden, Lewis Braithwaite, Timothy Smith
Director: Astrid Deinhard
Producers: Astrid Deinhard and Spartacus Olsson
Executive Producers: Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson, Bodo Rittenauer
Creative Producer: Maria Kyhle
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Ian Sowden, Lewis Braithwaite, Timothy Smith
Edited by: Miki Cackowski
Sound design: Marek Kamiński
Map animations: Miki Cackowski and Eastory (https://www.youtube.com/c/eastory)Sources:
David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Center, Stanford Libraries
Chapman University Digital CommonsSoundtracks from the Epidemic Sound:
Yi Nantiro – “Watchman”
Max Anson – “Ancient Saga”
Skrya – “First Responders”Archive by Screenocean/Reuters https://www.screenocean.com.
A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.
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June 23, 2020
Pushback for Chinese aggression in the Himalayas
In Quillette, Cleo Paskal outlines the Chinese military action last week and a few of the reactions in civil society:
The western portion of the Line of Actual Control, separating the Eastern Ladakh and Aksai Chin (map by CIA). In the Demchok sector, only two claim lines are shown. The line was the focus of a brief war in 1962.
Wikimedia Commons.
High in the Himalayan mountains, Chinese soldiers ambushed Indian troops this week, resulting in a brutal battle on the Indian side of their shared border. Twenty Indians were killed, while China won’t disclose its losses. It was the deadliest confrontation on the border in over 40 years. As a result, some Indian strategists are openly discussing recognizing Taiwan and providing more visibility to the Dalai Lama, state-owned telecoms are blocking Chinese equipment from 4G upgrades, and millions of Indians downloaded an app that helps remove Chinese apps from their phones (before Google removed it). All of this comes at a time when much of the world remains angry at China’s leaders for their initial handling of the COVID-19 crisis.
This week’s apparent provocation is part of a larger recent pattern with China. From the South China Sea, to Taiwan, to Hong Kong, Beijing has been seeking to change facts on the ground in a way that benefits its own strategic and economic interests. In a recent Atlantic Council discussion of the India-China border issue (convened before the latest fighting), senior American diplomat Ambassador Alice Wells summed the situation up well: “There’s a method here to Chinese operations. [A]nd it is that constant aggression, the constant attempt to shift the norms, to shift what is the status quo, that has to be resisted.”
For decades China has tried to expand its strategic reach along its de facto south-western border through the invasion of Tibet, land swaps with Pakistan, and war with India. To this end, China treats British Empire-era maps as political props to variously brandish or dismiss, as best suits Beijing’s goals. For example, it effectively accepted the 1914-era McMahon Line delineation in its border agreement with Myanmar, but rejects it with India.
The Line of Actual Control (LAC) separating China and India runs through rugged, high-altitude terrain that has witnessed multiple conflicts going back to the 1962 India-China border war. In recent weeks, there have been Chinese incursions at several points along the LAC, reportedly involving thousands of troops. In some spots, the Chinese military is digging in on the Indian side, while expanding its already considerable support infrastructure on their side of the LAC.
Delhi is particularly concerned about Chinese advances near India’s Daulat Beg Oldie (DBO) high-altitude military airfield, an essential Indian forward base that provides oversight of the strategic Karakoram Highway (KH) linking China’s western Xinjiang Autonomous Region with Pakistan, including the Gwadar Port on the Indian Ocean. It is a key component of the multi-billion-dollar China-Pakistan Economic Corridor.
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April 13, 2020
Increasing hazards to navigation in the East China Sea
It’s odd that all the increased collisions seem to involve Chinese vessels:
Japanese Maritime Self-Defence Force ship JS Shimakaze (DDG-172), the second ship of the Hatakaze class, commissioned in 1988. She was slightly damaged in a collision with a Chinese fishing boat in the East China Sea on 30 March 2020.
Image via Wikimedia Commons.
Sci-fi genius Robert Heinlein warned readers never to attribute to villainy behavior that was adequately explained by stupidity. In other words, he believed malice should be the explanation of last resort for puzzling conduct on the part of people or groups of people; it shouldn’t be the default. Better to hunt for more benign explanations first. With apologies to Heinlein, I would amend his “razor,” or heuristic, slightly. It’s too narrow. There are other candidates than stupidity or purposeful villainy to account for misconduct. Factors like incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, and sheer accident form — and sometimes deform — human thought and action. They belong on the stupidity side of Heinlein’s ledger.
How about this: Never attribute to villainy behavior that can be adequately explained by human failings. That preserves the essence of Heinlein’s razor while widening its scope to fit reality.
Let’s use his revised heuristic to evaluate the Sino-Japanese collision. It’s certainly possible the mishap came about by accident. It took place at night, in crowded waters. If the U.S. Navy collisions of 2017 taught us nothing else, it’s that the crews of even frontline warships can suffer from a host of maladies, from overwork to shoddy personnel practices to doctrinal or training shortfalls. No amount of high technology — whether it’s Aegis radar or satellite navigation — can altogether forestall human error. It may be that the Japanese crew, the Chinese crew, or both blundered around in the dark and came to grief. By Heinlein’s lights that’s the generous and proper assumption until the facts become known. If they do.
Nevertheless, a silent corollary has to be appended to Heinlein’s razor: But don’t rule out villainy, either.
Especially when it comes to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). For decades Beijing has made militiamen embedded in the Chinese fishing fleet an arm of maritime strategy. The maritime militia is an irregular adjunct to regular naval forces, including the People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLA Navy) and especially the musclebound China Coast Guard fielded over the past decade. Beijing touted the militia’s combat prowess as long ago as 1974, when Chinese naval forces wrested a tottering South Vietnam’s holdings in the Paracel Islands from it in a brief but bloody sea battle. Militia craft backed by the coast guard have been a fixture in the South China Sea ever since 2009, when Beijing declared “indisputable sovereignty” over the vast majority of that body of water — including seas allocated to its neighbors by treaty. The irregular force went into overdrive in 2012 during the standoff with the Philippine Navy and Coast Guard at Scarborough Shoal, deep within the Philippines’ exclusive economic zone. Fishing craft flood the zone in CCP-claimed waters and dare local coast guards or navies to repulse them. If the locals resist, the China Coast Guard backs up the militia. PLA regular forces provide a backstop should things go awry.
H/T to Blazing Cat Fur for the link.
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November 27, 2019
The Father of Modern China – Sun Yat-sen l HISTORY OF CHINA
IT’S HISTORY
Published 2 Sep 2015Sun Yat-sen is known as the “father of modern China”. He spent his adult life fighting against imperial China and the ruling Qing dynasty. First as revolutionary leader and later as politician. He founded the Tongmenghui League in 1905 and supported rebellions in China. After the Wuchang Uprising, Sun handed over the presidential office for the Republic of China to Yuan Shikai who soon after would ban Sun’s political party, the Kuomintang. So he reformed it as China’s National People’s party. His military and political work laid the groundwork from which his successors would later call out the People’s Republic of China.
» Century of Humiliation
Part 1: http://bit.ly/humiliation1
Part 2: http://bit.ly/Humiliation2» SOURCES
Videos: British Pathé (https://www.youtube.com/user/britishp…)
Pictures: mainly Picture Alliance
Content:
Chang, Johannes (1960): “Sun Yat-sen – Seine Lehre und seine Bedeutung” in: JCSW 1 [1960] S.179-194
Gernet, Jacques (1988): Die chinesische Welt. Die Geschichte Chinas von den Anfängen bis zur Jetztzeit, Suhrkamp, Berlin.
Klein, Thoralf (2008): “Politische Geschichte Chinas 1900-1949”, auf bpb.de
https://www.bpb.de/internationales/as…
Vogelsang, Kai (2013): Geschichte Chinas, Reclam, Ditzingen.
Weigelin-Schwiedrzik (2012): “Der geteilte Himmel”, in ZEIT Geschichte Nr. 01/2012
http://www.zeit.de/zeit-geschichte/20…» ABOUT US
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Presented by: Guy Kiddey
Script by: Julia Korbik
Translated by: Guy Kiddey
Directed by: Daniel Czepelczauer
Director of Photography: Markus Kretzschmar
Music: Markus Kretzschmar
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Editing: Markus KretzschmarA Mediakraft Networks original channel
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January 14, 2019
Sun Yat-sen – An Army in Exile – Extra History – #3
Extra Credits
Published on 12 Jan 2019Sun Yat-sen spends the next ten years following his London adventures trying to organize the rebellion in Tokyo — and ends up not recruiting just Chinese reformers, but radical fighters from Japan and the Philippines too.
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