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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   36105 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 20, 2025

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The pay-off is huge - not only is half the world absolutely depended on China economically, in case of a conventional war, China could force a stale mate and then it can out-last and out-produce the entire rest of the world, combined.

China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US. No merchant ship will risk going to China and no merchant insurance company will insure it if they have to risk the most powerful blue water navy on Earth sinking it. You thought the Houtis were bad for trade? Meet the USN. They’ll be reduced to land trade with Russia. How are they going to outproduce us then? China does not have the natural resources for autarky.

China may not have the natural resources, but the huge chunk of Asia they have access to almost assuredly does.

We have China surrounded on three sides with allies. Good luck getting your resources from Mongolia, Russia, and North Korea.

As well as the Stans and Persia.

Russia, the nation who is in the top 5 (mostly the top 2) of every mineral tracked by the USGS? That doesn't seem implausible, at all.

They got the minerals, but they don’t have the throughput to get China as much as they need by train. Overland trade is something like 5x more expensive than maritime trade.

Depends on which fraction of expenses is transportation. If for some good 0.1% is replaced by 0.5% it's not that much.

It’s not about expense it’s about throughout. A modern cargo train can carry about 13,000 tons of material. China imports 3 million tons of iron ore per day.

These numbers make 231 trains/day. I.e. two train lanes are enough for it. China is world leader in train building. They can make it pretty quickly, if Russia and Mongolia would be cooperative.

A single train line, if it has been fully upgraded with appropriate sidings and signals, can move 1,000,000 tons per day when working optimally. There are currently only two major rail lines from Russia to China. So you would need to build at least a third and have all three running optimally to get all the iron ore China needs overland.

But that’s just the iron! China also imports 14 million barrels of oil each day. The maximum cargo train capacity for oil is 90,000 barrels per day, so that’s another 155 trains per day. And we haven’t even discussed the amount of grain, copper, and other raw materials we need to import daily. We’re going to need to build at least two more train lines, probably three, and run them at optimal efficiency.

Except wait: we can’t run them at optimal efficiency because Russia and China use different track gauges! That means all the cargo needs to be unloaded and reloaded at the Chinese border.

Is it possible to build the rail infrastructure needed to get all of Chinas imports overland? Possible, yes, but very impractical. Especially when you consider that the Chinese will need to rely on the Russians to run their trains efficiently.

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China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US.

The EU was arguing like that in favor of Russia for 30 years. But trade did not stop the Russians.

And for China, your points are true today, but Xi thinks in decades. At that time scale, it's all hypotheticals anyway.

  • It's possible that China gets its domestic consumption off the ground, making it less reliant on trade.
  • It's possible that the belt and road initiative leads to a massive increase in land access to trading partners.
  • It's possible that a variety of maritime drones, drone carriers and autonomous missile boats make aircraft carriers the battleship of the 21st century.
  • It's possible that the US turns inwards, and doesn't intervene in conflicts with Taiwan, or even in conflicts with Japan and India.

In all those cases, the US would want at least a strategic industrial base left at home for geopolitical reasons, and having it would out-weight the short-term loss that tariffs would bring today.

Even if China gets domestic consumption off the ground they're still reliant on imports for raw materials. China imports more than than 3 times as much oil is it produces, imports a little under three times as much iron ore as it produces, a little under 3 times as much copper ore as it produces, and produces less than 65% of their food domestically. They need global trade to keep their industry running and their people fed. You're not going to ship the 14 million barrels of oil, 3 million tons of iron ore, and the 161,000 tons of grain that China imports daily by train.

Those exact arguments where used in the case of Russia. They were far from autark before they attacked Ukraine, but that doesn't matter. If you have your propaganda dialed in, your population is sufficiently willing to go along, you can deal with embargoes and even blockades for years.

Yes, the deficit would explode, quality of life would decrease. There would be rationing, followed by an inefficient adaption of domestic production.

China needs far less ore if they stop being the worlds factory floor. They can mitigate the missing oil by continuing electrification, by relying on Russia to break the embargo and by starting coal liquefaction if they really have to. They have more than enough arable land to feed their population.

They do not have enough arable land to feed their population.

Despite its place as the third largest nation in the world, China falls behind other major food producing countries in terms of the availability of arable land (figure 1). Rapid urbanization, pollution, and uses of land for other purposes have all contributed to a rapid decline of agricultural land in China. The total pollution rate in China’s farmland soil is estimated at 10 percent, and about 2.5 percent of that land cannot be cultivated due to excessive contamination with heavy metals. As a result, it is estimated that the country has a domestic planting area shortage of 90 million hectares. This cropland shortage is expected to worsen and will further undermine China’s goals for food self-sufficiency.

https://www.armyupress.army.mil/Journals/Military-Review/English-Edition-Archives/July-August-2022/Critelli/

And if you can survive by drastically reducing your industrial output then you can’t use that industrial output to win a war with the US.

It's not even local imports from e.g. Indonesia either, it's majority trans-oceanic. Grain from Brazil, iron and coal from Canada and Australia, etc.
They can't try what Japan did with the co-prosperity sphere, even if they could cordon off the Pacific as far as Burma.

I wonder if they'll try to develop their domestic iron more. A thousand km over land from Liaoning to where the coal is in Shanxi, wonder how that competes with shipping from Australia.

Edit: woah, they're hauling in a ton of coking coal by rail from Mongolia now. , and they've actually succeeded in weaning themselves off Australian imports.

China is hugely dependent on foreign trade, which functionally stops as soon as they’re in a conventional war with the US. No merchant ship will risk going to China and no merchant insurance company will insure it if they have to risk the most powerful blue water navy on Earth sinking it.

This hinges on your belief that the modern American political system would be willing to sustain a total naval warfare sinking neutral nation shipping in the face of both domestic and international blowback. Consider me less than convinced.

And it's not like you can't ship the more valuable stuff to India or Russia via rail, and whitewash it.

Frankly if you could achieve that it would be considerably beneficial- the volume differences are just that much- but I have a hard time believing that the Americans would want (a) a Russian kinetic entry into the war on the side of China, or (b) attack Indian vessels.

Rather than 'war will end trade between opposing sides,' a lesson of the Ukraine War should probably be the opposite- that vast amounts of trade will continue. The Russians lost a naval blockade to a country with no navy from a far greater position, and second-party smuggling was such that sanction-restrictions really amount to an cost-increase rather than cutoff of contraband goods.

India likes us and hates China and in a conventional war scenario we will be putting pressure on them to cut off any trade into China. Ukraine doesn’t have anywhere close to the power to do that. You can’t compare what happens to trade when a minor power with no allies is in a war to what would happen to trade when the world hegemon goes to war.

This is what people said about sanctioning Russia. History shows that America putting pressure on people to cut off their trade for American geopolitical reasons is a pretty big driver of anti-American sentiment and disentangling from American trade systems.

If we are in a shooting war with China we will be bringing significantly more pressure on our friends and allies not to trade with China than we did for Ukraine. If China and the US are at war than this is WWIII and every country on Earth is going to be asking themselves the question: whose side do I want to be on? The US or the Chinese? I can't imagine India choosing China. China, the bellicose country that keeps trying to push the border with India. China, the country that killed 20 Indian soldiers as recently as 2020. China, the country that has been arming and allying with Pakistan against India. China, the country that keeps building dams in Tibet across the headwaters of major Indian rivers. China, the country Indians have a 67% unfavorable view of (in contrast, 70% of Indians view the US favorably).

If China is going to war with the US then India will be the first to stick a knife in their side.

EDIT: Also, of course they resisted Russian sanctions: they like Russia! They've been great friends with Russia since the 40s, back when it was the USSR. They like the Russians more than they like us, Russia sells them a lot of weapons, they and the Russians go way back. We should not expect India to treat China anything like they treated Russia recently.

If China and the US are at war than this is WWIII and every country on Earth is going to be asking themselves the question: whose side do I want to be on?

They WON'T. That’s my point. They’re going to be asking ‘how do I stop these maniacs ruining my economy while they try to kill each other?’

People do in fact like America slightly better than China, and will probably provide quiet help, but

we will be bringing significantly more pressure on our friends and allies not to trade with China than we did for Ukraine

is exactly how you discourage that behaviour.

Hasn't Chinese civilization been basically an autarky for most of its history?

For most of its history China would stand no chance against the modern US in a conventional war. The China we’re concerned may stand a chance against us hasn’t been an autarky in half a century.

Except that China makes a good chunk of our (and everyone else’s) goods. They make everything and therefore going to war with them has a huge cost. We no longer have a big clothing or shoes industry. Or auto parts. Etc. we can’t go to war with them for long because we are dependent on their factories for basic materials. Europe was using Russia for electricity, and the6 very quickly found out what a choke point that is.

"We" (or rather the US) can fight a war without clothes, shoes and auto parts. China receives 60-80% of its oil through the Malacca strait. The US has worked for decades to make almost every nation in East Asia an ally in a possible war with China and has stationed a tremendous amount of troops, naval and air assets in that region.
Here's a decently detailed video if you want to learn more about the situation there.

We" (or rather the US) can fight a war without clothes

Somehow I think naked soldiers on the front will have pretty bad optics.

I don't think optics are made from cloth, and anyway they can always fall back to iron sights.

But they'll be on the front, because the oil-powered vehicles will have carried them there.

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