China suspended military exchanges with the United States and threatened sanctions against American defense companies Saturday, just hours after Washington announced $6.4 billion in planned arms sales to Taiwan. Their response: “The U.S. will pay a price for this. Starting now, China will make some substantial retaliation, such as reducing cooperation on the North Korea and Iran nuclear issues and anti-terrorism work.”
The last are pretty hollow threats. China has done absolutely NOTHING to get North Korea to back off their nuclear program, and in fact has thoroughly enjoyed watching N. Korea be a thorn in our side. The same for Iran and for giving us any help against terrorism. China contributes nothing, no military support, no useful information, nothing. For Haiti they gave one million dollars. Ooo. China is for China only and against all the rest of us. Where their threats count is in sanctions. I have no figures but the fact that they first threaten sanctions against our defense industry tells me that we’re selling a lot of military-related goods to them ( a stupid move if ever there was one ) and cutting that off would hurt our already badly wounded economy. Take a good look around, on that one. Our defense industry is now our single largest industry.
The Chinese are OUR ENEMIES!!! We have given over all of our civilian and some of our military manufacturing to the Chinese in order to have cheaper goods, and have gotten seafood contaminated with heavy metals and organic filth, childrens toys contaminated with lead, barium and date-rape drugs, baby food and formula contaminated with melamine that killed thousands of infants and poorly made goods of all descriptions that are no bargain at all.
The result of this has been the shutdown of most of our manufacturing industries across the spectrum from all forms of clothing and cloth manufacture to furniture, plumbing pipe, shoes, appliances, car parts, you name it, and this is the primary cause of the massive unemployment in America today.
We will continue to have shoddy goods instead of the proud Made In USA high quality products we used to enjoy, we will continue to have high unemployment with many of us too poor to even buy the crap China sends us and we will continue in this sorry state until we STOP BUYING FROM CHINA, stop borrowing back from China the dollars we sent them, which they’re using, by the way, to become steadily more militarily threatening, and rebuild our manufacturing.
Blame? Plenty for everyone in Congress and the White House, now and previously, and a waste of time. We need to fix the problem, not the blame, and that’s not going to happen with our current set of “leaders”. In fact, the only way this will happen is if China becomes such an overt military threat that we are forced to withdraw from commerce with them.
Our politicians need to be scared of China and in this I see some hope. The Chinese want very much to take over our ally, Taiwan, the island of Formosa, I think mostly just because it’s there. Taiwan is an example of true democracy formed of formerly Chinese territory and right next door to the dictatorship, and its presence eats away at the Chinese leadership like a rat chewing on their guts. Our sales of defensive arms to Taiwan to help them hold the Chinese at bay infuriates the Chinese. Their problem with invading Taiwan has been that their sales of goods to the USA is the primary source of their economic boom, and while such an invasion might not stop the sales, it would result in massive across-the-board tariffs that would have the same effect.
However, China has expanded into South American, African, European and Eastern European markets even as sales to us fell with our increasing economic debacle. They need us less. A lot less. At the same time, their military strength has been steadily increasing and the reality is that they could probably roll right over Taiwan now.
This isn’t a simple equation. The Chinese government has more patience than ours as they get “elected” for life and don’t have to worry about getting voted out every 2 or 4 years. So they can wait and try to swing the Taiwanese over by popular opinion, to rejoin with mainland China. Only if it becomes clear that force is the only option, will they attack Taiwan as they did Tibet.
Considering the demonstration of their brutality with their recent assaults on the Tibetans, Taiwan is less likely than ever to want to re-merge with the repressive regime of mainland China, and it’s possible that our latest arms sale to them may push China over the brink. In doing so, they would succeed in causing our more centrist, clear thinking politicians to start redirecting our economy into safer, less China-dependent channels, or at least that’s the hope.
Whether we would actually provide military backup to Taiwan is doubtful, and I’m sure the excuse would be that we’re in another war right now, sorry. While I don’t want to see Taiwan thrown to the wolves, China is going to do what China is going to do, and a Chinese attack on Taiwan would do good things for America in getting us unhooked from our disastrous financial/economic relationship with this slave-labor using evil oppressive manufacturer of shoddy and poisonous goods.
China sucks.