Will Chinese over-confidence plunge Asia into war?
The Chinese younger generation is full of confidence and chauvinism:
"Post-millennial students usually have a strong sense of superiority and confidence, and they tend to look at other countries from a condescending perspective," Yan Xuetong, director of Tsinghua University's international studies institute, said at a conference in Beijing last Saturday.
"[They] look at international affairs with a make-believe mindset, thinking it's very easy for China to achieve its foreign policy goals. They think only China is just and innocent, while other countries, especially Western countries, are evil and thus have natural hatred towards Westerners." ...
He said heightened nationalism among people born after 2000 was driven mainly by key opinion leaders on the internet, with students being heavily influenced by conspiracy theories and economic determinism.
China is already leaning forward well before their objective to achieve the China Dream by 2049, the centennial of the People's Republic of China.
I've worried about China's rulers being stampeded into war by nationalist subjects who would be furious with the Chinese Communist Party for failing to stand up to the foreign devils:
So the Chinese government which has spent a couple decades stoking xenophobic nationalism in the public raised expectations of resisting such an American operation--and then did nothing.
At what point will the Chinese party-run government feel so pressured by a public clamor to do something--as they've been trained to expect--when we do the same again?
And how does the Chinese military feel? They have all this new hardware and they're feeling newly powerful.
China is a danger because their chest is swelling over their regained military stature. And while their actual power will help decide the outcome of a war, their beliefs about their power will help decide whether they start a war.
I liken it to new soldiers just out of boot camp. You enter probably out of shape and a pure civilian. You endure and come out part of the mean green fighting machine, with new muscles and the new skills of killing planted in you. You think you are a bad-ass SEAL Team 6-level killing machine in your still-crisp BDUs (or whatever they are called now).
But you are not a killing machine. You aren't even a cog in the killing machine. You are just the first rough stamping of a cog that will eventually be sanded and polished into a part of the killing machine. I remember our drill sergeants telling us that we need to avoid being full of ourselves when we leave basic training and move on to a new base or go back on the block. We are stronger than when we arrived. Do not mistake that for being stronger than other people, they warned. If we do, we'll get our butts kicked.
Even if the Chinese Communist Party rulers aren't confused about the correlation of forces, the pressure to fight and come home by Christmas the Chinese New Year might be too strong to resist. Because who gets to order the PLA into combat?
Oh, and don't count on that mythical innate Chinese long-range planning ability to avoid bad decisions.
Have a super sparkly day.
UPDATE: China threatens war. This will play well for a domestic audience.
